SOUL FOOD:

Under Islam, women are entitled to voting rights. In fact, voting is seen as a religious duty for all Muslims regardless of gender.

Yet as Huntington Beach resident Maria Khani pointed out to me recently, had she lived in the United States in 1908 instead of 2008, she, like other women in America, would not have been allowed to cast a vote. Her religion’s tenets would have been trumped by affairs of state.

And so it still is in some countries now, even Islamic countries that are on record as having granted women suffrage at an earlier time. But that doesn’t change what the Qur’an and the sayings of the Prophet teach about women’s rights.

In the 7th century, at a time when women were often at the mercy of misogynist societies, Islam bequeathed them rights equitable if not always equivalent to those of men.

Today, how much a Muslim woman enjoys these rights depends in part on where she lives. And living in the United States may give her the best chance of gaining their full advantage.

Here, women can safely champion their rights.

“In some countries if they stand for their rights, they’re going to be in trouble,” Khani acknowledged. “Some people will pay the price.”

As she sees it, that is all the more reason for Muslim women like her to speak up. Slowly, she believes, their voices can bring about change.

Khani, who was born in England and graduated from Damascus University with a bachelor’s degree in French literature, is dedicated to educating Muslims and non-Muslim about the rights of Muslim women.

The rights she lists are those also enumerated by Islamic scholar Sayed Moustafa Al-Qazwini in a book, a dialogue between himself and a Muslim woman named Fatma Saleh, titled “A New Perspective: Women in Islam,” published in 2001.

Iraqi-born Al-Qazwini is the founding Imam of the Islamic Education Center of Orange County and a graduate of the Islamic seminary in Qum, Iran. Saleh, who describes herself as “an average Muslim woman,” was born in Lebanon and raised in Southern California.

In his introduction to their discourse, Al-Qazwini writes that a Muslim woman is at liberty to own property as well as to sell it of her own free will. She can inherit property from her father, her mother, her siblings or her husband; in marriage, her dowry is considered her own.

She can seek to be educated. She is permitted to work and to manage her own income, but she is never obligated or required to work.

In Islam, financial responsibility falls to men: Husbands must provide for their wives; fathers must provide for their daughters. If a woman has no father and no husband, then her financial care rests with another man, a brother or perhaps an uncle.

In our day and age and culture, this may strike us as enforced dependency; but in “A New Perspective,” Al-Qazwini tells Saleh, “Islam has preserved the dignity of women by liberating them from the exceedingly great tasks of physically laboring or mentally exhausting themselves in their livelihood.”

This enables a woman, he explains, “to pursue [her] most important job — to raise a morally upright and respectable family.”

This, too, is Khani’s message: Raising her children is a woman’s highest calling.

Yet when a reporter wrote recently that she said the “Muslim culture encourages women to stay home and cook, clean and care for their children, rather than find a job, to keep the fabric of family intact,” Khani felt she was misconstrued.

“I said,” she told me on the phone, her frustration clearly evident, “women in Islam do not have to do that.”

As with much in Islam, it’s nuanced, a matter of priorities: The kids come first.

Mothering may be a woman’s paramount role, but Islam does not limit her solely to it. And when it comes to cooking and cleaning, as Khani understands the Qur’an, if a woman’s husband can afford to pay someone to do those things, he should.

“Women have the right to work outside the house,” she insists. Al-Qazwini would add a footnote: with her husband’s permission.

He tells Saleh in “A New Perspective” that a man cannot prevent his wife from pursuing a religious education. However, when it comes to seeking a degree or work in her field of study, he says, a wife is not right to so without her husband’s consent.

Even so, Al-Qazwini instructs, a husband should try to accommodate his wife’s aspirations. He quotes from the Qur’an: “Live with [women] on a footing of kindness and equity.” And “treat [your wife] in a just manner.”

In Islam there are rights, “haq,” and also obligations, “hukom.” The latter, for both genders, includes things such as prayer and fasting and almsgiving.

For women, according to the traditions embraced by Al-Qazwini, Saleh and Khani, hukom for women also includes what is commonly called hijab, covering her body from head to foot except for her hands and her face. Interpretations of the ordinance as anything other than hukom, Al-Qazwini describes as efforts to be “politically correct.”

In her introduction to “A New Perspective,” Saleh writes that she once wondered whether there were “truly such a concept as Muslim women’s rights.” She saw Islam as many non-Muslim Westerners do, as “domineering, circumscribable, and prejudicial against women.”

In her quest for understanding, she found that isolated readings of Qur’anic verses often obscure their intended purposes.

When, for example, restitution required for the death of a woman is reckoned at half the sum mandated for the death of a man, it is not because, Saleh explains, the life of a woman is seen as inherently worth less.

It is because a man is responsible for the livelihood of his family.

Should a woman by some turn of events be the family’s breadwinner, restitution for her death would be equal to that of a man.

“Ignorance about Islam has been a major opponent of Muslim women,” Saleh writes. Muslim women do have rights: Fatma Saleh and Maria Khani are urging them to know them and to secure them.

MICHÈLE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She can be reached at [email protected].