In the 6th century, a man named Muhammad began to preach a religion that drew from Jewish and Christian roots and added Arab tribal beliefs. Islam became a powerful force that conquered the entire Middle East and Persian lands; swept across Asia, and so touched China in the East; spread through Northern Africa and, from there, north into Christian Europe, particularly Spain. Between about the 8 th and 12 th centuries, Islamic society was the most advanced in the world, with a newly developed system of mathematics (Arabic numbers) to replace the clumsy Roman system and having the world’s most sophisticated techniques of medicine, warfare, and science.
Many Muslim societies have strong rules of satr al-’awra, or modesty, that involve covering the private parts of the body (which for women means almost the entire body). Muhammad had tried to preserve the rights of women. There are examples in the Koran (koe-RAN), the Muslim Bible, of female saints and intellectuals, and powerful women often hold strong informal powers over their husbands and male children. Still, women in many Islamic lands are subjugated to men, are segregated and not permitted to venture out of their homes, and are forbidden to interact with men who are not family members.
In Islamic law, as in Christian law, sexuality between a man and a woman is legal only when the couple is married or when the woman is a concubine (Coulson, 1979).