Islamism: What They Do to Women First

Before the Islamic Republic of Iran came for the press; before it came for the universities, before it came for anyone who disagreed with it in public, it came for women.

That is not a detail of the story. It is the story.

I was 10 years old when it happened to me, and I have spent the decades since watching the same pattern repeat itself, country after country, with the details rearranged but the architecture identical. If you want to know how serious a radical movement is about remaking a society, don’t watch what it says about the economy or foreign policy. Watch what it does to women’s bodies, women’s marriages, and women’s rights in a courtroom. That is where the ideology shows itself with no interest in hiding.

I want to walk through specific things — not abstractions, not “values,” but actual legal facts, on the books right now in the countries where the strictest version of this ideology governs — because I think most Americans, most Westerners, genuinely do not know the details.

They know the headline image: a woman in a burqa, a woman under a black cloth. They don’t know what the law actually says happens to her inside a marriage, inside a courtroom, inside her own family. I lived part of this. I have spent months having it verified against human rights reporting, court records, and the plain text of the legal codes themselves, so that nobody can wave this away as anecdote. This piece covers the legal architecture: what a woman inherits, who keeps her children, how she can and cannot leave a marriage, and whether a courtroom will even hear her. The second piece turns to something more intimate still — marriage itself, what she’s allowed to wear, and what the state believes it’s entitled to do to her body.

Start with inheritance, because it is the most mathematically explicit. Under the classical rule — codified today in Iran’s civil code, in Saudi Arabia’s 2022 Personal Status Law, and applied through Taliban courts in Afghanistan — a son’s inheritance share is double a daughter’s. A widow’s share is smaller still: one-quarter of her husband’s estate if there are no children, cut to one-eighth if there are.

I want to be precise about how much smaller, because the details matter here — in Iran, a Muslim wife cannot inherit her husband’s land or real property at all. Only movable property and the assessed value of buildings, never the land itself. Her son inherits the ground his father stood on. She does not.

Custody follows the same logic. A mother generally keeps young children after divorce — but if she remarries, in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and under Taliban law alike, she can lose them, on the theory that a stranger’s household is unfit for another man’s children.

A father who remarries faces no equivalent penalty. And in Saudi Arabia’s own 2022 law — the one state media presented as a modernization — fathers remain the legal guardians of the children even when mothers hold physical custody, meaning a mother can have her children living under her roof and still need a man’s signature to enroll them in school or approve their medical care.

Divorce is where the asymmetry becomes almost impossible to overstate. A husband can divorce his wife unilaterally. He does not need a reason. He does not need a judge. In Saudi Arabia’s current law, he simply has to file the paperwork within 15 days of pronouncing it. A wife seeking the equivalent has two paths, both narrower: khula, which requires her husband’s consent and repaying her dowry, or a judicial process where she must prove “harm” — a term Saudi law does not even bother to define — a process that can take years.

I want to tell you what this looks like at its most extreme, because it is happening right now, not in some historical account. In May of 2026, the Taliban issued a decree on judicial separation that lets a husband divorce at will while requiring a wife to prove mistreatment — and specifies that if she has no witnesses and he denies it, the court must accept his word. The United Nations has documented the Taliban going further still: reopening and reversing divorces that had already freed child brides under the previous legal system, sending girls back into the marriages they had escaped.

Testimony compounds all of it. The often-cited Quranic rule that two women’s testimony equals one man’s applied, in its original text, specifically to financial contracts. But Iran’s Islamic Penal Code has since extended that same ratio into modern statute for injury and compensation claims. And for the crime that touches women most directly — zina, sex outside marriage, which of course includes rape victims pulled into the same legal category as the men who assaulted them — classical law demands four male eyewitnesses to the act itself. Not two. Four. Not to the accusation — to witnessing penetration directly.

In practice, this means the crime is provable almost only by confession, which is precisely why a gang-rape victim in Saudi Arabia’s Qatif region was sentenced to lashes for “being alone with an unrelated man” while her attackers escaped execution for lack of corroborating witnesses. Her sentence was later increased, not reduced, after she spoke to the press about it. She was eventually pardoned by royal decree — which tells you that even the government recognized the outcome was indefensible, and issued a pardon rather than change the law that produced it.

Then there is the guardianship system itself — qiwamah, “men as protectors and maintainers of women,” the verse used to justify male authority over women’s most basic decisions. Saudi Arabia’s 2019 reforms are genuinely worth acknowledging: women can now get a passport and travel internationally without a man’s permission, and it would be dishonest of me not to say so. But a male guardian’s consent is still legally required for her to marry in the first place, at any age. In Afghanistan, the mahram requirement — a male chaperone for travel — has expanded since 2021 from long-distance travel to, in documented cases, hospital visits and public transportation. Women have been turned away from medical care and detained at checkpoints for the crime of traveling without a man.

Taken together, this is what a woman is worth on paper before anyone has said a word about what she wears or who she’s allowed to marry: half an inheritance, custody that evaporates if she rebuilds her life, an exit from marriage that requires proof a man’s exit never does, and a voice in court that counts for less than his.

Now, let’s turn to something more intimate still — who she’s allowed to marry, what she’s allowed to wear, at what age she can be given away, and what the state believes it’s entitled to do to her body in the name of morality.

Polygamy remains legal and unrestricted in Iran, Afghanistan under the Taliban, and Saudi Arabia — up to four wives, no requirement that a first wife consent. And the right to marry outside the faith runs in exactly one direction. Iranian law requires a non-Muslim man to convert to Islam and obtain government permission before marrying an Iranian Muslim woman. There is no equivalent barrier, and no equivalent conversion requirement, for a Muslim man marrying a Christian or Jewish woman.

The rule was never about religious purity in the abstract. It was about which spouse controls the household a marriage produces. Some clerics will only bless that particular pairing as sigheh — a temporary marriage — rather than a permanent one. That detail is worth pausing on, because temporary marriage in Iran is not a footnote. It is its own institution, and it tells you something ugly about how a theocracy launders whatever it needs to launder.

Sigheh, also called mut’ah, is a real, sharia-sanctioned contract that can last 99 years or 99 minutes — an afternoon, a weekend — for an agreed dowry, with no witnesses required beyond the two parties, no obligation on the man to support the woman financially, no inheritance rights for her unless she negotiates them into the contract in advance, and no divorce needed to end it: the contract simply expires on its own. The minimum age to enter one is 13 for girls. Iran International’s own reporting in 2025 uncovered an entire online brokerage economy built on top of it — intermediaries charging a few dollars just for a woman’s contact information, then anywhere from roughly $80 to nearly $500 a month depending on her age, education, and location, with payments routed through accounts registered to men so the transaction leaves no trace back to her. Listings advertise “virginity guaranteed.” One operator told a reporter, “We only use women who are under the protection of the Islamic Republic. No funny business. Everything is legal under sharia” — which is exactly the point. A Tehran legal expert put it more plainly: sigheh “offers a loophole. If the woman agrees, there’s a contract, and it’s framed as religious — who’s going to prosecute it?” In Mashhad, home to one of Shia Islam’s holiest shrines, hotels reportedly coordinate sigheh arrangements alongside ordinary room bookings for pilgrims. Prostitution is nominally illegal in Iran. Sigheh is how the same transaction gets a clergyman’s signature instead of a vice charge.

Dress is the one most people already picture, so I’ll give you what’s actually happened to it recently rather than what you already assume. Iran’s newest hijab law, passed in 2024, allows for up to 10 to 15 years in prison for repeated violations, along with fines that scale with a woman’s total assets if she has any public profile at all. In Afghanistan, enforcement of the Taliban’s covering requirements has escalated to the point that the UN recorded more public floggings in 2025 alone — for dress-code and other “moral” violations — than in every year before it combined. I mention this not to relitigate an image everyone already has in their head, but because the trend line matters more than the snapshot. This is not a static, ancient practice holding steady. It is actively getting harsher, right now, in real time, in at least one of these countries.

Child marriage is the topic that should stop every reader cold, and it’s the one where classical doctrine offers the least cover, because there is no fixed minimum age in traditional Islamic jurisprudence at all. Eligibility is tied to puberty, not to a birthday. A Taliban decree issued in May of this year does the same thing to marriage that it does to divorce — the UN has called it a functional legalization of child marriage, since it ties eligibility to puberty rather than any fixed floor. And before anyone assumes this is only a Taliban problem: Saudi Arabia’s own government statistics report that more than 15,000 girls aged 15 to 17 were married in a single recent year, under the very law its state media described as reform. Iran sets a legal minimum of 13, with court and paternal permission allowed to go lower still, and its own statistics center recorded a rise in marriages of girls aged 10 to 14 of over 10% in a single year.

And finally, sexual morality — the area where the state’s power over a woman’s body becomes most literal. In April 2023, Iran hanged a man named Ahmad Nikouyi for adultery — the first execution specifically on that charge since 2009, according to Iran Human Rights, with several more prisoners awaiting the same sentence. Notably, there is no public record of what happened to the married woman he was convicted alongside. But hanging isn’t really the historical method here. Stoning is, and it’s the one I actually grew up hearing about. Amnesty International has documented at least 77 stonings in Iran since the 1979 revolution — including Maryam Ayoubi, a 30-year-old woman stoned to death at Evin Prison in 2001, convicted of adultery along with her husband’s murder — and Amnesty’s own researchers note that record-keeping for 1979 through 1984, the exact years I was a small child there, was so incomplete that the true number from that period was almost certainly higher than anything that ever made it into a report.

I didn’t need a human rights organization to tell me that. It was simply something everyone around me already knew, the kind of thing said quietly, the way you’d mention a hard winter. Homosexuality remains a capital offense under the law in Iran, in Afghanistan under the Taliban, and in Saudi Arabia. Where the ideology has held territory without any check on its power at all — the Islamic State’s so-called caliphate, from 2014 to 2019 — the results were the starkest of all: a captured internal document, verified and published by Human Rights Watch, explicitly authorized sexual contact with captive girls not yet past puberty, and men accused of homosexuality were thrown from rooftops in public executions.

I want to be as fair as I know how to be about something else, because I think it actually strengthens the argument rather than weakening it: none of this describes the roughly 2 billion Muslims who live their faith peacefully, who would never dream of imposing any of this on anyone, and who in many cases are themselves the primary victims of the regimes I’ve just described. The distinction that matters is not between Islam and the West. It’s between people who hold a private faith and a political movement — Islamism — that treats these rules as a mandate to be imposed on entire societies by law and by force, whether the population consents or not. I grew up under people who made exactly that distinction irrelevant, because the ones with the guns and the courts decided for everyone else.

That is the part I need Americans and Europeans to sit with, because I don’t think most of you believe any of this could ever reach you. I promise you, the women marching in Tehran in 1979 for more freedom did not believe they were about to lose the freedoms they already had.

I have watched, from here, versions of the same instrument being assembled in the West in slow motion — parallel religious councils in parts of Europe adjudicating divorce and custody matters for Muslim women under religious rather than civil law, often with far less power to refuse than advocates claim; university students who will chant for the very ideology that would strip them of the rights they’re currently exercising to chant at all; a reluctance, even here, to say plainly that a legal system built on qiwamah and unilateral male divorce and four-witness evidentiary rules is not a competing lifestyle choice deserving equal deference, but a direct threat to the equal legal status of half the population wherever it gains real power.

I did not escape one version of this only to watch my adopted country invite a softer version of it in through the side door, dressed in the language of tolerance.

Tolerance is for differences of taste, of custom, of private belief. It is not obligated to extend to a legal architecture that assigns a woman half an inheritance, a fraction of a legal voice, and a body the state believes it owns. Guard your daughters’ equal standing under the law the way you would guard anything else you are not willing to lose.

I promise you, from firsthand experience, that it is far easier to give away than it will ever be to win back.