Even in highly developed and advanced countries, like those of Europe, it has taken a long time and a determined struggle for woman to come into her inheritance as a free and equal human person. Besides, the example of the oldest Western democracy in the modern sense of the term, Switzerland, shows that woman can be emancipated, modern, free and equal even without having the elementary human right of a say in matters which affect her personally, as well as nationally, through the vote. It is well to remember these truisms when we approach the problem of the emancipation of woman in Islam—in some of the countries of our inquiry.

In the first place, we must make an important distinction between a comparatively small group of Western-educated women, wives and daughters of Western-educated intellectuals, and the vast majority of uneducated, largely illiterate women whose labour is badly needed in the economic development of newly independent countries. What has taken decades or even centuries to mature in the West must be telescoped into a few years or at best a decade or two in order to make a difference to the standard of living, not to speak of higher things. To banish hunger in the worst cases, or to raise a people from bare subsistence level to a position in which the mind can be fed as well as the body in more fortunate cases, the full participation of every able-bodied woman is desperately needed.