Feminism is a product of Western Civilization. It was a reaction to attitudes and laws with a very long history. The cradles of Western Civilization were Greece and Rome. In those cultures women were not allowed to own property or vote. They could be married off without their consent. When Christianity became the dominant religion in the Greco-Roman world, the Church fathers engaged in a lengthy debate whether or not women had souls. They finally decided that they do. (How generous of them). Christian attitudes towards women were shaped by the idea that Eve was responsible for Adam’s fall. Menstruation was considered a punishment imposed on all of Eve’s kind as a result of this “Original Sin.” Women were frequently spoken of as the Devil’s snares. Restrictions on women’s rights to own property, enter into contracts and vote continued into the Twentieth century in most European countries.

    Feminism was originally inspired by a vision that the world would be a better place if women had the same rights as men. Women activists secured property rights, contractual rights and voting rights for their sisters in Western societies. Industrialization began changing women’s roles in society by making many of them factory workers. This process was given a tremendous boost by World War Two. When millions of men went away to fight, women were recruited to replace them.

    Another major impact on sex-roles occurred with the introduction of modern contraceptives in the last half of this century. Family sizes shrank in the West. Whereas most women in the past had spent their adult years bearing and raising children, these activities began to take less time. Women began to press for the right to enter into professions that men had previously monopolized, and they pressed for equal pay for equal work.

    In the 1970s a new form of feminism developed. Christina Hoff Sommers calls it “Gender Feminism.” The single most important truth in their world-view is that all human societies are organized by men to oppress women. Men are thus the enemy, and women must organize on the basis of loyalty to their gender in order to remake the world into one in which women will be safe.

    According to this point of view, Judaism, Christianity and Islam are patriarchal religions. The prophets were men. God is referred to as “He” in the Old and New Testaments and in the Qur'an. Christians went so far as to portray God as an old man with gray hair and a beard on the ceiling of the Systine Chapel. The feminist alternative to patriarchal religion is to resurrect the ancient cult of The Goddess. This was an ancient Mediterranean and European religion dedicated to a goddess of fertility known as The Great Mother. This nature-based religion was supposedly the original religion that was displaced and persecuted out of existence by the Catholic Church, which labeled its female priests as witches.

    The Islamic response to this is that Allah is neither male nor female. Male and female are aspects of duality, whereas God is unique. Nothing else resembles Him. He has no counterpart. So why is the male pronoun used to refer to Him? First of all, Arabic has no gender-neutral pronoun. Everything is either ‘he’ or ‘she,’ including inanimate objects. Even though English has the pronoun ‘it,’ to use ‘it’ to refer to God has a drawback, because ‘it’ is basically used for things and creatures that can’t think. Likewise, to refer to God as ‘she’ has certain connotations of weakness in a human context. Like it or not, men have dominated public life and human societies throughout history. Therefore, the Qur'an uses ‘He’ to refer to Allah, while making it clear that God transcends all dualistic traits. Descriptions of Allah abound in the Qur'an or the Sunnah, but none of them gives the slightest inkling that He is masculine or feminine.

    The Qur'an seems to refer to the cult of The Goddess in the following passage: “Allah will not forgive that partners be ascribed to Him. He forgives anything besides that to whom He wills. And whoever ascribes a partner to Allah has gone far, far astray. They call upon, instead of Him, none other than females, and they pray to no other than Satan, a rebel.”

    Of course, many gender feminists have no religious beliefs at all. For them feminism is their religion. It provides them the lens through which they view reality. Everything, on the social level at least, is explainable in terms of their theory that men have rigged things to maintain social control over women.