But when I look around the Islamic world and see women who cannot freely choose who their life partner will be, women who need their brother's/father's/husband's permission to continue their education, drive, or travel freely abroad, then it certainly begs the question of what Islam's aim, then, is.
Islam doesn't provide this same level of "support" (the assigning of duties to others that you spoke of) for dependent men as it does for women -- which makes me believe that at the very least Islam thinks that women are more prone to being dependent than men.
And it certainly makes no exceptions to these provisions for women who ARE more independent (e.g., they can't bypass getting a male's permission for certain things).
So really, whether it is Islam's aim or not, the end result is that it infantilizes women to a much larger degree that it does men.
"Most plain girls are virtuous because of the scarcity of opportunity to be otherwise."
-- Maya Angelou
But when I look around the Islamic world and see women who cannot freely choose who their life partner will be, women who need their brother's/father's/husband's permission to continue their education, drive, or travel freely abroad, then it certainly begs the question of what Islam's aim, then, is.
Islam doesn't provide this same level of "support" (the assigning of duties to others that you spoke of) for dependent men as it does for women -- which makes me believe that at the very least Islam thinks that women are more prone to being dependent than men.
And it certainly makes no exceptions to these provisions for women who ARE more independent (e.g., they can't bypass getting a male's permission for certain things).
So really, whether it is Islam's aim or not, the end result is that it infantilizes women to a much larger degree that it does men.
"Most plain girls are virtuous because of the scarcity of opportunity to be otherwise."
-- Maya Angelou