III. Historical Interaction with Other Civilizations
The status of women in Islam was profoundly influenced by the fact that the original Islamic life interacted with and was informed very rapidly by diverse cultures, all male dominated.
The rapid Arab conquests have put the Muslims in contact with other ways of living and thinking which were adopted quite easily. Among other customs, was the veiling of women and their seclusion, the denial of their rights, the negative attitudes towards women. These were not parts of the Islamic teaching. They were acquired through history by way of assimilation of the very diverse civilizations existing in the countries conquered by the Arabs. Let us have a rapid look at the first Christian centuries, where the notion of women’s seclusion – architecturally realized as a building or area for women in the residence (gynoecia) guarded by eunuchs – together with veiling attitudes about the proper invisibility of women, became features of upper-class life in the Mediterranean Middle East, Iraq and Persia. Such attitudes and practices were found before the Christian era on the northern shores of the Mediterranean as on the southern shores. They seemed to represent a coalescence of similar attitudes and practices originating from within the various patriarchal cultures of the region: Mesopotamian, Persian, Hellenic, Judaic and Christian cultures, each contributed practices that both controlled and diminished women, and each also apparently borrowed the controlling and reductive practices of its neighbors. Nothing for example was borrowed from the very egalitarian ancient Egyptian society of the Middle Empire (2000 B.C.). Cultural exchanges seem to have led above all to the pooling and reinforcement of such ideas and to the triumphant endorsement throughout the region of a notion of a woman in which humanity was submerged and who was considered as being essentially and even exclusively biological, sexual and reproductive creature.
The Arabs in their early and rapid conquests encountered all these practices and ideas, and moreover, the people themselves who were living in these systems embraced Islam and became active members of the new communities. Obviously, and naturally, they didn’t change totally and the invaders and the invaded assimilated and their systems intermixed. The reality was stronger than the principles. The new and still man dominated civilization couldn’t go through all the changes and transformations brought by the Prophet Muhammad. The women’s status in these Muslim societies was not as good as the Quran wanted it to be. Surely, this issue was not the only one neglected or changed by the practice of the Muslim people. They neglected others.
IV. The Modernization of the Islamic World

With the beginning of the 19th century, the Muslim world was going through a process of modernization to meet the challenge of the European colonization and the impact of the West. At that time, modernization meant importing techniques and reforms in all areas of life: Education, urbanism, engineering, techniques, armament, science, economics and social life.
In Egypt, by the beginning of the 20th century, the Muslim family law and the status of women were on the agenda of the Islamist modernists, like Mohammed Abduh. Kassem Amin opened the door to the feminist movement and he was soon followed by the first feminist women: Malak Hifni, Nabawiya Mussa, Hoda Shaarawy, Cesa Nabarawy, Dorreyah Shafiq who demanded their Islamic rights. Women had a long way to go. Significant changes occurred in the lives of Muslim women. Influenced by the Western ideas and by Islamic and secular modernism, legal reforms, voting rights, educational and employment opportunities altered and broadened women’s role in society. In addition to being wives and mothers, women entered many areas of public life, ranging from politics to the professions.
V. Socio-Economic Changes and Women

Thus, universal education, open government employment, and family reforms were introduced by governments and implemented from the top down, rationalized and legitimated in the name of Islam, by using or manipulating Islamic principles and legal techniques.
Since the seventies, several new factors, internal and external, intensified and influenced the process of change. These include the dramatic economic fluctuations of the seventies and the eighties; the increase in labor migration; women’s participation in salaried work, state ideology and politics; feminists recommendations; the awareness of Western distaste for and criticism of Islamic family institutions; International pressure through agencies such as the United Nations, the Agency for International Development and the International Monetary Fund; the reality transforming the lives of Western women; a backlash against radical feminism in the West.