Narrated 'Aisha: "The things which annul the prayers were mentioned before me. They said, "Prayer is annulled by a dog, a donkey and a woman (if they pass in front of the praying people)…" Bukhari

A'isha said [to Muhammad]: "You have made us equal to the dogs and the asses." Muslim 4:1039

Treat women well, for they are like domestic animals (awan) with you and do not possess anything for themselves. Tabari vol.9 p.113

The Prophet said, "Isn’t the witness of a woman equal half that of a man?" The women said, "Yes." He said: "This is because of the deficiency of the woman’s mind." Bukhari

Virgil Gheorghiu in his admiring biography La vie de Mahomet (Robert Lafont, 1974) describes the reaction of the Prophet when he first arrived in Medina and discovered that date-bearing palms were artificially pollinated. God’s Messenger was scandalized and ordered the practice stopped immediately. He re-instituted the practice the next year after date production plummeted, but insisted it be done when he wasn’t around.

On another occasion, still according to Gheorghiu, the Prophet had a vision in his home and was unsure if it was Satan or an angel. His wife Khadijah proved to her husband that it was an angel. She told her husband to get undressed and she did the same and they embraced. Do you still see him, she asked? No, said God’s Messenger. Then it must have been an angel, his wife replied, because an angel would not have remained to stare at a naked couple embracing.

Considering that the Prophet was married to fourteen women; kept a number of concubines for company (one of which, Maryam, bore his only son who, unfortunately, died in infancy, another was the beautiful Rayhanah, a  widow of the Beni Qurayzah Jewish clan of Medina whose men and teenaged boys God's Messenger had beheaded for strategic reasons) and an unknown number of slave-girls, his extraordinary prudishness is surprising, to say the least.

Allah, like His Messenger, is also a bit of a prude. Consider the following verse where He warns women not to stamp their feet for fear that men might discern their jiggling attributes, and who knows what that will lead to.

24:31 And tell the believing women to cast down their eyes and guard their private parts and not show their finery, except the outward part of it. And let them drape their bosoms with their veils and not show their finery, except to their husbands, their fathers, their husbands’ fathers, their sons, the sons of their husbands, their brothers, the sons of their brothers, the sons of their sisters, their women, their maid-servants, the men-followers who have no sexual desire, or infants who have no knowledge of women’s sexual parts yet. Let them, also, not stamp their feet, so that what they have concealed of their finery might be known. Repent to Allah, all of you, O believers, that perchance you may prosper.

Prudish men are known to be both attracted and repelled by the sex act, a trait often shared with misogynous males; for them a woman is both an object of desire and of contempt. The type of contempt clearly evident in the following hadiths where God's Messenger fixes the distance if there is no physical barrier that women, Jews, dogs, pigs and donkeys must maintain from a praying Muslim male.

Ikrimah reported on the authority of Ibn Abbas, saying: "I think the Apostle of Allah said: When one of you prays without a sutrah (a barrier), a dog, an ass, a pig, a Jew, a Magian, and a woman cut off his prayer, but it will suffice if they pass in front of him at a distance of over a stone's throw.” Abu Dawud

And what to make of His Mentor's revelation about women's guile:

12:26 He (Joseph) said: “She sought to seduce me.” And a member of her household bore witness: “If his shirt was torn from the front, then she is telling the truth and he is a liar.

12:27 “But if his shirt is torn from behind, then she lies and he is one of the truthful.”

 12:28 When he (the husband) saw that his shirt was torn from behind, he said: “This is part of your guile, you women. Your guile is indeed very great.

Could this prudish middle-aged man’s struggle between contempt and desire for the dozens of mostly young females he secluded within his household be responsible for the double standard in Islamic law. Did contempt win out, which is why believing women are in class by themselves, the lowest class, a class not deserving of any of the benefits of Islamic jurisprudence, only the punishment:

According to Islamic law and tradition, there were three groups of people who did not benefit from the general Muslim principals of legal and religious equality – unbelievers, slaves and women. The woman was obviously in one significant respect the worst-placed of the three. The slave could be freed by his master; the unbeliever could at any time become a believer by his own choice, and thus end his inferiority. Only the woman was doomed forever to remain what she was.

Bernard Lewis author of What Went Wrong, Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response.

The Cult of Masculinity

The most visible manifestation of the cult of masculinity, or male adoration, in pre-Islamic Arabia was the patronymic naming nomenclature (a part of a personal name is based on the name of one's father) which rests on a father being able to trace his ancestry through his father’s name. That is why today, as it was then, Arab names often contain the conjunctions ibn/ben meaning son of, or Abu meaning father of.

The expression of this male adoration cult was everywhere evident in pre-Islamic Arabia, where sons were cherished and daughters barely tolerated until a male heir was produced.

This did not mean that pre-Islamic Arabs were misogynous, quite the opposite. As proof, what they worshipped most often was not gods but goddesses, the most prominent being Lat, Uzzah, and Manat the daughters of God.

Like the Greeks and Romans before them, the pre-Islamic Arabs believed that it was important, to maintain some balance between the sexes, to allow women into the Parthenon of deities. The Prophet did away with this civilizing, equalizing tradition^*.

Islam, like the Jewish religion on which it is model, has only one god and he is male; a misogynous all powerful, omnipotent male in Whom the cult of masculinity would find its ultimate expression.

Verses pertaining to the pre-Islamic goddesses where Allah’s preference for males is very much in evidence:

53:19 Have you, then, seen al-Lat and al-‘Uzza?

53:20 And Manat, the third one, the other?

53:21 Do you have the male and He has the female?

53:22 That indeed is an unjust division.

Two verses in close proximity containing a clear warning about not insulting Allah by saying He is the father of females.

16:57 And they ascribe to Allah daughters [glory be to Him!], but to themselves what they desire (sons).

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16:62 And they ascribe to Allah what they themselves dislike (daughters). Their tongues utter the lie that theirs will be the best reward. There is no doubt that the Fire awaits them, and that they will be left [there].

In Islamic Traditions angels are sexless. If this is the case, why is Allah aghast that people would insinuate that they get the sons while He has to be content with females from among His angels?

17:40 Has your Lord, then, favoured you with sons and taken to Himself females from among the angels”? Surely, you are uttering a monstrous thing.

Furthermore, only unbelievers would give angels female names.

53:27 Those who do not believe in the Hereafter will surely give the angels the names of females.

Allah’s extreme reaction to being associated with females in the preceding verses may also have had something to do with His Messenger not fathering any sons that survived beyond infancy. For this failure, the Prophet was often taunted and ridiculed by his enemies who would openly wonder why God had not favoured His greatest Messenger with sons.

Allah or His Messenger may have seen this inability to father healthy sons as just another of women’s many failings, and both may not have wished to associate themselves too closely with so obviously flawed creatures.

The Prophet, with Allah’s Koran as proof as to the righteousness of his endeavour, preached a new world order where women, during their lifetime would be secluded like prisoners in their fathers' or husbands' home, largely invisible to the general population ,with only their husbands or a close relative able to testify as to who they were, what they looked like, what they yearned for. Once this largely anonymous life came to an end, the memory of their time on earth would be largely forgotten courtesy of the Messenger of God.

The pre-Islamic Arab patronymic naming nomenclature was a tradition, the Prophet made it a law, whose transgression meant flirting with death and an eternity in Hell.

Islam expressly forbids the use of a mother’s name to trace your lineage. To do so is heresy, a capital offence.

He who deliberately lets himself be called the son of someone other than his father is guilty of disbelief. Bukhari

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* To avoid offending Allah, no Muslim female can be given the name of any goddesses, including goddesses from antiquity. A female convert with the name of Diana for instance, would have to change her name before becoming a Muslim.