Quran

The Quran appears in the book as an authority invoked to support women’s subordinate status, linking religious doctrine to social and economic power. Its significance lies not only in the stated hierarchy between men and women, but in the contrast between women’s varied circumstances and the restrictions imposed under patriarchal arrangements.

Religious Authority and Women’s Status

In a survey of laws and religious codes, the book presents the Quran alongside other traditions that assign women an inferior position. The cited formulation attributes men’s superiority to qualities God has given them and to their material provision for women. This account connects gender hierarchy both to divine authority and to economic dependence: provision becomes part of the stated rationale for male precedence.

The Quran’s appearance belongs to a wider analysis of how written codes, produced within established patriarchal societies, define women as subordinate. The book argues that such systems treat woman as the Other and organize social life around male authority. The Quran is therefore discussed as part of a historical pattern in which religious and legal language can reinforce women’s limited position, rather than as an isolated textual reference.

Social Conditions and Economic Dependence

The book distinguishes between the circumstances of Bedouin women and those of women described as veiled and secluded. Bedouin women are represented as undertaking hard work, including plowing and carrying burdens, while moving about freely and appearing with uncovered faces. Their labor establishes a reciprocal bond with their husbands. By contrast, the Muslim woman described as shut in is characterized as lacking real power and, in much of society, living under conditions of severe dependence.

To make that contrast concrete, the text recounts the author’s encounter in a Tunisian troglodyte village: four women were inside an underground dwelling, occupied with domestic work and child care, while the male household member returned from the market and conversation with other men. The account sets women’s confined domestic sphere against men’s access to public social life. It presents this division as an instance of the broader structure in which women’s labor sustains household life while men retain wider social freedom.

Place in the Book’s Argument

The Quran reference supports the book’s distinction between women’s capacities and the conditions imposed on them. In the book’s existentialist framework, every person is an autonomous freedom whose existence is realized through projects and movement toward an open future. Women, however, are made to assume the position of the Other and are pressed toward immanence, while their possibilities are restricted by social arrangements. The Quran’s cited authority is treated within this argument as one element in the historical legitimation of that restriction.

The book does not reduce women’s condition to religious doctrine alone. It examines biological functions, domestic labor, economic dependence, and social organization together, arguing that the constraints on women arise from their situation rather than from an unalterable destiny. The Quran thus figures in a broader account of how institutions and inherited explanations can make subordination appear justified, even as women’s concrete circumstances differ.