Diane, my stance on this shouldn't be confused with supporting Islam as a faith, or the wider abuses done in its name.
There really isn't a gnat's pube width of a difference between Islam and Christianity in their attitude towards women if you look at each faith during the time of their inception. Nor Judaism.
Women in those days were little more than chattels. Look at records of wars throughout time. Warriors were slaughtered, women taken as slaves. That's true of the Bible as it is of History Of The Mongols. The "begats" in the Old Testament conveniently omitted those who actually did the begatting, namely the girls, and our Western Christian names (the Macs, Mcs and O's) refer to our dads, not our mums.
What has made the difference is how each religion has travelled, i.e. progressed. Islam has not travelled. Islam did not ever really move out of the patriarchal tribal systems which embraced it, therefore what you see done in the name of Mohammed is in fact done in the name of backwards tribal tradition from the time before Mohammed. The tribal traditions in the West were more "enlightened", shall we say, and, like a kid leaving small town USA for the Big City, Christianity fared better when separated from the parent religion.
Also, Christianity is (*gasp*) based on the teachings of Jesus. Jesus's message is distinct from every other Messianic figure to have come before or after, and his was (is) the gospel of love. Turn The Other Cheek and Love Thy Neighbour As Thyself were truly revolutionary statements. Even the ninth Commandment only demanded that you not bear false witness against your neighbour, not that you should actually love the bugger.
Jesus's messages were heavy shit and totally outrageous in a warlike society.
However, they were spread abroad not by Jesus but by Paul, and Paul was the prototype of the business agents you see so often today. He was a Jew, and Judaism does not seek new members, merely to induct born members, so Paul packaged Christianity to appeal to what he knew was a receptive niche market in the West, and so you get a totally different slant -this religion of love- one that appealed to women.
In a world which demanded religious belief, women could see the appeal of Christianity and they became staunch champions, many willingly martyred in its name.
History demonstrates that Man's evil and excesses continued to flourish within Christianity, and that they still do. We have only recently come to see women ministers actually ordained within some sections of the Church. It's taken a long time. Gays are still discriminated against, and the Bible itself is used as the excuse for it. "I'd be totally for the gays if God wasn't so against them" seems to be the attitude.
Islam is still a "backward" religion. Its enforced ignorance is ingrained and just as it took 500 or so years for it to take off after Christianity, it may take another 500 years to catch up to where Christianity (with all its faults) is today. Christ is followed by a mostly educated urban Western demographic. Mohammed's followers are mostly peasant agrarian and uneducated. We should keep that in mind.
