My professor told me that men and women have different purposes, so we can't protest how men are more "free". We can't protest on how wives have to do what the husbands say as long as it's right. My Mom also told me that if your husband says no, then you don't do it. However, there are feminists that are rebelling against this, they say that it's sexist, women rights, equality, etc. What do you think about this? And what do you think about feminism? Sorry if it's hard to understand.

There are many types of feminists. Some of them believe in equal rights for women and there is nothing wrong with this. Others believe in women’s moral superiority and think that all men are inherently worthless

"I want to see a man beaten to a bloody pulp with a high-heel shoved in his mouth, like an apple in the mouth of a pig." —Andrea Dworkin

"All men are rapists and that's all they are" —Marilyn French, advisor to Al Gore's presidential campaign.

"In order to raise children with equality, we must take them away from families and communally raise them" —Dr. Mary Jo Bane, feminist and assistant professor of education at Wellesley College, and associate director of the school's Center for Research on Woman.

"The most merciful thing a large family can to do one of its infant members is to kill it." —Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, in "Women and the New Race," p. 67.

"We are, as a sex, infinitely superior to men." —Elizabeth Cady Stanton

These are feminism’s leaders and intellectuals. They have high-paying jobs as university professors and administrators, pundits and non-profit executives. These are not some crazy outsiders, they are at the center of feminism, and it is people like this who run most women’s studies departments at universities.

As for women who believe in the equal worth of men and women and simply want to promote equal rights and opportunities for women, then there is nothing necessarily wrong with that. So it is quite true that a Muslim woman can be a feminist and make a contribution to society.

There is a big difference between the old humanist feminism of Wollstonecraft and Stanton and the new radical leftist feminism in vogue today. The old one worked to end social injustice against women by demanding equal rights and freedoms for them. This old feminism is in keeping with Islamic principles and can serve a useful function in Islamic societies, ensuring that women’s rights are not neglected and women’s freedoms not limited due to un-Islamic cultural biases that exist in many places.

The new feminism, which is the doctrine of today’s women’s studies departments at universities, has little to do with the old feminism. It teaches that men are inherently evil and worthless, that men’s thinking is invalid, that the world would be a better place if all men ceased to exist. It promotes hatred and anger against men and civilization, teaching women to feel no moral responsibility toward their societies and to see everything from the highly skewed lens of a mythical war between the sexes. This view is highly un-Islamic, because it does not believe in the transcendent value of human life. It teaches that men are sub-human, lesser creatures, almost worthless. It teaches that a woman’s rights and feelings must be of the utmost importance while considering men’s (and boys’) rights and feelings laughable and worthless.

Any feminist Islam, therefore, must be highly sensitive to the differences between these two types of feminism and reject the new one in favor of the old, humanist feminism that truly believed in equality, in giving back to society, in cooperation with men rather than hatred toward them.