The women of Afghanistan do not wish to be freed from the strictures of the Taliban only to submit to a Western model of women's liberation, or so various of their representatives have reminded well-meaning American feminists during the past several weeks. "Bring your democracy, not your bikinis" is how Zohra Yusuf Daoud, Miss Afghanistan of 1973, put it to the audience of a recent conference in New York co-sponsored by Women for Afghan Women. In fact, there are a number of women in this country whose theological distaste for the bikini is combined with an appreciation for civil rights: American Muslim feminists. Some of these women read the Koran as a document that secures women's rights rather than as a blueprint for oppression, in spite of the evidence, throughout the Muslim world, of the originality of such an interpretation. The picture they present of God's plan for women is not quite consistent with American-style equality; instead, it suggests that the Muslim woman would be the most pampered, privileged creature on the planet, if only she knew her due.

Azizah al-Hibri, a Lebanese-American professor of law at the University of Richmond, in Virginia, who is an expert in the prenuptial contract that traditionally regulates every Muslim marriage, argues that, according to Islamic jurisprudence based on the Koran, the contract can be used as an instrument by which a woman can lay out her expectations about the shape she would like her marriage, and thus her life, to take. "It goes back to the very early days of Islam, when it was understood that women entered marriage equally, unlike previous regimes, in which she was chattel," al-Hibri says. A woman can secure her right to work outside the home at any job she likes; she can reassert her right to have her husband support her financially, even if she has a job or is independently wealthy; she can keep her finances separate from his and invest them wherever she wishes; she can specify the sum of money she expects to receive should the marriage end in divorce or should she be widowed; she can negotiate the right to divorce her husband at will, should he, for example, take another wife; she can reserve the right not to cook, to clean, or to nurse her own children.

Some American Muslim women even argue that Islam anticipates the demands of Western feminists by more than a thousand years: a stay-at-home wife can specify that she expects to receive a regular stipend, which is not that far from the goals of the Wages for Housework campaign of the nineteen-seventies. Elsewhere, the fully empowered Muslim woman sounds like a self-assured, post-feminist type—a woman who draws her inspiration from the example of Sukayna, the brilliant, beautiful great-granddaughter of the Prophet Muhammad, who was married several times, and, at least once, stipulated in writing that her husband was forbidden to disagree with her about anything.All these conditions are based on the canon of Islam and on early Muslim practice, al-Hibri says, but they are rarely applied, since centuries of male-dominated culture have so obscured the essential equality of the sexes at the core of Islamic marriage that a woman's failure to include these provisions in the marriage contract can be understood as implying that she has waived them.

For non-Muslims who fret about the high divorce rate in this country, the concept of a negotiated marital contract that makes explicit the financial, social, and even sexual expectations that each partner brings to the union has a certain appeal. Although wealthy Americans may have discovered the usefulness of the prenup, the dominant view of marriage in American culture is that it is a largely romantic endeavor rather than an arrangement based, at least in part, on pragmatism. Unfortunately, most Islamic marriages bear about as much relation to this paradigm as most American marriages bear to a Nora Ephron movie. Marriage contracts generally go no further than specifying the size of the bride's mahr—a sort of dowry the groom must pay her—because many Muslim women are illinformed of their rights, and, even if they do know them, lack the financial and social leverage to assert them. Things are even tougher for a woman who might prefer not to marry, or is obliged to remain single. And al-Hibri's pro-woman readings of the Koran are, at times, less than persuasive: in a recent essay for the Journal of Law & Religion, she acknowledges that the Koran permits a husband to beat his wife, though she argues that a correct reading of the verse indicates that he should use nothing more injurious than a miswak, a twig that commonly serves as a toothbrush in the Arabian peninsula.

A group of Muslim women in Washington, among them Sima Wali, a delegate to the Afghan conference in Bonn last month, has been drawing up a list of legislative recommendations for a reconstructed Afghanistan, including a woman's right to vote and her right of access to medical treatment. Also included is the suggestion that girls receive marriage-contract education in the schools when, as it is hoped, they return to them in the spring. If a particularly bright young Afghan girl should ask why, if Islam is predicated on equality and harmony between the sexes, a woman should be advised to load her contract with conditions that restrict her husband's capacity to exploit her, al-Hibri has an answer. "The way I explain it is that God understands patriarchy, because God created man," she says. "He realized immediately that women need affirmative action." American feminists have never been particularly celebrated for a sense of irony; Afghan feminists, assuredly, will need one.

— Rebecca Mead