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Having rejected the patriarchal liberal nation-state, with all the democratic machinery of self-government that goes along with it, the utopian concludes that there is only one way to achieve her goals: to impose them through international government. Utopian feminists fill the halls of the United Nations, where they examine everything through the lens of the “gender perspective” in study after unreadable study. (My personal favorites: “Gender Perspectives on Landmines” and “Gender Perspectives on Weapons of Mass Destruction,” whose conclusion is that landmines and WMDs are bad for women.)

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At the same time, though, the issue of women’s rights highlights two reasons for caution about the Islamic future. For one thing, no matter how much feminists might wish otherwise, polygamy and male domination of the family are not merely a fact of local traditions; they are written into the Qur’an itself. This in and of itself would not prove to be such an impediment—the Old Testament is filled with laws antithetical to women’s equality—except for the second problem: more than other religions, Islam is unfriendly to the notion of the separation of church and state. If history is any guide, there’s the rub. The ultimate guarantor of the rights of all citizens, whether Islamic or not, can only be a fully secular state.

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