New legislation in Morocco boosting women's rights was a rare exception in the Muslim world, where the status of women has become the subject of a pitched battle between modernisers and radical Islamists.
Morocco's new family code puts women on a more equal footing with their husbands, notably raising the age at which girls can legally marry from 15 to 18 and giving wives "joint responsibility" with their husbands in family matters.
The code, which became law earlier this month and which also says polygamy can now only be practiced under highly restrictive conditions, replaced a family code that women's groups said turned Moroccan women into perpetual minors, under the authority of men.
The prime mover behind it was King Mohammed VI, who has stressed it is in line with the tenets of Islam.
But such a move would likely meet fierce resistance in many Muslim countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
The status of women has become a central theme in the heated debates between Islamic modernisers and fundamentalists who fight what they see as Western-inspired models.
In north Africa, Tunisia's liberal legislation, in place since 1956, is the exception.
Neighbouring Algeria has a family code based on the Islamic Sharia legal system, under which women's rights are, to Western eyes, severely curtailed.
The legislation, dubbed the "code of shame" by feminist groups, makes a wife subject to her husband and recognises polygamy.
In Senegal, a 95-percent Muslim country on the continent's western Atlantic coast, an umbrella group called the Islamic Committee for the Reform of the Family Code is demanding that family law be rewritten because the existing text is too closely based on that of France, the former colonial power.
Also in Senegal, as in Ghana and in Egypt and 30 odd other African states, the persistent practice of circumcising young girls is a focal issue for local feminists backed by international aid agencies and non-governmental organisations.
The operation, in which the clitoris and labia are removed, impairs a woman's ability to enjoy sexual relations and is traditionally seen as controlling female sexuality and improving a girl's marriage prospects.
Yet Muslim theologians insist that the practice has no basis in Islamic texts.
Women's rights have only recently emerged as a debate in the Middle East, the heart of the Islamic world where strict Sharia law is widely practiced.
In Saudi Arabia, which houses Islam's holiest sites, the grand mufti last month denounced growing calls by Saudi women who want an end to male domination.
Most Saudi women are usually covered from head-to-toe when they venture out in public, and the recent sight of women unveiled and mixing with men at an economic conference in the city of Jeddah infuriated the religious establishment.
"It is illicit," said grand mufti Sheikh Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh. He criticised newspapers for publishing photos of the businesswomen, saying this was contrary to the teachings of the Koran.
In Jordan, the youthful King Abdullah II and Queen Rania have worked to improve the status of women in their kingdom. One of their aims is putting an end to so-called "honour crimes," in which women are murdered, often by their own husbands, for allegedly committing adultery.
In Nigeria and Pakistan women accused of such "crimes" are often sentenced to be stoned to death.
After the 2001 overthrow in Afghanistan of the Taliban, who had brought in the harshest Sharia regime in the world as regards women, modern legislation has been drawn up but has yet to be fully applied.
The overthrow last spring of Saddam Hussein in Iraq gave political muscle to the long-oppressed Muslim Shiite majority, who are now expected to try to use it to repeal the family code, drawn up in 1958 and said to be one of the most advanced in the Muslim world.
Asia is home to 700 million Muslims out of the world total of one billion. But how Islam is practiced and how women are treated depends largely on local traditions and varies enormously between countries like Indonesia, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh.
Radical Islamist groups and Koranic schools have flourished in recent years in countries such as Pakistan and Malaysia.
They threaten to put a brake on the progress made there towards a form of moderate and tolerant secularism in which the status of women is one of the major stakes.
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