**Found this article, thought it was pretty interesting. It’s pretty long, so I broke it down into several sections. 
I really hope you guys will take time to read this carefully. My opinion after reading this, these are not women who are taking off their clothes in teh name of false liberation but rather those who consider themselves proud Muslims, trying to use their religious principles in a secular society. They are working to lessen discrimination and jahil practices wrongfully associated with Islam (such as honor killings, forced marriages, hypocrisy, illiteracy, genital mutilation) by educating other women on true Islam and making a better future for them and their children **
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/12/01/news/islam6.php
The importance of education:
Hanife Karakus, the soft-spoken daughter of Turkish immigrants, is a thoroughly European Muslim. She covers her hair with a veil, but she also has a law degree and married the man of her choice. There was no pressure from matchmakers. The couple met on the Internet.
Adding to this mix, Karakus recently became the first woman to preside over one of France’s 25 regional Islamic councils.
“At first, the men didn’t speak to me,” she said. “They were uncomfortable - they didn’t know how to work with a woman.”
Karakus, 24, does not call herself a feminist; she simply says she is a French lawyer. But she qualifies as part of the quiet revolution spreading among young European Muslim women, a new generation that claims the same rights as their Western sisters while not renouncing Islamic principles.
For many, the key is education, an option often denied their mothers and grandmothers. These daughters of the poor immigrants from mostly Muslim countries are moving into universities, studying law, medicine and anthropology. They are getting jobs in social work, in schools, offices, business and media. French, English, German or Dutch may be their native languages.
Unlike their homebound elders, these emancipated Muslim women use the Internet and spend hours in the proliferating Islamic chat rooms. Web sites are now favorite trysting places, a chance for risk-free “halal dating” - that is, interacting with men in a way that violates no social or religious codes.
In the crowded immigrant suburbs ringing Paris, the scene of recent riots mostly led by young Muslim males, teachers say female students are the most motivated because they have the most to gain. This mirrors findings in young Muslim communities throughout Europe.
In interviews in France, Belgium and the Netherlands, young women repeat this like a mantra: studying offers an escape route from the oppressive housing projects, from controlling young Muslim fanatics and from strict social codes enforced by fathers and brothers.
“We all understood that education was our passport to freedom,” said Soria Makti, 30, who left her Marseille housing project and now works as a museum curator.
The emancipation of Muslim women, like that of Western women before them, is uneven in its progress, often slow, sometimes deeply painful when women feel they have no choice but to break with their families. But some changes are pointing to a new form of Islamic feminism.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the realm of religion, the centuries-old domain of men. Young women have begun carving out their spaces by following Islamic studies, a fast-growing field across Europe that offers a blend of theology, Koranic law, ethics and Arabic. Diplomas from the two-year courses allow women to teach in mosques and in Islamic schools or to act as religious advisers.
“This is a big shift,” said Amel Boubekeur, a social scientist writing her thesis on Europe’s “new Islamic elites.”
“Instead of having to be passive, women become teachers. It used to be taboo for women to recite the Koran,” she said.
Boubekeur has interviewed scores of Islamic studies graduates in France and elsewhere and said many felt that the knowledge of religion was empowering them.
“It offers them a new prestige, new jobs and, not least, it gives them a stronger voice in dealing with their parents, brothers and husbands,” Boubekeur said. “To defend their rights, these women find that arguments based on religious texts have more effect than secular ideas.”
Today, Islamic studies, often taken on weekends and accessible to secondary school graduates, are expanding in Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain. An informal survey for this article of France’s six Islamic studies institutes showed that of this year’s near 1,000 students, almost 60 percent are women.
La Grande Mosquée in Paris, a large white and green compound from the 1920s with a finely chiseled minaret, is France’s leading Islamic religious institution. It has its own theological school, largely financed from Algeria. On a recent Saturday, students were milling around under the arcades for a mint tea break from psychology classes.
Abdelkrim Bekri, the director, said that in 2002, the school had begun a new program, unavailable elsewhere, to train young women as spiritual counselors for hospitals and prisons, much like the ministry of Christian chaplains. Twenty have already graduated and other women are in training. “There is a great need here,” he said.
Religious tasks are low-paying, even for male clerics, and women are not allowed to perform the most prestigious ritual of leading the mosque in Friday prayers. Boubekeur said that for now women care about having a voice, participating in the debate. “What is new is that they want direct access to religion, without depending on the rigid views of the clergy,” she said.
Change can be measured in other small steps. At the Islamic University of Rotterdam, a small group of theology students, most of them speaking Dutch but all tightly veiled, chatted after classes about Islamic segregation of men and women. They said that in Europe it was important to end this.
“In class we sit anywhere we choose,” said a student who gave her name only as Aisha. “In the mosques we don’t want to sit in separate or hidden spaces.”
Ertegul Gokcekuyu, the university registrar, said more than 60 percent of his students were female. “The motivation of the girls is very remarkable.”
