Hey There, I appreciate you citing sources and doing some research yourself! However I would like to clarify the things that I feel are wrong in your argument, I am on mobile so please forgive if the comment is not formatted well

The first thing here is that as far as basic human dignity is considered, both men and women are equal in islam, if anything is permitted for men, it is also permitted for women and vice versa unless explicitly stated otherwise (and innovation is a huge in sin islam)^[1]^

Nowhere is education banned for women specifically, and it is in fact encouraged (which means for women as well)^[2][3]^

This is also a nice segue into the fact that islam doesn’t really ‘prohibit’ critical thinking, it deals with supernatural things, nowhere in islam you are taught calculus (cringe analogy i know, but it gets the point across), specifically islam talks about life after death, which we have no idea of, it’s completely open to interpretation, so there is really no answer to what happens after death or why life exists in the first place. Also nowhere in the quran will you find absurd statements like the sky is red like the thread suggests, most of the things that it talks about are established science or real life experiences (sun rising from the east, fruits growing from plants etc), or advice on how to handle situations like loans, marriage, divorces and so on, every institute has some sort of set of rules it is governed by, and you can read through the quran and won’t find anything that straight up contradicts common knowledge or established science, you can just think of it as a general set of rules, also it tackles a lot of things that the arabs of that time dealt with so it alienates some people, but the general rules which apply to everyone are very ‘naturalistic’/real life based, so saying that islam does not allow critical thinking is just wrong imo

Now on the most sensitive issue, the status of women in islam, i would like to point out that any hadith or verse from quran should be taken in context of the time and place it was revealed in the case of quran or said/performed in the case of hadith, things can change quite substantially depending on time and location, there are multiple examples of this of which i’ll add a source later

So in the hadith you mentioned about degeneration of women, i’ll first point out some reasons as to why it was probably said

1. With regard to a woman’s lack of reason, it is because women are easily swayed by emotions, which make them unable to deal appropriately with new issues that arise.

2. As for a woman’s lack of religious commitment, it is because women do not pray and fast during the days of their menses and when they are bleeding following childbirth.

As for them complaining, Surah Al Mujadilah (The first few verses) specifically talks about a women who complained to the prophet about the way her husband acted, and she was not the one criticized, instead all men warned about sinful divorce and the compensations they will have to complete(You can read it here https://quran.com/al-mujadila)

Also islam talk a lot about women rights in various other places^[4][5][6][7]^, hence maintaining a sort of equilibrium, both men and women are warned about their wrongdoings

On the last topic of suckling, it has nothing to do with segregation, it was a different matter which this ^[8]^ explains quite well

I would like to end by saying that there is a reason scholars exist who spend their lives studying hadiths and quran, they both have to interpreted carefully to not arrive at the wrong conclusions, your understanding of hadith isn’t perfect, nor is mine, the best I can do is try to explain the best I can, no society is perfect, there are of course of a lot of extremist on any sort of ‘following’, you will even find atheists who don’t want any person who follows any religion to exist, but it is important to understand there are good people and scholars as well, while our opinions might differ, the best thing to do is to try to adopt the good qualities from both sides

And really the point I am trying to make from all of this is that ‘organizations’ like taliban or ‘some’ governments don’t really represent Islam, for them religion is just a tool they can use to bring a ton of people on their sides who will not bother to fact check their claims or even bother to learn about their own beliefs, the perfect example of this is the fact that in photo in the article, you can see a male teacher teaching an all-female class, the more appropriate thing here is to actually have a female teacher, but I guarantee that the taliban doesn’t hire female teachers, which is just enough for any reasonable person to understand the hypocrisy of these (talibani) people

[1] https://sunnah.com/nasai:1578

[2] https://sunnah.com/riyadussalihin:1388

[3]https://sunnah.com/riyadussalihin:1383, https://sunnah.com/riyadussalihin:1385

[4] https://quran.com/an-nisa/19

[5] https://quran.com/an-nisa/32

[6] https://sunnah.com/muslim:1468a

[7] https://sunnah.com/tirmidhi:3895

[8] https://islamqa.org/hanafi/daruliftaa/8424/clarification-of-hadith-about-the-suckling-of-a-grown-man/