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This brings up a larger issue: people aren’t just sexually oppressed because they can’t get sex, but also because they’re expected to be sexual when they don’t want to be. What about Muslim women who are forced into marriage at a young age, such as that 12-year-old girl in Yemen who died in childbirth? In cases such as that, Muslim girls are expected to be sexual creatures when they actually shouldn’t be. That’s just as much of a problem as expecting Muslim women to be sheltered chaste angels.

That’s a good point, and something many feminist activists particularly in pre-dominantly Muslim countries are dealing with.

A rights-based framework is really important and useful in this context because not only because is it valid in Islamic terms but it is also universal (especially if such laws are extended to non-Muslims who live in a Muslim majority nation states). But Islam does appear to live a double life in many communities, where dominant and typically androcentric interpretation of the Quran are at odds with the ethical interpretation of the Quran (in which women and men are spiritually, psychologically, and mentally equal, and therefore should be treated as such). A rights framework would refer heavily on the latter interpretation and is often used as a tool (for lack of a better word) by activists and reformists.