The Koran says that "Men have authority over women because Allah has made the one superior to the other" (4:34). The same passage authorizes husbands to "admonish them [their wives] and send them to beds apart and beat them" (4:34). Moreover, an authoritative Hadith records that Muhammad gave his comrades permission to rape non-Muslim women captured in combat (Sahih Muslim, vol. 2, no. 3371). Since Islam considers itself to be in a permanent state of war with the non-Islamic world, this is often interpreted by some Muslim men to mean that non-Muslim women in non-Islamic countries can be raped with impunity.
