Not a historian here....

The Moroccan Berber Ibn Battuta in his voyages, written down in the Rihla, from everywhere from the Swahili Coast, Mali, Anatolia, China, Indonesia to Russia sometimes describes various customs in the treatment of women, sometimes critically (he was an Orthodox Muslim) and not in ways we would expect. In Mali, West Africa and the Maldives, women are described as being "topless" and women not having faces covered in Anatolia and the Steppes.

On Malian women, ibn Battuta claims that they were extremely beautiful and more important then the men. I am looking for specific part in which he claims this as a confirmation, but he describes an event in which he saw a Turkish woman being accompanied by a man, thinking it was the woman's slave, but then it turned out it was her husband.

"...A remarkable thing which I saw in this country was the respect shown to women by the Turks, for they hold a more dignified position than the men. ... I saw also the wives of the merchants and common [men]. [Their faces are] visible for the Turkish women do not veil themselves. Sometimes a woman will be accompanied by her husband and anyone seeing him would take him for one of her servants.

It's also worth noting that in the Ottoman Empire, the sultan's female relatives, like his mother, tended to wield political power.

When he was with the caravan of the Khan Ozbeg, "women of the court shared openly and energetically in the governing of the realm. Princesses, like their brothers, were awarded land which they ruled and taxed."

In other places, segregation happened (women eating separately from men in Muslim India, for example), and it definitely wasn't very nice to women.

Practically, it differed throughout the Islamic world, as one can see by Ibn Battuta's comments on them, he was not fond of it, preferring a woman to be more "modestly" dressed.

I know that medieval islamic societies were much more 'enlightened', educated and open minded than they are in modern times.

First of all, let's be open-minded ourselves. Bear in mind that our Western concept of equality is not necessarily right. There are strong feminist movements in many Muslim countries, and they're not necessarily fighting for the things white people think they should be fighting for. We ought to try and eschew ethno-centrism wherever possible.

Having said that, I do agree that there was more complex political and religious engagement in the medieval empire, but I think it's really important first and foremost to bear in mind that most regions in the empire had a certain level of autonomy and their own caliph. Religious practice, politics, civic law and general culture could change quite radically between India and Ghana.

Something you might want to look into is Sufism, which is Islamic mysticism, a movement founded (at least in part) by Rabi'a al-'Adawiyya, a woman from Basra. While women might have been on the margins of mainstream religious practice in some areas, that didn't mean that they weren't able to carve out their own spaces and practices.

The veiling of women was not an originally Islamic practice, but rather became common after the conquest of Safavid empire of Iran and the Byzantine empire of Levant. These very strongly patriarchal societies influenced Islamic practice, as the empire was one which found strength through absorbing and assimilating mutually to new conquered cultures to a certain extent. This practice was largely limited to upper-class families at the time though, and working women never wore veils. You'll find that similar practices abound in some medieval European societies. Veiling was a reasonably common way to mark an upper-class woman.

During the Abassid period, women underwent serious repression. Their names were removed from all public records. It became fashionable for men to restrict their wives and female family members movements and to veil them, because, as I previously alluded to, it was a marker of wealth and high social status.

Despite all this, it is important to note that the advent of Islam probably improved women's status. In the previous societies, women were property, but under the Qu'ranic and Sunnah law they gained the right to choose their marriage partner, set a limit on their partner's polygyny, inherit wealth, have their dowry paid directly to them, control their own money and property and be supported financially by their husband throughout marriage and for a period after divorce. We shouldn't forget though that this society was still very much a patriarchy and men were openly considered to have more rights, but women did play a very key role in the initial propogation of Islam, and while their rights were degraded later, one might argue that this came as a result of the assimilation of more aggressively patriarchal cultures into the empire.