By Maria Charles, Roger Friedland, Janet Afary, and Rujun Yang
Western depictions of gender relations in Muslim-majority societies reflect two widespread assumptions, shared even by many academics. The first assumption is that the Muslim world is uniformly gender-traditional, meaning that opinions on gender issues are presumed not to vary much within or across Middle Eastern, North African, and South Asian (MENASA) societies. A second, related, assumption is that gender ideology is a single dimension, meaning that if you know someone’s position on one issue, such as women’s veiling, you can easily predict their position on other issues, such as men’s control over their wives’ employment. This leads to the presumption that Muslim-majority societies are uniformly traditional about gender politics.
In our recent Gender & Society article, we test these ideas using data from a new Facebook survey of more than 6,000 Muslim men and women in six MENASA societies: Algeria, Egypt, Pakistan, Tunisia, Turkey, and Palestine. We didn’t only look at gender issues typically covered in Western surveys (e.g., household divisions of labor and women’s rights in education, employment, and politics), but instead explored two principles central to gender relations in Muslim-majority countries. The first gender principle we analyzed was women’s chastity. This is highly salient in societies where social control of women’s bodies can be a symbolic marker of Muslim cultural authenticity and where perceived impurity can be subject to severe social sanctions. The second gender principle we analyzed was marital patriarchy. This reflects issues of men’s primacy within marriage, specifically beliefs about the unequal status and rights of husbands and wives. We measure chastity beliefs using survey questions on whether women should wear the hijab, and whether women should be virgins at marriage. We measure marital patriarchy beliefs using questions on men’s rights to control their wives’ employment, and to resort to physical violence against their wives after exhausting “other methods of persuasion.”
The principles of marital patriarchy and women’s chastity differ in their explicit endorsement of gender inequality. Whereas men’s rights to beat their wives and control their wives’ employment rests upon an undeniable gender hierarchy within marriage, norms of feminine modesty may be more plausibly interpreted through a “different but equal” lens, legitimized by beliefs about men’s and women’s innately different bodies and sexual essences—for example, men’s natural sexual aggression. This distinction is important, we argue, because forms of gender inequality that openly violate liberal egalitarian ideals are often met with significant opposition, whereas inequalities based on perceived natural gender difference (“gender essentialism”) may exist quite comfortably alongside liberal ideals.
Two main questions motivate our study. First, how do beliefs about marital patriarchy and women’s chastity vary across and within MENASA societies? And second, do these gender principles vary independently of one another – in particular, are beliefs about marital patriarchy and women’s chastity influenced in different ways by respondents’ religious beliefs and gender status? When considering religiosity, we include two different aspects: piety and absolutism. Piety refers to a rigorous adherence to religious practice and beliefs, and absolutism refers to belief in the complete moral authority of the Quran, and the enforcement of its prescriptions and proscriptions through national laws.
With respect to the first question about the variability of attitudes, we find a strong heterogeneity in gender beliefs that is difficult to reconcile with Western depictions of a monolithic Islamic patriarchy. Within countries, gender attitudes differ between women and men and among people with different religious beliefs. Across countries, agreement with marital patriarchy and women’s chastity varies strongly as well.
With respect to the second question, we find that support for women’s chastity is much more broad-based than support for marital patriarchy in all six societies. Indeed, survey results show that most MENASA men do not support husbands’ rights to be violent towards their wives – even in countries with the highest levels of religious absolutism and the strongest support for women’s chastity. This finding calls to mind the “different but equal” gender regimes found in the West, where inequalities grounded in blatant male primacy are perceived to be less legitimate than those attributed to essential differences between (fundamentally equal) men and women. Although social desirability bias is always a concern with culturally sensitive topics, we worry less about such bias because we are analyzing an anonymous online survey. Because views on domestic violence are not typically interrogated in Western surveys, we cannot say how attitudes of MENASA men compare to those of their North American and European counterparts.
Three distinct gender cultures appear to varying extents in the six MENASA countries. Gender reformists question both marital patriarchy and chastity norms and make up the largest group of respondents in Turkey. Gender-traditionalists endorse both women’s chastity and marital patriarchy. They are the largest group in Algeria, Egypt, and Pakistan. We also find a group of people who reject marital patriarchy but adhere to norms of gendered chastity. We call them the chastity group, and they are the largest group in Tunisia and among Palestinians.
The different overall approval levels we find for the two gender principles depends partly on stronger support for women’s chastity than marital patriarchy among women and among liberal Muslims. While women’s and men’s relative acceptance of bridal virginity norms and head covering norms depends on the local meanings and histories of these practices, we find a strong gender divide in attitudes toward an explicit marital hierarchy that places women below their husbands within marriage. Religious beliefs also show uneven effects on the two gender principles. Muslim piety is associated with support for women’s chastity but not for patriarchal control within marriage. Islamic absolutismis associated with stronger support for both principles.
Compulsory veiling, an explicitly hierarchical form of state patriarchy that is not directly measured in our survey, has indeed elicited fierce resistance in some contexts, including in Iran (not part of our study) at the time of this writing. But our findings suggest that the symbolic meanings and practical implications of veiling and other gendered modesty practices are complicated and contextually contingent. It is the forms of patriarchal oppression that are most overtly hierarchical that Muslim women appear to oppose most uniformly – and that are more likely to catalyze successful movements for change.
Maria Charles is Professor of Sociology at the University of California–Santa Barbara, where she is also Area Director for Sex and Gender Research at the Broom Demography Center, and faculty affiliate of the Feminist Studies Department. Her research explores how gender-related beliefs, inequalities, and processes vary across national societies and demographic groups.
Roger Friedland is Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies and Sociology at the University of California–Santa Barbara. His research explores the relation between gender, sexual practices, Islamic piety, and Islamism in Muslim majority countries and to various forms of religiosity among university students in the United States. Friedland also seeks to develop an institutional logics approach which draws on a non-theistic religious understanding of the non-phenomenal grounding of institutional practice.
Janet Afary holds the Mellichamp Chair in Global Religion & Modernity at the University of California–Santa Barbara, where she is a Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Iranian Studies Initiative. Her research explores courtship, sex and marriage in the Muslim world, and history and politics of gender and sexuality in the Middle East.
Rujun Yang is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology and a Graduate Associate at the Broom Demography Center at University of California–Santa Barbara. Her research explores varied aspects of gender beliefs, their causes, consequences, and variabilities within China and across societies.
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