Islam and Patriarchy: How Robust is Muslim Support for Patriarchal Values?

Abstract

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Where Does Religion Matter Most? Personal Religiosity and the Acceptability of Wife‐beating in Cross‐National Perspective

“…In some sense, our article might have been stronger if we had been able to include more countries that have large numbers of fundamentalist Muslim respondents. Although we see little evidence of a positive influence of religiosity on the acceptability of wife‐beating among the Muslim respondents in these data, there are reasons to suppose that one might find different results if more fundamentalist Muslims were included in our analyses (Alexander and Welzel ; Inglehart and Norris ). Therefore, caution should be used in generalizing the findings in this study to the entire world population.…”

Does oil substitute for patriarchy?

“…Additionally, because factor analysis shows that the six questions tap two distinct dimensions of gender equality, I also construct two subindices. Like Norris (), Inglehart and Norris (2003a), and Alexander and Welzel (), I find that the questions regarding scarce jobs, university education, and whether women are inferior economic and political leaders form one dimension, representing orientations toward the role of women in public life . The questions regarding whether tensions emerge if a wife earns more than her husband and whether children suffer when their mother works outside of the home form a second dimension relating to orientations about women's role in the home .…”

“…One new variable is the size of the Muslim population in 2010 . While Ross finds that having a large Muslim population has no effect on FLFP when oil wealth is included in the model, others argue that Muslim societies are particularly patriarchal (Alexander & Welzel, ; Fish, ; Inglehart & Norris, 2003b; Norris, , ). The present paper is not a study of Islam per se —rather it concerns inegalitarian gender attitudes regardless of their origins—but in light of the current debate, it is important to see whether the baseline results hold once Islam is controlled for explicitly.…”

“…Much of the gendered resource debate centers on whether Islam is a particularly patriarchal religion. Some scholars argue that socialization into the Islamic faith instills especially inegalitarian gender attitudes and causes predominantly Muslim countries to have more pronounced gendered hierarchies (Alexander & Welzel, ; Fish, ; Inglehart & Norris, 2003a, 2003b; Norris, ). While thus far in the analysis, I have left gender attitudes exogenous, here I extend the argument and results presented above to argue that if oil wealth affects the demand for female labor, then this straightforward link between Islam and patriarchal attitudes treats the issue too simply.…”

“…To this catalog, Ross () adds that resource wealth is particularly bad for women; so much so that it, not Islam, explains why women in Arab countries participate in the labor force in low numbers and have comparatively little political clout. However, critics maintain that culture explains women's status better than oil does—that patriarchy, not petroleum, hinders women's liberation—and that evidence of a gendered resource curse evaporates once one properly accounts for culture (Alexander & Welzel, ; Groh & Rotchschild, ; Norris, , )…”