Gender Equality and Muslim Women: Negotiating Expanded Rights in Muslim Majority and Immigrant Contexts - Brill
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chapter 7
Gender Equality and Muslim Women:
Negotiating Expanded Rights in Muslim Majority
and Immigrant Contexts
Rema Hammami1
Abstract
This paper addresses contemporary debates about Muslim women’s rights and equal-
ity through re-visiting a fundamental debate in Western feminism: the conundrum
of equality versus difference. At the end of the twentieth century, Muslim women’s
inequality and lack of rights came to play an active role in the rhetoric and politics of
the ‘Clash of Civilizations’. In both Muslim majority and minority contexts, dominant
public discourse increasingly posed gender equality and Muslim identity as mutually
exclusive and conflicting choices for women and society at large. This problematic
view reflects a politics of gender where Muslim women’s rights have become a stand-
in for various imperial, national and identitarian agendas that in the process ignores
and silences the desires and needs of the very women it claims to represent. This
paper attempts to cast light on the different nature these debates take when they are
re-positioned among the women concerned—women in Muslim majority and minor-
ity contexts seeking a more just gender order within their societies and communities.
Rather than seeing contemporary debates around gender equality among women in
Muslim majority and minority contexts as incommensurable with those of their Western
counterparts, this paper seeks to address how desires for equality with recognition of
difference is a basic dilemma shared by women in any context seeking a more just
gender order.
Introduction
At the end of the twentieth century, Muslim women’s lack of rights and
inequality came to play an active role in the rhetoric and politics of the ‘Clash
of Civilizations’. Longstanding assumptions about Islam and women (or how
women’s inequality is foundational to Islamic culture and religion) became
1 Fourth holder of the Prince Claus Chair, 2005–2006.
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wedded in alarming ways to intense ideological conflicts and debates that
had immediate political implications in the real world. In foreign policy, the
Bush administration in the US used the ‘liberation’ of Afghani women from the
oppressive Islam of the Taliban in their arsenal of justifications for invasion
and regime change (Abu-Lughod 2002; Kandiyoti 2007, 2011). Across Europe,
pitched battles broke out over the right of Muslim women to wear Islamic dress
in public (in what became known as the ‘burqa wars’). Propelled by right-wing
political movements, these divisive debates thrust the issue of Muslim wom-
en’s oppression within immigrant communities onto national agendas, forcing
governments to create commissions and legislation to grapple with everything
from Muslim women’s ‘forced marriage’ to their right to wear headscarves
in public schools (Dustin 2006; Najmabadi 2006; Scott 2007; Gole & Billaud
2012). And in the contemporary Middle East, the rights of Muslim women have
also been thrust onto national agendas and placed at the centre of polarized
debates, most recently in the democratic transitions taking place in Egypt and
Tunisia where their rights have become the terrain on which political forces
battle out their contending ideological visions of their society and polity’s
future (Elsadda 2011; FIDH 2011; Atassi 2012; ElKouny 2012).
What is common to all these conflicts in which Muslim women’s rights or
inequality have been invoked (be it in the ‘war on terror’, in Europe or in the
Muslim majority contexts of Tunisia and Egypt) is that they are not fundamen-
tally about the very women they claim to be concerned with. Instead, a range
of highly charged conflicts and agendas has been played out using ‘Muslim
women’ as their stand-in. In the ‘war on terror’, women’s rights and equality
have been made a measuring stick in the politics of demarcating the civilized
‘us’ from the barbaric ‘them’, thus being a means to claim a ‘just war’ (regard-
less of the use of torture and forced rendition). In Europe, the real nature of
the debate has been immigration, cultural integration and legacies of rac-
ism (Scott 2007; Parvez 2011). In relation to the Arab Spring, women’s rights
and equality have been the stand-in for struggles over religious versus secu-
lar ideologies and their role in modern democratic governance (Moustafa &
Quraishi-Landes 2012). In all three cases, Muslim women have been the terrain
on which wider forms of identity politics have been fought. In the ‘war on ter-
ror’, they were used to express the civilizational identity of the West. In the
‘burqa wars’, rather than being about rights and equality for Muslim women
immigrants, more profoundly they were used to debate what it means to be
French or European and how immigration policy should relate to issues of
national identity. In Egypt and Tunisia, whether women should have rights
and what rights they should have is fundamentally a debate about the role of
Shari’a in national identity: To what extent does religion as a source of identity
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need to be encoded in the laws and policies of the modern state and society
(Kandioyti 2011a)?
But where does equality enter into these debates? The calls for Muslim
women’s integration in European cultural contexts encompass a number of
arguments about their equality and inequality. On the one hand, they are seen
as inhabiting an Islamic sub-culture that is founded on their innate inequality
with Muslim men. And on the other hand, their membership in their religio-
ethnic communities makes impossible their ability to enjoy the gender equality
that accrues to women of the dominant culture, be it French, Danish or Dutch.
Thus, in relation to these polarized debates in the European context, Muslim
women are offered an either/or proposition: either to remain in inequality
within their religion and community or to achieve full equality by leaving them
behind and integrating into the dominant culture. The logic of these choices is
that gender equality and cultural difference are made mutually exclusive cat-
egories. Only by assimilation (i.e. erasing their cultural difference) can Muslim
women attain gender equality as it is provided by the dominant culture.
The dominant debates in contemporary Egypt and to a lesser extent Tunisia
go in the opposite direction but also tend to provide women with an either/
or proposition based on the equality/difference dualism. In the discourse of
religious conservatives and dominant Islamist groups, the choice offered to
women is this: either remain attached to your religious heritage and accept
that men and women are fundamentally different and therefore unequal or
forsake your religious identity (our collective difference) for gender equality
(Abu-Odeh 2004; FIDH 2011; Kandiyoti 2011b; Mir-Hosseini 2011; Tadros 2011a).
In other words, we once again have gender equality and cultural difference
being made mutually exclusive categories, where Islamic conservatives and
Islamist political movements assert that women cannot lay claim to Islamic
identity and gender equality at the same time.
In this paper, I want to show how the politics of gender vis-à-vis Muslim
women—or “processes of appropriation, contestation and re-interpretation of
positions on gender relations and rights by state, non-state and global actors”
(Kandiyoti 2011a)—has foreclosed spaces for them to voice their own range of
desires for gender equality. Rather than assuming—as these dominant debates
do—that gender equality is an inherent good (or bad) aspiration for Muslim
women, I aim to show that the contradictions and dilemmas inherent in the
‘equality feminism’ that marked the experience of feminist movements in the
North America and Europe a generation ago remain salient today for Muslim
women trying to negotiate an expansion of their rights across varying contexts.
I consciously focus on the concept of equality (versus equity), because it
has been the foundational (albeit often problematic) principle for women’s
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rights struggles historically and globally. The equality principle is the legal
basis for the United Nations’ most powerful convention on gender rights.
The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against
Women (CEDAW) of 1979 suggests the degree to which the concept of equal-
ity remains the central and normative term for women’s rights struggles in
the contemporary world. In contrast, while the notion of gender ‘equity’ has
increasingly taken hold in the language of the development industry since the
1990s, it has been criticized for de-politicizing women’s rights agendas because
it is based on subjective notions of fairness between the sexes rather than on
legal principles of non-discrimination and substantive equality (or equality
of outcomes).2
I end the paper with a personal example of debates around gender equality
among women in a Muslim majority context when there is a space free from
the adverse effects of the ‘politics of gender’: my Gender Studies classroom in
the occupied West Bank. Rather than being a utopian case, I offer the example
as exemplary of the myriad though invisible “third spaces” (Soja 1996) through-
out the region and across Muslim minority contexts in which women grapple
with the promise and problems inherent in gender equality as a basis for a
more just gender order.
Sameness versus Difference
Over thirty years ago, the dilemmas and contradictions of gender equality
became a core debate within Western feminism. The principle of demand-
ing full equality between the sexes that had guided feminist activism since
the 1960s became in the 1980s the centre of conflict over the very meaning
of feminism itself, in what is now known as the equality/difference debates
(Phillips 1987, 1999, 2000; Fraser 1998; Scott and Keates 1999). Back then, it was
argued that the liberal feminist model of gender equality actually rested on
a number of crucial exclusions and made invisible the variegated needs and
circumstances of women in relation to men and between women of different
ethnicities and classes. The outcome of campaigns for gender-equal legisla-
tion and access across the US and Europe had by the 1980s achieved much
2 For a discussion of this position, see International Women’s Rights Action Watch, Equity
or Equality for Women? Understanding CEDAW’s Equality Principles. IWRAW Occasional
Paper Series, No. 14 (2009). For a counter-view, see Hazel Reeves & Sally Baden, Gender and
Development: Concepts and Definitions. BRIDGE Development and Gender Report (#55)
(2000).
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in increasing women’s access and expanding their rights: to the professional
workplace, to property and over their bodies, as well as increasing access to
political office and making strides towards lowering gender-based wage gaps.
But particularly the entry of women into professional employment and
public life had been won at the cost of denying the existence of women’s dou-
ble burden (working women’s continued responsibility for domestic and care-
giving work). The actual choices for women within the gender-equality model
were either to be the ever-exhausted super-woman (who worked as well as a
man but then went home to become the perfect wife and mother) or to forsake
family life altogether in order to fully concentrate on their career as a man
could. While in Europe provisions of the welfare state to some extent mitigated
these conflicts for middle-class women, in North America they were particu-
larly acute, leading some of the icons of the movement to repudiate the equal-
ity paradigm.3 For many feminists the conclusion was that the gender-equality
model was based on a problematic calculation of the sameness of women and
men. The principle that women have the same capacities as men, and should
therefore have the same rights and opportunities as them, crucially overlooked
where women were different from men, most critically in the spheres of bio-
logical and social reproduction. Thus, women, in order to achieve equality,
were forced to make blind these differences and act as if they did not exist.
But the sameness/difference problematic also arose as an issue over differ-
ences between women. Feminists of different ethnic, racial and class groups
criticized equality feminism as focusing only on women’s inequality with men,
while ignoring other forms of crucial disadvantage they faced as migrant,
black or poor women (Hooks 1981; Moraga & Anzaldúa 1984). They charged
that equality feminism had primarily met the desires and needs of middle-
class white women, for whom equality with men had enabled entry into pro-
fessional employment and public life (though at the costs mentioned above).
But equality feminism had done nothing to address the racism and structural
poverty that was the overwhelming experience of many women, who due to
these factors were unable to take advantage of the expansion of rights and
access that mainstream feminism had opened up.
Western feminism as a political movement never found a programmatic
answer to either of these profound challenges posed by the equality/difference
debates. Indeed, the debate over difference ultimately succeeded in dividing
what had been until then a fairly united women’s movement along the lines
of identity politics—and is still looked upon as a destructive and divisive
moment in the history of that feminism.
3 See, for instance, Betty Friedan’s The Second Stage (1981).
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However, when we look at the outcome of these debates in the practical
world of politics today, the principle of gender equality seems to have survived
largely unscathed and untouched by these challenges. Indeed, the language of
gender equality continues to be the dominant language of gender-based legisla-
tion throughout Europe and North America, as well as having become the core
language for principles of gender rights in international law such as the General
Assembly’s 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination
Against Women (CEDAW), where it is highlighted in Article 3. Gender equal-
ity has gone on to be mainstreamed throughout the United Nations’ system
in development practice as a guiding principle at all levels of the institution’s
policy and praxis. In sum, regardless of the profound criticism that the gender
equality framework has undergone by feminists themselves, it continues to be
the normative language for gender rights globally.
But feminist thinkers who have reflected on the profound political implica-
tions that arose from the equality/difference debates have gone on to develop
more nuanced understandings of how the issue of women’s equality might be
re-thought as a more inclusive goal that is enabling to women suffering from
a variety of, and multiple experiences with, disadvantages. This has become
especially critical given that identity has increasingly come to dominate the
global political landscape more generally since the 1990s, displacing ear-
lier frameworks that were primarily focused on a politics of re-distribution
(Phillips 1987, 1999; Fraser 1998).
In addressing what they call the conundrum of equality, Joan Scott & Debra
Keates have argued that group identities are an inevitable aspect of social life,
but they only become visible, salient and troubling in specific contexts—when
they are made the basis for exclusion and disadvantage and become the basis
for political contestation. Specifically,
. . . when exclusions are legitimated by group differences, when social and
economic hierarchies advantage some groups at the expense of others,
when one set of biological or religious or ethnic or cultural characteris-
tics are valued over another—the tension between individual and group
identities emerges. Individuals, for whom group identities were just
simply dimensions of multi-faceted individuality, find themselves fully
determined by a single element: religious or ethnic or racial or gender
identity. (Scott & Keates 1999: 3)
In other words, exclusion and discrimination on the basis of perceived
group attributes works to heighten individuals’ identification with their
group. Importantly, Scott & Keates argue that exclusion and discrimination
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negatively homogenize the variegated identities of individuals within groups,
reducing them all to some basic and fixed negative characteristics. And this
is a mirror process—members of the disadvantaged groups themselves tend
to overlook their individual differences and attach a fixed and immutable
character to their collective identity. Effectively, group identities are not the
cause for exclusion or disadvantage—but the opposite: politicized group
identities are an outcome of exclusionary processes and the imposition of
disadvantage.
And the conundrum is that in demanding inclusion and equality, disadvan-
taged groups are forced to use the very identities that were the terms for their
exclusion at the same time as rejecting them. Individuals as women, minorities
or members of ethnicities take these on as collective identities only in rela-
tion to the exclusion and disadvantage based on them. But the fight against
discrimination based on these attributes themselves forces them to use these
identities as the grounds for inclusion. As Scott & Keates (1999: 7) note,
[F]eminism was a protest against women’s political exclusion; its goal
was to eliminate sexual difference in politics. But it had to make claims
on behalf of women. To the extent that it acted for women, feminism
produced the very sexual difference that it sought to eliminate—drawing
attention to exactly the issue (sexual difference) that it wanted to banish.
The Dynamics of Identity Politics
Scott and Keates’s insights are extremely relevant to our understanding of
the problematic of Muslim women and identity politics both in the Middle
East and in Europe. The politicization of Muslim identities in the European
context (including Muslim women’s identities) is the outcome of a two-sided
process. On the one hand, immigrants experience discrimination and disad-
vantage and have been negatively homogenized and identified as ‘Muslims’
in dominant political discourse and practice. On the other hand, the outcome
has been the growing identification with this one dimension of their identity
by males and females from migrant backgrounds who under other forms of
discrimination and disadvantage might have identified themselves primarily
as migrants, women, workers, Moroccans, Turks or a whole variety of other
identities. And since Islamic identity has been made the salient basis of exclu-
sion, struggles for inclusion have actually heightened and underlined issues of
Islamic identity both among those struggling against exclusion and among the
dominant culture.
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In the contemporary Middle East4 we can see similar processes at play.
Across a range of different societies, contexts and historical moments, Islamist
movements have provided a political identity framework for large sectors of
the society that have been economically or politically disadvantaged or disen-
franchised. Political movements carrying the message of Islamic solidarity and
justice have found fertile ground for their version of identity politics among
large social sectors that—under the long legacy of authoritarian states claim-
ing to be secular, democratic and modernist—actually denied political voice
to most of the populace while excluding them from access to basic social and
economic goods. And in international relations, Islamic identity has also been
made extremely salient, even before 9/11 and the twenty-first century invasions
of Afghanistan and Iraq. In the past, the inequities of colonial legacies and
imperialism across the region gave rise to an identity and politics of Arabism.
But increasingly over the past two decades, as Arab nationalism became seen
as corrupt and incapable of challenging US hegemony over the region (espe-
cially, but not only, as it relates to Palestine), Islamic identity has increasingly
gained ground. But it is through the politics and rhetoric of the ‘war on terror’
under the Bush administration that even secularists and non-Muslims across
the region found themselves being identified as Muslims and indeed identified
themselves with them.
The larger lesson from this is that we need to understand both identity and
equality as changing, as historically contingent and always a product of spe-
cific social, political and cultural configurations and conflicts. As we have seen,
group identities are made salient through exclusion on the basis of character-
istics associated with them. Through processes of enfranchisement and inclu-
sion, these same group identities lose their critical power and return to be just
one among an array of an individual’s multiple selves that can be a source of
joy, sadness or neglect—but no longer who they primarily are and what they
need to fight about or for. That many women in North America and Europe no
longer see the need for feminism is exactly because they no longer see discrim-
ination on the basis of their sex as a dominant force of exclusion in their lives.
Equality
But while one can view identities as shifting and changeable, is equality not
an absolute principle? According to Scott & Keates (1999), paradoxically it
4 The complex and variegated histories across the region that led to the resurgence of Islam as a
central marker of political identities among men and women is beyond the scope of this paper.
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is both. Through calls to the absolute principle of equality, diverse groups have
made claims through history and across societies for various forms of equality
that have changed through time and in relation to new and changing forms
of disenfranchisement. As nations under colonialism, as castes and classes, as
races and genders and, more recently, as identities (ethnic, sexual, religious
and cultural), groups have all used the principle of equality as their means to
challenge discrimination on the basis of a shared exclusion. In that sense,
equality is both never complete and always an ongoing process. National lib-
eration may solve one inequality, but many others remain, while some will be
made more salient than others and thus be made the basis of a new struggle
for equality.
Ultimately then, equality is a protest against discrimination and injustice. It
is always fought for on the basis of group identities that are themselves contin-
gent. And its achievement can never be total but only in relation to the iden-
tity that has been instantiated by discrimination at any one moment. And as
those earlier feminist critiques have pointed out, it is especially when equality
is claimed to be without identity (as in universal rights or the rights of man
or the citizen)—and therefore is constructed on the basis of an abstract indi-
vidual rather than a socially situated group or person—that it makes both the
greatest claims and the greatest exclusions. Who the rights-bearing abstract
individual is, is usually defined by the dominant and the powerful and thus
reflects their interests. For instance, as feminist legal scholar Carol Pateman
(1988) has shown, the rights-bearing citizen of the liberal social contract that
underpins much of Western political and economic theory is actually the self-
owning white male.
Muslim Women and Equality/Difference
How can we apply these insights to the issue of Muslim women and the equal-
ity/difference conundrum? Here, in the short space left, I would like to address
them by calling upon my experiences of teaching Gender Studies for the past
seventeen years in occupied Palestine—which, for the sake of this discussion,
I will term a Muslim majority context.
In 1995, my university—Birzeit University in Ramallah—founded the
Women’s Studies Institute, only the second academic centre for the study of
women and gender of its kind in the region. By 1997, we became the first in the
region to offer a full degree programme in Gender Studies at the MA level along
with teaching elective undergraduate courses. Over that period of seventeen
years, the students that I teach have changed considerably in relation to the
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extent that Islam has become a salient dimension of their identities—but in
much more complex and surprising ways than one might assume. Superficially,
the changes could be summed up by the growing numbers of female students
wearing some form of Islamic dress. Where fifteen years ago only one student
out of the twenty in the course wore a headscarf, now approximately half of
our students are religiously identified in terms of their dress. These are out-
ward signs of social phenomena, but what exactly do they mean? And do they
all mean the same thing? A simple reply: No.
The first question that needs to be asked according to Scott & Keates
(1999) is not who or what is a Muslim woman (as if it is something fixed and
unchangeable), but when and in what specific contexts do women primarily
define themselves as Muslims?
Even among my group of students, regardless of what they are wearing,
there is not an obvious answer; simply because they are wearing a headscarf
or other variety of Islamically identified dress does not mean in the least that
their main identity is as Muslims. For the majority, in relation to Israeli oppres-
sion and discrimination, they see themselves as Palestinians. In relation to
experiences of bias and inequality within Palestinian society, they see them-
selves primarily as women. And only when they feel discriminated against or
excluded on the basis of their Muslim religious identity do they become pri-
marily Muslim.
Yes, Muslims can feel and be discriminated against even in Muslim major-
ity contexts. In the classroom, on a few occasions I have seen what is normally
a vibrant and critically thinking range of individuals suddenly become a dis-
tinctive and defensive unified group, because a secular student (either male or
female) has made a remark implying the inferiority of women wearing heads-
carves. Outside the classroom, it is in relation to some workplaces that prefer
‘secular’ women, where religiously identifiable students have faced discrimi-
nation. But more often, this happens when students are working with inter-
national agencies and foreign nationals where their Islamic identity becomes
emphasized because they have faced negative stereotypes and insulting treat-
ment. A number of times, students have actually turned these negative expe-
riences into research projects and looked at how other religiously identified
women actively challenge these stereotypes while attempting to negotiate
respect on the basis of difference. But in all these cases, Muslim identity has
become for them the salient issue exactly because it has been used as a basis
to identify them negatively.
Similarly, a number of studies have noted that one outcome of the rise
of Islamophobia in Europe and the US has been a growth in the numbers of
Muslim women choosing to wear ‘Islamic’ dress as markers of their faith and
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identification with their community, rather than the opposite (Phillips 2000;
Dustin 2006).
However, by calling some of our students ‘religiously identified’, I am imbu-
ing a range of highly variegated individuals with a single collective identity
that presumes their religiosity is the same. As individuals, how they define,
practice and give content to the religious dimension of their identity is
extremely diverse and, I imagine, is also changing over time. A small handful
of students (often among the best academically) are active in Islamic politi-
cal movements. Others support secular national movements, but the majority
are like the majority of people in the world: critical of all organized political
parties, religious or secular. Beyond some foundational practices and beliefs,
they also differ on the definition and demands of piety; not only in terms of
‘Islamic dress’, but also in the degree to which Islamic faith is the dominant or
guiding ethic in their everyday lives and what that might entail. For the major-
ity, being a Muslim is simply part and parcel of who they are: a natural and
mundane part of their everyday lives. It is sometimes a cause for celebration
and positive belonging, at other times a source of burden and responsibility;
and at others still, a source of solace, support or guidance in a difficult and
complex world.
But what about gender equality. Do my students want it? Of course—but
exactly in accordance with the contingent and changing historical practice that
I have already discussed. Many of them, both religious and secular-identified,
arrive at the programme fully wedded to the notion that their struggle is about
equality with men. Rarely do I find students willing to support radical feminist
positions about men’s and women’s innate difference—because it is the con-
servative version of this position that has been the force for gender discrimina-
tion in their lives. So when I review the equality versus difference debates and
bring out the limitations and dilemmas that I have discussed here, students
still attempt to claim the model—but seek ways to make it work for their needs
and context. Should women be in the military if they want full equality? The
class divides among an array of individual opinions. What about the double
burden? That the majority of them are working wives and mothers also doing a
higher degree in their spare time actually means they work a triple burden. On
this issue, they profoundly identify with the trade-offs Western feminists made
long ago, and their answer is that men—be it husbands, employers or the
state—need to share more of that responsibility. But what about difference?
In discussion over Islamic family law, when it is pointed out that the gender
logic underlying Islamic jurisprudence is the principle of the complementar-
ity of the sexes (their fundamental difference from each other) rather than
equality—once again, the responses are to look for context-specific solutions
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of how to expand women’s rights within and simultaneously against a source
of inequality.
In summary, equality for our female students (both religious and secular-
identified) is seen as an absolute principle through which they seek to fight
discrimination on the basis of their gender in their Muslim majority context.
At the same time, they see it for what it is—a process of expanding rights, one
that can lead in unforeseen directions, or create new dilemmas and contradic-
tions. There is no universal model and no universal outcome, only a universal
struggle against existing inequalities.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I would like to return the discussion from Palestine back to
the issue of Muslim women in Europe. Through sharing the discussions and
experiences I have had with my students, what I have tried to do here is to give
an example of how debates and conflicts are profoundly different when those
being debated actually have a voice. My students do not represent all Muslim
women, or even all Palestinian women. But in comparison with the European
context, they have the space to actively shape and discuss what equality or
religious identification means for them. And they can do so without fear
that their criticisms and demands for change will be used as a weapon against
their community and as a means to impose further discriminatory practices
against them (Israeli discriminatory practices may be gendered but they are
not about gender!). Nor do they face a situation where racism throws them
back on their communities, which are mostly led by conservative men who
further shut down the space available to them to voice their visions of gender
change and equality. Finally, they are not operating in an environment where
their choices have become framed as a series of incommensurable dualisms—
equality versus oppression, religion versus secularism, one of us versus one
of them.
This question of voice is also extremely relevant as we see the struggles
around visions of gender relations unfold in the democratic transitions in
Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere across the region. This is especially so when
we see that hard-won democratic elections brought to power political par-
ties that seem inimical to gender equality—often with the help of women’s
activism and votes. In the media, we are constantly being warned that women
in Egypt and Tunisia who fought for the revolution are likely to be its main
victims. But across the region, if we look behind the headlines and listen to
what women are saying, we find a range of much more complex arguments
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and debates going on. Though beyond the limits of this paper, public opinion
polls find a majority of women supporting an expansion of women’s rights—
with for instance, approximately 80% of women and a slightly lower percent-
age of men in post-revolution Egypt asserting that men and women should be
granted equal legal rights (Gallup 2011). Also in Egypt, polls found that wom-
en’s support for an expansion of their rights had no correlation with whom
they voted for (i.e. religious or secular parties); and perhaps most importantly,
that among men, conservative views on gender relations correlated strongly
with low socio-economic and life satisfaction levels, while bearing little or no
correlation with religious sentiments.
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