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The Political Economy of Women's Support for Fundamentalist Islam

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Drew A. Linzer
Affiliation:
Stanford University, blaydes@stanford.edu Emory University, dlinzer@emory.edu
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Abstract

Why do some Muslim women adopt fundamentalist Islamic value systems that promote gender-based inequalities while others do not? This article considers the economic determinants of fundamentalist beliefs in the Muslim world, as women look to either marriage or employment to achieve financial security. Using cross-national public opinion data from eighteen countries with significant Muslim populations, the authors apply a latent class model to characterize respondents according to their views on gender norms, political Islam, and personal religiosity. Among women, lack of economic opportunity is a stronger predictor of fundamentalist belief systems than socioeconomic class. Cross-nationally, fundamentalism among women is most prevalent in poor countries and in those with a large male-female wage gap. These findings have important implications for the promotion of women's rights, the rise of political Islam, and the development of democracy in the Muslim world.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 2008

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References

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4 The Islamic basis for these practices is a source of debate in the Muslim world. For example, the performance of female genital mutilation is not supported by most interpretations of Islamic law but many women in the Muslim world associate this act with adherence to Islam. In 1995, 97 percent of ever-married women aged fifteen to forty-nine in Egypt were circumcised and 96 percent of families surveyed in Indonesia in 2003 reported that their daughters had undergone some form of circumcision by age fourteen. See Yount, Kathryn, “Like Mother, Like Daughter? Female Genital Cutting in Minia, Egypt,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 43, no. 3 (2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sara Corbert, “A Cutting Tradition,” New York Times Magazine, January 20, 2008.

5 It is less problematic as to why Muslim men might support social practices that advantage them vis-à-vis women, though this, too, is a research subject in need of further investigation.

6 This definition of fundamentalism may not conform to some popular or journalistic uses of the term. We believe that our conceptualization is nonetheless valid and analytically useful. Debate over the status, role, and rights of women in Islam is perhaps the most important line of cleavage between those individuals who believe that the holy texts of Islam can be reinterpreted in the context of the present and those who would be considered hard-line literalists; see also Winter, Bronwyn, “Fundamental Misunderstandings: Issues in Feminist Approaches to Islamism,” Journal of Women's History 13, no. 1 (2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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34 It is not clear whether individual extremists or fundamentalist group leaders who are subject to academic study are representative of the broader distribution of individuals with these beliefs. Ethan Bueno de Mesquita makes the compelling case that there exists a wide distribution of individuals in extremist groups, yet those selected for study may be the individuals of highest “quality” with regard to education and ability. See Mesquita, Bueno de, “The Quality of Terror,” American Journal of Political Science 49, no. 3 (2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 In the wealthiest of the Gulf oil states, it is possible to live off of state largesse and family wealth although the vast majority of women are married, employed, or both.

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58 A complete list of these countries, and the sample sizes for each, are given in Appendix 1. We exclude wvs countries with fewer than 150 Muslim respondents to ensure that each country has a sufficient sample size to be able to make meaningful estimates of country-level fundamentalism at a later point in the analysis.

59 The technique of latent class analysis was first set forth by Lazarsfeld, Paul F., “The Logical and Mathematical Foundations of Latent Structure Analysis,” in Stouffer, Samuel A., ed., Measurement and Prediction (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1950)Google Scholar. A wide range of variations and extensions of that original model have subsequently been developed; see Hagenaars, Jacques A. and McCutcheon, Allan L., eds., Applied Latent Class Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A study similar to ours in both spirit and execution is Yamaguchi, Kazuo, “Multinomial Logit Latent-Class Regression Models: An Analysis of the Predictors of Gender-Role “Attitudes among Japanese Women,” American Journal of Sociology 105 (May 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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62 To be clear, while this article deals with belief systems in Islamic societies, we make no claims regarding whether certain beliefs are aspects of a “right” or “true” Islam.

63 Latent class models require no assumptions about respondents assigning utility to their responses, nor about any sort of utility maximization when selecting among outcomes. This contrasts with the statistical methods of ideal point estimation, which are also used to estimate latent characteristics of individuals based upon their observed behaviors, but which do require certain rationality assumptions. See, for example, Clinton, Joshua, Jackman, Simon, and Rivers, Douglas, “The Statistical Analysis of Roll Call Data,” American Political Science Review 98 (May 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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65 If any survey item does a poor job of “discriminating” between the latent classes—either because the classes do not differentiate on that item or because the item does not contain that much variation to begin with—it will be apparent in the estimated values of πjkr. Using survey questions with low variance does not impede the estimation or interpretation of the latent class model in any way.

66 To fit the model, we utilize the statistical package poLCA implemented in R version 2.7,1. Drew A. Linzer and Jeffrey Lewis, “poLCA: Polytomous variable Latent Class Analysis,” R package version 1.1 (2007); http://userwww.service.emory.edu/~dlinzer/poLCA; R Development Team, Core, R:A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing (Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing, 2008)Google Scholar; http://www.R-projcct.org.

67 It does not follow that one-third of all Muslims in the world are fundamentalist. This is because while the survey sample is random within each country, the pooled sample is not a random sample of Muslims worldwide. Countries such as India and Indonesia are undersampled, while others such as Azerbaijan, Jordan, and Turkey are oversampled.

68 It is possible that the secular group is so small because of the choice of countries surveyed. It is also possible that Muslim respondents who hold secular beliefs are not identifying themselves as Muslims on the survey. To investigate this possibility, we fit a four-class model to the 2,541 respondents who report no religious affiliation. A subgroup of 22 percent constitutes a secular class similar to what was found among self-identified Muslims; a further 20 percent are still more secular. Even if all of these respondents were actually Muslim, that would only be 1,070 individuals—less than 5 percent of the total number of self-identified Muslims in the sample.

69 The covariates are wvs items X001, X025, X028, and X045. Education and social class fall into ordered categories with eight and five responses, respectively. Employment status is a nominal variable with eight categories; we recode the variable as 1 if the individual is unemployed or a housewife, 0 otherwise.

70 Because respondents with missing observations on the dependent variables can be included when estimating the latent class model, it is possible to estimate the model across the entire eighteen-country sample for all sixteen dependent variables, even though the full battery of questions was not asked in every country. For how the latent class model accommodates missing values, see Drew A. Linzer and Jeffrey Lewis, “poLCA: An R Package for Polytomous Variable Latent Class Analysis,” Journal of Statistical Software (2008). We do not include country dummy variables among the covariates, as doing so would imply that respondents who gave the same survey responses and had the same covariates, but resided in different countries, would have different probabilities of belonging to each latent belief system cluster. This would imply that “fundamentalism” had different meanings in different countries, an operationalization we wish to avoid.

71 It is possible that fundamentalist women who marry are simply less inclined than secular women to seek work subsequently. However, this provides no explanation for why women are or are not fundamentalist to begin with and in particular yields no testable predictions about the effects of education, socioeconomic class, or (as we investigate in the following section) aggregate poverty and wage inequality.

72 Unfortunately, other countries such as Afghanistan under the Taliban and Sudan (since 1989) that also promote fundamentalist Islamic religious education were not in the wvs.

73 Women in the highest, upper class constitute just 2 percent of the survey sample.

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75 Islamist feminists have their roots in the activism of Zeinab al-Ghazali—founder of the Muslim Women's Association and affiliate of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.

76 Moghadam questions whether Islamic feminism, as characterized by Karam, even exists or if this term is an oxymoron. See Moghadam, Valentine M., “Islamic Feminism and Its Discontents: Toward a Resolution of the Debate,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 27 (Summer 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Karam (fn. 74).

77 The emergence of a small but influential class of highly educated, fundamentalist women is an important area for future research. Since their fundamentalist orientation is not likely due to poor job prospects, other motivations, including but not limited to antiauthoritarian or antiglobalization sentiment, should be investigated. See Hessini, Leila, “Wearing the Hijab in Contemporary Morocco: Choice and Identity,” in Gocek, Fatma Muge and Salaghi, Shiva, eds., Reconstructing Gender in the Middle East (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

78 Michael Ross, “Oil, Islam and Women,” American Political Science Review 102 (February 2008).

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88 The strategic basis for male support for fundamentalism is just beginning to be explored and offers another potentially fruitful area for research. See, for example, Arce, Daniel and Sandier, Todd, “An Evolutionary Game Approach to Fundamentalism and Conflict,” Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 159 (March 2003)Google Scholar.

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