Re-Understanding Religion and Support for Gender Equality in Arab Countries

Abstract

Much is said about Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) publics opposing gender equality, often referring to patriarchal Islam. However, nuanced large-scale studies addressing which specific aspects of religiosity affect support for gender equality across the MENA are conspicuously absent. This study develops and tests a gendered agentic socialization framework that proposes that MENA citizens are not only passively socialized by religion but also have agency (within their religiosity). This disaggregates the influence of religiosity, highlights its multifacetedness, and theorizes the moderating roles that gender and sociocognitive empowerment play via gendered processes of agentic dissociations. Using 15 World Values Surveys and multilevel models, our analyses show that most dimensions of religiosity fuel opposition to gender equality. However, the salience of religion in daily life is found to increase women’s support for gender equality and cushion the negative impact of religious service attendance. Also, gender and education moderate the impacts of several religiosity dimensions; for instance, women’s (initially greater) support for gender equality more sharply declines with increased service attendance than men’s. Altogether, this study finds that religious socialization is multifaceted and gendered, and that certain men and women are inclined and equipped to deviate from dominant patriarchal religious interpretations.

Acculturation, decoupling, or both? Migration’s impact on the linkage between religiosity and gender equality attitudes

“…Zooming in on Islam, Alexander and Welzel (2011), for example, found that 'Muslim support for patriarchal values is robust against various controls', identifying 'mosque attendance as a mechanism to sustain Muslim support for patriarchy in non-Muslim societies ' (249). Similarly, in a more refined analysis of this linkage, Glas, Spierings, and Scheepers (2018) show that several dimensions of Islamic religiosity (e.g. attending religious service and devotion) fuel opposition towards gender equality in the Middle East.…”

“…At the same time, there have been deviating findings, and it has become clear that different dimensions of religiosity play different roles (Glas, Spierings, and Scheepers 2018;Spierings 2018). To understand how religiosity, gender equality, and migration interrelate, first we have to conceptually distinguish between two core dimensions of religiosity (cf.…”

“…To understand how religiosity, gender equality, and migration interrelate, first we have to conceptually distinguish between two core dimensions of religiosity (cf. Glas, Spierings, and Scheepers 2018;Guveli 2015): individual religiosity and religious communal integration.…”

“…Turks have been part of the migration debate since the 1960s (Van Klingeren, Zaslove, and Verbeek 2017); however, the debate as well as the general discourse on integration and immigration has changed massively since that time. Especially since the turn of the millennium, the debate in Western Europe no longer simply focusses on the integration of migrants as such, but often particularly emphasises Muslim migrants and cultural integration, thereby referring mostly to migrants of Turkish be gendered, as recent studies have demonstrated that the link between religiosity and gender equality attitudes differs between men and women (Glas, Spierings, and Scheepers 2018;Idema and Phalet 2007;Röder and Mühlau 2014).…”

Contact and conflict between adult children and their parents in immigrant families: is integration problematic for family relationships?

“…In including this measure, we indirectly control for how conservative or liberal the values of the parents are. Studies on Muslim populations show strong effects of the degree of religiosity on traditional values about gender, marriage, and sexuality (Diehl and Koenig 2013;Diehl, Koenig, and Ruckdeschel 2009;Glas, Spierings, and Scheepers 2018;Halman and van Ingen 2015). Adjusting the effect of the child's cultural values and behaviours for the effect of the parent's degree of orthodoxy in a multivariate model is analytically similar to estimating effects of parent-child differences in cultural integration.…”