Religion, Trust, and Other Determinants of Muslim

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Taiwan Journal of Democracy, Volume 13, No. 2: 1-29

Religion, Trust, and Other Determinants of Muslim Attitudes toward Gender Equality

Evidence and Insights from Fifty-Four Surveys in the Middle East and North Africa

Mark Tessler and Hafsa Tout

Abstract

This essay uses data from fifty-four surveys conducted in seventeen Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries to test hypotheses about determinants of attitudes toward gender equality. Independent variables include personal religiosity, views about political Islam, interpersonal trust, political trust, and individual economic circumstance. Hypotheses are tested separately for respondents grouped by sex, educational level, and age cohort, taken together. Key findings are: (1) while support for political Islam consistently is inversely related to support for gender equality, personal religiosity is not associated with views about gender equality for a majority of respondent categories; (2) while level of political trust rarely is associated with views about gender equality, low interpersonal trust is associated with greater support for gender equality among men, regardless of age and educational level, but very rarely among women; and (3) favorable economic circumstance is related to greater support for gender equality only among older individuals.

Keywords: Gender, Islam, Middle East, survey.

This essay uses a new dataset that merges fifty-six public opinion surveys conducted in seventeen Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) between 1988 and 2014 to test hypotheses about various determinants of attitudes toward gender equality. Fifty-four of these surveys include questions about gender equality, and these will be used in the present investigation.

The effort to identify some of the factors and associated pathways that push either toward or away from support for gender equality is motivated by the

Mark Tessler is Samuel J. Eldersveld Professor of Politics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. <[email protected]>Hafsa Tout is an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan. <[email protected]>

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fact, amply documented, that the general welfare, as well as that of individuals and their families, is advanced in societies where women have greater rights and opportunities, comparable to those of men. At the aggregate level, cross-national comparative studies show that this includes good governance and support for democracy, social tolerance, and even, based on data from the World Values Survey, personal happiness.1 To the extent that levels of gender equality are low in the Muslim-majority countries of the Middle East and North Africa, as indeed they are both in absolute terms and relative to those of other world regions, knowledge about factors and mechanisms that shape public attitudes and values relating to women and their status is particularly important.

Five hypotheses will be presented and subsequently tested in an effort to account for individual-level variance in attitudes toward gender equality, the latter being the dependent variable in the analysis. Reflections and informed speculation about the causal stories to which each hypothesis presumes to call attention will be presented as well. Personal religiosity is the independent variable in one of the hypotheses. Views about political Islam is another; the remaining three are interpersonal trust, or generalized trust; evaluation of the institutions by which one’s country is governed and managed, or political trust, for short; and individual economic circumstance.

The essay is organized as follows. The first section briefly considers the circumstances of Muslim women in the Middle East and North Africa, laying a foundation for, and establishing the importance of, the present study’s concern with accounting for variance in the views held by ordinary citizens about the status and rights of women. The essay next presents the hypotheses about determinants of attitudes toward gender equality to be tested. The logic and presumed causal associations that inform each proposition also are discussed in this section. Following these two sections, the essay describes the data and methodology that have been used to test these hypotheses, and the section after this presents the study’s findings. Findings are presented both for a pooled analysis based on all Muslim respondents and for subsets of respondents grouped on the basis of sex, age, and education, taken together. A final section offers some thoughts about the broader insights to which these findings appear to call attention.

Women’s Status and Gender Equality

The circumstances of Muslim women in the Middle East and North Africa vary widely. Women are government ministers and members of parliament, corporation managers, university presidents, scientists, engineers, journalists, and physicians. In all these categories, there are many examples. Whereas an

1 See Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris, Rising Tide: Gender Equality and Cultural Change around the World (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

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important study noted two decades ago that Muslim women in the Middle East faced “limitations on their participation in the economy, [and] their exclusion from many fields of activity in their society,”2 this description is increasingly out-of-date. Further, with as many women as men attending university in most countries, and with more women than men attending university in some countries, the number of women in positions of influence and prominence within their societies is certain to increase.

At the same time, women continue to be underrepresented in all the above-mentioned professions, usually very seriously underrepresented, and this is the case as well in many of the mid-level fields where most educated individuals find employment in a modern economy. The disadvantaged situation of women in the Arab world is summarized in a 2012 Gallop Country Data Set report:

About one in three young Arab women between the ages of 23 and 29 participate in their country’s labor force versus about eight in 10 young Arab men. This gender gap is generally consistent across the 22 Arab countries and territories Gallup surveyed in 2011, but young women’s labor force participation is slightly higher in low-income countries than in higher income countries.3

The report goes on to state that, in many Arab countries,

chronic job shortages combined with cultural factors, such as pressure on employers to give young men jobs that enable them to marry and start families, [and] may limit employment opportunities for young women, [moreover,] the World Bank recently reported that the Middle East and North Africa region continues to have the lowest female workforce participation rate of any global region.4

Work and professional life is not the only arena in which the picture is mixed. Societal codes and practice pertaining to personal status and relations within the family frequently deny to women some of the rights and opportunities enjoyed by men; particularly relevant in this connection are matters pertaining

2 Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 23. For a useful account of Arab women’s labor force participation during this period, see Seteney Shami, Lucine Taminian, Soheir Morsy, Zeinab El Bakri, and El-Wathig Kameir, Women in Arab Society: Work Patterns and Gender Relations in Egypt, Jordan and Sudan (Paris: UNESCO, 1990).

3 See Steve Crabtree, “Two-Thirds of Young Arab Women Remain Out of Workforce,” Gallop World (April 2, 2012), http://www.gallup.com/poll/153659/two-thirds-young-arab-women-remain-workforce.aspx (accessed October 30, 2017).

4 Ibid.


to marriage and divorce, property rights, and veiling and seclusion. In these and other areas, Islamic family law usually has been codified in a manner that provides fewer rights to women than men,5 and these prescriptions, or interpretations of prescriptions, often are enshrined in national legal systems. Only in Tunisia and Turkey is polygamy formally outlawed, for example; in most of the Muslim-majority countries of the Middle East and North Africa, divorce remains easier for a man than for a woman, and men and women have unequal inheritance rights. The connection between Islam and gender inequality is ambiguous in some of these areas, at least from a historical perspective. The Quran does not call for women to be veiled or kept apart from the world of men, for example, and this suggests that norms and practices in this area are not of Islamic origin.6 Nevertheless, Muslim scholars and officials sometimes insist that Islam requires veiling and prohibits the public mixing of men and women, and this view is accepted by many Muslims, including many Muslim women.

A focus on these inequalities, important as they are not only for individual women and their families but also for society at large,7 provides only a partial picture of the situation of Muslim women in the Middle East and North Africa. There also has been, and continues to be, significant progress toward removing barriers to gender equality. On the one hand, women themselves, along with supportive men, have been organizing and pressing for reforms related to family law and personal status. As a study of Egypt reported a few years ago, to view “relations between men and women in the Islamic world as the interaction of sheer power and abject obedience is quite inaccurate. Women are not passive victims, and they quite actively argue their case and seek to widen their opportunities when the chance is offered.”8

On the other hand, many governments, sometimes responding to pressure from women’s groups or other progressive movements, have enacted reforms that remove, or at least reduce, some of the legal bases for gender inequality. The Supreme Constitutional Court of Egypt, for example, declared gender

5 Ann Mayer, Islam and Human Rights: Tradition and Politics (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2006), and Abdullahi An-Na‘im, Islamic Family Law in a Changing World: A Global Resource Book (New York: Zed Books, 2002).

6 Yvonne Haddad, Byron Haines, and Ellison Findly, The Islamic Impact (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1984), 97. See also Mohammed Arkoun, Rethinking Islam: Common Questions, Uncommon Answers (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), 60-61.

7 For a data-based study arguing that the subordination of women is a major reason for the absence of democracy in many Muslim-majority countries, see Steve Fish, “Islam and Authoritarianism,” World Politics 55 (October 2002): 4-37. See also Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris, “The True Clash of Civilizations,” Foreign Policy 135 (March-April 2003): 62-70.

8 Denis Sullivan and Sana Abed-Kotob, Islam in Contemporary Egypt: Civil Society vs. the State (Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner, 1999), 111. For historical perspective on women’s activism in pursuit of legal reform, see Judith Tucker, Women, Family and Gender in Islamic Law (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 32.

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equality to be fully compatible with Islam and a fundamental component of a just society. It insisted, therefore, that the state consider the promotion of gender equality to be part of its constitutional obligation.9 In Morocco, where the personal status code previously had been established by royal decree, reforms were debated and subsequently approved by the National Assembly in 2004.10 Among the more than one hundred ratified amendments to the code, which were substantial even if less far-reaching than some had wanted, were provisions specifying that a woman cannot be married against her will, that a man cannot take a second wife without gaining agreement from a judge that this is justified by genuinely exceptional circumstances, that both men and women can petition for divorce, and that divorce proceedings should take place in civil rather than religious courts.11

These accounts, brief as they are, paint a picture of women’s status that is problematic, complicated, dynamic, and, perhaps most important, contested all at the same time. They also describe an issue about which Muslim publics are not of one mind. Table 1 illustrates this division of opinion. The table presents aggregate findings from fifty-four of the fifty-six surveys in the dataset that include questions about gender equality. More specifically, it presents the distribution of responses, with “don’t know” responses removed, to the ten questions about women’s rights and status that were asked in some or all the surveys. The table also shows that the central tendency and degree of dispersion of public views vary considerably from item to item. On some questions, attitudes are skewed heavily in the direction of support for gender equality. For example, 81.5 percent of the respondents agree or agree strongly that a married woman can work outside the home, if she wishes; 84.4 percent agree or agree strongly that men and women should have equal salaries and wages; 76.5 percent agree or agree strongly that it is acceptable for a woman to be a member of parliament; and 69.6 percent disagree or disagree strongly that a university education is more important for a boy than a girl.

On other questions, by contrast, either citizens are more divided or the distribution of attitudes is skewed against gender equality. Only 56 percent agree or agree strongly that a woman can be president or prime minister of a Muslim country; only 37.9 percent agree or agree strongly that a woman can travel abroad by herself, if she wishes; and only 27.1 percent disagree or disagree strongly that men make better political leaders than women. These findings not only indicate that attitudes are not distributed the same way on all

9 Bruce Rutherford, Egypt after Mubarak: Liberalism, Islam, and Democracy in the Arab World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 58.

10 Leon Buskens, “Recent Debates on Family Law Reform in Morocco: Islamic Law as Politics in an Emerging Public Sphere,” Islamic Law and Society 10, no.1 (2003): 70-131.

11 See Stephanie Wilman Bordat and Saida Kouzzi, “The Challenge of Implementing Morocco’s New Personal Status Law,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Arab Reform Bulletin 2, no. 8 (2004).


subjects pertaining to gender equality, but also that they shed light on the types of issues with respect to which citizens are, respectively, more likely to favor or less likely to favor equality between men and women. More specifically, support for gender equality is more widespread on questions pertaining to personal opportunity and mobility, while support for gender equality is less widespread on questions involving leadership and unchaperoned interaction with strangers.

Hypotheses

Even though division in public opinion varies from question to question and issue area to issue area, overall, there is both substantial support for and substantial opposition to equality between the sexes among Muslim publics in the Middle East and North Africa. This variation, pertaining to a dimension here labeled gender equality, constitutes the dependent variable in the analysis to follow. More specifically, it refers to a continuum of individual attitudes ranging from very strong opposition to very strong support for equality between men and women across the broad range of domains about which the items in table 1 ask. As suggested by the table and discussed further in the section on methodology, this broad and inclusive definition of gender equality knowingly sacrifices whatever additional insight might be gained by investigating the determinants of attitudes relating gender equality and women’s rights and status in specific domains, such as the treatment of women in the economy or before the law. This “drilling down” is left for future studies by others, or by

Table 1. Responses to Selected Items about Gender Equality

Strongly Agree or

Agree

Disagree or Strongly Disagree

Do you think it is important for girls to go to high school? 85.9 14.1

A married woman can work outside the home, if she wishes. 81.4 18.6

It is acceptable for a woman to be a member of parliament. 76.5 23.5

A university education is more important for a boy than a girl. 29.4 70.6

Men and women should have equal job opportunities and wages. 69.6 30.4

Women have the right to obtain divorce upon their request. 69.6 30.4

A woman can be president or prime minister of a Muslim country. 53.8 46.2

A woman should cease to work outside the home after marriage so that she can devote full time to home and family. 48.6 51.4

A woman can travel abroad by herself, if she wishes. 33.9 66.1

Overall, men make better political leaders than women. 72.9 27.1

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the authors themselves, who will, to the extent it is productive, build on what has been learned about the determinants of Middle Eastern Muslim attitudes toward gender equality, in general.

There undoubtedly are numerous factors that predispose ordinary Muslim men and women in the Middle East and North Africa either to favor or to oppose gender equality and greater rights and opportunities for women. Orientations pertaining to Islam are among those examined in the present study. As made explicit in Hypotheses 1 and 2, these include personal religiosity and attitudes toward political Islam. Hypotheses 3 and 4 concern trust and confidence in one’s societal and political environment. The independent variable in H3 is interpersonal trust, or generalized trust. The independent variable in H4 is political trust, or trust in the various institutions by which one’s society is governed and managed. A final consideration, expressed in Hypothesis 5, concerns personal economic circumstances. The discussion below includes a brief statement of the rationale and presumed causal story that informs each hypothesis and makes it plausible enough to warrant investigation.

The relatively unsatisfactory status of women in the Muslim-majority countries of the Middle East and North Africa is frequently, albeit often simplistically, attributed to Islam.12 Those who hold this view argue that gender inequality is enshrined in the Shari’a, and they sometimes cite conservative Islamic scholars such as Abul Ala Mawdudi and Sayyed Qutb in support of their contention that this is the only correct interpretation of Islamic law. Mawdudi, who was born in British India in 1903 and died in the United States in 1979, founded the Jamaat al-Islami, the most important Islamic organization in Asia. Qutb, an Egyptian educator who was born in 1906 and died in 1966 at the age of 59, often is credited with establishing the theoretical basis for radical and conservative Islamism in the modern Sunni world.13

Mawdudi and Qutb had very different lived experiences, and both men died some years ago. Nevertheless, the writings of each man remain extremely influential, particularly among those who believe that Muslim societies should be governed by a strict and literalist interpretation of Islamic law. With respect to issues of gender, Mawdudi believed that women should leave their homes only when essential and that Islam required gender segregation and the complete

12 For a useful and empirically grounded assessment, see Amy Alexander and Christian Welzel, “Islam and Patriarchy: How Robust Is Muslim Support for Patriarchal Values?” World Values Research 4, no. 2 (2011): 40-70. Noting that there is evidence that Muslims support patriarchal values more frequently than non-Muslims but also that the validity of this evidence is contested, the authors use multilevel models to test whether disproportionate Muslim support for patriarchal values disappears when controlling for patriarchy’s structural underpinnings.

13 See the chapter on Qutb in Roxanne Euben and Mohammad Qasim Zaman, Princeton Readings in Islamic Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 129-144. See also John Calvert, Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). Publicity for the book states that Qutb “is often portrayed as a terrorist, Islamo-Fascist, and advocate of murder. This book rescues Qutb from misrepresentation.”


veiling of women outside the home.14 Qutb’s view was similar. Although he acknowledged that there might be circumstances requiring a woman to work outside the home, he believed “a woman’s real job is the home and the family: she helps the son achieve his manhood and provides the spiritual source of love and kindness for her husband, nurturing thereby, on her own, the future of the nation.”15

Other interpretations of Islamic law are possible, of course, and they have been advanced by Islamic theorists and scholars who are equally important, if not more so. Among these are Yusuf Qaradawi and Ali Gomaa, who, among others, are leaders of what is often described as a wasatiyya, or middle ground, trend in Islamic interpretation. Al-Qaradawi, an Egyptian Sunni Muslim scholar who lived in exile in Qatar for many years, serves as a spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. He vigorously defends the equality of women and men in a society governed by Islamic law and encourages women to become educated and empowered members of that society. Indeed, arguing that these rights not only are permitted but also actually encouraged by Islam, he explicitly has opposed Muslim clerics who attempt to deny women their rights by, in his view, manipulating and distorting Hadith and Quranic verses.16 Gomaa, a prolific scholar of Islamic legal theory and Grand Mufti of Egypt from 2003 to 2013, also has written and spoken extensively on matters relating to women. He has issued many fatwas declaring that Islam gives women the same political rights as men, including the right to become president of a modern state.

Finally, in addition to the above-mentioned and other conservative and middle-ground scholars, there are Muslim scholars who have worked to more fully reinterpret Islam in ways that remove, or at least significantly reduce, tension between the religion and modern life. Unlike prominent figures within the conservative and wasatiyya Islamist streams, those associated with a more liberal current are not officials with a formal and institutionalized role in the dissemination of opinion about how Islam should be understood and practiced. Instead, they are political activists, academics, and public intellectuals who share their views through publications, interviews, and, increasingly, the Internet and social media.

Understandably, the boundary between the wasatiyya stream and one that is more liberal is not always possible to denote with precision. But among those who arguably may be placed in the latter category are Tariq Ramadan, Mona Eltahawy, and the late Fatima Mernissi. Ramadan, a Swiss philosopher

14 A. A. Mawdudi, Towards Understanding Islam (Chicago: Kazi Publications, 1992).15 Lamia Rustum Shehadeh, “Women in the Discourse of Sayyid Qutb,” Arab Studies Quarterly

22 (Summer 2000): 45-55.16 For additional accounts of Qaradawi’s views, see Michaelle Browers, Political Ideology in the

Arab World: Accommodation and Transformation (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), and Rutherford, Egypt after Mubarak.

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and professor, has published numerous commentaries and opinions on Islam and modern life, and he has participated in many debates with his opponents across the world. With respect to the circumstances of women, he insists, like other progressive scholars, that it is not Islam that has a problem with women, but rather it is Muslims who are wedded to an incorrect, literalist, and ossified version of their religion, or who in some cases mistake cultural traditions for inviolable Islamic precepts.17

Mona Eltahawy, an Egyptian-American writer and lecturer based in Cairo and New York, calls herself a proud liberal Muslim and insists that her fight with Islam is from within, not from a rejectionist perspective that seeks to abandon Islam because it is irreconcilably incompatible with modern life. In this connection, she argues that the oppression of women has emerged in Middle Eastern male-dominated societies, rather than from Quranic decree.18 Eltahawy’s arguments and prescriptions are presented in a new book, Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution.19 Mernissi, a Moroccan scholar and academic who died in 2015, wrote extensively on the conditions of women in Muslim society. In her later writings, she undertook to show how patriarchic interpretations distort Islamic teachings pertaining to women.20

The degree to which ordinary citizens in the Muslim-majority countries of the Middle East and North Africa are attuned to these debates about interpretation among Muslim scholars, as well as the extent to which they find certain streams of opinion more persuasive than others, undoubtedly varies a great deal. However, the dataset used in the present study offers clear evidence that Muslim men and women in the Middle East and North Africa are not of one mind regarding the proper interpretation of Islam with respect to the rights and status of women. For example, 39 percent of the respondents agree or agree strongly that it is a violation in Islam for men and women to study together at university, while 58 percent disagree or disagree strongly, and another 3 percent neither agree nor disagree.21

17 See, for example, “The Role of Muslim Women: A Conversation with Tariq Ramadan” (recorded on March 13, 2016), http://aboutislam.net/family-society/gender-society/role-muslim-women-conversation-tariq-ramadan/ (accessed October 30, 2017).

18 See Mona Eltahawy, “My Unveiling Ceremony,” New York Times (April 11, 2015), https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/11/opinion/mona-eltahawy-my-unveiling-ceremony.html?_r=0 (accessed October 30, 2017).

19 Mona Eltahawy, Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016).

20 Fatima Mernissi, Women and Islam: An Historical and Theological Enquiry (Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishers, 1991), and id., Women’s Rebellion and Islamic Memory (New York: Zed Books, 1996). See also Nilüfer Göle, “Islamisme et féminisme en Turquie: regards croisés” [Islamism and feminism in Turkey: Contrasting views], in Le foulard islamique en questions [Questions on the Islamic headscarf] (Paris: Éditions Amsterdam, 2004).

21 A similar division of opinion is reflected in responses to a question about Islam and women’s dress, with 57 percent agreeing or agreeing strongly that Islam does not require wearing a


These differing views about how to understand the relationship between Islam and women’s status provide the context for thinking about the potential explanatory power of religious orientations. So, too, does the fact that both autocratic leaders and their Islamist opponents in the MENA region frequently offer the public a version of what, from their sometimes sincere and sometimes self-serving perspective, Islam either promises or prohibits. As noted recently by an Algerian scholar writing about the relationship between Islam and the status of women, “religion is manipulated as a political instrument by groups from different political stripes.”22 Against this background, the first of a series of hypotheses to be tested with survey data from the Middle East and North Africa considers the possibility that views about gender equality vary as a function of personal religiosity.

H1a. Men and women who are more religious are less likely than those who are less religious to support gender equality.

H1b. Men and women who are more religious are not less likely than those who are less religious to support gender equality.

H1a postulates that Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa who are more religious are disproportionately likely to embrace views about the rights and circumstances of women that approximate those held by conservative scholars such as Mawdudi and Qutb. While many and perhaps most of these individuals may not be familiar with the works of these men or those of other prominent scholars who espouse a conservative and literalist interpretation of Islam, H1a rests on and tests the assumption that more religious citizens are more likely than less religious citizens to have been exposed to and then embraced the view that fidelity to Islam, properly understood, requires the denial to women of the full range of rights and opportunities available to men.

H1b might be considered H0, the null hypothesis, for H1a. But given the prominence of Muslim scholars, theorists, and intellectuals who challenge conservative interpretations and insist that Islam should not be understood as denying equality to women, H1b explicitly considers the possibility that

hijab, 42 percent disagreeing or disagreeing strongly, and only one percent neither agreeing nor disagreeing. The “neither agree nor disagree” option was not given in most surveys, hence the small percentages for this response. A “conservatism-liberalism in Islamic interpretation” index based on these items is the dependent variable in a study by the authors that is in progress. Details about the dataset, which includes almost 80,000 Muslim respondents, are given in the section on methodology. The weights discussed in the section on methodology have been applied when computing these percentages.

22 Rachid Tlemçani, “The Algerian Woman Issue: Struggles, Islamic Violence and Cooptation,” in Women’s Movements in Post-“Arab Spring” North Africa, ed. Fatima Sediqi (London: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2016).

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the latter view has gained a significant measure of currency and that support for gender equality is therefore no less pronounced among more religious individuals than among less religious individuals. H1b thus rests on and tests the assumption that more religious individuals are just as likely as less religious individuals to have been exposed to and then embraced the view that fidelity to Islam, properly understood, does not require the denial to women of the full range of rights and opportunities granted to men. Indeed, recent research has described some of the ways in which deep religious attachments actually can contribute to gender equality.23

Independent of whatever may be the explanatory power of personal religiosity, it is possible that the embrace of political Islam predisposes ordinary citizens to disapprove of gender equality.24 Support for political Islam, here meaning a belief that Muslim societies should be ruled in accordance with Islamic legal codes and prescriptions and with Islamic clerics exerting political influence, is disproportionately likely among religious individuals. The converse is not the case, however; a substantial proportion of the men and women who are religious believe that religion should be considered an essentially private matter and, thus, for the most part, separated from social and political life. Indeed, although the proportions vary substantially across countries and time periods, this view was expressed by fully 53 percent of the Muslim respondents in the dataset who described themselves as religious, compared to 67 percent of those who said they are not religious.25 Accordingly, personal religiosity and support for political Islam, while correlated, are not related to one another so strongly as to suggest that the two Islamic orientations are almost certainly associated with gender equality to the same degree.

At the same time, the context in the Middle East and North Africa within which attitudes toward political Islam are shaped is the same as that described with respect to personal religiosity. On the one hand, while the relative privatization of religion is at odds with the way that Islam has traditionally been understood, and properly so, it has gained a significant measure of currency not

23 See, for example, Saba Mahmoud, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). Mahmoud shows how a desire for opportunity and experience draws women into mosque activities, which increases their sense of confidence and autonomy.

24 For an instructive study of some of the reasons why women support political Islam, see Lisa Blaydes and Drew Linzer, “The Political Economy of Women’s Support for Fundamentalist Islam,” World Politics 60 (July 2008): 576-609.

25 The item asked respondents whether they agreed strongly, agreed, neither agreed nor disagreed, disagreed, or disagreed strongly with the following statement: Religious practice is a private matter and should be separated from social and political life. Responses to other items in the dataset similarly show that a significant proportion of more religious individuals favor limiting the influence of religion in political affairs. For example, 52 percent agree or agree strongly with the statement that men of religion should have no influence over the decisions of government, and 40 percent disagree or disagree strongly with the statement that it would be better for their country if more people with strong religious beliefs held public office.


only among Muslims in the West but also, as noted, among ordinary citizens in many Muslim-majority countries. Accordingly, and particularly since issues of gender equality have broad societal implications, it may be that there is less support for the equality of men and women among those who are more supportive of political Islam-who believe that Muslim societies should be governed by Islamic legal codes and prescriptions.

Again, however, it is also possible that many who favor political Islam take their cues when thinking about what a proper Islamic society should look like from the more middle-ground and liberal ideological streams described above. Should this be the case, support for political Islam would be unlikely to have a significant impact on attitudes toward gender equality.26 These competing possibilities are reflected in the following hypotheses:

H2a. Men and women who support political Islam are less likely than those who do not support political Islam to support gender equality.

H2b. Men and women who support political Islam are not less likely than those who do not support political Islam to support gender equality.

Trust and confidence in one’s societal and political environment define another category of factors that may play a role in shaping views about gender equality. Interpersonal trust, or generalized trust, is one factor that may have explanatory power. A second is political trust, here defined as confidence in the various institutions by which one’s society is governed and managed.

The importance of interpersonal trust as an explanatory variable is well established in the political science scholarly literature. Among other things, it has been shown to be a critical element in a constellation of normative orientations that make up what is sometimes described as a “democratic culture” or “civic culture.”27 Democracy requires a measure of interpersonal

26 For an instructive comparative country-level study that connects the presence or absence of impediments to women’s sociopolitical equality to variation in the specific Islamic codes and interpretations that are incorporated into a country’s legal system, see Fatima Z. Rahman, “Gender Equality in Muslim-Majority States and Shari’a Family Law: Is there a Link?” Australian Journal of Political Science 47, no. 3 (2012): 347-362. Rahman finds that the inclusion of laws and policies based on Islamic tenets do not, in and of themselves, constitute important obstacles to gender equality. Rather, it depends on which Islamic codes and interpretations become law.

27 Foundational studies include Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (New York: Little, Brown & Company, 1965); Lucien Pye and Sidney Verba, Political Culture and Political Development (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969); and Seymour Lipset, The Democratic Culture (Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 2004). See also Ronald Inglehart, “Culture and Democracy,” in Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress, ed. Lawrence Harrison and Samuel Huntington (New York: Basic Books, 2000).

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trust since, in a functioning democracy, citizens must believe that most men and women are fair-minded and reasonable, and, accordingly, that citizens such as themselves are the best judges of how their country should be governed. Otherwise, they are unlikely to distinguish respect for the rule of law from uncritical deference to those in authority.28

With respect to gender equality, it seems likely, or at least possible, that support for according equal rights and opportunities to both sexes would increase to the extent that an individual trusts other people, both men and women, and thus believes that they will act fairly and responsibility and with concern for the welfare, sensibilities, and dignity of fellow citizens.29 Several interrelated causal stories make this proposition plausible. On the one hand, those who see their fellow citizens as trustworthy, and consequently see the society they inhabit as friendly and welcoming, should be less likely to believe that women must be “shielded” from the vagaries and dangers of an inhospitable societal environment-that they must be denied certain rights and opportunities for their own good. On the other hand, to the extent the belief that “most people can be trusted” includes the view that women as well as men are trustworthy, women may be seen both as “deserving” of all the rights and opportunities enjoyed by men and as capable and responsible citizens whose full participation will not disrupt, and may even enrich, the life and proper functioning of a society.

At the same time, it is also possible to imagine an inverse relationship-that a lower level of interpersonal trust would increase support for gender equality, particularly in less developed and/or more authoritarian political contexts, in which support for gender equality may not be a component of a civic political culture to the degree that this tends to be the case in developed democracies. One rationale in this case is that lower levels of interpersonal trust may reflect a belief that most individuals, women included, and perhaps especially women, are not treated well by others and face unfair obstacles in their daily lives. Should this be the case, this belief may predispose men and women with lower levels of trust to be more aware of and sympathetic to the obstacles faced by women and, as a result, to be more supportive of greater rights and opportunities for women. Further, beyond awareness and sympathy, less trusting individuals may believe not so much that women need shielding and protecting but, rather, that they need to have opportunities to acquire the skills and experience with which to function and, if necessary, defend themselves in an inhospitable societal environment.

28 Richard Rose, William Mishler, and Christian Haerpfer, Democracy and Its Alternatives: Understanding Post-Communist Societies (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1998), 98.

29 See Inglehart and Norris, Rising Tide, and Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy: The Human Development Sequence (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005). For an application to the Arab world, see Veronica Kostenko, Pavel Kuzmuchev, and Eduard Ponarin, “Attitudes towards Gender Equality and Perceptions of Democracy in the Arab World,” Democratization (June 2015): 1-30.


Finally, offering a different kind of rationale, it is possible that interpersonal trust is greatest in the traditional sectors of society, where familial relations may be strong and people may be less buffeted than others by the pressures, insecurities, and fast-paced change that often characterize modern life. Interpersonal distrust, following this logic, thus would be greater in the less traditional sectors of society. If this is the case, and if it also is the case that conservative social values, including those pertaining to women, are stronger in more traditional social environments than in less traditional ones, then an inverse relationship between interpersonal trust and support for gender equality is to be expected.

These competing possibilities, positing positive and inverse relationships, respectively, are expressed in the following hypotheses:

H3a. Men and women with higher levels of interpersonal trust are more likely than those with lower levels of interpersonal trust to support gender equality.

H3b. Men and women with lower levels of interpersonal trust are more likely than those with higher levels of interpersonal trust to support gender equality.

The logic with respect to political trust is in some ways similar and in some ways different from that proposed with respect to interpersonal trust. There are several reasons to imagine a positive association between political trust and support for gender equality. One the one hand, confidence in the institutions by which one’s country is governed and managed suggests a measure of certainty and predictability, and perhaps also personal security, and these in turn may suggest a well-ordered political environment in which citizens go about their business without, or with greatly reduced, fear of confrontation, harassment, or provocation. Under such conditions, individuals may see less reason to believe that it is undesirable, or problematic, for women to have a full measure of rights and opportunities. In other words, as considered with respect to interpersonal trust, they may see less reason to believe that women should be shielded, for their own well-being, from the dangers of an inhospitable societal environment.

On the other hand, a low level of political trust may involve more than the perceived absence of a well-ordered, confidence-inducing political environment. To the extent that low political trust reflects intense discontent with the political and economic status quo, which it very probably does for most individuals, this situation may give rise to animosity with the potential to depress support for gender equality, as a recent study found.30 The operative

30 Sarah Sunn Bush and Amaney Jamal, “Anti-Americanism, Authoritarian Politics, and Attitudes about Women’s Representation: Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Jordan,” International Studies Quarterly 59 (2015): 34-45.

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mechanisms for this part of the presumed causal story may involve the perception of others as competitors for jobs and other resources and an alienation that fosters prejudice, scapegoating, xenophobia, and neotraditionalism. Under these conditions, horizons may constrict, citizens may be more anxious, and people may fall back on traditions and be less willing to see opportunities go to others, including, and perhaps especially, women.

As with interpersonal trust, however, it is also possible to imagine an inverse relationship between political trust and support for gender equality. To the extent that low political trust reflects a belief that leaders and authorities cannot be counted on to protect the rights of citizens, perhaps especially those of women, individuals may reason that it is up to ordinary men and women to embrace and support the struggle for a just society, including, possibly, justice for women in the form of greater gender equality. Further, again as in the case of interpersonal trust, those with lower levels of political trust may also believe that women need and deserve opportunities to acquire the skills and experience with which to function in an inhospitable political and economic environment. These alternative dynamics and pathways, which again inform propositions that remain to be tested, are expressed in Hypotheses 4a and 4b:

H4a. Men and women with higher levels of political trust are more likely than those with lower levels of political trust to support gender equality.

H4b. Men and women with lower levels of political trust are more likely than those with higher levels of political trust to support gender equality.

A final set of hypotheses concerns personal economic circumstances. The reasons that it may help to account for variance in attitudes toward gender equality parallel some of those proposed with respect to political trust. The difference is that, in this case, it is the individual’s personal and immediate situation that is at issue, rather than the broader political and economic environment that she or he inhabits. The latter, political trust, involves what is often described as a “sociotropic” consideration, a term used by economists and political scientists to refer to judgments about the broader political economy.31 Personal economic circumstance, by contrast, involves what economists and political scientists often characterize as “pocketbook” considerations, reflecting an assessment of one’s personal situation regardless of whether the broader environment is assessed the same way. To the extent that the dynamics and

31 For an instructive exploration of gender differences associated with alienation based on sociotropic considerations, see Monika Djerf-Pierre and Lena Wangnerud, “Gender and Sociotropic Anxiety: Explaining Gender Differences in Anxiety and Social Risks and Threats,” International Journal of Public Opinion Research 28 (Summer 2016): 217-240.


pathways proposed above turn out to have explanatory power, Hypotheses 5a and 5b provide an opportunity to assess the importance for Muslim women and men in the Middle East and North Africa of judgments about one’s personal circumstances relative to judgments about one’s larger political community:

H5a. Men and women in more favorable economic circumstances are more likely than those in less favorable economic circumstances to support gender equality.

H5b. Men and women in less favorable economic circumstances are more likely than those in more favorable economic circumstances to support gender equality.

Data and Methodology

The hypotheses will be tested with a dataset composed of fifty-six surveys, all but two of which asked questions pertaining to gender equality, carried out between 1988 and 2014 in seventeen Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and North Africa. Labeled the Carnegie Middle East Governance and Islam Dataset (so named because a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York made its construction possible), the dataset, along with extensive documentation, is available through the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research at the University of Michigan. The dataset with all fifty-six surveys contains the responses to scores of questions of 82,489 men and women aged eighteen and older. Table 2 lists the surveys that have been merged to create the Carnegie dataset. Surveys are grouped in the table according to source, such as the Arab Barometer or the World Values Survey, and in each case, the country, year, and sample size of the survey are given.

All but two of the surveys are based on face-to-face interviews with nationally representative probability-based samples.32 There are 2,919 non-Muslim respondents, primarily Lebanese and Egyptian Christians, in the dataset, and they have been removed for the present analysis given that orientations pertaining to Islam are important independent variables. In addition, as noted, two of the surveys, that in Jordan in 2008 and that in Palestine in 1999, do not include questions pertaining to women’s status and gender equality. With these surveys therefore excluded as well, the present analysis is based on 77,403 Muslim respondents. Weighting is used to adjust for sample-size differences, so that each survey contributes in equal measure to the findings of the analysis, and to adjust for what may be described as “population overlap.” The latter

32 Detailed methodological information about the Carnegie dataset, including that pertaining to sources, sampling, and mode, is provided in Mark Tessler, Islam and Politics in the Middle East: Explaining the Views of Ordinary Citizens (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), see chap. 1.

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corrects for the fact that populations in a country surveyed more than once during a period of two or three years are not completely independent.33

Measurement in most cases, including that pertaining to gender equality, involves using factor analysis to construct survey-specific multi-item indices composed of items that form a unidimensional scale, and then establishing cross-survey conceptual equivalence through high loading “bridge” items when indices in different surveys are constructed from some but not all of the same items.34 In almost all of the surveys, the factor analysis of items pertaining to each variable-gender equality and several of the independent variables-yields only one factor, and only items with high loadings on that factor are retained.35 Factor scores are then generated to produce continuous variables that are included in multivariate statistical tests of the hypotheses presented earlier.

This measurement procedure has been used to develop indices pertaining to views about gender equality, personal religiosity, attitudes toward political Islam, and attitudes toward the governing regime, here described as political trust. Table 3 lists the items pertaining to each of these variables that were included in at least some of the surveys, and it also gives the number of surveys in which each item was included. Obviously, only the items included in each survey were used in the factor analyses of data from that survey. As noted earlier with respect to gender equality, the development of a broad, multidomain measure knowingly sacrifices whatever additional insight might be gained by investigating the determinants of attitudes relating to women’s rights and status in specific domains, such as the economy or legal justice system.

Table 3 also lists the items used to construct the two remaining independent variables. The measure of personal economic circumstance is based on two highly correlated items: family income and a question that asks respondents about satisfaction with their economic situation. Interpersonal trust is measured by a single item, the only one in the dataset.

33 The following weights, admittedly subjectively determined, are applied when surveys are conducted in the same country at an interval of less than four years. Two surveys conducted in the same country a year apart are each given a weight of .65. Two surveys conducted in the same country at an interval of two years are each given a weight of .80. Two surveys conducted in the same country at an interval of three years are each given a weight of .90. A fuller discussion of both the sample size weights and the population overlap weights, including the rationale for each, is provided in Tessler, Islam and Politics in the Middle East, 58-60.

34 This approach to establishing cross-survey conceptual equivalence through bridge items when surveys contain some similar items and some different items, drawing on procedures described in an important early work by Przeworski and Teune, is discussed in detail and illustrated in the case of the Carnegie dataset in Tessler, Islam and Politics in the Middle East, 52-54. See also Adam Przeworski and Henry Teune, The Logic of Comparative Social Inquiry (New York: Wiley Interscience, 1970), Part II.

35 Unidimensionality, based on high loadings on a common factor and thus reflecting substantial interitem agreement, offers evidence of reliability and a basis for inferring that the measure is valid as well as reliable.


OLS regression is used to test the hypotheses enumerated above, with the dependent variable, of course, being attitude toward gender equality. The variance captured by the measure of attitude toward gender equality, based on factor scores generated from the items shown in table 3, ranges from -3.31 to 2.11. Since these are standardized scores, the mean is 0 and the standard deviation is 1. The response distributions on the individual items used to construct the scale, as well as a few other items pertaining to gender equality, were presented earlier in table 1. Table 4 lists the lowest and highest values, based on factor scores, of the attitude toward gender equality index and of the measures of the independent variables in the analysis.

The implications of a pooled analysis of data from fifty-four surveys should be mentioned in concluding this discussion of methodology. It must be acknowledged that against the benefits of the “big-picture” findings that emerge from pooled analyses must be weighed the fact that these findings almost certainly do not apply to every country in the dataset in every year that it was surveyed. On the one hand, there may be, and mostly likely are, a certain number of outliers. On the other hand, there may be surveys in a subset of countries and/or years that contribute disproportionately to the findings that emerge from the pooled analysis. With fifty-four surveys, it is not practical to consider each individual survey as a potential outlier or disproportionate driver. Accordingly, there has been no attempt to do this in the present study, which is concerned with broad, region-wide patterns and content to stipulate that these trends almost certainly do not apply in equal measure to every country each time it was surveyed.

Two points may be added to the above stipulation, however. First, since the Carnegie dataset is in the public domain and available to all would-be users, those interested in specific countries and/or years, or in particular subsets of countries and/or years, can acquire the relevant data and undertake whatever descriptive and/or multivariate analyses they consider pertinent, including analyses designed to determine the fit with findings from the pooled analysis. Second, a different and to some extent preferable option, which the authors intend to pursue in future research, is to identify the country and time-specific attributes that condition the applicability of particular explanatory relationships. The Carnegie dataset was constructed to facilitate hierarchical modeling and other types of two- or multilevel analyses that connect individual-level and country-level explanatory factors. In addition to the numerous individual-level variables based on respondent answers to survey questions, the dataset contains several dozen country-level variables based on the political, economic, and societal attributes of each country at the time (or each time) it was surveyed.

Analysis and Findings

OLS regression has been carried out to test the hypotheses presented earlier. It will be recalled that fifty-four of the fifty-six surveys that were merged to

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construct the Carnegie dataset contain items pertaining to gender equality, and so the analysis is based on these fifty-four surveys.

The results of the regression analysis are presented in table 5. The table shows the results when all Muslim respondents, but only Muslim respondents, are included in the analysis, and with sex, age, and level of education added to the model as control variables. Four of the five independent variables are related to gender equality to a statistically significant degree. The exception is evaluation of the governing regime, or political trust. Thus, when all Muslim respondents are included, the analysis provides support for Hypotheses 1a, 2a, 3b, and 5a. More specifically, support for gender equality is shown to decrease as personal religiosity increases and as support for political Islam increases; support for gender equality is shown to increase when political trust is lower and when an individual’s economic situation is more favorable. Based on the regression analysis, each of these relationships is independent of the others and holds when all the others are held constant.

Table 2. Surveys in the Carnegie Middle East Governance and Islam Dataset

Early Surveys World Values Survey 4th & 5th Waves

Arab Barometer 2nd Wave

Country Year N Country Year N Country Year NEgypt 1988 292 Jordan 2003 1,000 Jordan 2010 1,188Kuwait 1988 300 Palestine 2003 1,320 Palestine 2010 1,200Palestine 1995 2,368 Algeria 2004 1,446 Algeria 2011 1,216Palestine 1999 1,200 Morocco 2005 1,083 Lebanon 2010 1,387

Kuwait 2005 750 Yemen 2011 1,200World Values Survey

3rd Wave Yemen 2006 1,440 Iraq 2011 1,236

Country Year N KSA 2003 1,502 Egypt 2011 1,220Egypt 2000 3,000 Iraq 2004 2,325 KSA 2011 1,405Iran 2000 2,532 Iran 2005 2,667 Sudan 2011 1,538Turkey 2001 4,607 Iraq 2006 2,701Jordan 2001 1,223 Jordan 2007 1,200 Arab Barometer 3rd WaveMorocco 2001 2,264 Morocco 2007 1,200 Country Year NAlgeria 2002 1,282 Egypt 2008 3,051 Jordan 2013 1,795

Turkey 2007 1,346 Palestine 2012 1,200Nat’l Science Foundation Qatar (6th wave) 2010 1,060 Algeria 2013 1,220Country Year N Morocco 2013 1,116

Jordan 2003 1,000 Arab Barometer 1st Wave Kuwait 2014 1,021Palestine 2003 1,320 Country Year N Lebanon 2013 1,200Algeria 2004 1,446 Jordan 2006 1,143 Yemen 2013 1,200Morocco 2005 1,083 Palestine 2006 1,270 Iraq 2013 1,215Kuwait 2005 750 Algeria 2006 1,300 Egypt 2013 1,196Yemen 2006 1,440 Morocco 2006 1,277 Sudan 2013 1,200

Lebanon 2007 1,200 Tunisia 2013 1,199Yemen 2007 1,182 Libya 2014 1,247Jordan 2008 967 Jordan 2013 1,795Palestine 2008 3,430Bahrain 2009 500 N=82,489


Table 3. Items Used to Measure Attitude toward Gender Equality, Personal Religiosity, Political Islam, Interpersonal Trust, Political Trust, and Individual Economic Circumstance

Measures and Constituent Items Number of Surveys

Gender EqualityA married woman can work outside the home if she wishes. 38Overall, men make better political leaders than women. 53A university education is more important for a boy than a girl. 54Men and women should have equal job opportunities and wages. 28A woman can travel abroad by herself, if she wishes. 20A woman should cease to work outside the home after marriage so that she can devote full time to home and family. 10

Women have the right to obtain a divorce upon their request. 12Personal Religiosity

When you consider what a suitable spouse is for your son or daughter, would you say that each of the following is very important, somewhat important, or not important:S/he doesn't pray. (The question also asks respondents to assess the importance of each one of several additional factors.) 28

Independently of whether you go to religious services, would you say that you are religious, in between, or not religious? 46

How often do you pray? 40How often do you pray at/attend the mosque? 36How often do you read the Quran? 36Do you find that you get comfort and strength from religion? 14When you need advice about a personal problem, how often do you consult each of the following, an imam or fakih? 6

Do you refer to religious teachings when making decisions about your life? 2Political Islam

Government should implement only the laws of the Shari’a. 45Men of religion should NOT influence how people vote in elections. 45Men of religion should have NO influence over the decisions of government. 45Religious practice is a private matter and should be separated from socio-political life. 41

It would be better for [country] if more people with strong religious beliefs held public office. 45

Religious leaders should NOT interfere in politics. 2Clergy should have important social and political roles in society. 2

Interpersonal TrustCan or cannot most people be trusted? 54

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Measures and Constituent Items Number of Surveys

Political TrustTrust in the prime minister 47Trust in courts/justice system 31Trust in parliament 43Trust in the police 47Trust in political parties 32Trust in the press 21Trust in the military 35

Individual Economic Circumstancem107 Individual monthly income 54m108 Satisfaction with economic situation of household 33

Table 4. Highest and Lowest Values on Indices Measuring Attitude toward Gender Equality, Personal Religiosity, Political Islam,

Interpersonal Trust, Political Trust, and Individual Economic Circumstance

Index or Measure Lowest Value Highest ValueGender Equality -3.31 .211Personal Religiosity -4.32 .272Political Islam -3.99 3.07Interpersonal Trust 1 3Political Trust -4.25 2.83Individual Economic Circumstance -2.07 1.74

Table 5. Support for Gender Equality by Personal Religiosity, Attitude toward Political Islam, Interpersonal Trust, Political Trust, and

Personal Economic Circumstance

More Personally Religious -.026 (.006)***More Supportive of Political Islam -.148 (.007)***Higher Level of Interpersonal Trust -.049 (.007)***Higher Level of Political Trust .002 (.007)More Favorable Individual Economic Circumstance .040 (.007)***Constant -1.023 (.038)***

Control VariablesFemale Sex .515 (.013)***Older Age .017 (.006)**Higher Level of Education .115 (.006)***

Table 3. Items Used to Measure Attitude toward Gender Equality, Personal Religiosity, Political Islam, Interpersonal Trust,

Political Trust, and Individual Economic Circumstance (continued)


Given the very large N, even after it has been reduced by the weighting procedures described above, relationships that are only moderately strong may deviate from the null hypothesis to a degree that is sufficient to be statistically significant. Accordingly, the findings reported in table 5 should be accepted with a certain measure of caution, despite the fact that p < .001 in the case of all four of the statistically significant relationships.

A second and different kind of caution also is in order, that pertaining to the causal stories that accompanied the introduction, earlier, of Hypotheses 1a, 2a, 3b, and 5a. These stories give the hypotheses a significant measure of plausibility and represent the authors’ informed speculation about the attitude-shaping dynamics for which there would be evidence, should the hypotheses subsequently be confirmed. It must be acknowledged, however, confirmation of the hypotheses themselves notwithstanding, that these causal stories are the product of informed speculation and it is not possible to be certain, however plausible or even persuasive they might be, that they describe the actual pathway that tells why, not just whether, each independent variable accounts for variance in attitudes toward gender equality. Nevertheless, while a measure of caution is in order, these causal stories help to move inquiry into the determinants of attitudes toward gender equality in the Middle East and North Africa beyond prediction and in the direction of explanation, laying a foundation and offering a stimulus for additional reflection and research.

It also is possible, and in fact is the case, that some of the relationships found to be statistically significant when all Muslim respondents are included in the analysis are not significant for some subsets of the population. In other words, just as it is possible that some of the findings that are significant in the pooled analysis do not apply to all of the countries and time periods included in the pool, it also is possible that some of the findings that are significant in the pooled analysis do not apply to all segments of the population in the pool. And, although investigating the possibility of scope conditions associated with country and temporal attributes is being left for future research, as noted, a first cut at disaggregating the data on the basis of demographic attributes has been undertaken. More specifically, the analysis shown in table 5 has been run with subsets of respondents categorized by sex, age, and level of education, taken together. Age is dichotomized at thirty-four and younger and thirty-five and older, and education is dichotomized at less than secondary schooling and secondary schooling or more. This yields eight categories; table 6 shows the distribution of gender support levels for each of the eight. Gender equality ratings in the table are based on dividing into quartiles the multi-item gender equality index, constructed, as reported earlier, by factor analysis.

Table 6 shows, as does table 5, that support for gender equality is higher among women and among older and better-educated individuals. Equally important and more central to present purposes, the table also shows that in every one of the eight categories based on sex, age, and education, taken together, there is considerable variation in attitudes toward gender equality-

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Table 6. Attitude toward Gender Equality among Respondents Grouped by Sex, Age, and Educational Level

Support for Gender Equality on Index Based on Factor Scores-

Percent in Each Quartile of the Index

First Quartile:

Least Supportive

Second Quartile

Third Quartile

Fourth Quartile:

Most Supportive

Men Aged 34 and Under with Less than Secondary Education (N=6,189)

42.4 25.6 18.0 13.9

Men Aged 35 and Over with Less than Secondary Education (N=13,455)

33.4 27.2 21.4 18.0

Women Aged 34 and Under with Less than Secondary Education (N=10.132)

39.1 26.2 20.1 14.6

Women Aged 35 and Over with Less than Secondary Education (N= 9,333)

29.4 26.0 24.5 20.1

Men Aged 34 and Under with Secondary Education or More (N=7,982)

22.2 24.6 25.7 27.4

Men Aged 35 and Over with Secondary Education or More (N=12,839)

12.4 19.8 28.1 39.7

Women Aged 34 and Under with Secondary Education or More (N=12,042)

23.7 25.9 25.0 25.4

Women Aged 35 and Over with Secondary Education or More (N=6,482)

15.4 22.3 28.2 34.2

there is thus variance to be explained. Table 7 presents the results of regression analyses that test whether any of the hypotheses introduced earlier helps to account for this within-group variance in any of the eight cases. Table 7 thus replicates the analysis presented in table 5, with sex, age, and education removed as control variables and instead used to specify the subset of respondents on which each model is based.

Table 7 shows several similarities but also some interesting differences across the eight demographic categories. Similar to the finding reported in table 5 is that attitude toward political Islam is significantly related to attitude toward gender equality in every instance, with greater support for political Islam consistently pushing toward lower support for gender equality. Thus,


Table 7. Support for Gender Equality by Personal Religiosity, Attitude toward Political Islam, Interpersonal Trust, Political Trust,

and Personal Economic Circumstance for Respondents Grouped by Sex, Age, and Educational Level, Taken Together

More Personally Religious

More Supportive of Political

Islam

Higher Level of

Inter-personal

Trust

Higher Level of Political

Trust

More Favorable Individual Economic Situation Constant

Men Aged 34 and Under with Less than Secondary Education

.005(.021)

-.102***(.025)

-.084**(.028)

-.004(.024)

.045 (.025)

-.207***(.052)

Men Aged 35 and Over with Less than Secondary Education

-.038**(.013)

-.195***(.015)

-.054**(.018)

.011 (.015)

.053**(.016)

-.098**(.033)

Women Aged 34 and Under with Less than Secondary Education

-.012(.019)

-.165***(.019)

-.004(.021)

.008(.019)

.024(.019)

-.312***(.039)

Women Aged 35 and Over with Less than Secondary Education

-.059***(.017)

-.209***(.018)

-.013(.019)

-.014(.017)

.075***(.019)

-.090**(.037)

Men Aged 34 and Under with Secondary Education or More

-.003(.025)

-.109***(.023)

-.085***(.025)

.042(.023)

.024(.023)

.291***(.047)

Men Aged 35 and Over with Secondary Education or More

-.038**(.015)

-.110***(.015)

-.081***(.018)

.014(.015)

.049***(.015)

.545***(.033)

Women Aged 34 and Under with Secondary Education or More

.004(.025)

-1.07***(.021)

-.064**(.023)

-.018(.021)

.023(.021)

-.198***(.043)

Women Aged 35 and Over with Secondary Education or More

-.010(.022)

-.113***(.021)

-.039 (.023)

-.060**(.021)

.056**(.021)

.428***(.043)

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although it is possible, and perhaps likely, that this association reflects a degree of causal conditioning flowing in both directions, it seems clear that H2a is both confirmed and broadly applicable. A second finding similar to that reported in table 5 is the finding of no significant relationship between political trust and attitude toward gender equality-with one exception, that of well-educated older women. Among well-educated older women, lower political trust pushes toward greater support for gender equality, and higher political trust pushes toward lower support for gender equality. The reasons for this may be those suggested earlier in the discussion of H4b, with the additional observation that their applicability in this case may result from greater political consciousness and concern about issues of gender among women who are better-educated and more mature.

Table 7 shows that, for all three of the remaining independent variables, the findings reported in table 5 apply to individuals in only certain demographic categories. Perhaps the most straightforward are findings about personal economic circumstance. The positive relationship between more favorable economic circumstances and greater support for gender equality reported in table 5 is found among older individuals, regardless of sex and educational level, but not among younger individuals, again regardless of sex and level of education. Findings pertaining to personal religiosity are somewhat similar. Greater personal religiosity is associated with lower levels of support for gender equality among older and less well-educated individuals, regardless of sex, and also among better-educated older men. It is perhaps surprising that personal religiosity so frequently has little explanatory power and that H1b is confirmed among more subsets of the population than H1a. Turning finally to interpersonal trust, the discussion of H3a and H3b might have suggested that the rationale for the former is the more plausible. In fact, however, as seen in table 5, it is H3b that finds support. But this is not the case for all demographic categories. Among poorly educated women in both age categories and among well-educated older women, interpersonal trust is unrelated to attitudes toward gender equality. Among the other five respondent categories, which includes all male respondents regardless of age and educational level, a lower level of interpersonal trust pushes toward greater support for gender equality.

Discussion and Conclusion

While all but one of the hypotheses that have been tested found a measure of support, as shown in table 5, only that pertaining to political Islam received consistent support from the Carnegie data. In this case, both in the analysis based on all respondents shown in table 5 and in the separate analyses of respondents grouped into eight demographic categories based on sex, age, and education, taken together, as shown in table 7, greater support for political Islam predicts, and presumably pushes toward, reduced support for gender equality. Although it is beyond the scope of the present study to say


anything about the determinants of attitudes toward political Islam, the data offer compelling evidence that men and women who want their country to be governed by a political system in which Islam plays an important role, and probably the leading role, are disproportionately likely to hold views about the place of women in society that align, at least roughly, with those of more conservative Islamist theorists.

Findings pertaining to political trust are only slightly less consistent. With the exception of well-educated older women, hypotheses pertaining to political trust do not receive support either in the analysis of all respondents or in the separate analyses of respondents in the various demographic categories. With the data showing that there is no significant relationship between level of political trust and attitudes toward gender equality, it appears that sociotropic political judgments, while often important in explaining attitudes and behavior in other areas, do not affect attitudes toward gender equality one way or another among ordinary Muslim citizens in the Middle East and North Africa.

The one exception to the above conclusion is that of well-educated older women. This finding, particularly since the three remaining sets of hypotheses also have been found to have explanatory power for some demographic categories but not others, calls attention to the importance of avoiding one-size-fits-all explanations of support for, or opposition to, gender equality among ordinary citizens in the Middle East and North Africa.

The finding about personal religiosity is particularly notable in this connection. Personal religiosity does not have as much of an effect on views about gender equality as might have been assumed. It predicts, and presumably pushes toward, lower levels of support for gender equality among both men and women who are older and less well-educated. This may not be entirely surprising since these individuals are more likely to be relatively traditional, having had, other things being equal, less of the exposure to nontraditional lifestyles and values that comes with more education or, most often for young people, through the Internet and social media. What may be more surprising is that, with the exception of better-educated older men, personal religiosity has no effect on views about gender equality for individuals who are either younger, or better-educated, or both. Among these men and women, who represent the future of their societies, being more religious does not bring with it an embrace of conservative Islamic interpretations and a belief that their faith encourages them to oppose equal rights and opportunities for women.

The finding pertaining to interpersonal trust also may be somewhat surprising. Hypothesis 3a, which posited a positive relationship between trust and support for gender equality, might have seemed more convincing than Hypothesis 3b, which posited an inverse relationship. Support for gender equality and backing of interpersonal trust generally are considered elements of a democratic culture, and so they would be expected to vary together. But this logic apparently is less applicable to nondemocracies or quasidemocracies, since for five of the eight demographic categories, as shown in table 7, it is

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lower interpersonal trust that is associated with greater support for gender equality. The reasons, possibly, as posited in the discussion of Hypothesis 3b, flow from the fact that lower levels of interpersonal trust reflect a belief that most individuals are not treated well by their fellow citizens. On the one hand, this belief may foster sympathy for those who face important obstacles in their daily lives, including and perhaps especially women. On the other hand, it may lead to the view that women should not be denied opportunities to gain the skills and experience needed to function effectively in an inhospitable societal environment.

It is also notable, and potentially very instructive, that, with the exception of younger well-educated women, it is only the demographic categories involving men for which lower interpersonal trust is related to greater support for gender equality to a statistically significant degree. Among both younger and older less well-educated women and among better-educated older women, interpersonal trust and views about gender equality are not related. The pathway suggested above is thus an essentially male causal story. As discussed, the story itself is only informed speculation, or theorizing; it is impossible to be sure that it accurately describes the pathway that links lower interpersonal trust to higher support for gender equality. But as this causal story and plausible alternatives become the focus of additional reflection and research, it will be important to consider that there are, or at least probably are, gender-specific dynamics associated with the relationship between interpersonal trust and attitudes toward gender equality.

Turning finally to relationships involving individual economic circumstance, the pattern is consistent among both older and younger individuals. Among older persons, regardless of sex and educational level, those in favorable economic circumstances are disproportionately likely to be more supportive of gender equality; among younger persons, again regardless of sex and educational level, views about gender equality do not vary as a function of individual economic circumstance. Why this should be the case also may require additional reflection. Since age was dichotomized at thirty-five in the present analysis, and since many in the younger age category may not have reached full adulthood and entered professional life at the time they were interviewed, perhaps economic considerations had not yet become as salient for these individuals as they will be in the future. Alternatively, the generational shift that will take place as today’s younger men and women become tomorrow’s societal mainstream could bring a change in the relationship between personal economic conditions and attitudes toward gender equality among older and established individuals. Additional research, as well as additional reflection, once again will be needed to assess this possibility and understand its dynamics.

Respondents in one demographic category deviate from the patterns described above with sufficient frequency to warrant additional attention. This is well-educated older women. In contrast to the findings for all other


categories of older individuals, regardless of sex and educational level, personal religiosity does not push toward a lower level of support for gender equality among better-educated older women. Additionally, in contrast to findings for all seven of the other demographic categories, a higher level of political trust does push toward a lower level of support for gender equality among these same respondents.

The reasons for the deviations from patterns that are otherwise broadly applicable, which in this case involve diminished influence of personal religiosity and greater influence of sociotropic political considerations, are not readily apparent. But the life experience of better-educated older women may be distinctive in several ways that are relevant. First, as women, they presumably are particularly sensitive to issues pertaining to women, although, as table 6 shows, they are no more likely to support gender equality than well-educated older men. Second, as older individuals, they have lived for a long period with the obstacles and restrictions that women generally confront in Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and North Africa. And they also have lived through a previous period when, in at least some countries, these obstacles and restrictions were more pronounced than they are presently. Finally, being better-educated, at least in relative terms, they may have both high aspirations and high expectations and thus feel more acutely than others the limitations placed on women.

Taken together, the above-mentioned possibilities suggest that discontent with the circumstances of women may be particularly intense among those better-educated older women who support gender equality, with this intensity of feeling characterizing those who are personally religious, as well as those who are not, and reinforced by the unhappy judgment that the leaders of their country are more interested in maintaining the status quo than promoting reforms that would improve the status of women. The latter possibility suggests that causation, to the extent it exists, also may be flowing in the opposite direction, from high support for gender equality to low political trust.

The findings presented in this study provide an instructive map of whether, and for which segments of the population, various religious, political, and economic factors help to account for variance in the attitudes toward gender equality held by ordinary Muslim citizens in the Middle East and North Africa. Further, these insights benefit and derive credibility from the breadth and depth of the Carnegie dataset, which covers a very wide range of countries over a period of a decade and a half. At the same time, the study raises important questions that it makes no pretense to answer. One of these concerns the attitude-shaping pathways and dynamics that have been proposed. For the most part, these go beyond the data, constituting at best informed speculation that not only is incomplete but that also, in at least some cases, may not be entirely convincing. Further reflection and research will be needed to improve our understanding of the pathways and causal stories that lie behind the significant relationships that have been observed.

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A second of these concerns, noted earlier, is one that unavoidably comes with the type of pooled analysis undertaken in the present study. While the patterns observed can be assumed to be at least broadly applicable across the countries and time periods covered in the Carnegie dataset, findings almost certainly apply to some counties, and perhaps to some time periods, more fully than to others. It will be important in future research to identify any countries and time periods that contribute disproportionately to the region-wide patterns revealed by the pooled analysis, and, alternatively, to identify those countries and time periods that deviate from these otherwise broadly applicable patterns. It also will be desirable to investigate, if possible, the reasons that certain countries and time periods are in one of these two categories. All these considerations deserve a place of prominence on the research agenda of those concerned with attitudes toward gender equality in the Muslim-majority countries of the Middle East and North Africa.

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Religion, Trust, and Other Determinants of Muslim