Gender Equality and Muslim Women: Negotiating Expanded Rights in Muslim Majority and Immigrant Contexts

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chapter 7 Gender Equality and Muslim Women: Negotiating Expanded Rights in Muslim Majority and Immigrant Contexts

Rema Hammami1

Abstract

This paper addresses contemporary debates about Muslim women’s rights and equality through re-visiting a fundamental debate in Western feminism: the conundrum of equality versus difference. At the end of the twentieth century, Muslim women’s inequality and lack of rights came to play an active role in the rhetoric and politics of the ‘Clash of Civilizations’. In both Muslim majority and minority contexts, dominant public discourse increasingly posed gender equality and Muslim identity as mutually exclusive and conflicting choices for women and society at large. This problematic view reflects a politics of gender where Muslim women’s rights have become a stand- in for various imperial, national and identitarian agendas that in the process ignores and silences the desires and needs of the very women it claims to represent. This paper attempts to cast light on the different nature these debates take when they are re-positioned among the women concerned—women in Muslim majority and minority contexts seeking a more just gender order within their societies and communities. Rather than seeing contemporary debates around gender equality among women in Muslim majority and minority contexts as incommensurable with those of their Western counterparts, this paper seeks to address how desires for equality with recognition of difference is a basic dilemma shared by women in any context seeking a more just gender order.

Introduction

At the end of the twentieth century, Muslim women’s lack of rights and inequality came to play an active role in the rhetoric and politics of the ‘Clash of Civilizations’. Longstanding assumptions about Islam and women (or how women’s inequality is foundational to Islamic culture and religion) became

1 Fourth holder of the Prince Claus Chair, 2005–2006.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��4 | doi ��.��63/9789004269729_��9 Rema Hammami - 9789004269729 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 08:19:44AM via free access Gender equality and Muslim women 119 wedded in alarming ways to intense ideological conflicts and debates that had immediate political implications in the real world. In foreign policy, the Bush administration in the US used the ‘liberation’ of Afghani women from the oppressive Islam of the Taliban in their arsenal of justifications for invasion and regime change (Abu-Lughod 2002; Kandiyoti 2007, 2011). Across Europe, pitched battles broke out over the right of Muslim women to wear Islamic dress in public (in what became known as the ‘burqa wars’). Propelled by right-wing political movements, these divisive debates thrust the issue of Muslim women’s oppression within immigrant communities onto national agendas, forcing governments to create commissions and legislation to grapple with everything from Muslim women’s ‘forced marriage’ to their right to wear headscarves in public schools (Dustin 2006; Najmabadi 2006; Scott 2007; Gole & Billaud 2012). And in the contemporary Middle East, the rights of Muslim women have also been thrust onto national agendas and placed at the centre of polarized debates, most recently in the democratic transitions taking place in Egypt and Tunisia where their rights have become the terrain on which political forces battle out their contending ideological visions of their society and polity’s future (Elsadda 2011; FIDH 2011; Atassi 2012; ElKouny 2012). What is common to all these conflicts in which Muslim women’s rights or inequality have been invoked (be it in the ‘war on terror’, in Europe or in the Muslim majority contexts of Tunisia and Egypt) is that they are not fundamentally about the very women they claim to be concerned with. Instead, a range of highly charged conflicts and agendas has been played out using ‘Muslim women’ as their stand-in. In the ‘war on terror’, women’s rights and equality have been made a measuring stick in the politics of demarcating the civilized ‘us’ from the barbaric ‘them’, thus being a means to claim a ‘just war’ (regardless of the use of torture and forced rendition). In Europe, the real nature of the debate has been immigration, cultural integration and legacies of racism (Scott 2007; Parvez 2011). In relation to the Arab Spring, women’s rights and equality have been the stand-in for struggles over religious versus secular ideologies and their role in modern democratic governance (Moustafa & Quraishi-Landes 2012). In all three cases, Muslim women have been the terrain on which wider forms of identity politics have been fought. In the ‘war on terror’, they were used to express the civilizational identity of the West. In the ‘burqa wars’, rather than being about rights and equality for Muslim women immigrants, more profoundly they were used to debate what it means to be French or European and how immigration policy should relate to issues of national identity. In Egypt and Tunisia, whether women should have rights and what rights they should have is fundamentally a debate about the role of Shari’a in national identity: To what extent does religion as a source of identity

Rema Hammami - 9789004269729 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 08:19:44AM via free access 120 hammami need to be encoded in the laws and policies of the modern state and society (Kandioyti 2011a)? But where does equality enter into these debates? The calls for Muslim women’s integration in European cultural contexts encompass a number of arguments about their equality and inequality. On the one hand, they are seen as inhabiting an Islamic sub-culture that is founded on their innate inequality with Muslim men. And on the other hand, their membership in their religio- ethnic communities makes impossible their ability to enjoy the gender equality that accrues to women of the dominant culture, be it French, Danish or Dutch. Thus, in relation to these polarized debates in the European context, Muslim women are offered an either/or proposition: either to remain in inequality within their religion and community or to achieve full equality by leaving them behind and integrating into the dominant culture. The logic of these choices is that gender equality and cultural difference are made mutually exclusive categories. Only by assimilation (i.e. erasing their cultural difference) can Muslim women attain gender equality as it is provided by the dominant culture. The dominant debates in contemporary Egypt and to a lesser extent Tunisia go in the opposite direction but also tend to provide women with an either/ or proposition based on the equality/difference dualism. In the discourse of religious conservatives and dominant Islamist groups, the choice offered to women is this: either remain attached to your religious heritage and accept that men and women are fundamentally different and therefore unequal or forsake your religious identity (our collective difference) for gender equality (Abu-Odeh 2004; FIDH 2011; Kandiyoti 2011b; Mir-Hosseini 2011; Tadros 2011a). In other words, we once again have gender equality and cultural difference being made mutually exclusive categories, where Islamic conservatives and Islamist political movements assert that women cannot lay claim to Islamic identity and gender equality at the same time. In this paper, I want to show how the politics of gender vis-à-vis Muslim women—or “processes of appropriation, contestation and re-interpretation of positions on gender relations and rights by state, non-state and global actors” (Kandiyoti 2011a)—has foreclosed spaces for them to voice their own range of desires for gender equality. Rather than assuming—as these dominant debates do—that gender equality is an inherent good (or bad) aspiration for Muslim women, I aim to show that the contradictions and dilemmas inherent in the ‘equality feminism’ that marked the experience of feminist movements in the North America and Europe a generation ago remain salient today for Muslim women trying to negotiate an expansion of their rights across varying contexts. I consciously focus on the concept of equality (versus equity), because it has been the foundational (albeit often problematic) principle for women’s

Rema Hammami - 9789004269729 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 08:19:44AM via free access Gender equality and Muslim women 121 rights struggles historically and globally. The equality principle is the legal basis for the United Nations’ most powerful convention on gender rights. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) of 1979 suggests the degree to which the concept of equality remains the central and normative term for women’s rights struggles in the contemporary world. In contrast, while the notion of gender ‘equity’ has increasingly taken hold in the language of the development industry since the 1990s, it has been criticized for de-politicizing women’s rights agendas because it is based on subjective notions of fairness between the sexes rather than on legal principles of non-discrimination and substantive equality (or equality of outcomes).2 I end the paper with a personal example of debates around gender equality among women in a Muslim majority context when there is a space free from the adverse effects of the ‘politics of gender’: my Gender Studies classroom in the occupied West Bank. Rather than being a utopian case, I offer the example as exemplary of the myriad though invisible “third spaces” (Soja 1996) throughout the region and across Muslim minority contexts in which women grapple with the promise and problems inherent in gender equality as a basis for a more just gender order.

Sameness versus Difference

Over thirty years ago, the dilemmas and contradictions of gender equality became a core debate within Western feminism. The principle of demanding full equality between the sexes that had guided feminist activism since the 1960s became in the 1980s the centre of conflict over the very meaning of feminism itself, in what is now known as the equality/difference debates (Phillips 1987, 1999, 2000; Fraser 1998; Scott and Keates 1999). Back then, it was argued that the liberal feminist model of gender equality actually rested on a number of crucial exclusions and made invisible the variegated needs and circumstances of women in relation to men and between women of different ethnicities and classes. The outcome of campaigns for gender-equal legislation and access across the US and Europe had by the 1980s achieved much

2 For a discussion of this position, see International Women’s Rights Action Watch, Equity or Equality for Women? Understanding CEDAW’s Equality Principles. IWRAW Occasional Paper Series, No. 14 (2009). For a counter-view, see Hazel Reeves & Sally Baden, Gender and Development: Concepts and Definitions. BRIDGE Development and Gender Report (#55) (2000).

Rema Hammami - 9789004269729 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 08:19:44AM via free access 122 hammami in increasing women’s access and expanding their rights: to the professional workplace, to property and over their bodies, as well as increasing access to political office and making strides towards lowering gender-based wage gaps. But particularly the entry of women into professional employment and public life had been won at the cost of denying the existence of women’s double burden (working women’s continued responsibility for domestic and care- giving work). The actual choices for women within the gender-equality model were either to be the ever-exhausted super-woman (who worked as well as a man but then went home to become the perfect wife and mother) or to forsake family life altogether in order to fully concentrate on their career as a man could. While in Europe provisions of the welfare state to some extent mitigated these conflicts for middle-class women, in North America they were particularly acute, leading some of the icons of the movement to repudiate the equality paradigm.3 For many feminists the conclusion was that the gender-equality model was based on a problematic calculation of the sameness of women and men. The principle that women have the same capacities as men, and should therefore have the same rights and opportunities as them, crucially overlooked where women were different from men, most critically in the spheres of biological and social reproduction. Thus, women, in order to achieve equality, were forced to make blind these differences and act as if they did not exist. But the sameness/difference problematic also arose as an issue over differences between women. Feminists of different ethnic, racial and class groups criticized equality feminism as focusing only on women’s inequality with men, while ignoring other forms of crucial disadvantage they faced as migrant, black or poor women (Hooks 1981; Moraga & Anzaldúa 1984). They charged that equality feminism had primarily met the desires and needs of middle- class white women, for whom equality with men had enabled entry into professional employment and public life (though at the costs mentioned above). But equality feminism had done nothing to address the racism and structural poverty that was the overwhelming experience of many women, who due to these factors were unable to take advantage of the expansion of rights and access that mainstream feminism had opened up. Western feminism as a political movement never found a programmatic answer to either of these profound challenges posed by the equality/difference debates. Indeed, the debate over difference ultimately succeeded in dividing what had been until then a fairly united women’s movement along the lines of identity politics—and is still looked upon as a destructive and divisive moment in the history of that feminism.

3 See, for instance, Betty Friedan’s The Second Stage (1981).

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However, when we look at the outcome of these debates in the practical world of politics today, the principle of gender equality seems to have survived largely unscathed and untouched by these challenges. Indeed, the language of gender equality continues to be the dominant language of gender-based legislation throughout Europe and North America, as well as having become the core language for principles of gender rights in international law such as the General Assembly’s 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), where it is highlighted in Article 3. Gender equality has gone on to be mainstreamed throughout the United Nations’ system in development practice as a guiding principle at all levels of the institution’s policy and praxis. In sum, regardless of the profound criticism that the gender equality framework has undergone by feminists themselves, it continues to be the normative language for gender rights globally. But feminist thinkers who have reflected on the profound political implications that arose from the equality/difference debates have gone on to develop more nuanced understandings of how the issue of women’s equality might be re-thought as a more inclusive goal that is enabling to women suffering from a variety of, and multiple experiences with, disadvantages. This has become especially critical given that identity has increasingly come to dominate the global political landscape more generally since the 1990s, displacing earlier frameworks that were primarily focused on a politics of re-distribution (Phillips 1987, 1999; Fraser 1998). In addressing what they call the conundrum of equality, Joan Scott & Debra Keates have argued that group identities are an inevitable aspect of social life, but they only become visible, salient and troubling in specific contexts—when they are made the basis for exclusion and disadvantage and become the basis for political contestation. Specifically,

. . . when exclusions are legitimated by group differences, when social and economic hierarchies advantage some groups at the expense of others, when one set of biological or religious or ethnic or cultural characteristics are valued over another—the tension between individual and group identities emerges. Individuals, for whom group identities were just simply dimensions of multi-faceted individuality, find themselves fully determined by a single element: religious or ethnic or racial or gender identity. (Scott & Keates 1999: 3)

In other words, exclusion and discrimination on the basis of perceived group attributes works to heighten individuals’ identification with their group. Importantly, Scott & Keates argue that exclusion and discrimination

Rema Hammami - 9789004269729 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 08:19:44AM via free access 124 hammami negatively homogenize the variegated identities of individuals within groups, reducing them all to some basic and fixed negative characteristics. And this is a mirror process—members of the disadvantaged groups themselves tend to overlook their individual differences and attach a fixed and immutable character to their collective identity. Effectively, group identities are not the cause for exclusion or disadvantage—but the opposite: politicized group identities are an outcome of exclusionary processes and the imposition of disadvantage. And the conundrum is that in demanding inclusion and equality, disadvantaged groups are forced to use the very identities that were the terms for their exclusion at the same time as rejecting them. Individuals as women, minorities or members of ethnicities take these on as collective identities only in relation to the exclusion and disadvantage based on them. But the fight against discrimination based on these attributes themselves forces them to use these identities as the grounds for inclusion. As Scott & Keates (1999: 7) note,

[F]eminism was a protest against women’s political exclusion; its goal was to eliminate sexual difference in politics. But it had to make claims on behalf of women. To the extent that it acted for women, feminism produced the very sexual difference that it sought to eliminate—drawing attention to exactly the issue (sexual difference) that it wanted to banish.

The Dynamics of Identity Politics

Scott and Keates’s insights are extremely relevant to our understanding of the problematic of Muslim women and identity politics both in the Middle East and in Europe. The politicization of Muslim identities in the European context (including Muslim women’s identities) is the outcome of a two-sided process. On the one hand, immigrants experience discrimination and disadvantage and have been negatively homogenized and identified as ‘Muslims’ in dominant political discourse and practice. On the other hand, the outcome has been the growing identification with this one dimension of their identity by males and females from migrant backgrounds who under other forms of discrimination and disadvantage might have identified themselves primarily as migrants, women, workers, Moroccans, Turks or a whole variety of other identities. And since Islamic identity has been made the salient basis of exclusion, struggles for inclusion have actually heightened and underlined issues of Islamic identity both among those struggling against exclusion and among the dominant culture.

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In the contemporary Middle East4 we can see similar processes at play. Across a range of different societies, contexts and historical moments, Islamist movements have provided a political identity framework for large sectors of the society that have been economically or politically disadvantaged or disen- franchised. Political movements carrying the message of Islamic solidarity and justice have found fertile ground for their version of identity politics among large social sectors that—under the long legacy of authoritarian states claim- ing to be secular, democratic and modernist—actually denied political voice to most of the populace while excluding them from access to basic social and economic goods. And in international relations, Islamic identity has also been made extremely salient, even before 9/11 and the twenty-first century invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. In the past, the inequities of colonial legacies and imperialism across the region gave rise to an identity and politics of Arabism. But increasingly over the past two decades, as Arab nationalism became seen as corrupt and incapable of challenging US hegemony over the region (especially, but not only, as it relates to Palestine), Islamic identity has increasingly gained ground. But it is through the politics and rhetoric of the ‘war on terror’ under the Bush administration that even secularists and non-Muslims across the region found themselves being identified as Muslims and indeed identified themselves with them. The larger lesson from this is that we need to understand both identity and equality as changing, as historically contingent and always a product of specific social, political and cultural configurations and conflicts. As we have seen, group identities are made salient through exclusion on the basis of characteristics associated with them. Through processes of enfranchisement and inclusion, these same group identities lose their critical power and return to be just one among an array of an individual’s multiple selves that can be a source of joy, sadness or neglect—but no longer who they primarily are and what they need to fight about or for. That many women in North America and Europe no longer see the need for feminism is exactly because they no longer see discrimination on the basis of their sex as a dominant force of exclusion in their lives.

Equality

But while one can view identities as shifting and changeable, is equality not an absolute principle? According to Scott & Keates (1999), paradoxically it

4 The complex and variegated histories across the region that led to the resurgence of Islam as a central marker of political identities among men and women is beyond the scope of this paper.

Rema Hammami - 9789004269729 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 08:19:44AM via free access 126 hammami is both. Through calls to the absolute principle of equality, diverse groups have made claims through history and across societies for various forms of equality that have changed through time and in relation to new and changing forms of disenfranchisement. As nations under colonialism, as castes and classes, as races and genders and, more recently, as identities (ethnic, sexual, religious and cultural), groups have all used the principle of equality as their means to challenge discrimination on the basis of a shared exclusion. In that sense, equality is both never complete and always an ongoing process. National liberation may solve one inequality, but many others remain, while some will be made more salient than others and thus be made the basis of a new struggle for equality. Ultimately then, equality is a protest against discrimination and injustice. It is always fought for on the basis of group identities that are themselves contingent. And its achievement can never be total but only in relation to the identity that has been instantiated by discrimination at any one moment. And as those earlier feminist critiques have pointed out, it is especially when equality is claimed to be without identity (as in universal rights or the rights of man or the citizen)—and therefore is constructed on the basis of an abstract individual rather than a socially situated group or person—that it makes both the greatest claims and the greatest exclusions. Who the rights-bearing abstract individual is, is usually defined by the dominant and the powerful and thus reflects their interests. For instance, as feminist legal scholar Carol Pateman (1988) has shown, the rights-bearing citizen of the liberal social contract that underpins much of Western political and economic theory is actually the self- owning white male.

Muslim Women and Equality/Difference

How can we apply these insights to the issue of Muslim women and the equality/difference conundrum? Here, in the short space left, I would like to address them by calling upon my experiences of teaching Gender Studies for the past seventeen years in occupied Palestine—which, for the sake of this discussion, I will term a Muslim majority context. In 1995, my university—Birzeit University in Ramallah—founded the Women’s Studies Institute, only the second academic centre for the study of women and gender of its kind in the region. By 1997, we became the first in the region to offer a full degree programme in Gender Studies at the MA level along with teaching elective undergraduate courses. Over that period of seventeen years, the students that I teach have changed considerably in relation to the

Rema Hammami - 9789004269729 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 08:19:44AM via free access Gender equality and Muslim women 127 extent that Islam has become a salient dimension of their identities—but in much more complex and surprising ways than one might assume. Superficially, the changes could be summed up by the growing numbers of female students wearing some form of Islamic dress. Where fifteen years ago only one student out of the twenty in the course wore a headscarf, now approximately half of our students are religiously identified in terms of their dress. These are out- ward signs of social phenomena, but what exactly do they mean? And do they all mean the same thing? A simple reply: No. The first question that needs to be asked according to Scott & Keates (1999) is not who or what is a Muslim woman (as if it is something fixed and unchangeable), but when and in what specific contexts do women primarily define themselves as Muslims? Even among my group of students, regardless of what they are wearing, there is not an obvious answer; simply because they are wearing a headscarf or other variety of Islamically identified dress does not mean in the least that their main identity is as Muslims. For the majority, in relation to Israeli oppression and discrimination, they see themselves as Palestinians. In relation to experiences of bias and inequality within Palestinian society, they see themselves primarily as women. And only when they feel discriminated against or excluded on the basis of their Muslim religious identity do they become primarily Muslim. Yes, Muslims can feel and be discriminated against even in Muslim majority contexts. In the classroom, on a few occasions I have seen what is normally a vibrant and critically thinking range of individuals suddenly become a dis- tinctive and defensive unified group, because a secular student (either male or female) has made a remark implying the inferiority of women wearing headscarves. Outside the classroom, it is in relation to some workplaces that prefer ‘secular’ women, where religiously identifiable students have faced discrimination. But more often, this happens when students are working with international agencies and foreign nationals where their Islamic identity becomes emphasized because they have faced negative stereotypes and insulting treat- ment. A number of times, students have actually turned these negative experiences into research projects and looked at how other religiously identified women actively challenge these stereotypes while attempting to negotiate respect on the basis of difference. But in all these cases, Muslim identity has become for them the salient issue exactly because it has been used as a basis to identify them negatively. Similarly, a number of studies have noted that one outcome of the rise of Islamophobia in Europe and the US has been a growth in the numbers of Muslim women choosing to wear ‘Islamic’ dress as markers of their faith and

Rema Hammami - 9789004269729 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 08:19:44AM via free access 128 hammami identification with their community, rather than the opposite (Phillips 2000; Dustin 2006). However, by calling some of our students ‘religiously identified’, I am imbu- ing a range of highly variegated individuals with a single collective identity that presumes their religiosity is the same. As individuals, how they define, practice and give content to the religious dimension of their identity is extremely diverse and, I imagine, is also changing over time. A small handful of students (often among the best academically) are active in Islamic political movements. Others support secular national movements, but the majority are like the majority of people in the world: critical of all organized political parties, religious or secular. Beyond some foundational practices and beliefs, they also differ on the definition and demands of piety; not only in terms of ‘Islamic dress’, but also in the degree to which Islamic faith is the dominant or guiding ethic in their everyday lives and what that might entail. For the majority, being a Muslim is simply part and parcel of who they are: a natural and mundane part of their everyday lives. It is sometimes a cause for celebration and positive belonging, at other times a source of burden and responsibility; and at others still, a source of solace, support or guidance in a difficult and complex world. But what about gender equality. Do my students want it? Of course—but exactly in accordance with the contingent and changing historical practice that I have already discussed. Many of them, both religious and secular-identified, arrive at the programme fully wedded to the notion that their struggle is about equality with men. Rarely do I find students willing to support radical feminist positions about men’s and women’s innate difference—because it is the conservative version of this position that has been the force for gender discrimination in their lives. So when I review the equality versus difference debates and bring out the limitations and dilemmas that I have discussed here, students still attempt to claim the model—but seek ways to make it work for their needs and context. Should women be in the military if they want full equality? The class divides among an array of individual opinions. What about the double burden? That the majority of them are working wives and mothers also doing a higher degree in their spare time actually means they work a triple burden. On this issue, they profoundly identify with the trade-offs Western feminists made long ago, and their answer is that men—be it husbands, employers or the state—need to share more of that responsibility. But what about difference? In discussion over Islamic family law, when it is pointed out that the gender logic underlying Islamic jurisprudence is the principle of the complementar- ity of the sexes (their fundamental difference from each other) rather than equality—once again, the responses are to look for context-specific solutions

Rema Hammami - 9789004269729 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 08:19:44AM via free access Gender equality and Muslim women 129 of how to expand women’s rights within and simultaneously against a source of inequality. In summary, equality for our female students (both religious and secular- identified) is seen as an absolute principle through which they seek to fight discrimination on the basis of their gender in their Muslim majority context. At the same time, they see it for what it is—a process of expanding rights, one that can lead in unforeseen directions, or create new dilemmas and contradictions. There is no universal model and no universal outcome, only a universal struggle against existing inequalities.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I would like to return the discussion from Palestine back to the issue of Muslim women in Europe. Through sharing the discussions and experiences I have had with my students, what I have tried to do here is to give an example of how debates and conflicts are profoundly different when those being debated actually have a voice. My students do not represent all Muslim women, or even all Palestinian women. But in comparison with the European context, they have the space to actively shape and discuss what equality or religious identification means for them. And they can do so without fear that their criticisms and demands for change will be used as a weapon against their community and as a means to impose further discriminatory practices against them (Israeli discriminatory practices may be gendered but they are not about gender!). Nor do they face a situation where racism throws them back on their communities, which are mostly led by conservative men who further shut down the space available to them to voice their visions of gender change and equality. Finally, they are not operating in an environment where their choices have become framed as a series of incommensurable dualisms— equality versus oppression, religion versus secularism, one of us versus one of them. This question of voice is also extremely relevant as we see the struggles around visions of gender relations unfold in the democratic transitions in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere across the region. This is especially so when we see that hard-won democratic elections brought to power political parties that seem inimical to gender equality—often with the help of women’s activism and votes. In the media, we are constantly being warned that women in Egypt and Tunisia who fought for the revolution are likely to be its main victims. But across the region, if we look behind the headlines and listen to what women are saying, we find a range of much more complex arguments

Rema Hammami - 9789004269729 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 08:19:44AM via free access 130 hammami and debates going on. Though beyond the limits of this paper, public opinion polls find a majority of women supporting an expansion of women’s rights— with for instance, approximately 80% of women and a slightly lower percent- age of men in post-revolution Egypt asserting that men and women should be granted equal legal rights (Gallup 2011). Also in Egypt, polls found that women’s support for an expansion of their rights had no correlation with whom they voted for (i.e. religious or secular parties); and perhaps most importantly, that among men, conservative views on gender relations correlated strongly with low socio-economic and life satisfaction levels, while bearing little or no correlation with religious sentiments.

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