The Limits of Gender Equality in the Middle East

• In Event: Intersectionality: Religion and Cross-Cutting Cleavages

Abstract

Are all evocations of gender inequality qualitatively similar? We theorize that the issue of inheritance between men and women in Islam, in light of explicit and quite detailed Quranic prescriptions, calls forth considerations that are not brought to bear in other areas of gender equality. Whereas certain issues in this domain are mostly outside the authority of religious edicts or can rely on genuine differences of opinion (e.g., female education or political leadership), supporting equal inheritance between the sexes requires going against a clear interpretative consensus.

We test our theory using original survey data from Tunisia. Our findings support the distinctive quality of equal inheritance in the gender norms discourse. Descriptively, a clear majority of Tunisians support wives working outside the home and feel that educating women is just as important as educating men. Conversely, a clear majority strongly disagree that “sons and daughters should have equal inheritance rights.” Moreover, in an accompanying survey experiment, we compared a control condition that gauged support for equal social and political rights between the genders with a treatment condition that first reminded respondents about the current Tunisian civil code on inheritance and another treatment condition that first noted the Quranic prescription on inheritance. We found that the latter two conditions both significantly depressed support for equal rights at similar rates. The magnitude and equivalence of the two treatment conditions not only underscores the ability of this issue to cut against general support for gender equality but also, in contrast to President Essebsi’s recent speech, that the issue of inheritance really is about the Quran—indeed, it is baked into the discourse. To further probe this last point, we show that support for wider implementation of sharia mediates the effect of both the implicit and explicit primes equally and to a significantly different degree than the control.

Authors

• Youssef Chouhoud, Christopher Newport University

• M. Tahir Kilavuz, University of Notre Dame