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June 9, 2006

What Do Muslim Women Want?

Gallup has produced a new survey on Muslim attitudes, focusing on the expectations of women, and the results are fascinating. Covered by ABC, the New York Times, the Pakistan Daily Times and Voice of America the poll has determined that women are less concerned with sexual liberation than they are with worries about Muslim unity.

The survey, entitled "What Women Want: Listening to the Voices of Muslim Women" was conducted in Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. The survey as published is only the initial assessment of a larger study which will be completed by the end of the year. Dalia Mogahed, who is coordinator of this poll, is executive director of Gallup Muslim Studies.

"By the end of 2006, we will have interviewed Muslims in up to 40 Muslim countries, covering 90 percent of the global Muslim population," she announced.

This is part of an even bigger plan, called the Gallup World Poll, which aims to survey 95% of the planet's population by the end of the century.

Mogaded noted that most Muslim women polled were put off by the lack of traditional values in the West. She said: "Sexual freedom portrayed in Western media is actually degrading to women, not a form of liberation."

When asked: "What do you admire least about the West?", the most frequent answers named moral decay, promiscuity and pornography.

The poll found that most women in each country studied so far claimed that "attachment to moral and spiritual values" was the aspect of their societies they appreciated the most.

53% of Pakistani respondents said attachment to religious belief was the best trait of their nation, and 59% of Egyptian felt the same way about their country.

On voting issues, Lebanese women were the most in favour of suffrage for women. 97% said they should make their own decisions about voting, closely followed by Morocco with 95%. In Afghanistan, 92% of women thought they should have voting rights, compared to 87% of their male co-nationals. Pakistan's women had the lowest desire to make their own electoral decisions, rating only 68%.

Most Muslim women associated sexual equality with the West, with Morocco's women finding this in 78% of cases, 71% in Lebanon and 48% in Saudi Arabia. Most of those polled did not think that the adoption of Western values would help the Islamic world to progress politically and economically.

The hijab or Muslim headscarf is seen by many in the West as a preoccupation for an increasing number of Muslim women, but the pollsters claimed that hijabs were never mentioned in the women's answers. The questions were open, allowing women to articulate for themselves their opinions, rather than requiring "yes, no, don't agree" responses.

Egyptian-born Dalia Mogaded herself wears a hijab. She denied that Muslim women are brainwashed by masculine culture. She said that women freely claimed that they deserved certain rights. She said: "In every culture there is a dominant narrative, and in many cases it is constructed by people in power who happen to be men."

She warned that women who are perceived as too pro-West in outlook could become victims of counter-reaction. She said: "Associating gender equality with the west or with western values will actually alienate the very women, we're trying, or one might be trying, to reach, and, at the same time, actually energize those who oppose women's rights in the Muslim world, in the name of cultural guardianship."

Posted by Giraldus Cambrensis at June 9, 2006 1:16 AM

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