In this five-part series, Gulf News excerpts the fascinating conclusions of the largest ever opinion survey of the world's Muslims, carried out by Gallup. Who speaks for Islam? by John Esposito and Dalia Mogahed was published by Gallup Press.

Sexism committed by men, not religion

Because anti-women views are often believed to result from religious sentiment, important questions that must be asked are: Does religiosity among Muslim men correlate with less egalitarian views toward women? Is there merit to the arguments of those who say that women's lagging status in much of the Muslim world is attributable to Islamic principles?

Our data analysis would say no to both questions. When we compared the men who say that women and men should have the same legal rights with men who espouse the opposite view, for the most part, we found little difference in their degree of religiosity. In fact, in Lebanon, Morocco and Iran, men who support women's rights are found to be more religious than those who do not support women's rights. The only exception among the eight countries included in this analysis is Turkey, where the opposite is true. In Turkey, in contrast to other parts of the Muslim world, religiosity correlates heavily with lack of education, which could explain this result.

A similar trend is evident among men convicted of honour killings, long believed to be the result of religious zeal. For example, research indicates that 69.4 per cent of men who committed honour killings in Jordan did not perform their daily prayers, and 55.5 per cent did not fast. That these men fail to observe the most obligatory rituals of Islam suggests that their act of murder is not motivated by religious zeal or devotion. Rather, other factors normally associated with criminal behaviour are more likely to play a role. For example, most of these men had a record of violent behaviour: 35.1 per cent had already served sentences for crimes. Furthermore, 32.4 per cent were illiterate, only 3.7 per cent had attended college, and 24.1 per cent were brought up in broken homes.

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Women see worse problems than gender issues in Muslim societies

Although Muslim women value the role Islam plays in their personal lives and favour a role for Sharia as at least an aspect of their public lives, they are not uncritical of the Muslim world. What women say they admire least about Arab/Muslim societies is similar to what their male counterparts complain about: lack of unity, economic and political corruption, and extremism.

As Marina Ottaway of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace points out, Muslim women are operating in a larger context of limited political freedom, economic deterioration, and global injustice - problems that confront all citizens of the Muslim world.

Considering the political stagnation and democracy deficit in many of these countries, it is not surprising that gender inequality did not generate the frequency of spontaneous responses one might expect to this open-ended question. In Gallup's surveys, gender inequality is not mentioned at all in Jordan and mentioned by only 1 per cent of women in Egypt and 2 per cent in Morocco. It is mentioned by 5 per cent of women in Saudi Arabia, but it is outranked by "lack of unity" and "high unemployment."

Overall, women favour Islam's role in their lives, but they see a gap between the ideal and reality. Haja Samira summarises this sentiment well in her critique of modern Muslim society: "We are Muslim in name, but our acts are not those of Muslims."

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Equal rights don't always bring equality

While Egyptian women agree that women should vote for whomever they wish without interference (95 per cent) and work at any job they are qualified to fill (88 per cent), their enthusiasm for "the same legal rights" is more muted (69 per cent). A similar pattern is found among women in Jordan, where a significant percentage (30 per cent), though still a minority, disagree that women and men should have the same legal rights, although they agree that women should have rights to the ballot and the workplace.

Interestingly, the women who disagree with giving women the "same" legal rights as men are not less educated than their counterparts. They are, however, more likely to favour Sharia as the only source for legislation. So do women who support Sharia oppose gender equality? Not necessarily. Rather, some Muslim women believe that having the same legal rights does not always mean fair and just treatment of women, because men and women have different roles in a family. In the words of one Egyptian woman: "Giving a farmer and a carpenter both a hammer as a tool to help their work is certainly treating them the same, but not fairly."

One example from Islamic jurisprudence may help to explain what she means: Men and women have the same legal rights in matters of crime and punishment, financial interactions, and other matters of civic law. However, in Muslim family law, the area of Sharia most strongly criticised in the West for gender discrimination, men and women share different, "complementary" rights - ones that do not necessarily favour men. For example, according to a unanimous opinion of Muslim jurists, a woman carries no financial obligation for the family. She maintains the right to keep her earned wages and property under her name alone, instead of as "communal property." However, she and her children have legal rights to her husband's property and earnings. Men are also financially responsible for wedding expenses, housing, and the mahr.

Even if she is very wealthy, a woman is never financially responsible for supporting anyone, not even herself. The "complement" to this financial advantage is that her inheritance is a 1:2 ratio to that of her brother's. The rationale for this law is that while a woman may work, she should never be obligated to work.

And therefore, her closest male relative is responsible for her financial support. Because her financial responsibility is zero, in theory, and her brother is responsible for his own family and potentially for his mother and other female siblings if they are not married, giving his sister a third of the inheritance may seem unfairly generous to some. Giving women the "same" legal rights as men would obviously do away with this advantage that Muslim women have historically enjoyed.

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Muslim women want equal rights

In the West, Muslim women have frequently been portrayed as victims of a repressive social order so severe that it renders most women in Muslim societies unaware that they even deserve rights. In 1906, a group of women missionaries held a conference on Muslim women in Cairo and published the conference proceedings in a collection called Our Moslem Sisters: A Cry of Need from the Lands of Darkness Interpreted by Those Who Heard It. The introduction reads: "They will never cry for themselves, for they are down under the yoke of centuries of oppression."

One can still hear echoes of these sentiments. In a scene in Baby Boom, a Hollywood movie about a high-powered career woman turned single mother, the heroine is interviewing nannies for the infant she just inherited. One of the interviewees is a woman dressed in a long black veil who speaks in a thick Arabic accent as she says, "I will teach your daughter to properly respect a man. I speak only when spoken to. I do not need a bed; I prefer to sleep on the floor."

This image is reinforced by the Western press, which portrays Muslim women as silent, submissive and relegated to the domestic sphere, while men monopolise the active roles. In a survey of all photographs of Muslims in the American press, three-quarters (73 per cent) of the women were depicted in passive capacities, compared with less than one-sixth (15 per cent) of the men. In photographs of the Middle East, women were six times (42 per cent) more likely to be portrayed as victims than were men (7 per cent).

In sharp contrast to the popular image of silent submissiveness, Gallup findings on women in countries that are predominantly Muslim or have sizable Muslim populations hardly show that they have been conditioned to accept second-class status. Majorities of women in virtually every country we surveyed say that women deserve the same legal rights as men, to vote without influence from family members, to work at any job they are qualified for, and even to serve in the highest levels of government. In Saudi Arabia, for example, where as of this writing, women were not allowed to vote or drive, majorities of women say that women should be able to drive a car by themselves (61 per cent), vote without influence (69 per cent), and work at any job for which they are qualified (76 per cent).

Egyptian women, who face far fewer restrictions than their Saudi counterparts, speak even more strongly in favour of women's rights, with 88 per cent saying that they should be allowed to work at any job for which they are qualified. In Egypt, as elsewhere in the Muslim world, this attitude is not just a theory: a full third of professional and technical workers in Egypt are women, on par with Turkey and South Korea.

If you want to put faces to these data, observe women such as Souad Saleh, an assertive and outspoken woman whose area of expertise is fiqh, or Islamic jurisprudence. Saleh is an Islamic jurist and professor at Al Azhar University, the most prominent institution of Islamic scholarship and authority in Sunni Islam. She was the first woman dean of faculty at the institution and is a prolific writer on issues ranging from family law to women's rights, authoring more than seven volumes on Islam and at least four in-depth research works.

A regular on pan-Arab television and one of the most outspoken preachers on Islam, her message is clear: "Islam is simple and holds women in high esteem."

Celebrity preachers aren't the only ones who defy conventional wisdom. There are also women like Salwa Riffat, an Egyptian woman now in her late 5os who earned her bachelor's degree in aeronautical engineering from Cairo University and went on to earn her PhD in civil engineering. At the same time, she managed to successfully balance raising a family and fulfilling the demands of her career. She is now a professor of engineering, teaching men and women alike. "Women of my generation were at the forefront of a new era in Egypt," she says, referring to the wave of women attending college that gained momentum in the 1950s and 196os. "Now, it's hardly something worth noting that in Egypt, universities are filled with women, in some cases more than men, and they are excelling." The valedictorians of Cairo's elite medical school are famously known to almost always be female.

These cases are hardly unique. Nationally representative self reported data show percentages of women in Iran (52 per cent), Egypt (34 per cent), Saudi Arabia (32 per cent), and Lebanon (37 per cent) with postsecondary educations. In the UAE and Iran, women make up the majority of university students. However, in Muslim countries - as well as in non-Muslim countries - Gallup finds a wide range of female education with percentages of women pursuing postsecondary educations dipping as low as 8 per cent and 13 per cent in Morocco and Pakistan, respectively, which is comparable with 4 per cent in Brazil or 11 per cent in the Czech Republic.

Jonathan Hayden, a young American who went to Malaysia and Indonesia as part of a research project, met some of these female Muslim college students, who challenged a few of his own assumptions:

Some college girls approached me after a session at a university in Kuala Lumpur. After the meeting with about 1oo students and teachers, I stayed behind to get a few more questionnaires. I was cornered by a group of young girls who wanted to know all about America, why we came all that way to meet them, and what our research was about. They told me about them-selves and wanted to explain Islam to me. They were slightly aggressive and wanted to understand what Americans thought about them and the reasons behind some of our foreign policy decisions. But they were also very polite and we took pictures at the end. I remember thinking at the end that this is not the picture of Muslim women that we are usually presented with in the West. They were smart, curious and well-spoken. These were not submissive women who are forced to live a life of serving their husband. They were getting a college education and had a future that would allow them to pursue any dream that they wanted.

According to the Unesco 2oo5 Gender and Development report, the ratio of women to men in secondary education in 2oo1-o2 was 1oo per cent or higher in Jordan, Algeria, Lebanon, Kuwait, Libya, the UAE, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Bangladesh. This compares with only 77 per cent in Turkey, a staunchly secular nation often assumed in the West to be ahead of its neighbours in gender development, or 74 per cent in India. The gender gap in these nations is higher than in Saudi Arabia, which has an 89 per cent ratio of women to men enrolled in secondary education.

Despite these hopeful statistics, women's basic education still lags in some countries. In Yemen, women's literacy is only 28 per cent vs 7o per cent among men; in Pakistan, it is 28 per cent vs 53 per cent for men.

These sad findings, however, are not unique to Islamic nations nor do they represent the entire Muslim world; women's literacy rates in Iran and Saudi Arabia are 70% and as high as 85% in Jordan and Malaysia.