THE POLITICAL ROLE AND STATUS OF WOMEN IN THE MUSLIM WORLD

CAROL JEAN RUNTY, University of Nebraska - Lincoln

Abstract

The subject of this study is women's political role and status in Muslim countries. The position of women is probably the least investigated aspect of Middle Eastern societies. The major works on politics and society in the Middle East have not touched upon the subject of women. This analysis is an attempt to fill this gap and to do so on an empirical basis. To analyze women's political role and status and move it from its peripheral position in the field to the center, political science must expand its scope to include the informal or private domain. To combine the formal, that which takes place in the public arena, and informal aspects of women's power, we utilize the concept of life options. The following five are used as indicators of women's status in this study: education, employment, political participation, physical health and fertility; these are the dependent variables. The independent variables in this study include culture, economic development, urbanization, civil strife and political instability, ideology and political modernization. The focus of the study is to discover what impact these factors have on the status of women in Muslim countries. As the case base in this study, countries in which at least twenty percent of the population is Muslim were chosen. Since this is an exploratory study, we thought it best to focus on a relatively homogeneous group of countries in terms of culture. We had expected Islam or Islamic culture to have a significant impact on the status of women and to contribute to a low position for them in the polity. We found that the proportion of a nation's population which is Muslim did have a negative effect overall but that the effect was small and not always consistent. One explanation of the lack of a stronger relationship may be that the low status of women in Muslim countries may not be due to Islamic culture but rather a function of traditional society. However, it appears to us that there are certain norms and strictures in Islam and Islam's traditional heritage that do restrict the political role and status of women and that a Muslim nation must be secularized (as in Turkey) or seek to reinterpret or modernize its traditional heritage before the political role and status of women will be improved. Our other major findings suggest that economic development does have a general positive impact on the political role and status of Muslim women. The question arises, however, as to whether this trend will carry over to those areas unaffected by a rise in GNP such as employment and political participation. Urbanization has both a positive and negative impact on women's status as anticipated. The relationship between political instability and universal suffrage was complicated by problems of causality given the temporal relations of our variables; no relationship was found between civil strife and the political role and status of women in Islam. Following a strict interpretation of the data, our results support the work of those scholars who assert that ideology does not have an impact on the political role and status of Muslim women. Our findings lead us to conclude that a modernizing leadership may benefit women as expected but not in all areas. Finally, no relationship was found between military regimes, which might be expected to have modernizing impulses, and women's status.

Subject Area

Political science

Recommended Citation

RUNTY, CAROL JEAN, "THE POLITICAL ROLE AND STATUS OF WOMEN IN THE MUSLIM WORLD" (1981). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI8124521.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI8124521

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