Western depictions of gender relations in Muslim-majority societies reflect two widespread assumptions, shared even by many academics. The first assumption is that the Muslim world is uniformly gender-traditional, meaning that opinions on gender issues are presumed not to vary much within or across Middle Eastern, North African, and South Asian (MENASA) societies. A second, related, assumption is that gender ideology is a single dimension, meaning that if you know someone’s position on one issue, such as women’s veiling, you can easily predict their position on other issues, such as men’s control over their wives’ employment. This leads to the presumption that Muslim-majority societies are uniformly traditional about gender politics.
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