Gender Inequality In Islam

Aims

The question of human rights in modern world of Islam is a very common topic for debates. It turns out to be guided by two perspectives. Firstly, as it is said in the Holy Quran, Islamic book that is believed to be the words of God, men and women are equal and the only difference is the socioeconomic duties of a man over a woman. However, people continuously claim that there is discrimination. Therefore the main purpose of this research is to understand what the truth is in these debates on gender inequality.

The following Research Questions will be addressed:

Is there gender inequality between men and women?

To what extent people's belief about gender inequality is right and who benefits more out of it: men or women?

The research outcomes

According to Islamic principles, both men and women have absolutely the same human rights, but if we attentively look after their roles in real life, one can easily observe that there is discrimination.

As it is said before, my research questions were:

Is there gender inequality between men and women?

To what extent people's belief about gender inequality is right and who benefits more out of it: men or women? In order to answer the given questions an internet survey and an interview were conducted, where survey mostly was directed to answer to the first question, while second question were discussed in an unstructured interview.

1.1. Questionnaire

The results from questionnaire were valuable. All data for each question is set out in the Appendix 1. The main findings indicate the following:

There were 34% men and 66% women participants.

When it was asked whether a respondent follow Islamic principles or rules written in the Holy Quran, 16 per cent answered that they do not obey the rules, while 34 per cent claimed, that they even do not know what the rules are. It is probably because of the effect of western culture and modern world. In my view, the development of technology, worldwide trade, globalisation and etc. can significantly affect on the cultural beliefs and opinions of

Interview

The unstructured interview was also conducted in order to find the answer to the RQs. The interview allowed me to gain much more information on people's opinion about women rights in Muslim societies. There were 3 women and 3 men who took part in interview. The questions were not prearranged, because it is unstructured interview. Unstructured interview is a qualitative research method. However, there were key questions that had been prepared before the interview was conducted. They are written in Appendix2. Even though there are some limitations of unstructured interview such as difficulty analyzing of the qualitative data, unstructured interview is more flexible, because questions can be adapted and changed according to interviewees’ answers.

An open interview described people's perspectives on the gender inequality in specific details. The main points are illustrated below:

Exactly 50% of interviewees think that there is discrimination, while others disagree with that. See Table2 to see the proportion of males and females who took part in an interview.