WASHINGTON: Muslim American women are educated, active in the workforce and on an equal footing with men in terms of income, according to a report released Monday, which analysts said chips away at myths associated with Islam.
What we learned in the study is that US Muslim women are roughly equal to men and to women who are non-Muslims in America in their level of education, level of income, level of religiosity and mosque attendance, Ahmed Younis, a senior analyst at the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, told reporters.
The Achilles Heel that has always existed – that Muslims are not like us because their women are oppressed – well, the data speak to the proposition that that is absolutely not true, said Younis.
The report, based on data culled from 946 people who identified themselves as Muslims out of a sample of more than 319,000 interviewed across the United States last year, showed that Muslim American women and the religious group as a whole are second only to Jewish Americans in terms of educational attainment.
Forty percent of Muslims have a bachelor s or graduate degree, compared with 61 percent of Jews and 29 percent of the US population as a whole.
US Muslim women stand out, both compared to their global counterparts and women from other religious groups in the United States, in that they are statistically as likely as their male counterparts to have earned a university degree or higher.
Forty-two percent of Muslim women had degrees compared with 39 percent of Muslim men in the United States.
Jewish women trailed Jewish men by six percentage points in the higher-education achievement realm, and for the US population as a whole, 29 percent of women and 30 percent of men had bachelor s degrees or better.
The study also showed that Muslim American women tend to earn the same as men, both at the low and high ends of the income scale, giving the religious group the highest degree of economic gender parity.
Muslim women in the United States also frequent mosques as often as their male counterparts, in sharp contrast to women in many majority Muslim countries who are generally less likely than men to report attending a religious service, the report said.
And more Muslim women than men in the United States – 46 percent versus 38 percent – said they are thriving , or categorized themselves as being at the upper end of a scale measuring life satisfaction.
The Muslim-American experience for a woman yields to her the opportunities and freedoms that America generally yields to women, said Younis.
There is a uniqueness of experience among Muslim-American women vis a vis Muslims globally, he added.
Indeed, Muslims in the United States as a whole fare well compared with the Muslim populations in other Western societies.
While 41 percent of American Muslims said they are thriving , only 23 percent in France and a mere seven percent in Britain said the same, the report showed.
One exception: 49 percent of Muslims were deemed thriving in Germany, which welcomed many immigrants from Turkey during labor shortages in the 1960s and 1970s.
In predominantly Muslim countries, only in Saudi Arabia were more Muslims – 51 percent – thriving than in America.
Gallup found only 11 percent of Muslims thriving in Indonesia and Pakistan, 13 percent in Egypt, in the high teens to 20 percent in Bangladesh, Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, and 24 percent in Morocco. Gallup found the proportion suffering ranging from 20 to 26 percent in Turkey, Egypt and Lebanon and as high as 33 percent in Jordan and 45 percent in Pakistan.
In short, Muslim Americans look more like other Americans in their life outlook than they resemble Muslims in most predominantly Muslim nations.
The Gallup Organization study found Muslim-Americans to be racially and ideologically diverse, extremely religious, and younger and more highly educated than the typical American.
The authors of the report called for a rethink of Americans understanding of the US Muslim community.
Muslims are the most negatively viewed religious community among Americans, Dalia Mogahed, executive director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies told AFP.
Only 45 percent of Americans consider Muslims in the country as loyal and 25 percent of Americans said they wouldn t want to have Muslims as a neighbor, she said.
A huge survey of the world s Muslims released by Gallup last year showed that Muslims admire the West for its democracy, freedoms and technological prowess.
But when Americans were asked in the same study what they admired most about the Islamic world, most replied Nothing , said Mogahed.
In an essay for the Gallup report, Rep. Keith Ellison, a Democrat and the first Muslim elected to Congress, urged Muslim Americans to step out of the shadows of your own world, and step forthrightly into a participatory America.
For too long – and particularly after 9/11 – Muslims have withdrawn into their own mosque-defined communities, denying themselves their rightful place in the fabric of America, Ellison wrote. Being Muslim shouldn t need to be explained, but rather be observed by how each of us lives our lives, and the values we espouse. However defined we are by our religion, we are equally defined by our nationalism; we are Americans.
Results were subject to sampling error of plus or minus 4 percentage points for Muslim-Americans, 0.2 points for all Americans and varying ranges in other countries.
The study was the first-ever conducted across the United States of a randomly selected sample of Muslim Americans. -With agencies
