Are Muslims Distinctive? by M. Steven Fish;

Author:M. Steven Fish;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA
Published: 2011-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

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Social Inequality

Inequality has long fascinated social scientists. A passion for depicting, explaining, and overcoming it motivated Mary Wollstonecraft, Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Marx, Max Weber, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Amartya Sen. Unearthing the sources of inequality remains one of the great pursuits of people who study people.

This chapter investigates whether a particular religious tradition is linked to social inequality. Is social inequality among Muslims higher, lower, or about the same as among non-Muslims?

Race, gender, and class are the main loci of social inequality in the contemporary world. Ideally we could investigate each of them. But assessing racial inequality is beyond our reach. There is no generally accepted metric for assessing racial inequality across societies, and there are no cross-national data that rate the level of racial inequality in a comparative framework. Thus, a study such as this book, which relies on cross-national comparison and comparison among individuals around the world, cannot investigate racial equality. We know that some religious traditions contain sacred exhortation to full equality. Among humanity’s holy scriptures, the Qur’an arguably contains the most explicit and poetic injunction against racial inequality and discrimination. In 30:20-22, God, speaking in the third person, goes so far as to depict racial and linguistic diversity as marks of His lordship and His goodness to man: “By one of His signs He created you from dust; and behold, you became humans and multiplied throughout the earth. . . . Among his other signs are the creation of the heavens and the earth and the diversity of your tongues and colours. Surely there are signs in this for all mankind.” The Bible depicts God’s coming in Jesus Christ as rendering racial difference irrelevant. Referring to the rebirth of creation that Jesus has wrought, the apostle Paul writes, “In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, and free; but Christ is all and in all!” (Col. 3:11). We also know, however, that racial slavery, with Muslims and Christians in the role of slave owners as well as slaves, is part of Muslim and Christian history. Thus, while we cannot empirically test whether Muslims are more or less prone to racial discrimination and inequality than adherents of other faiths, we may note that Islam, like Christianity, contains both a sacred ban on racism and historical practice that defies injunctions in its central texts.

Inequality between the genders and between classes may be investigated, since we do have data on them. On gender-based inequality, there is a plethora of quantitative data. I will use a variety of indicators covering the status of women in public life, popular attitudes toward gender-based inequality, and structural inequalities in well-being. Data on class inequality are much less plentiful. Measuring class inequality is more difficult, and only one statistic, the Gini score, is widely used. I will use it here.

We begin with consideration of gender-based inequality, then investigate class inequality. The main question is: Do Muslims and non-Muslims differ from one another in

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