Inglehart and Norris declared gender equality the true axis of civilizational clash

Evidence

Echoing Huntington, Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris have sought to show that a fatal cultural flaw plagues the Muslim world. In their estimation, it is the issue of gender from which the ‘True Clash of Civilizations’ (italics added) emerges. Gender is the reason ‘freedom’ will never grow in the Middle East. Their 2003 book Rising Tide argues that regardless of the degree of economic modernization, an Islamic religious heritage remains one of the most powerful barriers to ‘self-expression, subjective well-being, and quality of life concerns.’ Because the Islamic world lacks the core self-expression values of individual autonomy, tolerance, personal freedom, and interpersonal trust, Muslims exhibit a weak commitment to gender equality and to democracy. The empirical basis of Inglehart’s and Norris’s claims are data taken from value surveys. For example, the survey includes the question ‘Do men make better political leaders than women?’ Those who disagreed that men made better political leaders also scored highest on the self-expression scale and came from the most democratic societies. Gender, they conclude, is the site of the single most important value change in post-industrial societies, a marker of whether or not a society has progressed. Islamic societies, then, are clearly still trapped in the pre-modern. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 210

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains the ‘self-expression values’ framework: individual autonomy, tolerance, personal freedom, and interpersonal trust as Inglehart and Norris define the scale.