CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Emma Tomalin
The relationships between religion, gender, and development, are complex and context-specific. The need for development donors and organizations to consider religion as a relevant factor is ever more important, since religion and religious practices are a feature of life for the vast majority of women, men, and children whom development organizations seek to support. Engaging with religion, and understanding its role and significance in women's and men's lives, is also useful when this leads development policymakers and practitioners to challenge the notion that 'development' can be reduced to the pursuit of economic prosperity alone, at the expense of other indicators of well-being. In addition, the gendered impact that development processes themselves can have on religious practices are significant, yet are typically overlooked in assessments and evaluations carried out by development actors.
The aim of this volume is to give an overview of published research in the field of religion, gender and development, to help those who are interested in promoting gender equality and women's rights in development understand this important topic.
Religion has, until recently, been largely ignored in development research, policy, and practice, due to the secular leanings of mainstream social science and development agendas (Selinger 2004: 526). One reason for this is an underlying assumption on the part of many secular development organizations that religion will disappear as societies modernize. Another is the belief that religion is a problem for development, supporting views about the world, and ways of living, that run counter to progressive and egalitarian development goals. Faith-based organizations (FBOs), such as Christian Aid, CAFOD, and Islamic Relief, have been an exception in an otherwise secular-oriented development environment. Over the past decade, this 'negative' engagement of development with religion has receded to some degree, and religious issues are being given more consideration, including in relation to women's rights and gender equality (Bradley 2006; 2010). This includes an increased willingness to support, fund and learn from those FBOs that have the experience and resources to lead secular organizations through examples of best practice.
About this book
This book brings together articles from three issues of the journal Gender& Development, together with an Introduction, Conclusion and Annotated bibliography. In March 1999, Gender & Development published a thematic issue focusing on Religion and Spirituality: one of the first collections of articles to focus specifically on the complex links between religion, gender and development. A second issue, on the theme 'Working with faith-based communities', was published in November 2006.
The 1999 G&D volume captured a prior moment in the debate about religion, gender, and development, before the explosion of religion onto the global stage. The emphasis in it was very much on the reasons for the absence of religion in research, policy and practice about gender and development, and authors in the issue argued that there was a need for researchers, policymakers and practitioners to begin to consider and address religion and religious institutions in their work on gender and women's rights.
The second Gender & Development issue, published in 2006, focused on working with faith-based organizations, and reflected the beginnings of a shift in attitude towards religion within governments and donors in the West. During the 2000s, in particular, interest in religion grew quickly within development organizations, and we saw an increase of funding from international donors to faith-based organizations, together with a desire to seek partnerships with faith leaders in pursuit of development goals (UNFPA 2004, 2010). Yet despite this new awareness and interest in religion and its relationship to gender equality and development, research into the impact of religion on women's lives and rights has been thin on the ground. The editorial to the 2006 volume noted: 'there is little scholarship or capturing of practice that considers the interaction between development practice and faith-based communities from the feminist perspective' (Greany 2006: 341). This research is needed to inform the kinds of work to be done with faith-based organizations. Today, this still remains an under-researched area.
In this Introduction, I will first present a short discussion introducing the field in more detail, with the aim of contextualizing the chosen chapters. Then I will guide the reader through the chapters, drawing out their main themes, and pointing towards more recent debates and controversies.
Ten chapters follow the Introduction. Readers will notice that four of the chapters focus on Islam (Adamu; Ahmed; Hopkins and Patel; Bartelink and Buitelaar), four on Christianity (Walker; Marshall and Taylor; Kane; Dolan), two deal with Buddhism (Tomalin; Saul) and one of the aforementioned also covers aspects of 'traditional religion' in Africa (Dolan).
In terms of research and writing on gender, religion and development, most attention has been paid to Islam. This can be seen in the context of the rise since '9/11' of global concern over fundamentalist and extreme versions of Islam, and the specific implications of this for women's empowerment and development in different contexts. Several of the chapters in this volume explore this obsession with Islam by the West, which predates '9/11' but has intensified since. They argue that such an obsession results in a stereotyped depiction of Muslim women as particularly religious and as victims of a patriarchal and controlling Islamic faith (for example, Adamu; Bartelink and Buitelaar). While there is an absence of chapters in this volume that explore other faith traditions (including Hinduism and Sikhism), many of the themes that are covered in the selected chapters are relevant across faith traditions, and I will point readers to broader literature across regions and traditions in the accompanying annotated bibliography at the rear of this book.
At the end of the book, there is a short concluding chapter, in which I place the points raised in the introduction and through the chapters in a forward-facing context.
Contextualizing the field
The chapters in this volume suggest that there is a pressing need for development research, policy, and practice to adopt appropriate and sensitive ways of engaging with religious organizations and leaders in addressing gender concerns, and to ground their understandings of the ways that religion shapes gender roles and relationships in high-quality empirical research.
Development research, advocacy and community-level initiatives should be open to engaging with religion, and working with religious leaders and faith-based organizations, in order to deliver progressive change for women. Programmes that aim to pursue and secure women's rights have tended to ignore or reject religion, either for being irrelevant, or because patriarchal religious teachings and practices are considered to be one factor amongst many that contribute to women's unequal treatment.
At a time when the authority and appeal of conservative and fundamentalist religious outlooks seem to be on the rise in many contexts, exerting a particular influence on political systems, and often threatening women's control over their own bodies, concern about the fragility of women's rights is growing. Engagement with the religious institutions which shape gender roles and power relations in society is potentially an important step in addressing the negative effects of religion on women's lives.
As suggested above, the focus on religion and faith in the last decade has grown rapidly, and some commentators perceive development donors as having been in rather a hurry to engage with religious leaders and faith-based organizations, without a full awareness of the complexities and sensitivities involved in doing this (Pearson and Tomalin 2007). They argue that there is a risk that they actually collude with dangerous, essentialist ideas about women and gender roles and relations, while simultaneously cutting off the possibility of pursuing potentially more useful 'secular' strategies (see Bartelink and Buitelaar's chapter in this volume).
Religious feminism
A number of the chapters in this volume deal with the topic of 'religious feminism', and the role that it plays in women's empowerment and development at a local level. In some contexts, a 'secular' model of feminism has been rejected by development organizations and other civil society groups working in grassroots communities, perceiving it as lacking cultural relevance, due to its associations with the West. It is sometimes felt that in order to gain legitimacy within conservative religious cultures, the goal of gender equality needs to be pursued from within the religious worldview of women and men in that context. This has the potential to make development interventions more likely to be accepted, and, in the long term, more likely to be successful.
Interpretations of religious traditions that support gender equality have emerged from within religious traditions since the 1970s, in the guise of various 'feminist theologies'. Feminist researchers have engaged in the reinterpretation of religious texts and the traditions that surround them in order to uncover and promote understandings of religions that are gender equal. Acceptance of these interpretations has often been hampered by the lack of women scholars who are trained to undertake this sort of work. In addition, these scholars may be seen as elite, Western-influenced or -educated women, who have little connection with ordinary women.
In my own chapter, 'The Thai bhikkhuni movement and women's empowerment', I argue that styles of 'religious feminism' have emerged in different contexts, and from within different religious traditions that aim to reinterpret religious traditions in ways that promote equality and leadership roles. I suggest not only that this is relevant in order to improve the lives of 'religious' women (that is, those practising as nuns), but that it can also have a positive impact upon the roles and status of women more broadly. The research presented in the paper is concerned with the campaign to revive female ordination (bhikkhuni ordination) in Thailand. Many supporters of the campaign do not see a separation between the religious and the social, arguing that the powerful position of the orange-robed bhikkhu (monk) and negative stereotypes about women that are sustained by the Buddhist tradition (for example, according to Buddhist teachings, when people die they are thought to be reborn and if one is reborn as a woman it is viewed as the negative outcome of 'bad' actions in a previous life) do much to maintain 'broader social attitudes that increase women's vulnerability to risks such as domestic violence, sex trafficking or HIV' (p 44).
Some social movements and development interventions draw upon this feminist scholarship. The chapter by Fatima L. Adamu, 'A double-edged sword: challenging women's oppression within Muslim society in Northern Nigeria', is also concerned with 'religious feminism' at the local level. Adamu argues that 'because gender issues are both religious and political concerns in many Muslim societies ... any attempt to reform gender relations that excludes religion is likely to fail' (97). The failure of international donors to incorporate Islam into gender policies and programmes has compounded the view that GAD ('gender and development') is a tool of the West and has meant that some of the principles adopted in international documents, such as CEDAW (the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women) are perceived to be at odds with Islamic values about the family. Muslim feminists who choose to pursue rights within Islam have found themselves trapped between conservatives in their tradition who deny women's rights in the name of religion and 'Western critics' who consider that in pursuing empowerment from within an Islamic framework they are ultimately 'accepting or supporting their own subordination' (98). While by the 1990s there was more of a willingness on the part of some international donors to fund Islamic NGOs working on women's and gender issues, the relationship between the two continues to be tense.
Bridget Walker's chapter 'Christianity, development, and women's liberation' also draws attention to the ambiguous role of religion in women's lives. As she highlights, religious teachings and institutions may legitimate oppression and violence, but may also provide women with sorely-needed resources in the struggle for emancipation and equality. Church is often a place where women can go to meet others, and also to escape from domestic abuse, and its teachings can be interpreted to support equality. Bridget Walker argues that development workers must be aware of these two options – domestication and liberation – and should be more accepting of the centrality of religion to women's lives, as well as the ways in which their religion may offer alternatives to 'conventional definitions of development as modernization and economic growth' (p66). This point is relevant to the critique that development agencies merely want to use religion instrumentally, to achieve their ends, rather than recognizing that it might challenge their goals and conception of development. It raises questions about the extent to which engagement with religion should force us to theorize or practise development differently and what trade-offs, compromises or tensions this throws up for the pursuit of gender equality (Deneulin and Bano 2009).
While many have welcomed the recent 'turn to religion' in development, others are concerned not to overestimate the role that 'religious feminisms' can play. As Mariz Tadros writes, 'caution is needed in assuming that a feminist re-engagement with religious text within a religious framework is a panacea for altering gender bias in laws, policies and practices' (2011: 9). This point is taken up in the chapter in this volume by Brenda Bartelink and Marjo Buitelaar, 'The challenges of incorporating Muslim women's views into development policy: analysis of a Dutch action research project in Yemen'. They discuss a development project in Yemen, funded by the Dutch government, which aimed to incorporate Muslim women's experiences into policy, based on an understanding of how women 'draw on religious and cultural resources to claim rights to reproductive health and education' (p14). The chapter demonstrates that even when women involved in the project were presented with feminist interpretations of the Koran, they were reluctant to use them and were just as likely as men to stick to traditional interpretations, perhaps as a reaction against perceived Western interference. Moreover, while women did see their religion as a source of comfort and support, this is arguably a 'discourse that potentially leads to acquiescence in oppressive situations' (p18). The authors make the important point that religion may well be able to support women's rights, but its ability to actually have an effect depends on the context. They conclude that the project set out to prove the assumption that Islam could empower women rather than to test it.
The above discussion suggests that there is no 'one size fits all' approach to incorporating 'religious feminism' into development. While it offers an alternative to Western secular feminism that is potentially more culturally appropriate, concerns about essentializing women's identities, and the privileging of a religious approach above others, urge caution.
Engaging with faith-based organizations and religious leaders: implications for gender and development
As discussed above, since the 1999 Gender & Development edition was published, there has been a greater engagement of Western donors with religion, through financing faith-based organizations and engaging with religious leaders. This 'global faith agenda' is potentially positive for women in the sense that it opens up a greater space for different sorts of religious feminisms in GAD work. However, the 'turn to religion' in development may have gender-related consequences, which have yet to be adequately considered by development practitioners and policy makers.
