When “Traditional” Religion Shakes Up Gender Roles

In The Gambia, adherents of the Tablighi Jama‘at movement call on believers to devote themselves to a conception of Islam that includes strict gender segregation. But when anthropologist Marloes Janson spent time with Tablighi families between 2003 and 2007, she found that the effects on gender roles were not what you might expect.

Janson writes that Tablighi Jama‘at began in nineteenth-century India and has since spread to other parts of the world including West Africa. In The Gambia, the movement is most popular among lower-middle-class teenagers and young adults.

Tablighi young people break from Gambian norms in a number of ways. One is that they generally marry younger, something the movement encourages by forbidding high bride prices. Tablighi authorities also place great importance on religious education for women, and they encourage wives to travel with their husbands on mission trips and participate in spreading the faith.

The education sessions Janson attended presented the ideal Muslim woman as one who remains at home, obeys her husband, dresses and behaves modestly, takes care of the household, and attends to the children’s moral education. Yet, for wives to get to class and be able to travel, husbands find they need to fill in at home in ways many Gambian men do not.

Tablighi couples typically center their lives on the nuclear family, rather than large family compounds where women handle domestic tasks together. That means couples often have to work together to meet their household’s demands. One man explained that he needed his wife’s permission to set out on a missionary tour “because maybe she needs me during that period. If I set out without her permission, I commit a sin.”

During their missionary work, men typically stay in a local mosque while their wives stay in the home of a local woman. If they aren’t with their wives, the male missionaries are responsible for cooking and cleaning for themselves. Even if they’re touring with their wives, the men take responsibility for shopping.

“Market vendors often laugh at us,” one man told Janson. “However, it’s our duty to do the shopping since it’s not good for women to mingle with men at the market.”

Tablighi men told Janson that they view menial tasks like sweeping the house as a spiritual practice, humbling themselves and recalling the names of God while doing the work. Meanwhile, some non-Tablighi women expressed a grudging appreciation for Tablighi men’s attitudes.

“I have to admit that I admire the way they take care of their wives and children,” one woman told Janson. “Imagine, they even help their wives shopping!”

However, the Tablighi men and women Janson spoke with didn’t equate their crossing of typical gender role lines with female emancipation. In fact, they were highly critical of feminist calls for women’s rights or equal sharing of household work.

“My male interlocutors legitimized their domestic work not in terms of an emancipatory, modern move but as a return to the Prophetic normative model,” Janson writes.

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