MSE Research Associate Completes Muslim Gender-Issue Research

Sabbah's study focuses on gender relationships within the classroom

Those who are unfamiliar with Islamic culture are sometimes puzzled by the Islamic view of gender. However, closer examination shows that Muslim values closely parallel those cherished by most Christian-Americans: that men and women are equal.

Hilda Sabbah, former research associate at the Positive Behavior Support Initiative, a devout Muslim, recently completed a doctoral study regarding gender issues in Islamic schools. Her inspiration for the research came as she noticed certain disparities between the treatment of boys and girls in American school systems. She resolved to research those same issues in Islamic schools to see what kind of correlations she would find.

Originally she and her doctoral chair, Vance Randall, planned to conduct the study in Gaza and the West Bank near Jerusalem—Sabbah’s native land. However, civil unrest and violence made such a study difficult and dangerous. “It was impossible to go and collect any kind of data or to do a study,” Randall said. “It was just way too dangerous.” Instead, Sabbah performed her research with several private Islamic schools in the Midwestern United States. The specific goal of the research was to observe the differences between gender issues in private Islamic schools vs. US public schools.

In her study Sabbah sought plausible explanations of how boys and girls in Islamic schools interact. “The idea behind the study was that education in the United States has issues between boys and girls—how they are treated in schools by the teachers,” Sabbah said. “Islam as a religion gives equal rights for men and women, especially education, so the question was if there are any gender issues among the students in an American-Muslim context.”

The study consisted of interviews, classroom observations, and work groups. Sabbah observed the children and noted their behavior during class. She focused her studies particularly on behaviors specific to gender: teacher preferences, female to female bias, male to male bias, interaction of male students with female students and vice versa.

Sabbah found that Islamic schools deal with the same general issues and problems as American public schools: Male teachers are more responsive and tend to favor female students, female teachers tend to favor male students, etc. “But there was something unique to the Islamic schools,” Sabbah explained. “Gender plays a role on an institutional level in Islamic schools. Their religion requires them to separate boys from girls, so they are taught separately in different rooms. Because the school didn’t have many students, they arranged the classrooms differently. Boys sat in the front separated by two empty rows, and the girls sat in the back. There was a gender issue, but it was part of the religion, and the boys, girls, and teachers accepted it.”

Sabbah was hired in 2008 as the principal of the Iqra Academy of the Islamic Society of Greater Salt Lake in Salt Lake City, Utah. She looks forward to teaching the students there, particularly her own five children, all of whom will be attending the academy.

5 March 2008