Attitudes towards Islamic Inheritance: Religious or Patriarchal Preferences?

1 Introduction

Egypt ranks 135th out of 146 countries with respect to gender equality according to the 2024 Global Gender Gap Index (World Economic Forum 2024). Egypt is a (Sunni) Muslim-majority country where, according to its constitution, “principles of Shari’a [Islamic law] are a major source of legislation” (Constitution of the Arab Republic of Egypt 2014, art. 2). The supremacy of Shari’a in the Egyptian constitution influence a host of economic, political, and social phenomena in the country, including gender inequality (Gouda and Potrafke 2016; Gouda and Gutmann 2021; Gouda and Hanafy 2022). Furthermore, Egypt, along with Saudi Arabia and Iran, has one of the least gender-equal family laws worldwide pertaining to the strong influence of Shari’a in family legislation (Htun and Weldon 2011; Rahman 2012). For example, according to Islamic inheritance, a woman’s inheritance is generally half of the share of a man at the same kinship degree from the deceased.

This paper examines whether religiosity and/or patriarchal cultural norms can explain individual attitudes towards gender inequality in Islamic inheritance law. We use an online vignette experiment in Egypt in order to elicit the preferences for abiding by the (default) Islamic inheritance law versus the willingness to accept a deviation from the law to achieve gender equality in inheritance. This research question is motivated by recent empirical evidence from two lines of literature. The first line of literature relies on cross-country studies of gender inequality. According to this literature, gender inequality is found to be higher in countries with higher average religiosity among the population with religious affiliation (Schnabel 2016), and lower in countries with higher share of those without religious affiliation within the population in general (Schnabel 2016; Klingorová and Havlíček 2015), or among the male population in particular (Moon et al. 2022). This literature also documents higher discrimination against women in Muslim-majority countries (Bishin and Cherif 2017; Donno and Russett 2004; Fish 2002). Unequal gender norms in these countries have been explained by the prevalence of specific, conservative, interpretations of the Qur’an (Donno and Russett 2004; Klingorová and Havlíček 2015), and by patriarchal institutions and culture (Rahman 2025; Ahmad et al. 2012; Bishin and Cherif 2017). The second line of literature that motivates our research question employs observational individual-level data to study attitudes towards the Islamic inheritance law. This literature documents societal backlashes against attempts to achieve gender equality in inheritance in Muslim-majority countries such as Bangladesh (Khan et al. 2016), and Pakistan (Ahmad et al. 2012), and among the Muslim populations in Kenya (Harari 2019) and India (Roy 2015; Bhalotra et al. 2020).

We contribute to both lines of literature in two ways. First, our paper lies at the intersection of the two lines of literature by examining how religiosity and patriarchal norms may explain attitudes towards gender disparity in Islamic inheritance. Second, and more importantly, our paper is among the first studies to employ a vignette experiment in a Muslim-majority country to elicit preferences towards gender inequality in inheritance. This goes beyond both the cross-country studies and the observational individual-level studies, because it allows us to disentangle the effect of religiosity versus patriarchal norms via varying the hypothetical scenarios shown in the vignettes. In this regard, our paper is closely related to Engel et al. (2021) who examine women’s inheritance rights in Pakistan by employing inheritance-related vignettes. However, Egypt differs from Pakistan with respect to women’s inheritance. Whereas women in Egypt inherit half of men’s shares, women in Pakistan do not de facto inherit at all. Therefore, conducting an experiment in Egypt offers novel perspectives on the question.^[1]

Egypt passed a legal reform in 1946 with respect to inheritance by legalizing will writing.^[2] Specifically, article 37 of the Egyptian Testament Law No. 71 of 1946 states that legal heirs (and others) can be given up to one-third of the inheritance by the commandment of a will without other heirs’ consent. A will that implies devoting more than one-third of the inheritance can only be implemented if approved by all legal heirs. The introduction of wills could have restored the unequal shares in inheritance by devoting a share of inheritable assets to women when they compete with men over inheritance. However, to the best of our knowledge, will writing remains a rare phenomenon in Egypt.^[3] Instead, parents without sons often gift assets to their daughters – when the parents are still alive – in order to overcome the transfer of wealth to secondary heirs upon their death, as dictated by Islamic inheritance law.^[4]

We employ an online vignette experiment to elicit individual preferences towards the departure from the Islamic inheritance law via child gifting to achieve gender equality in inheritance. We design hypothetical situations where a Household Head (HH) is allocating his endowments to his offspring to avoid the application of the inheritance law. We vary the gender composition of the progeny^[5] in the hypothetical situations between only females or a female and a male child, and we ask participants whether they agree or disagree with the HH’s decision. Our empirical analysis is based on comparing participants’ responses in the female-only and the male-female vignettes. Participants who reject the HH’s allocation decision regardless of the gender composition of the progeny are defined to be always law abiders. However, participants’ who accept the HH’s allocation decision in the female-only case but reject it in the female-male case are said to be pro-male selective law avoiders. We hypothesize that religiosity induces an always law-abiding preference but patriarchal beliefs form a preference for pro-male selective law avoidance.

Our findings support our hypotheses. In line with the first hypothesis, we find that religiosity strongly and positively correlate with non-selective abidance by the Islamic law, but not with pro-male selective avoidance of the law. In line with the second hypothesis, we find that patriarchal beliefs are positively correlated with pro-male selective law avoidance, but not with non-selective law abidance. Put together, our findings suggest that both religiosity and patriarchy act as impediments to gender equality in inheritance in Egypt. Our findings on religiosity and compliance with the gender unequal Islamic inheritance law are in line with the results of the cross-country studies that religiosity is positively correlated with higher gender inequality in Muslim-majority countries (e.g. Schnabel 2016; Klingorová and Havlíček 2015). Our finding on patriarchal beliefs and the pro-male preferences in inheritance align with the findings of the individual-level studies on the attitudes towards gender inequality (e.g. Engel et al. 2021; Bishin and Cherif 2017).

2 Related Literature and Hypotheses

Pro-male biases in family expenditures and intergenerational transfers of wealth are documented in the literature (Burgess and Zhuang 2002; Quisumbing et al. 2004; Basu and de Jong 2010). This is often blamed on the level of religiosity and/or patriarchal culture within a given society (Bishin and Cherif 2017; Charrad 2011; Donno and Russett 2004; Fish 2002). While Bishin and Cherif (2017) argue that patriarchal culture better explains individual attitudes towards gender equality in Muslim-majority countries than religiosity, empirically disentangling the effect of religiosity from patriarchal culture remains challenging. This is because cultural norms may be derived from religion (Klingorová and Havlíček 2015). That is, religious rules develop into cultural norms and individuals may follow these rules, not because they believe in them, but rather to signal their compliance with the norms in their society (Zasu 2007).

Recent empirical literature examined the effects of pro-women legal reforms of inheritance laws, generally finding a societal pro-male backlash. For example, Harari (2019) documented an increase in compensatory behavior by Muslim parents to their sons following a legal reform in Kenya that supported gender equal inheritance rights. A similar legal reform in India also resulted in an increase in son gifting (Roy 2015) and son preference in fertility choices (Bhalotra et al. 2020). However, we cannot arguably disentangle religiosity from pro-male cultural norms in cases such as Kenya and India, where the legal reforms deviated from the Islamic inheritance law (i.e. from unequal to equal shares in inheritance). By contrast, an intervention that is better suited to disentangle religiosity from pro-male culture is the case of Pakistan (Engel et al. 2021). The legal system in Pakistan originally deprived women of inheritance rights altogether. However, this was changed following a series of legal reforms which introduced women’s inheritance rights in accordance with the Islamic law (i.e. from none to unequal inheritance shares to women). Although the Pakistani legal reforms conformed with the Islamic law, Engel et al. (2021) documented the failure of the reforms to introduce women’s de facto inheritance rights.^[6] It is therefore the patriarchal culture, rather than religiosity, that explains the societal resistance to the Islamic-law-abiding reforms in Pakistan.

Guided by the empirical evidence discussed above, we design a vignette experiment to disentangle the effects of religiosity and patriarchal beliefs on attitudes towards women’s inheritance, i.e. the acceptance of the Islamic inheritance law and its distributive disadvantage to women versus the willingness to deviate from the religious law to achieve gender equality. We examine the two following hypotheses:

According to the first hypothesis, we expect individuals with higher religiosity to have a preference for the universal compliance with the law, regardless of the gender composition of primary heirs. According to the second hypothesis, we expect individuals with stronger patriarchal beliefs to prefer complying with the law only if primary heirs include a son to protect the male distributive advantage, but to prefer avoiding the law if primary heirs are all daughters. Next, we discuss our experimental design and analysis to test for our hypotheses.

3 Experiment and Empirics

3.2 Data

3.2.1 The Sample

A sample of 245 adults (94 % Muslims) completed the online experiment and questionnaire.^[11] We drop non-Muslims (14 participants) due to the irrelevance of the research question to them, and we present our Muslim sample characteristics below.

We present the summary statistics for participants’ characteristics in Table 1. Female participants represent 41 % of the sample. Participants’ age ranges from 21 to 64 years old with the mean age in the sample being 35. The majority of participants (90 %) are well-educated holding a bachelor degree or above (denoted by high_education). More than half of the sample (68 %) live in an urban governorate (denoted by urban_gov_liv) and 34 % self-report having above average income level (denoted by abvavg_income).

Table 1:

Descriptive statistics.

	N	Mean	St. Dev.	Min.	Max.
Socioeconomic characteristics
Female	231	0.41	0.49	0	1
Age	231	34.67	8.25	21	64
High_education	231	0.90	0.30	0	1
Urban_gov_liv	231	0.68	0.47	0	1
Abvavg_income	231	0.34	0.47	0	1
Preference profiles
Set A
Reject-reject	231	0.51	0.50	0	1
Accept-reject	231	0.20	0.40	0	1
Reject-accept	231	0.07	0.25	0	1
Accept-accept	231	0.22	0.42	0	1
Set B
Reject-reject	231	0.37	0.48	0	1
Accept-reject	231	0.33	0.47	0	1
Reject-accept	231	0.08	0.27	0	1
Accept-accept	231	0.22	0.42	0	1
Religiosity
Non_conserv	224	0.83	0.38	0	1
Relig_index	231	3.03	1.22	0	5
Pro-male cultural beliefs
Pro_male_cul1	231	2.00	1.26	0	6
Pro_male_cul2	231	0.82	0.92	0	4

We explain the preferences profiles, religiosity, and pro-male cultural beliefs variables in what follows.

3.2.2 Attitudes towards the Inheritance Law

Employing the vignettes, we examine participants’ attitudes towards the allocation decision by the HH to circumvent the inheritance law. Recall that there is full circumvention in the law avoidance treatment and partial in the law internalization treatment. Figure 1 presents participants’ preferences in both treatments. We find that 51 % of our sample have a reject-reject preference, as described above, regardless of the gender composition of the progeny in the law avoidance treatment (panel a). This means that half of our sample prefers the full abidance by the inheritance law. For the law internalization treatment (panel b) this percentage is significantly lower (37 %, t-test p-value < 0.01 ). This suggests that participants feel more at ease with the partial rather than with the full avoidance of the inheritance law.

Figure 1:

Attitudes towards HH’s allocations of endowment.

We also find that a sizeable number of participants accept law avoidance in the absence of a son but reject it when a son is present (i.e. accept-reject, or pro-male selective law avoiding). Furthermore, the percentage of pro-male selective law avoiders in the law internalization treatment is significantly higher than that in the law avoidance treatment (33 % vs. 20 %, t-test p-value < 0.01 ). We investigate this finding further in the empirical analysis section.

The preference for pro-female selective law avoidance (i.e. reject-accept) is demonstrated by only 7 % and 8 % of participants in the law avoidance and law internalization treatments, respectively. Finally, a quarter of the sample always avoid the law in both treatments. These last two groups, who accept law avoidance in the presence of a son, exhibit a gender egalitarian attitude towards inheritance norms.^[12]

3.2.3 Religious Beliefs

The majority of (Muslim) participants (83 %) self-report holding non-conservative religious beliefs. Yet, when asked about their religious practices, the respondents score a mean of 3 out of 5 on a religiosity index created by the authors.^[13] We base this religiosity index on five equally-weighted criteria: a) pro-women’s-veiling (82 % of the respondents agree), b) against cross-gender handshake (31 %), c) pro-polygyny (a man marrying several wives) (42 %), d) does not drink alcohol (97 %), and e) does not accompany someone who drinks alcohol (51 %). Those values were propagated by the Islamic revival in Egypt since the 1970s and as such they present the populist views of religion among the masses.^[14] Responses to individual questions forming the index show higher variation in views on cross-gender handshake, polygyny, and accompanying an alcohol consumer than views on women’s veil and own consumption of alcohol. The correlation coefficient between the self-reported and the authors’ constructed religiosity measures (denoted by non_conserv and relig_index, respectively) is −0.11.^[15]

3.2.4 Pro-male Cultural Beliefs

We elicit patriarchal or pro-male cultural beliefs using two alternative measures. First, we ask participants about their views on whether parents must buy an apartment for each of their sons versus their daughters.^[16] We construct a variable that takes the value of one if the respondent’s view to this question is stronger when the child is male than when the child is a female, and we find that 48 % of the respondents are pro-male. As a follow-up, we ask the participants if the children must receive a compensation in cases of under-provision (of the apartment) by the parents, and we find that 21 % are pro-male in the sample.^[17] We use these two alternative measures (hereafter labelled pro_male_cul1 and pro_male_cul2, respectively) as a proxy for patriarchal or pro-male cultural beliefs.

Table 2 shows the pair-wise correlations between the religiosity and pro-male cultural beliefs measures. As stated before, the religiosity index is negatively weakly correlated with self-reported religiosity. Our main measure of patriarchal beliefs is not correlated with self-reported religiosity, but positively weakly correlated with the constructed religiosity index. The two patriarchal beliefs measures are positively moderately correlated with one another.

Table 2:

Religiosity and patriarchy correlation matrix.

	non_conserv	relig_index	pro_male_cul1	pro_male_cul2
Non_conserv	1.00
Relig_index	−0.11	1.00
Pro_male_cul1	−0.03	0.15	1.00
Pro_male_cul2	0.01	0.01	0.51	1.00

4 Discussion

To summarize, our results are mostly consistent with our two hypotheses. Consistent with the first hypothesis, we find that religiosity is positively correlated with the abidance by the Islamic inheritance law in both the law avoidance and the law internalization treatments. Pro-male cultural beliefs are not significantly correlated with the always law-abiding preference profile. Conversely, in line with the second hypothesis, we find that pro-male cultural beliefs are positively correlated with pro-male selective avoidance of the inheritance law. However, religiosity is not significantly correlated with this preference profile.

Despite this, it may be plausible to think that our results could be driven by a preference for primary heirs. Recall that under the Islamic inheritance law, secondary heirs (e.g. deceased’s brothers and sisters) receive a share of inheritance if the deceased had no sons, but receive nothing if the deceased had at least one son. So, the acceptance of law avoidance may be driven by a preference for primary heirs (children) over secondary heirs. However, we argue that our findings cannot be solely explained by a preference for primary heirs. While law avoidance in the first scenario (female-only) may be indeed driven by a preference for primary heirs, law abidance in the second scenario (the presence of a son) cannot be explained by a preference for primary heirs, since secondary heirs do not inherit in this case, but rather by a pro-male preference.

We show in Tables B7 and B8 in the appendix the correlates of the relative odds of choosing an accept-reject profile versus an accept-accept profile, within the restricted sample of respondents who choose an accept-reject or accept-accept profile. Notice that in this restricted sample, all respondents hold a preference for primary heirs, as they all accept the avoidance of the inheritance law in the first scenario (female-only progeny). They only differ in their attitude towards women as captured in the second scenario (female-male progeny), where the risk of passing inheritance to secondary heirs is not present. We find that in this restricted sample, our patriarchy measures are strongly positively correlated with the probability of choosing an accept-reject profile in the case of law internalization, which is similar to our main results for the full sample.

Furthermore, in the law internalization treatment, it may be plausible that our participants think that inheritance is risky due to its deferred nature and may find it unfair for the daughter to receive a secured portion of the wealth while the son does not. To test for this possibility, we include a vignette where the transfers to the daughter is managed via a will.^[18] We again test for the pro-male selective law avoidance in the law internalization treatment using this alternative vignette and we present the results in appendix Table B9. We find that the pro-male cultural beliefs are positively and strongly correlated with the pro-male selective attitude. Moreover, the pro-male cultural beliefs coefficients’ magnitude and significance are comparable in Table 6 and Table B9 lending confidence to our interpretation on the patriarchal culture and pro-male preference.

Finally, the law internalization treatment may include a religious primer; the reference to the Shari’a-eligible heirs in the first scenario, and the reference to the one third inheritance share in the second scenario. We do not expect this potential religious priming to bias our results since the potential prime is introduced in both scenarios.

5 Conclusions

Egypt’s rank on the Global Gender Gap index demonstrates persistent gender inequality. While promoting gender equality is important for development, the roots of inequality in Egypt have not been directly addressed. In this paper, we present the case of inequality in inheritance between men and women of equal kinship level as dictated by Islamic law and legislated in the Egyptian family law. We examined if religiosity and pro-male cultural beliefs represent obstacles to achieving gender equality in inheritance.

We employ an online vignette experiment to elicit individual attitudes towards the inheritance law in Egypt. The vignettes present situations where a household head (HH) decides to allocate their endowments to either achieve gender equality in inheritance between a son and a daughter, or to protect their daughters in the absence of a son. In both situations, the HH intervenes with the inheritance law. We further investigate the cases where the HH completely avoids the application of the law, and when the HH internalizes the law allowing for partial avoidance/application. We correlate the elicited attitudes towards inheritance with individual religiosity and pro-male cultural beliefs.

We find that religiosity is positively correlated with a higher likelihood of abiding with the Islamic inheritance law. This is true for the complete law avoidance and the law internalization cases. In contrast, we find that pro-male cultural beliefs are correlated with the application of the law in the presence of a son but not in his absence. This relationship is stronger in the law internalization than the law avoidance cases. Our results show that the religious values promoted by the Islamic revival in Egypt as well as the pro-male cultural beliefs represent obstacles for any legal reform allowing for gender equality in inheritance. Such pro-male values may result in weak legal enforcement of any potential reform or potentially even blocking such a reform altogether.

This paper opens new and exciting areas of research on religion, culture, and gender. While we employ the inheritance law, future research may employ other examples such as the asymmetric polygamy rights in Islam but not in other monotheistic religions or the implications of polygamy in cross-country settings (such as Muslim migrants in Western countries).