Huff Post: One issue involving religion and its relationship to violence that is gaining greater attention in the media and in academic research is the threat by fundamentalist religious groups to women’s rights and equality. From sexual violence in South Sudan and by the Islamic State, to the abduction of young women and girls by Boko Haram in northern Nigeria, women’s freedoms are increasingly under threat. In several instances, fundamentalist religious movements mobilize the very forces that should have been expected to safeguard women: globalization, secularization, and democracy.

“Fundamentalism” was first used to describe a conservative type of Christian thought that opposed liberal conceptions of the Christian faith. Today the term is applied more broadly to those religious adherents who fear modernist movements as corrosive to the foundation of their religion. For the Abrahamic traditions, the foundational texts all fell into social contexts in which males exercised all political, economic, and most social authority and, critically, the texts themselves were transcribed by males. Given that the core argument of fundamentalists is that “text is sovereign” and its meaning is fixed, it follows that the more closely one cleaves to the texts, the fewer opportunities there will be for women to escape subordination to men. All three texts–the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Qur’an–invariably stipulate women’s religious duty of submission to men. In this view, women are deemed subordinate to men, with their legitimate roles invariably exhausted inside the home.

As women’s equality has advanced, a clash has developed within societies whereby fundamentalists attempt to reassert more traditional gendered roles. This is the case particularly in Islamic societies where Islam is viewed as a total way of life, with no division between state and religion. All institutions are seen as religious in nature, and the state itself is considered a religious institution having as its constitution the “Sharia”–the religious moral values of Islam.

It is likely no accident therefore, that religious fundamentalism has expanded in tandem with women’s equality. Religious fundamentalism has been on the rise since the 1960s, accelerating over the past 15 years. From the 1970s Moral Majority activism in the United States, to state-sanctioned religious revivalism in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution in 1979, and the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan, to the ascension to power of Islamist parties such as the Muslim Brotherhood briefly in Egypt and the Ennahda party in Tunisia in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, there is a resurgence of religion backed by well-organized movements. This resurgence is neither random nor discrete. It is embedded in broader historical processes of globalization, secularization, and in some cases, democratization.

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