Opinion | The Islam Kerala Built & The Islam It Is Importing: When Conservatism Comes Home

The World Bank paper does not prove that such a cultural shift has already taken place. But it does provide reason to ask whether social norms in Kerala are beginning to change

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A World Bank Policy Research Paper on Kerala’s migration experience raises an uncomfortable question: can migration bring home not only money, but also conservatism?

The study found that migrants returning from Saudi Arabia exhibited significantly more conservative attitudes towards gender than non-migrants, particularly on Gender-Based Violence (GBV) and extreme attitudes towards women. Their attitudes towards GBV were more conservative than those of non-migrants, particularly on more extreme gender-related issues, including sexual assault. They were also more likely to tolerate physical violence against women and to approve of extreme behaviour towards women.

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The study thus points to the possibility of what it calls a “social remittance" of conservative gender norms, transmitted through migration. The researchers also examined how these attitudes varied across religious communities. Interestingly, Christians in the sample exhibited fewer conservative attitudes across almost all the gender indices. The analysis also found that Muslims held more conservative attitudes than Hindus towards women’s employment. The findings, however, should be understood as evidence of an association rather than proof that migration itself causes these attitudes. The study also found that the effects varied across different gender measures.

Thiruvananthapuram MP Shashi Tharoor, in a post on X, wrote that Kerala has long been home to a liberal and progressive practice of Islam, fully in tune with the coexistence and communal harmony prevalent across the state. He expressed the strong view that the import of conservative and even reactionary attitudes and customs from abroad is fundamentally at odds with Kerala’s longstanding social ethos. He said the findings called for serious introspection and an internal discussion, particularly within the Muslim community.

Tharoor is right in saying that Kerala has historically embraced a liberal and progressive form of Islam, one that has coexisted closely with the state’s traditions of communal harmony and social pluralism. Islam entered Kerala in a manner quite different from its spread in North India. It was not through the sword that the religion came to Kerala. Even before the advent of Islam, Arab traders had established strong trade relations with the Malabar coast, and Islam gradually found a place in Kerala through these longstanding commercial and cultural connections. Malik ibn Dinar, regarded as one of the earliest Islamic missionaries to Kerala, is said to have arrived in the region and received a warm welcome. Legends hold that one of the local kings, Cheraman Perumal, converted to Islam, travelled to Mecca and died there. The Cheraman Perumal story, however, is best understood as a longstanding tradition rather than an uncontested historical........

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