Kerala’s Gender Debate Doesn’t Need a Gulf Alibi

Kerala is once again arguing about who controls Muslim women’s place in public life, and once again the argument has found a convenient external villain: the Gulf. The sequence matters, because it has been getting twisted in the narratives.

It started with Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, who posted that the Muslim community needed “introspection and internal discussion” on what he called the “import of conservative and even reactionary attitudes and customs from abroad.” He was leaning on a World Bank working paper that claims migrants returning from Saudi Arabia carry home more conservative attitudes toward gender-based violence than those who never migrated.

When it was pointed out to him that the paper was four years old and that its headline claims sat awkwardly against its own raw survey numbers, Tharoor allowed that this was “a welcome corrective.” The correction did little to slow a common trend online – Gulf returnees, particularly those who had worked in Saudi Arabia, being blamed for importing patriarchy into Kerala.

It was only after this, and after Muslim women turned out visibly in Nabi Day (Milad-un-Nabi) rallies and functions across Kerala that Kanthapuram A.P. Aboobacker Musliyar’s faction of Samastha Kerala Jam’eyyat ul-Ulama issued its circular, instructing that women should not share stages with men or appear in mixed public programmes. Kanthapuram went further at a conference in Kochi, arguing that Islam prescribes purdah because women on public platforms could cause “great destruction,” and that the Quran requires women to stay within their homes.

Confronted by women political leaders, he held his ground, justifying the position as a century of settled religious teaching that had preserved women's “honour and dignity.”

That order of events cuts against the Gulf-import narrative rather than supporting it. Kanthapuram was not reacting to a newly arrived Saudi custom. He was reacting to the visible, growing presence of Muslim women in Kerala’s own religious public life. The World Bank paper and the Nabi Day circular are, in truth, two unrelated stories that got fused together in the space of a single social media thread.

Was the conservatism imported?

Kanthapuram’s circular has nothing to do with a community absorbing new habits off a returning flight from Riyadh. It actually came from the leadership of an organisation with roots in Kerala’s own religious history, dating to the reformist ferment of the 1920s and the eventual formation of Samastha at Calicut in 1926. The 1989 split that produced today’s E.K. and A.P. factions was a dispute over political alignment and institutional control, not theology – and on the specific question of women’s public visibility, the two factions have tracked each other closely for years. The E.K. faction’s Sunni Yuvajana Sangham opposed women’s participation in the 2019 Women’s Wall; in 2022 a senior E.K. scholar objected publicly when a schoolgirl was invited on stage to collect an academic prize, and as recently as February 2026, that faction’s leadership was still defending gender segregation at its own centenary event.

By December 2025, both factions were reportedly uneasy about women’s public celebration of local-body election wins. None of this required a Saudi intermediary, and none of it needed a Nabi Day rally to set it off. It is homegrown organisational conservatism, sustained by institutions that have operated in Kerala for a century, that simply found a fresh occasion to reassert itself.

That is not to deny that Salafi or Islamist-inflected currents, certain dress codes and stricter interpretations gained visible ground in parts of Kerala over the past several decades, partly through funding and networks connected to the Gulf. But identifying an institutional channel of religious influence is a different claim from saying that ordinary return migrants are transmitting a package of gender attitudes absorbed abroad. The two claims get regularly conflated, and the World Bank paper is where the conflation gets statistical cover.

What the paper actually measured?

The study – “Beyond Money: Does Migration Experience Transfer Gender Norms?” – draws on the 2013 Kerala Migration Survey. Its central comparison rests on 256 Saudi returnees and roughly 300 returnees from the rest of the Gulf, against more than 8,600 non-migrants. That alone should invite caution, but the problem is composition: only about one in ten of the Saudi-returnee respondents is a woman, against nearly six in ten among non-migrants. A study designed as being about the transfer of gender norms is, in practice, mostly capturing the self-reported views of a small group of men.

The attitude questions themselves collapse a lot of nuances. Respondents could answer ‘Yes,’ ‘No,’ “Depends on the situation,” or “Don't know,” and the analysis reduces all of that to a single binary – ‘Yes’ scored as conservative, everything else scored as open-minded. A conditional answer and a flat rejection end up in the same vessel. Several items are also more ambiguous than they look on a coefficient table. Agreeing that “gender equality has already been achieved for the most part” measures a person’s read of current conditions, not their commitment to equality.

Agreeing that empowerment programmes “benefit mostly well-to-do women” could equally be a class critique from someone sympathetic to poorer women. And questions asking whether a woman loses “community respect” after being assaulted or after disobeying her husband may take a respondent’s description of social stigma – stigma they personally disapprove of – rather than their own endorsement of it. Treating every one of these as a unit of “extreme conservatism” builds a lot of interpretive weight on thin ice.

There is also a matching problem the paper cannot get around no matter how sophisticated its econometrics. It has no measurement of what these men believed before they ever left Kerala. Without a before-and-after comparison for the same individuals, a conservative attitude recorded in a 2013 survey could just as easily be something a migrant carried with him to Jeddah as something he brought back. The authors try to address self-selection through instrumental variables and a shift-share design, which is a serious statistical effort, but no amount of modelling can reconstruct an unobserved pre-migration mindset. The “transfer” language in the paper’s framing claims more than the design can actually support.

The raw numbers themselves challenge the spick and span conclusion. Saudi returnees do score more conservative on several questions about women’s mobility and male authority, but on other measures – certain employment questions, and son preference – they are actually less restrictive than non-migrants, and they are not uniformly the most conservative group on every item touching violence. Paired questions make the point strikingly: respondents were asked whether girls should be raised to be modest and submissive, then asked the identical question about boys, and among Saudi returnees agreement was marginally higher for boys.

That looks less like a gendered double standard imported from abroad and more like a general preference for disciplined children, a very different finding from the one the paper’s headline implies. A dataset this uneven does not support a single storyline about conservative transmission. It supports a much complex reality that gets lost the moment 35 survey items are compressed into one index.

The part the controversy keeps skipping

What gets lost in the migrant-blaming version of this story is the other half of the Gulf experience – one that runs in the opposite direction. Years of a husband’s absence routinely pushed wives into roles the household had previously reserved for men – managing money, dealing with banks, handling children’s schooling, engaging with local institutions. As I argued in a Cambridge University Gulf Research workshop paper on social remittance, that shift fed directly into the expansion of women’s involvement in neighbourhood bodies and Kudumbashree groups across Malabar, and it coincided with a marked rise in Muslim girls entering higher and professional education, including study abroad. Gulf remittance funded classrooms, and it gave women practical authority inside households that religious circulars were not designed to grant them.

Both things were happening simultaneously – a family growing more outwardly religious while investing heavily in a daughter’s degree, a woman adopting stricter dress while gaining more say over the household budget than her mother ever had. A framework that only allows for “conservative” or “open-minded” cannot hold both halves of that picture, and it is exactly this coexistence that Kanthapuram’s leadership now finds threatening.

Read against its actual trigger – women visibly present at Nabi Day functions, not any newly imported Gulf habit – the circular appears to be a reaction to a generation of Kerala Muslim women, and young men alongside them, who are simply more mobile, more educated and less willing to be spoken for than the organisation is used to.

Fixing the target

It doesn’t mean migration is culturally inert, or that Saudi-linked religious networks deserve a clean chit. It actually means the causal story needs to run in the right direction. Patriarchal authority in parts of Kerala’s Muslim community has its own long history, tied to institutions like Samastha rather than to any particular migration corridor. Gulf migration entered that existing field and pulled it in several directions simultaneously, toward stricter religious observance in some households, toward greater female authority and mobility in others, often within the same family.

A more honest inquiry would track the same individuals before departure, during their years abroad and after return, include the wives and daughters who stayed behind, and pay attention to what happens within organisations like Samastha rather than assuming ideas travel by suitcase. Until then, treating Gulf returnees as the source of Kerala’s gender politics does two things badly. It lets homegrown religious leadership off the hook for a set of positions it has held and defended in public for years, and it flattens a genuinely contradictory social transformation into a uncluttered but false story about import and contamination. Kerala’s Muslim women deserve a debate about their own public life that starts with the social conditions and institutions actually influencing it, not one that outsources the blame elsewhere.

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