“Benevolent Patriarchy”: Palestinian Women between “Ideal” and “Reality”

In this article polygyny is used to illustrate how the ideal of benevolent patriarchy and the “good” Muslim man as the benevolent patriarch tends to create a discrepancy between the and the moral in Islamic legislation as well as in Islamic discourse. The study is based fieldwork in the West Bank in 2011 when 49 Islamist and Islamic-oriented women were . The main finding of this study is that Islamist women tend to accept the gender system as the divine will, and they also accept its legal expression, Personal Law. However, there is a little awareness of the lack of legal consequences for men do not behave according to the moral code, which is not explicitly but only implicitly in the law.