Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism (30 page)

Firstly, within many Western feminist discourses about Third World women, the standards of First World women have often been used as the superior norms against which Third World and non-Western women are measured. Often, Western cultural ideals are imposed on women coming from very different religious and cultural traditions.

Secondly, the homogenization of women within dominant Western feminist paradigms relates to the construction of women as
a priori
victims and as “powerless.”
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This approach does not examine particular material conditions and ideological frameworks that generate a certain context of disempowerment for a specific group of women. Instead, various examples of disempowered women are used to prove the general thesis that women as a group are “powerless.”
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Women become identified as an oppressed group prior to the process of analysis. The crucial fact that groups of women are constituted through the processes and structures of social relations is obscured.

In exemplifying the way in which these two critiques of Western feminist analyses apply to discourses on Muslim women, I will examine some of the popular Western understandings of Muslim women’s veiling, head covering, or
hijab
. While the term
hijab
literally means “barrier” or “curtain,” in this context it has come to signify the notion of concealing garments that women wear outside their homes in keeping with an Islamic ethic of modesty.
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Conceptually it encompasses a range of different forms of covering that Muslim women adopt which are contingent on socio-historical factors and range from a headscarf to loose clothing to a veil.

It is certainly true that some discourses of the
hijab
are based on the coercion, the “othering,” and the subjugation of women. This is most apparent in cases where women are forced to veil and are punished if they resist, as in the case, for example, of Afghani women under Taliban rule. However, this type of coercive discourse is by no means universal. Those Western feminist discourses that represent the
hijab
as simply symbolic of Muslim women’s subjugation miss both the particularity of such a phenomenon as well as the multiple levels of meanings that it may have for different Muslim women.

For example, during the British colonial occupation of Egypt many Muslim women adopted the
hijab
as a symbol of their resistance to colonial definitions.
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During the 1979 Iranian Revolution many middle class Iranian women donned the
hijab
as a symbol of their resistance to the Shah and Western cultural encroachment. The latter represents a very different meaning of the
hijab
from the post-revolutionary Iranian enforcement of
hijab
on women. In a contemporary study of Islamist movements, anthropologist Fadwa el Guindi found that educated and professional Islamist women have deliberately donned the veil as an assertion of their identity which reflects a syntheses of modernity and tradition.
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Hijab
within Muslim societies does not constitute a singular symbolic field. It has come to represent varying meanings within multivalent realities. On the one hand there are large numbers of women who believe it is a religious requirement exemplifying the Islamic requirement of modesty and they choose to wear it because they seek to be obedient to God. Other women have stated explicitly feminist and anti-capitalist motivations for their veiling. They argue that the veiling detracts from patriarchal prioritization of women’s physical and sexual

attractiveness. Moreover it provides resistance to a perceived Western consumerism in which money and energy are constantly spent in keeping up with changing fashions that in reality keep women hostage to their appearance and to the market.
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Finally, it is necessary to remember that norms for dress are socially and culturally specific and there is no reason that Muslim women’s clothing needs to be measured against specific Western norms of dress.

Moreover, numerous sociological and anthropological studies have illustrated the ways in which veiling has increased female mobility in different parts of the Muslim world. In Iran and Egypt, for example, as in other parts of the Muslim world, the wearing of the
hijab
has neutralized public space for many traditional families, thus making it more acceptable for women to occupy such space.
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This has led to a greater female presence in various aspects of public life, including the crucial areas of education and skills training, and has for the most part facilitated increasing participation of women in the public sphere.

It is worth considering the position that veiling reinforces the patriarchal assumption that public space is a sexualized, male space and thus women who enter it need to erase the femaleness of their bodies in order to be legitimately present. However, it should also be noted that the reality of a sexualized male public space is not unique to the Muslim world: in many parts of the Western world, one’s visual space is constantly assaulted by pictures of scantily clad women advertising commercial products.

Ultimately in any study of dress and
hijab
among Muslim women, it is necessary to look at the complexity of the varying narratives and to treat Muslim women as subjects instead of objects of research. Such an approach will prioritize Muslim women’s self-understandings, it will look at the varying ways in which veiling operates in relation to women’s agency, it will recognize sites of resistance as well as contradictions and ambivalence within the discourses, instead of treating veiling as evidence of the monolithic victimization of women.

Furthermore, to the extent that Muslim women engage in this debate, there is much diversity in the ways in which we discourse upon the question, meaning and necessity of the particular forms of religiously appropriate dress, a diversity that has often remained unrepresented in many Western feminist discussions of veiling. One-dimensional Western feminist depictions of Muslim women as always oppressed by the phenomenon of veiling are thus both misrepresentative and reductionist. An example of contemporary feminist scholarship on Islam that most aptly encapsulates both misrepresentation as well as victim constructions of Muslim women is the 1997 edition of a sociology textbook by feminist sociologist Linda Lindsey called
Gender Roles: A Sociological Approach
.
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Whereas the titles for the sections on Judaism, Christianity, and Hinduism merely give the name of the respective traditions without any adjectives, the section examining Islam is titled “Islam and Purdah: Sexual Apartheid.” This immediately reduces all the complexity of Muslim gendered practice to the issue

of the veil, a misrepresentative caricature of the complexity of Muslim societies and Islam. Moreover, it forecloses any serious engagement with aspects of this religious tradition that are potentially or actually liberating for Muslim women. These types of homogenization, generalization, and objectification of Muslim women result in the perpetuation of dominant patriarchal and colonial discourses that freeze women and the colonized into rigid categories. Such approaches suppress the ways in which particular groups of women challenge, subvert, and resist patriarchy at various points. They thereby undermine a politics of resistance and the construction of women as subjects capable of agency and transformation.

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In reviewing some of the alternative conceptualizations of women, Third World feminism offers a broader paradigm through which some of the concerns of Muslim women may be articulated. Indian feminist Chandra Mohanty asserts that there are no monolithic “Third World women,” or “Third World situations” for that matter. Rather the term “third world” is utilized as “an analytical and political category” that makes connections in terms of the struggles of women in the Third World against racism, sexism, colonialism, and neo-colonialism in the context of particular balances of power in the world.
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This definition thus refers to “a common context of struggle” which facilitates the formation of politically oppositional alliances and coalitions in the face of specific exploitative structures.
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The alternatives posed by many Third World feminists are premised on the understanding that the gendered social subject has a number of simultaneous social identities that overlap, interlink, and position particular women at the nexus of different social hierarchies.
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The recognition and representation of such heterogeneity is an initial and fundamental premise from which any study of Third World women may proceed.

Similarly, feminists working in the area of post-modern and post-structuralist theory have also contributed to the debunking of essentialist notions of “women” and “feminism.” The post-modern approach undercuts singular feminist narratives through embracing cultural diversity, recognizing multiple feminist epistemologies, and focusing on the specificities and particularities of the women’s different contexts.
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Post-modernism, Third World feminism, and critiques from other women on the margins have resulted in the development of varying understandings and different articulations of feminism over the last two decades. Thus there is a reconfiguring of the contours of feminism, one that is more attuned to specificities of different groups of women and acknowledges the varying forms of feminist praxis. Within this type of fluid and dynamic understanding of feminisms, it is possible to detect a range of Muslim women’s gender activism or Islamic feminisms.

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While some Muslims eschew the term “feminist,” increasing numbers have begun to utilize the term to describe themselves. The value of retaining the term “feminism” is that it enables Muslim women to situate their praxis in a global political landscape. This in turn creates greater possibilities for alliances, exchanges, and mutually enriching interaction among different groups of women. These connections enable varying groups of women to share and learn from each other’s experiences, whether this is an exchange of feminist tools of analysis, or of varying ways of implementing activist initiatives, or simply an exposure to other forms of justice-oriented gender praxis. Furthermore the use of feminist language is helpful in that it creates a finely tuned vocabulary for a constellation of ideas that are linked to a critical consciousness surrounding gender politics. To accept feminism as a Western concept is in the last analysis to concede the most visible discourses around women’s rights and gender justice as the property of the West and to marginalize the indigenous histories of protest and resistance to patriarchy by non-Western women. Therefore I use the term “feminist” as a description of Muslim women’s activities that are aimed at transforming masculinist social structures.
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Muslim women and men with feminist commitments need to navigate the terrain between being critical of sexist interpretations of Islam and patriarchy in their religious communities while simultaneously criticizing neo-colonial feminist discourses on Islam. The fact that Muslim women resist both narratives while sometimes moving between their critiques is a consequence of the way in which they are situated within this larger minefield. miriam cooke describes this adoption of different speaking positions as a “multiple critique.”
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I find her notion of multiple critique compelling in that it allows one to conceptualize the notion of dynamic and multi-layered subjectivities of Muslim women in varying contexts as well as the reality that one’s speaking position is influenced by one’s audience. However, cooke’s position and theorization of this concept reflect some fundamental problems as well. She suggests that the “term Islamic feminism invites us to consider what it means to have a difficult double commitment, on the one hand to a faith position, and on the other hand to women’s rights both inside the home and outside.”
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I would contend that implicit in this statement of a “difficult double commitment” is an acceptance of the assumption that Islam and women’s rights belong to essentially different domains and that Muslim women bring them together strategically as “an act of radical subversion” as part of the “postcolonial women’s jockeying for space and power” (as cooke puts it). I would argue that this account runs contrary to the self-definitions of many Muslim feminists who see their feminism as emerging organically out of their faith commitment and whose contestation of gender injustice is more than simply the result of a post-colonial power struggle.

Nonetheless the notion of multiple critique is useful in capturing the complexity of Muslim women’s positioning. Most Muslim women reject those feminist discourses that have been implicated and continue to be implicated in attacking Islam and Muslim culture. However, in relationship to our own faith communities, we are positioned simultaneously as critics of the assumptions of male normativity, and as female believers who present an alternative way of understanding and approaching gender relations in Islam.

Among the most revolutionary elements in the works of Islamic feminism is the view that feminist commitment is integral to Islam and responsive to the core Qur’anic call to justice. The primary incentives for some feminist Muslim scholarship is the reality that there is dissonance between the ideals of Islam which are premised on an ontology of radical human equality and the fact that in varying social contexts Muslim women experience injustice in the name of religion.
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Some look at the way in which Islamic teachings are subject to social contexts and argue that patriarchal interpretations are the result of the exclusively male constitution of much of institutional Islam.
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Others acknowledge the tension between patriarchy and egalitarianism in the Islamic legacy but argue for the primacy of egalitarianism as representative of the spiritual and ethical ideals of Islam, ideals that need to be constantly worked towards.
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