Ali has a post up today about Iranian divorce, and Western feminist involvement with the issues facing Muslim women in Islamic countries. Ali writes,
To me, it is better if a progressive rather than a Neo-Con gets gung ho about human rights in the Muslim world because the latter will try to solve the problem by occupation and turning half the country into ‘insurgents.’ The problem, of course, and I think Jill knows this full well (because she tries to confront it), is that progressives will not get gung-ho about human rights issues except as an academic exercise (or when they can get their universities involves). (They are often too afraid to come off as cultural imperialists — which is due to having taken a few too many post-colonial studies classes). Once they “learn” about an issue from an ‘insider’ party, they feel as if they have done their part – as if awareness is activism. This is what distinguishes progressive human rights activism from the activism of today’s neo-liberal semi-neo-conservative. The latter is actually action oriented (even if the action is highly dubious and altogether counter-productive, like invasion or economic sanctions).
Now, I see what he’s saying, but I’m not sure that he’s entirely understanding our (or at least my) motivations. I write about issues facing Muslim women, but I make an effort to recognize that I don’t speak for them, and that there are Muslim women who are speaking, writing and acting on behalf of themselves and other women who share their backgrounds.
I think it’s part of my responsibility, as someone who has a whole lot of privilege as a white woman living in developed nation, to listen to what these women are saying, and to make sure that they have a place at the table when we’re discussing issues that disproportionately affect them. I think it’s unfair, ignorant and offensive when Western feminists try and speak for Muslim women, or make wild assumptions about them, or dive head-first into their spaces without really understanding their complex cultural contexts. I think the method of Westerners trying to “reform” the backwards East has been a fantastic failure, and my feminism demands that we trust other women enough to allow them to reform their own societies and create their own demands. Now, that also means that as people who are fantastically privileged, we do what we can to give these women the tools to do that. A few Western feminist NGOs, like the Global Fund for Women, are good examples of this. What I can’t abide are Western feminists setting the dialogue for what women elsewhere should be concerned about, when the fact is that women elsewhere probably know damn well what the biggest issues facing their lives are.
I know that we all have good intentions, and the oppression of women around the world clearly angers me to no end. I obviously want to do whatever I can to end this oppression. But in fighting women’s oppression, we must make sure that we aren’t using our global privilege to silence or condescend the very women we’re trying to help. And we have to be careful, when examining other cultures, that we’re not orientalizing and othering them. This is nearly impossible when we’re Western feminists sitting in front of our computers in the United States or Canada or England. The fact is that we just don’t have a very good handle on the day to day lives, desires and needs of women in other countries if our scholarship focuses only on written laws and religious texts. Could someone from, say, Iran possibly understand the day to day experience of living in a female body in the United States by simply reading the Constitution, New York state laws, and the Bible? Probably not. If we aren’t listening to Muslim women, we’re missing their stories, and we’re nowhere near understanding the reality on the ground.
Beyond just making sure that we adhere to feminist ideals of trusting and empowering women, it’s also useful to look at the success of Western-centric modernization campaigns around Islam in particular, and examine how effective they’ve been.
Answer: Not particularly effective, especially not in the long run.
The best example I can think of for this is female genital cutting (also known as “female genital mutilation” or “female circumcision;” I’ll be using the abbreviation FGM from here on out). FGM is a long-standing cultural practice in Egypt and other areas of North Africa. It was never a strictly religious tradition, and was practiced by Muslims, Coptic Christians, and people who adhered to other local religions. It is not, and has never been, widely practiced throughout the Middle East. It is not mentioned in the Quran or the Hadith (there’s an argument that it is mentioned in one Hadith, but it’s highly disputed). In the first half of the 20th century, local activists in North African countries began to campaign against FGM, using local solutions and tailoring the dialogue against it to their own communities. They were highly successful. FGM practices substantially decreased in Coptic communities, and was outlawed in Egyptian hospitals. It was being practiced less and less in urban Muslim communities, and outreach efforts were increasingly successful in rural communities as well.
Then the Western feminists got involved.
They certainly had the best of intentions, as they saw a profound human rights violation and wanted to combat it. But the problem with Orientalist scholarship is that too often, it reinstates the very practice it seeks to fight. Western feminists and scholars framed FGM as a religious practice, and addressed it with deeply “othering” language — in essence, they defined FGM as something Muslim, putting the people who practice FGM on the defensive about their religion, and giving FGM, which was a pre-Islamic practice, religious backing. The reaction from Muslim communities in North Africa shouldn’t have been a surprise: They felt that their very religion, culture and way of life was under attack from imperialistic, arrogant outsiders, and they circled the wagons.
Al-Azhar University in Cairo, which has long been considered the most influential university in the Middle East, issued several fatwas endorsing FGM, with some going so far as to say that it is required for Muslim women. Egypt turned back its law banning FGM from hospitals. From the late 1950s through the 1980s, the practice spread to several other Middle Eastern countries. The vast majority of women in several North African countries and Egypt have had their genitals cut.
Cultural imperialism simply doesn’t work, although it might appear to in the short term. Other examples? Iran, which promoted women’s rights before the Revolution and went so far as to ban the hijab in public, in the name of modernization and Westernism in the mold of the Attaturk. Post-Revolution, though, women’s rights were seen as inherently tied to Western colonialism and to an illegitimate regime. We know what Iran looks like now.
When we don’t focus on local solutions, we fail. When we ignore Muslim women and assume that we know better than they do, we fail them.
My point, then, is that the best activism that Western feminists can do for women elsewhere is to trust them, listen to them, allow them to define their problems, and allow them the tools to strategize solutions to those problems. Strutting in and attempting to solve all their problems is bound to be about as effective at promoting human rights as invading their nations and killing tens of thousands of them will be at promoting democracy. That is, neither method works.
This phenomenon certainly isn’t limited to Muslim women. The feminist movement does, in many ways, reflect the same privileges that play out in other spheres. Women in the global north are more influential and set the conversation in ways that women in the global south don’t; issues that affect white middle-class American women get more play than issues that affect women of color, or poor women; Western feminist ideas are seen as more evolved than the feminist scholarship of women elsewhere. And, it seems to me, an overwhelming, lazy stereotype that we don’t hear the voices of Muslim women because they just aren’t talking. Because they’re veiled and therefore silenced. Because they’re beaten down, because they’re perpetual victims, because they’re the most oppressed of the oppressed.
I think the frustration at this stereotype was what launched many of the criticisms of Amanda for posting this picture. Part of the issue, I think, was the question of, “What would have been so wrong if the picture did look like this?” Do covered women have less of a right to be at a political discussion than uncovered women? Why are we using an image of a woman in a burqa to indicate that that woman is silent, or to suggest that it would be completely ridiculous or ironic for her to be standing next to the President? In using the image of the woman in the burqa to make a political point, aren’t we ignoring the humanity of the woman underneath it?
Now, I happen to think that Amanda’s purpose wasn’t to do any of these things, and I think she did a nice job of explaining that her purpose was to point out hypocrisy, not to stereotype or silence Muslim women who wear certain kinds of clothing, whether that clothing is forced or chosen. She points out that the burqa was a necessary choice for calling out this kind of hypocrisy, because Western powers have long used women’s status in non-Western nations as an excuse to invade, colonize, and attack those countries, when in fact social conservatives here are just as hung up on women’s bodies as godbags in Afghanistan are. Sally puts it nicely in the comments at Pandagon:
Western countries have been using Muslim oppression of women as an excuse to invade and colonize and exploit Muslim countries for two hundred years. And the invasion, colonization and exploitation have not actually helped Muslim women. Furthermore, in times past, those non-helpful invasion and colonization projects have been supported by Western feminists in the name of liberating women. Those same Western feminists have used Muslim women as symbols of extreme oppression, but they’ve refused to listen to what Muslim women have had to say about their lives. Muslim women have been objects of Western feminism for a very, very long time, since the 19th century. They have generally not been subjects. They have generally been seen as people in need of rescue, not people with whom we should work to achieve their own goals and liberation on their own terms. This has had a bunch of bad effects, one of which is to associate feminism with colonialism and to make things really hard for Muslim feminists, who need to convince themselves and others that they can work for women’s liberation without automatically playing in to a racist, colonialist ideology.
And when you invoke the burqa, you invoke that whole history.
Yes. This was largely my problem with the Red Burqa campaign promoted by Tennessee Guerilla Women a while back (bloggers who, I should emphasize, I absolutely love and respect, despite my distaste for this particular campaign). It’s othering. It assumes that the woman beneath that burqa is voiceless and doesn’t have rights. It assumes she’s the ultimate victim.
The fact is, women around the world have done amazing thing while dressed in all kinds of ways. Is a hijab more debilitating than high heels? Why is a miniskirt more empowering than a chador? If we believe that a woman can wear a miniskirt or a bikini and feel empowered, as I have, not for displaying my body for consumption but for personally triumphing over my own body issues and recognizing that I have nothing to be ashamed of, why can’t it follow that a woman who isn’t required to wear a chador or a hijab or a burqa can do so with the purpose of proving that she can be covered and still be a powerful human being with opinions and accomplishments? I’ve met several feminist Muslims who wear the headscarf for that very reason — to make a statement, on behalf of covered women everywhere, that covering does not mean that those individuals are oppressed, silenced figures who should remain in the private sphere.
At the same time, we must point out oppression when it stares us in the face, and I don’t think anyone would disagree that requiring women to wear certain types of clothing is a bad thing. However, we cannot assume that because the laws are oppressive, women are universally silent and need us to save them on our terms. Being covered doesn’t make Muslim women less able to voice their own concerns and set their own agendas any more than wearing painful high heels and a push-up bra renders me unable to express my views. And yet, when we invoke the burqa or the hijab or the Taliban or Islam in general as the universal expample of patriarchy, we contribute to the silencing of Muslim women, and the harmful stereotypes that reproduce themselves within “oriental” contexts and serve to do further harm to women everywhere. When we tell Muslim women what they should be concerned about, instead of listening to them and allowing them to set their own human rights agendas, we silence them with our arrogance.
It seems to me that this frustration is what spurred the strong reactions to the picture Amanda posted, but I’ll add the caveat that I think Amanda’s purpose was clearly not de-humanizing, and indeed was highly effective at pointing out the right-wing hypocrisy on this one. I’m not sure the same can be said for the vast majority of Burqa/American Taliban/etc invocations.
And while I respect Ali‘s point of view, and I agree that liberal human rights ideology must not be entirely culturally subjective, I also think that when we’re coming up with solutions, we must trust in women to know what’s best for their own communities. My human rights perspective requires that people everywhere have the same basic rights to life, liberty, bodily autonomy, property, shelter, education, healthcare, etc, and that these rights are not contingent on any particular aspect of their identity other than their humanness. And so I agree with Ali that we cannot turn our heads to violations of these human rights, and that it is indeed up to progressives to maintain these standards.
But what is not progressive is to assume that Westerners are the only ones who have figured this out, or that our human rights standards are the end-all be-all of that scholarship. Other cultures have different understandings of human rights, of which rights are the most valuable, and of how to best achieve those rights. Those voices should not be silenced. We could learn a lot from them. And we cannot assume that being Western automatically gives us the higher moral or intellectual ground.
Where I differ from Ali, and from many feminists, then, is in the problem-identifying and the solution-finding phase. I really believe that these things have to be left up to women, and have to happen locally. That doesn’t bar Western feminists, and other people in privileged positions, from listening and using our position to pull other women up, too. It certainly means that we can call out behavior which is misogynist and which compromises women’s humanity. But it should at least make us self-conscious about attempting to speak for other women.