Saving Muslim Women

Following are excerpts from two interviews conducted within last few years and collected in the volume “The Present as History” by Nermeen Shaikh (Columbia 2007). Would highly recommend this volume to all readers, especially those in the humanities and social sciences.

Lila Abu-Lughod

Lughod, pg. 144-5: “Many of us have noticed that suddenly, after 9/11 and the American response of war in Afghanistan, the hunger for information about Muslim women seems insatiable. My own experience of this was in the form of an avalanche of invitations to appear on news programs and at universities and colleges. On the one hand, I was pleased that my expertise was appreciated and that so many people wanted to know more about a subject I had spent twenty years studying. On the other hand, I was suspicious because it seemed that this desire to know about “women and Islam” was leading people away from the very issues one needed to examine in order to understand what had happened.

Those issues include the history of Afghanistan – with Soviet, US, Pakistani, and Saudi involvements; the dynamics of Islamist movements in the Middle East; the politics and economics of American support for repressive governments. The problem gets framed as one about another culture or religion. Plastering neat cultural icons like “the Muslim woman” over messier historical and political narratives doesn’t get you anywhere. What does this substitution accomplish? Why, one has to ask, didn’t people rush to ask about Guatemalan women, Vietnamese women (or Buddhist women), Palestinian women, or Bosnian women when trying to understand those conflicts? The problem gets framed as one about another culture or religion, and the blame for the problems in the world placed on Muslim men, now neatly branded as patriarchal….

“… I ask myself about the very strong appeal of this notion of “saving” Afghan women, a notion that justifies American intervention (according to the First Lady Laura Bush’s November 2001 radio address) and that dampens criticism of intervention by American and European feminists. It is easy to see through the hypocritical “feminism” of a Republican administration. More troubling for me are the attitudes of those who do genuinely care about women’s status. The problem, of course, with ideas of “saving” other women is that they depend on and reinforce a sense of superiority by Westerners.

When you save someone, you are saving them from something. You are also saving them to something. What violences are entailed in this transformation? And what presumptions are entailed in this transformation? And what presumptions are being made about the superiority of what you are saving them to? This is the arrogance that feminists need to question. The reason I brought up African American women, or working-class women in the United States, was that the smug and patronizing assumptions of this missionary rhetoric would be obvious if used at home, because we’ve become more politicized about problems of race and class. What would happen if white-middle class women today said they needed to save those poor African American women from the oppression of their men?”

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“The point about women’s veiling is of course too complicated to lay out here. But there were three reasons why I said it could not so simply be associated with lack of agency. First, “veiling” is not one thing across different parts of the Muslim world, or even among different social groups within particular regions. The variety is extraordinary, going from headscarves unself-consciously worn by young women in rural areas to the fuller forms of the very modern “Islamic dress” now being adopted by university women in the most elite fields, including medicine and engineering. Second, many of the women around the Muslim world who wear these different forms of cover describe this as a choice. We need to take their views seriously, even if not at face value. Beyond that, however, we need to ask some hard questions about what we actually mean when we use words like “agency” and “choice” when talking about human beings, always social beings always living in particular societies with culturally variable meanings of personhood. Do we not all work within social codes? What does the expression we often use here, “the tyranny of fashion,” suggest about agency in dress codes?

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“I think we need to recognize that even after “liberation” from the Taliban, Afghan women (and one can’t presume any uniformity of views even within this category) might want different things from what we (Westerners, of course also a diverse category) might want for them. What do we do about that? I don’t think we need simply to be cultural relativists, advocating respect for whatever goes on elsewhere and explaining it as “just their culture.” I‘ve already talked about the problem of “culture” explanations in my criticism of the focus on the category of “Muslim women.” And it should be recalled that Afghan or other Muslims’ “cultures” are just as much part of history and an interconnected world as ours are. What I think we need to do is to work hard to respect and recognize difference-as produces of different histories, as expressions of different circumstances, as manifestations of differently structured desires. We might still argue for justice for women, but consider that there might be different ideas about justice and that different women might want, or choose, different futures from what we envision as best. Among the most difficult things for American feminists to accept is that these futures might involve women in developing within a different religious tradition, or traditions, that don’t have as their primary ideal something called “freedom.”

Reports that came out of the Bonn peace conference in late November 2001 revealed that there were even differences among the few Afghan women feminists and activists present. Some, like the representative of the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) refused to be conciliatory to any notion of Muslim governance. But others looked to Iran as a country in which they could see women making significant gains within an Islamic framework – in part through an Islamically oriented feminist movement that is challenging injustices and reinterpreting the religious tradition. The situation in Iran is itself the subject of great debate within feminist circles, especially among Iranian feminists in the West. It is not clear whether and in what ways women have made gains, and whether the great increases in literacy, decreases in birthrates, presence of women in the professions and government, and a feminist flourishing in cultural fields like writing and filmmaking are because of or despite the establishment of a so-called Islamic Republic.

The concept of an Islamic feminism itself is also the subject of heated debate. Is it an oxymoron, or does it refer to a viable movement forged by women who want another way? Still, the representatives at the Bonn peace conference thought it was more realistic to look to the Iranian model than to a secular Western one if they wanted to have any appeal to local women and to have a chance of transforming women’s lives and gender relations from within.”

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Saba Mahmood

Saba Mahmood, Present as History, 148-153: “In my writing when I use the term “liberal” I am referring to liberalism as a tradition of political thought and philosophy with a distinct conception of the subject, ethics, and politics. The liberal tradition as it emerged over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth century in Europe is coincidental with development of capitalism and modern governance. Among the principles central to liberal political and moral philosophy that I address in my work on Islamism is the principle of liberty and freedom as an individual and political ethic. While the notion of freedom is valued in a number of premodern traditions, liberalisms comes to be primarily understood as an individual capacity to act autonomously in accord with one’s own desires and interests (interest here is largely defined in economic terms). Insomuch as autonomy is regarded as a “natural” human attribute, it presupposes a necessary antagonism between the individual and the social, and individual interests are understood to stand in opposition to community values and interest. The liberal maxim that the good life is necessarily a freely chosen one in which a person develops his unique capacities in accord with his “own will and interests” has now become the most dominant ethic of our age….

"The precepts of liberal political philosophy were introduced into non-Western societies (including Muslim societies) through colonial rule and an expanding system of global capitalist power (through institutions of law, governance, trade, and commerce) over the course of two centuries. Liberal presuppositions about politics and society have over time become an intrinsic part of the sensibilities and institutions of these societies and form an important resource for indigenous critiques of Western power and domination throughout the colonial and postcolonial period. It is precisely because many aspects of liberal discourse have become a part of the language of resistance to Western forms of power that I think it is important to attend to its hegemonic qualities, its normative assumptions, and the ways in which it remains peculiarly blind to other kinds of political and social projects and moral-ethical aspirations. Let me elaborate on this…

“A second example I want to give here of the hegemony liberalism commands in discourses of resistance is the prominence given to the ideal of individual freedom and autonomy within postcolonial feminist projects. One of the most cherished goals of postcolonial feminism-a movement aimed at improving the collective situation of “Third World women”- is to secure conditions under which women can live more autonomously and learn to distinguish between their “own desires” and those of the society, tradition, culture, or community. Despite the critiques leveled against Eurocentric feminism, it is quite common for postcolonial feminists to continue to reproduce many liberal assumptions, key among them the idea that the individual’s desires and interests stand in a relationship of opposition to the demands of tradition, society, and community. It is quite common, therefore, to hear that one of the failings of traditional societies is to subsume the individual within the collective (the family, the biradari, etc.), thereby extinguishing the opportunities for women to learn how to distinguish between their own desires and those of the society, the elders, the culture, and so on. But one might as to whether such an opposition between the individual and the social is universally valid: indeed, such an opposition hardly applies to how life is lived and experienced in Western liberal societies.

In my work I have tried to unpack the limits, prejudices, and blind spots that the adoption of liberal ideals and discourses has produced within the political imagination of postcolonial Muslim societies. Thus, for example, in my book Politics of Piety I have tried to problematize the liberal valorization of the value of autonomy and the concomitant ideal of freedom that animates contemporary feminist thought. In doing so, my aim is not to dismiss the utility of these ideals for women’s struggles, or to suggest that they are wrong, or to presuppose a better model of the relationship between the individual and the social. Rather my aim is to question the validity of these distinctions as universally valid and to urge feminists to challenge this rather narrow and parochial way of being human in the world. Some of the questions I am interested in exploring are: What are the different conceptions of the self that are now part of the postcolonial Muslim world that stand in tension with liberal conceptions of the self that are often upheld as more enlightened ways of being human in the world? Because liberalism does not map on to the geographic divide of the West and non-West (in other words, it is not a “cultural” trope) but commands a much broader set of allegiances, what sorts of mutations and genealogies of the self exist in our postcolonial world? What structures of power and authority, with different kinds of political imaginaries, do different conceptions of the subjective presuppose? And what desires, other than freedom, do people live by? What do we mean by freedom, from what, and toward what end? …

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“The remarks I made that you quote from were a product of the dissatisfaction I had come to feel with feminist analyses of the Islamic movements in particular and conservative religious movements in general. These analyses often present two supposedly different accounts of women’s participation in the Islamist movement. On the one hand, you have accounts in which feminist scholars portray Islamist women as the antithesis of all that feminism stands for, women who instrumentally appropriate feminist symbols, imagery and language, only to make these symbolic resources serve patriarchal ends and goals. On the other hand, there are monographs that desperately search for “Islamic feminism,” trying to unearth the feminist potential within Islamist women’s discourses even when this language is not a part of Islamist projects. These two accounts, in my opinion, are the mirror opposite of each other: the political and analytical worth of this movement is to be measured in terms of whether it is profeminist or antifeminist. What changes in this equation is the valuation of Islamism vis-à-vis feminism, but we learn little about the goals, projects, and practices of Islamism itself. It is seldom asked whether feminism is the relevant lens through which to analyze women’s participation in the Islamist movement: Are there other notions of what it means to be human in this world, competing conceptions of human flourishing and collective and individual good, whose logic does not map onto the ideals that feminism represents and advocates? How might these movements expand feminist politics and analytics beyond what this tradition already knows and values?

Feminism, as I discuss in my book, admittedly is a wide ranging tradition that encompasses socialist, liberal, radical, and other interpretations. But what is common to this tradition and indeed what gives it a certain analytical and political coherence, is the position that women are the subservient members of any society and it is the task of feminist scholars both to render this subservience visible within a given society and to suggest ways in which this subservience might be subverted and changed. While I consider both of these aspects of feminist scholarship to be a worthy enterprise, I also think that in order for feminism to be a vibrant and expansive tradition, it must expand its horizons to a consideration of projects, aspirations, and desires that do not reproduce its liberatory assumptions and telos- but indeed challenge it. In other words, if feminist analysis aspires to be more than a regurgitation of its moral superiority (which these days often translates into a simple denunciation of Islam’s abuses), then it must seriously contemplate the idea that it can learn something from nonliberal movements; that these movements might have something to teach feminists about what it means to be human in this world and to live in a variety of ways that do not map onto the logic of anti- or profeminist positions. Such a way of engaging nonliberal movements requires that we question the idea that all women, regardless of their historical and social location, are necessarily interested in expanding their freedoms, that they all seek to become autonomous individuals against the constraints of social and cultural norms.”

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“I think one of the reasons why the burqa-or the veil-took such center-stage in the feminist mobilization against the Taliban in the United States is due to the overdetermined status of the veil in Western history, particularly the colonial and Orientalist legacy that made the veil a symbol of Islam’s inferior status vis-à-vis “European civilization.” What Charles Hirschkind and I tried to point out [in “Feminism, the Taliban, and Politics of Counter-Insurgency”] is that American feminist preoccupations-along with the Western media’s-came at the expense of ignoring (or downplaying) the conditions of war and starvation that women were subjected to at that time in Afghanistan. Let me remind you here of the immense feminist mobilization we saw in American against the Taliban: it was led by the Feminist Majority whose broad-based campaign bore fruit as a wide array of popular women’s magazines (Such as Jane, Glamour, and Vogue) and television and radio shows honed in on the burqa as the primary symbol of Afghan’s women’s oppression. Mind you, this was before the events of September 11, 2001, when the Bush administration instrumentally used this vast feminist mobilization to justify its bombing of Afghanistan and the overthrow of the Taliban regime. At the time, there were other Afghan women’s organization that had also been trying to draw international attention to women’s plight under Taliban rule, but their efforts never seized the American imagination on the scale or in the manner that the Feminist Majority campaign did- with the burqa as its potent and singular symbol.

We need to recall here that when the Taliban came to power in 1995, the situation of Afghan women was already dire as a result of twenty years of war in which the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, had turned the region into an orgiastic field of violence. The United States alone poured over three billion dollars into Afghanistan, the largest covert operation in the U.S. history since the Second World War, to destabilize the Soviet occupation (with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the two most dictatorial regimes in the region, as partners in this project). It has been widely reported that the vast majority of the U.S. financial aid was given to the most extreme militant groups in Afghanistan with the understanding that “religious fanatics” would fight the godless communists better. When the Taliban came into power in 1995, they made the situation for urban women worse, but, as was reported even in the popular media at the time, women’s situation remained much the same in rural areas.

The Feminist Majority campaign, by virtue of focusing exclusively on the burqa and the Taliban regime, in effect ignored these other issues and the larger context that hand enabled the Taliban to come into power in the first place. In doing so, American liberal feminists overlooked the U.S. government’s culpability in promoting extremist groups like the Taliban and in creating the conditions of war and starvation to which women were particularly vulnerable. In the Feminist Majority campaign literature, there was hardly a mention of the fact that the United States had practically created the likes of the Afghan mujahideen (of which the Taliban were a product) or the brutal history of U.S. involvement in the region. The focus on the burqa made the Taliban issue sexy, it caught the attention of the popular media. Celebrities, who would not have been moved by accounts of poverty and starvation, were galvanized by the image of the burqa. The question we asked in this article was a simple one: Why were images of starving women and children, ravaged by twenty years of war, not as moving for Americans as the image of the burqa-clad women?

It was clear to us that what mobilized the sympathies of ordinary Americans was the shared judgment that the veil is the ultimate symbol of Muslim women’s oppression, which, once removed, would give Afghan women the freedom to do what they wanted. Now this judgment, as we argued, is not simply wrong but a fantasy, produced by a certain kind of imaginary that has an overdetermined reading of the veil. It does not take much intelligence to understand that Afghan women’s freedom depends not on an article of clothing but on the kinds of resources they have access to and the general social conditions in which they live: simply put, an unveiled starving woman is no better than a veiled starving woman. Furthermore, as has been proven over and over again in history, groups that are most devastated by conditions of war, militarization, and starvation are women, children, and the elderly since they are the most vulnerable members of a society and their access to the material resources of a community is limited. It was the silence of the feminist and the media campaign in American against this far more injurious form of victimization of women (enable by billions of dollars in U.S. financial and military aid to the region) that was absolutely astounding to us.

Given the campaign’s success, it was hard for us not to reach the conclusion that the preoccupation of liberal feminists and the Western media with the veil had more to do with the long-standing colonial fantasy to disrobe the Muslim woman than with an interest in securing her “liberation.” This is not a difficult deduction to make especially if one follows the events in Afghanistan since the ouster of the Taliban. When the American forces marched in, there were joyous celebratory articles and reports in the U.S. media about how the overthrow of the Taliban would result in Afghan women unveiling themselves, which in turn was represented as an act that would restore their freedoms and rights. Of course, subsequently, we learned that not all women wanted to unveil and that the custom of donning the burqa continued to be practiced in many areas of Afghanistan. More importantly, women’s situation became much worse than it was under the Taliban because of increased lawlessness and ethnic-tribal warfare, and the escalation of poverty and militarization in Afghanistan (numerous human rights groups have documented this). Yet none of these disturbing reports have galvanized the Feminist Majority, media celebrities, or popular media (all of whom rallied in support of the U.S. military campaign obscenely named “Operation Enduring Freedom”) to take up the cause of Afghan women.

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“… Is women’s adoption of regimes of dieting, exercising, and various body enhancement techniques in Euro-American societies simply an expression of their false consciousness or is one’s relationship to cultural values, its standards of sexual, physical, and personal worth, more complicated than the false consciousness thesis allows? The notion of false consciousness presumes an omniscient self-transparent consciousness that can step out of the fog of ideology to reveal the “true conditions” of one’s oppression and a pathway out of it. Such clairvoyance is crucially dependent upon a calculation of more and less enlightened beings, wherein the destiny of the latter is clearly to be determined by the former. As must be clear, my objection to such a formulation is both analytical and political.

I do not think that the concept of “choice” is very helpful here either, even though it is the term often used in debates around the veil-both by its champions and detractors (“I choose to wear it” versus “The veil is a cultural imposition”). Liberalism often formulates choice as a measure of freedom (societies that have “more choices” are supposed to have “more freedom” and those with fewer choices have less). Yet such a calculus must be clearly rejected precisely because of the ways in which choice has been rendered an instrument of domination in liberal capitalist societies. Not only does this liberal formulation resurrect the fiction of the autonomous sovereign subject, but it also blinds us to the powers and processes that produce such a subject. Clearly, neither the veil nor any other form of attire can be easily mapped onto the calculus of less-and-more choice (or less-and-more freedom) precisely because one’s relationship to a religious-cultural practice is far more implicated and complicated.”