Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism (29 page)

1. 1. Salman Rushdie,
      Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991
      (New York: Granta, 1992), 396.
      

Part II
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TRANSFORMING FEMINISMS:

ISLAM, WOMEN, AND GENDER JUSTICE

Sa‘diyya Shaikh

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I will begin by making my positioning explicit. My name is Sa‘diyya Shaikh, an Arabic name. I am South African, born and raised solely on the continent of Africa, and my ancestry is Indian. I have, to date, never visited India although the first language I learned to speak was an Indian language called Gujarati and the staple diet of my family is still curry. I am most fluent and comfortable speaking the English language. I am a Muslim woman, whose existential, spiritual, and ethical universe is based on an Islamic worldview, a religion whose roots are to be found in seventh-century Arabia. The first time I ever visited the Middle East was on pilgrimage at the age of nineteen.

My coming of age was formulated within the socio-political context of apartheid South Africa. The aspect of my religious tradition that resonated most strongly in confronting this reality was the fact that Islam spoke to a humanity that transcended boundaries of race and that demanded human agency in the quest for social justice. In my confrontation with patriarchy in my social and cultural milieu, sometimes paraded under the guise of religion and tradition, it was this same social justice imperative that urged me to struggle with what exactly constituted Islam and the Islamic legacy – and what it means to be a gendered human being as well as a believer. My academic pursuit of Islamic studies is premised on a view of the integrity of the relationship between intellectual pursuits, social responsibility, and spiritual commitments.

By this extended introduction I am not only intending to situate my own ideological and personal positioning but also to make salient the notion of plurality and diversity encapsulated within the world of Islam, which encompasses

realities of people from varying socio-cultural and political realities. Therefore, my positioning is also an explicit rejection of those intellectual, political, and popular idioms that argue for a homogeneous religious civilization, a reductionist assumption that is most pervasively prevalent in depictions of Islam.

Within the diverse worlds of Islam gender issues have been indigenously engaged with, argued about, harmonized, problematized, synthesized, negotiated, and re-negotiated in varying ways throughout history. In this era there are Muslim women and men who find Islam to be a source of human well-being and profound social egalitarianism. There are also, however, Muslim women in many parts of the world who experience oppression and marginalization that is justified in the name of Islam. Currently, one can find Muslim leaders who hold forth endlessly about the fact that Islam accords women high status and liberation while simultaneously promoting hierarchical and discriminatory power relationships between men and women. There are, however, also Muslim leaders who contest sexism and resist the masculinist bias of inherited traditions, many of whom relentlessly strive on the path of gender justice in Islam.
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There are also some Muslim women who have internalized the patriarchal dimension of their heritage and become its proponents, while, at the other end of the continuum, there are those who have exited the religious tradition as a response to experiences of patriarchal realities. Moreover, different groups of Muslim women come from varying cultural and geographical backgrounds, so that Jordanian Muslim women are often grappling with very different realities from Indonesian or Senegalese Muslim women.
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The realities of gender dynamics in Islam are as complex and polymorphous as the realities of women in other religious, social, and political contexts.

Among those unwilling to compromise on the Islamic imperative to gender justice, there are some who define themselves as feminists, while there are others who do not sit comfortably with such an identification. Let me define at the outset what I understand by the term “feminism.” It includes a critical awareness of the structural marginalization of women in society and engaging in activities directed at transforming gender power relations in order to strive for a society that facilitates human wholeness for all based on principles of gender justice, human equality, and freedom from structures of oppression.
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However, the current debates on feminism, gender, and women’s rights in Islam are ideologically charged, since they are embedded in a history of larger civilizational polemics between the Islamic world and the West.
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Gender discourses in contemporary Islam are prefigured by the history of a political conflict between Islam and Christianity, the European colonial encounters in different parts of the Muslim world, and the nationalist responses by colonized peoples. The processes of globalization, in tandem with neo-colonial config- urations of power, currently pervade not only the concrete economic and socio- political spheres of most parts of the world but also the areas of knowledge production.
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From the perspective of many Muslims, Euro-American cultural hegemony remains coupled with a xenophobia directed at Islam and Muslims. This is reflected in the enduring legacy of problematic types of orientalist scholarship on Islam and, on the popular level, the continuing stereotyping of Islam as a violent, medieval, and, especially, misogynist religion. In many Muslim societies, gender issues have acquired a symbolic field that extends beyond simply redressing prevailing injustices, to the politics of cultural loyalty.
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American scholar Gisela Webb points out that one of the unfortunate consequences of misrepresentations of Muslims in the West is the creation of a siege mentality among many Muslims.
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This mindset reinforces a reactive and defensive posturing towards the West. Alternatively, in some parts of the Muslim world the overall ascendancy of Euro-American powers in an increasingly shrinking globe, together with a sense of economic and political frustration with local despotic governments that are sometimes financed by Western powers, also contributes to strongly anti-Western sentiment.

Akbar Ahmed suggests that Muslim religious leaders who adopt a blanket opposition to the West are “in danger of rejecting the essential features of Islam such as love of knowledge, egalitarianism and tolerance because these are visibly associated with the West.”
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Moreover, part of this siege mentality ironically contributes to an occidentalist view that perpetuates similar “othering” constructs relating to Western immorality, greed, and brute force. This type of dichotomous categorization of “Islam versus the West”
a` la
Samuel Huntington results in monolithic constructions that efface the complex nature of realities and multiple ethical discourses prevalent in both Muslim and Western societies.
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It also eclipses the reality that there are growing communities of Muslims in the West, many of whom are culturally Western as well as religiously Muslim. These contemporary socio-political dynamics have especially strong ramifications for discourses of gender and feminism in Islam.

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Many Muslims view contemporary Euro-American feminist approaches that reinforce reductionist views of Islam as a peculiarly sexist religion as part of the broader Western enterprise to discredit and misrepresent Islam. Ironically, many of these same Muslims also misrepresent feminism by stereotyping it with all that is considered negative and problematic in Western culture. Azza Karam, a contemporary Muslim scholar, summarizes these tensions in describing some of the difficulties in using feminist discourse in the Muslim world:

The term “feminism”. . . in post-colonial Arab Muslim societies is tainted, impure and heavily impregnated with stereotypes. Some of these stereotypes are that feminism basically stands for the enmity between men and women, as well as a call for immorality in the form of sexual

promiscuity for women . . . some religious personalities . . . have associated feminism with colonialist strategies to undermine the indigenous social and religious culture.
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Some Muslim scholars have reacted with blind defensiveness to this perceived Western feminist attack on Islam. In legitimately attempting to repudiate the unpalatable and inaccurate stereotypes of certain orientalist discourses, these Muslim scholars have unwittingly become equally reductionist by romanticizing the Muslim legacy as one that has unequivocally empowered Muslim women.
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This stance makes it increasingly difficult to approach the questions of gender relation in an honest manner, seeking to identify and redress realities of injustice.

Moreover, those Muslims who have invested in the maintenance of a patriarchy use the civilizational polemic with which Western feminism has been associated in order to discredit and malign Muslim women who are involved in feminist activity as agents of Western colonialism.
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These accusations are particular charged due to the legacy of imperial feminism, missionaries and other emissaries of the empires having justified their political attacks on Islam and Muslim cultures by suggesting that their colonial “civilizing mission” was also intended to free the poor oppressed women in Islam. The ideological hypocrisy of this colonial narrative is exemplified by the case of the British Consul General in Egypt, Lord Cromer, who in the late nineteenth century was the champion of Egyptian women’s unveiling while in his homeland, England, he was the President of the men’s league for opposing women’s suffrage.
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While this reflects some European men’s manipulation of Western feminist discourse in furthering the project of imperialism, many Western feminist women were also enmeshed in the colonial mindset as reflected in their interactions with women from colonized nations.

A particularly illustrative case is the nature of relationships between the Euro-American and Arab feminists in the International Alliance of Women (IAW), an international feminist organization.
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This group began as a Western suffragist alliance; in 1923 it expanded its focus to broader questions of women’s empowerment and invited “Eastern” feminists to participate. The ideological tensions between Eastern and Western feminists came to a head in 1939 when Western members of the organization registered protests and appeals for the release of a Czech Jewish member incarcerated by the Nazis, but refused to do so when a Palestinian member was imprisoned by the British.
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Arab women saw this as symptomatic of the double standards and ideological biases of Western feminists. For Arab women the limits of international feminism became apparent due to the “failure of western feminists to confront imperialism and its negative implications for democracy and feminist ideals.”
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Dominant strands of Western feminism were subject to extensive and continuing critique into the latter part of the twentieth century, not only by

Arab women but also from a spectrum of other women outside of the centers of white, Euro-American privilege.
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This body of criticism by various women, including African-American and Chicana women as well as women from the many parts of the Third World, sparked extensive debates that articulated some of the central problems with second-wave feminism well into the 1980s.
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Many Third World women have argued that while the genesis and historical development of Western feminism primarily reflected Eurocentric realities, Euro-American feminists regularly assumed that they could speak for the experiences of all women.
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Feminists from the Third World and African- American womanists argued that this presumption of a universal womanhood represented only the realities of a particular group of women, namely, First World, white, middle class women.
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Such discourses marginalized and eclipsed the realities of women with different experiences and who came from diverse contexts. Subsequently, many Western feminists, particularly from the 1980s onwards, have acknowledged their own positioning and have significantly responded to issues of pluralism, representation, and hegemony.
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However, I would argue that when it comes to issues of Islam and Muslim women, feminists more easily discard judicious analysis and reiterate negative stereotypes. Thus some Western feminists, who would otherwise be sensitized to questions of diversity, persist in making sweeping claims about Muslim women or Islam without engaging the necessary levels of complexity and specificity. Moreover, as I will illustrate, such Western discourses on Muslim women are predicated on unquestioned cultural and social assumptions that do not allow for the engagement of specific Muslim societies in their own terms. Thus I believe that some of the key critiques offered by feminists from the Third World continue to reflect the conceptual difficulties and ideological biases experienced by many groups of Muslims with regard to certain developments in Western feminism. I will explore two specific dimensions of a Third World feminist critique that apply to certain Western feminist discussions on Muslim women, particularly relating to questions of cultural hierarchy and representation.
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