BY MALEIHA MALIK
Muslim women welcome a debate about the status of women in
Islam. Intelligent, honest critique is an
invaluable source of ideas for Muslims as we begin the process of
reclaiming our religious and intellectual tradition. Muslim women also
welcome feminist alliances with other women in the task of challenging the
misuse of power by Muslim men – just as we can offer our own perspective
on both women’s advances and setbacks in the West.
But such public debate and alliances obviously don’t take
place in a vacuum but in a social, racial and political context. It would
be naive to imagine that the domestic debate about Islam – and Muslim
women in particular – can be hermetically sealed off from the politics of
the "war on terror", as the last couple of weeks have demonstrated. Polly
Toynbee was right to say on these pages that "women’s bodies have been the
battle flag of religions". But the significance of religious and cultural
symbols such as the veil is not immutable and static – they have a mixed
and changing social meaning. Muslim women who adopt the veil in Europe may
simultaneously be seeking to affirm their religious identity while being
determined to enter the public sphere as full and equal citizens. They are
often also trying to change the cultural and political meaning of the veil
in a contemporary context.
For some it may be linked to patriarchal pressure, for
others a symbol of identity and emancipation in a commodified and
patriarchal society – and for many a response to a religious vocation.
Feminist politics needs to be flexible and respond to these complexities.
And for Muslim women their religion and even their gender are not the only
or the most grievous focus of their oppression – their bodies have also
been, and continue to be, a battleground for European and US imperialism.
Lord Cromer, British consul general in Egypt in the late
19th century, famously justified British colonial rule by arguing that it
could liberate Egyptian women from their oppressive veils. Commenting on
French colonialism in Algeria in the 50s the writer, Frantz Fanon, noted:
"There is also in the European the crystallisation of an aggressiveness,
the strain of a kind of violence before the Algerian woman. Unveiling this
woman is revealing her beauty; it is baring her secret, breaking her
resistance (to colonial rule). There is in it the will to bring this woman
within his reach, to make her a possible object of possession."
When the US launched its war on terror in Afghanistan in
2001, George Bush glorified his aims by stating: "Because of our recent
military gains in much of Afghanistan, women are no longer imprisoned in
their homes… The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights
and dignity of women." The US social anthropologists, Saba Mahmood and
Charles Hirschkind, have noted that the relationship between the
neo-conservative Bush administration and some US feminists was reciprocal
and intimate. "By the time the war started, feminists like (Eleanor) Smeal
could be found cozily chatting with the general about their shared
enthusiasm for Operation Enduring Freedom and the possibility of women
pilots commandeering F-16s." By December 2001, 3,767 Afghans, including
women and children, were reported to have been killed by US bombs.
The "war on terror" moved to Iraq in 2003. Once again Bush
included concern for the rights of women as one of his war aims: "Respect
for women... can triumph in the Middle East and beyond," he told the UN in
2002. Four years later, as Iraq spirals into a violent abyss, women are
paying the highest human costs for foreign invasion – an ever increasing
number of victims of murder, rape and abduction. Female politicians in
Blair’s cabinet are falling over each other in their enthusiasm to protect
the rights of vulnerable Muslim women. Yet these same politicians voted to
launch aggressive war against Iraq. Muslim women listen in amazement when
these women, their "feminist sisters", are praised for their "bravery" in
speaking out so freely about protecting them from the veil when none of
them felt it necessary to resign their political office when it became
clear that illegal war had unleashed a tide of violence, killing vast
numbers of Iraqi women and children.
In offering support to Muslim women, all feminists need to
be strategic and prioritise the harm those women actually suffer. Toynbee,
female politicians and other feminists from the majority community would
do well to reconsider the disproportionate weight they are giving to
complex symbols such as the veil, which can undermine alliances around
more grievous harms such as war, violence, genuine patriarchal oppression
and poverty. By attacking the veil – as in the colonial past – they may
strengthen many Muslim women’s commitment to it and make it more difficult
for Muslims to have a much needed debate on women and Islam. Those
feminists who give well meaning lectures to Muslim women on what they
should think, say and wear are not in the end alone. There is a risk that
their powerful female voices will inadvertently sustain another political
discourse: the words and actions of an illustrious line of men who
continue to justify their imperial ambitions on the bodies, often dead
bodies, of Muslim women.
