Canada Archives Canada Published Heritage Direction Du Branch Patrimoine De I'edition

UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY Globalization and its Islamic Discontents: Postcolonialism, Women's Rights, and the Discourse of the Veil by Janis Lee A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS DEPARTMENT OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES CALGARY, ALBERTA AUGUST, 2008 © Janis Lee 2008 Library and Bibliotheque et 1*1 Archives Canada Archives Canada Published Heritage Direction du Branch Patrimoine de I'edition 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington Ottawa ON K1A0N4 Ottawa ON K1A0N4 Canada Canada Your file Votre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-44224-1 Our file Notre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-44224-1 NOTICE: AVIS: The author has granted a non L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive exclusive license allowing Library permettant a la Bibliotheque et Archives and Archives Canada to reproduce, Canada de reproduire, publier, archiver, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, sauvegarder, conserver, transmettre au public communicate to the public by par telecommunication ou par Plntemet, prefer, telecommunication or on the Internet, distribuer et vendre des theses partout dans loan, distribute and sell theses le monde, a des fins commerciales ou autres, worldwide, for commercial or non sur support microforme, papier, electronique commercial purposes, in microform, et/ou autres formats. paper, electronic and/or any other formats. The author retains copyright L'auteur conserve la propriete du droit d'auteur ownership and moral rights in et des droits moraux qui protege cette these. this thesis. Neither the thesis Ni la these ni des extraits substantiels de nor substantial extracts from it celle-ci ne doivent etre imprimes ou autrement may be printed or otherwise reproduits sans son autorisation. reproduced without the author's permission. In compliance with the Canadian Conformement a la loi canadienne Privacy Act some supporting sur la protection de la vie privee, forms may have been removed quelques formulaires secondaires from this thesis. ont ete enleves de cette these. While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires in the document page count, aient inclus dans la pagination, their removal does not represent il n'y aura aucun contenu manquant. any loss of content from the thesis. Canada Abstract The following thesis examines emergent discourses in the postcolonial context to investigate the ways in which feminist and postcolonial analyses have been applied to the study of women and Islam. It analyses Muslim feminist responses to two key issues—women's human rights and the practice of veiling—to determine how, and to what extent, they have been informed by postcolonial attitudes towards secularization and the imposition of hegemonic Western paradigms in Islamist environments. Through an investigation of these debates, it proposes that Muslim feminists' engagement with contentious elements of Islamist discourse can be interpreted as tools for mediating between themselves and prevailing social, political, and religious power structures in the islamist postcolonial context. It concludes that this engagement has effectively challenged the hegemony of the Western, liberal model of subjectivity by articulating a non-secular alternative to it. in Acknowledgments I would like to thank the faculty and staff of the University of Calgary Department of Religious Studies for their invaluable assistance during the writing of this thesis. I am particularly indebted to Dr. Morny Joy for her input and encouragement. I am also grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Alberta Advanced Education and Technology Scholarship Program, the University of Calgary Faculty of Graduate Studies, the Department of Religious Studies, the Safiya Fathi Graduate Scholarship, and the Colleen Griffin Memorial Scholarship for their generous financial support, without which this project would not have been possible. Finally, I would like to thank my family and friends, who have taught me more than these pages can hold. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Approval page ii Abstract Hi Acknowledgements iv Table of Contents v INTRODUCTION 1 Outline of analysis and methodology 4 CHAPTER 1: Orientalism, gender, and postcolonial discourse 10 Edward Said and the development of Orientalism 11 Feminism and Orientalism 13 Western women's agency and the limits of the Orientalist paradigm 23 Islam in postcolonial discourse 29 CHAPTER 2: Women's rights and the veil 35 Muslim rights versus human rights 36 Islamic feminist responses: new interpretive strategies 42 Hijab in the rights debate 52 The veil's new symbolism 58 CHAPTER 3: Secularism, Islam, and the universal subject 65 Accounting for Islamist women 66 The piety movement in Egypt 73 Secularism and the "new" Orientalism 81 The veil debate reprised 89 v CONCLUSION 94 Bibliography 101 VI 1 Introduction The twin phenomena of globalization and modernization have elicited a series of discordant responses, especially from women within Islam. These trends and the challenges they present are important concerns both for those struggling with their effects, and for those who want to better understand reactions and responses to them. Increasingly, scholars are trying to frame their inquiries into these issues in terms of how they are experienced by the people they immediately affect. When studying Third World environments, this has led to the conscientious attempt not to impose Western categories and concepts on non-Western cultures, relying instead on more particularized investigations to determine how dominant power structures are locally created and maintained. In light of this, historical issues such as colonialism and, more recently, economic and cultural imperialism, have had a significant impact on discourses surrounding religion and the role of women. Incorporating postcolonial perspectives into the study of women and Islam is one of the means by which contemporary analyses have articulated this more contextual approach.1 1 The use of terms such as "Western" and "Third Word" to demarcate geographical and cultural difference has become a point of contention in recent scholarship (see Chandra Talpade Mohanty, '"Under Western Eyes' Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28:2 (Winter 2003)). Mohanty emphasizes that, by moving away from strictly geographical binaries, categories such as "North/South" or "One- Third/Two-Thirds Worlds" better represent the political and economic disparities between the "haves" and the "have-nots" under the proliferation of global capitalism. However, she also notes that the latter terminology obviates "a history of colonization that the terms Western/Third World draw attention to" (506). Because the effects of colonialism and postcolonialism are central to what follows, I have chosen to use "Western" and "Third World" to emphasize their role in feminist scholarship as it relates to the study of Islam and gender. 2 The discursive utility of postcolonial criticism lies in its ability to disrupt the authority of dominant narratives that posit an asymmetrical relationship of power between different cultures and peoples. In describing the contours and purposes of postcolonialism, Homi K. Bhabha maintains that it: bears witness to the unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation involved in the contest for political and social authority within the modern world order. Postcolonial perspectives ... intervene in those ideological discourses of modernity that attempt to give a hegemonic 'normality' to the uneven development and the differential, often disadvantaged, histories of nations, races, communities, peoples. They formulate their critical revisions around issues of cultural difference, social authority, and political discrimination in order to reveal the antagonistic and ambivalent moments within the 'rationalizations' of modernity.2 Modern colonialist language and attitudes, made explicit in the discourse of Orientalism, tended to locate non-Western persons and their experiences at the bottom of a hierarchy dividing the colonizer from the colonized. This served to define and uphold the hegemony of the Western subject's imperialist and humanist claims to authority and legitimacy.3 In the case of non-Western women, this polarizing tendency moved them to the periphery of "otherness" on two levels, the first based on gender and the second on geography. Consequently, feminist postcolonial perspectives have sought to address how these same "forces of cultural representation" have impacted the depiction of women outside of the Western context. 2 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 245-246. 3 Meyda YeQenogiu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 3 The rise of conservative and fundamental religious groups has added another dimension to these discussions. Early feminist scholarship criticized Western social paradigms rooted in gender-based inequality for marginalizing women and/or discriminating against them. In challenging the reductionism of treating the male subject as normative, feminism also laid the groundwork for the incorporation of gender-focused methodologies into a variety of humanities and social science disciplines, including religious studies. However the exportation of feminist critiques to Islamic societies has been controversial, raising the question of the applicability of Western values and models in non-Western

Load more