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

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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 environments.4

As indigenous material from Third World Muslim writers and critics has become more readily accessible, it has reoriented the way in which Western scholars approach critiques of both Islamist5 movements and the status of Muslim women.

As a result, the need to understand the religious fundamentalist impulse from a contextualized perspective has become increasingly apparent.

Applying an interdisciplinary approach that combines resources from religious studies, gender studies, and postcolonial theory, this thesis examines these trends through emergent feminist discourses in the Islamist postcolonial

4 Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 5 Following current scholarly trends, I will use the terms "Islamism" and "Islamist" in what follows to refer to groups and individuals that have traditionally been combined under the term "Islamic fundamentalism." The former, more specific terminology is intended to reflect the various movements' conscientiously political and legal, as well as religious, dimensions. 4 context.6 It critically engages 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. Through an analysis of Western and Third World responses to these issues, it will demonstrate how the discursive marginalization of Islamic women has continued in the era of modernization and globalization. By exposing the new model of Orientalism as a product of the secular/religious divide, it will also show how this model reiterates colonialist assumptions of

Western authority and power. Finally, it will propose that Muslim feminist responses to women's rights and the veil are effectively challenging, and constructing an alternative to, the Western liberal model of subjectivity.

Outline of analysis and methodology

Due to its interdisciplinary nature, the analysis that follows draws on a substantial body of theoretical and empirical material from a number of research fields. These include religious fundamentalism and its relationship to the status and treatment of women; postcolonial and feminist theory; debates surrounding women's human rights in the Islamic context; the veil as an ambiguous symbol in discourses of the hijab7; and the construction of the subject in discourses of secularism and modernity.

6 While I recognize that the influence of Islamic traditions and doctrines is not limited to those nations subjected to colonial rule, the current analysis focuses on former European colonies in which prominent Islamist movements have emerged following independence. 7 The term "hijab" is used here as a general reference to covering practices used by Muslim women. When referring to an article of clothing, the generic term "veil" will be employed; in cases 5

In terms of the study of religious fundamentalism generally, much of the existing scholarship supports a reading of it as a modern phenomenon responding to the particular challenges of modernity. The editors of the

Fundamentalism Project have demonstrated the tendency of fundamentalist movements to develop as reactionary responses to political and cultural realities by relying on religion as a primary source of identity.8 While the Project's research does not specifically address the issue of gender, feminist scholars have persuasively argued that the fundamentalist articulation of identity is intimately connected with the control and "othering" of women. Postcolonial critics have in turn emphasized the need to recognize how the concept of gender is constructed and applied in terms of issues of race, ethnicity, and class.

Separately and together, these scholarly trends have reinscribed the importance of contextualization in order to account for how particular power structures— especially those that marginalize women—are manifested and maintained.

As a result, feminism and postcolonialism have provided instrumental theoretical guidelines for understanding positions on both sides of the rights and veil debates. Proponents of universal women's rights in the Islamist context have been divided, largely based on the problematic tendency of the rights discourse to reinscribe Western values and ideas. Wary of the dangers of reviving

Orientalist models of representation, Muslim feminists who advocate the where a particular type of veil is used, this will be referred to by the name it is given in that context. 8 Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, "The Fundamentalism Project: A User's Guide," in Fundamentalisms Observed, ed. Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), vii-xiii. 6 universal rights paradigm have grounded their claims for equality within the

Islamic tradition. Similarly, discourses surrounding the veil have pointed to its ambiguous signification to question the colonialist interpretation of the veil as a symbol of Muslim women's subordination. Instead, recent scholarship has marked the conscientious appropriation of the veil as a source of Identity by

Islamist women to illustrate how a complex set of values and multivalent constructions are embedded in the veil's use as a symbol of both oppression and resistance for Muslim women.

Finally, while the social construction of the subject was a prominent theme in early postmodern and poststructural criticism, issues surrounding the contested authority of secularism as the basis for subjectivity have come to the forefront in the postcolonial context. As an element in the larger project of modernity, secularism has been challenged as a Western discursive construct that has limited applicability in non-Western settings. From a religious perspective, the emergence of Islamic revival movements has challenged the normative liberal account of the autonomous agent by showing how the religious actor is essentialized within the discursive framework of secular modernity.

Aiming as it does to de-centre the hegemony of Western discourses by contextualizing the study of Muslim women within Islam, the methodology employed in what follows is broadly poststructuralist. That is, it takes its cue from a reading of difference that "juxtapose[s] the alternatives of assimilation, separatism and multiculturalism in the context of globalization" to ask, "what are the differences we want to hold on to in an increasingly homogenized world? By examining how meaning is generated in and through the notion of difference— specifically in the context of feminist and postcolonial criticism—a poststructural approach problematizes assumptions of superiority/inferiority that have privileged

Western interpretations of what constitute normative models of behaviour and value. This provides a useful foundation for analysis, allowing for the articulation of legitimate alternatives to dominant universal modes of discourse. Because globalization has been accused of favouring Western interests, values, and norms,10 the investigation of difference within this context is also implicitly connected to notions of identity and power. According to Michel Foucault, power is "a strategic relation of force that permeates life and is productive of new forms of desires, objects, relations, and discourses."11 Understood in this way, power permeates all social relations such that the individual is constantly negotiating discursive instruments of regulation and control. The subject, then, only emerges out of this continual process of negotiation. Postcolonial criticism can therefore illuminate the particular discursive mechanisms that tend to evoke resistance in the non-Western context.

Applying these approaches, Chapter One will outline the historical development of Orientalism as a Western scholarly endeavour. It will assess

9 Catherine Belsey, "Poststructuralism," in The Routledge Companion to Critical Theory, ed. Simon Malpas and Paul Wake (London: Routledge, 2006), 53. 10 Paul Walton, "Globalization," in The Routledge Companion to Critical Theory, ed. Simon Malpas and Paul Wake (London: Routledge, 2006), 195. 11 Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 17. 8 postcolonial criticisms of Orientalism, including those of feminist writers who reworked early postcolonial theory to reflect feminist concerns with the depiction and status of non-Western women. In order to elucidate the historical development of the Middle Eastern woman as the essentialized "other," it will examine how this representation is achieved through the confluence of sexual and cultural modes of differentiation that reinforce the stereotypical model of her as a passive rather than active subject of discourse.

Chapter Two will instantiate this theoretical background in terms of two closely related debates that are current in the Islamist context, beginning with the issue of women's human rights. It will demonstrate how Islamic feminists, sensitive to criticisms of women's rights as a Western imposition, have attempted to develop an indigenous model that mediates between universal and Islamic understandings of how rights are construed. A similar discursive framework will then be brought to bear on the debate surrounding the veil, examining its differential appropriation in colonial and postcolonial discourses. This will reveal the veil's ambivalent signification as both a symbol of oppression and empowerment, and the necessity for contextualized investigations that avoid reiterating the reductive assumptions of Orientalism.

Chapter Three will then revisit in more substantive detail the Issues of secularism and modernity to draw conclusions regarding the viability of the

Western liberal notion of the subject as a necessary condition for the exercise of agency. It will critically assess the secular/religious divide in Western-based 9 discourses of power to argue that this distinction is inherently problematic for a contextualized understanding of Muslim women's religious action in an Islamist framework. My contention will be that a new form of Orientalism privileges the secular model of subjectivity, and underscores the failure of current signifying strategies to account for the agency of the religious actor. 10

Chapter 1: Orientalism, gender, and postcolonial discourse

The lingering effects of colonialism have significantly impacted cultural

and feminist discourses that have emerged from Third World contexts, as well as the work of Western scholars seeking to develop a better understanding of the

unique dimensions of such discourses. Together, these investigations have created a body of material that approaches issues of gender and race from

contextualized perspectives that problematize the universal projection of Western categories and labels. Instead, they rely on particularized investigations of the ways dominant power structures are created and maintained, socially and

historically, in postcolonial environments. While there is some debate as to the discursive value of the term "postcolonial," due to its potentially essentializing

effects when applied across the range of cultures and countries that were

subjected to European colonial rule,1 there is a broad category of scholarship that falls under this heading. As a whole, it addresses a common set of theoretical and methodological issues, especially as they apply to the articulation

and propagation of Western hegemonic subjectivity and its concordant

rationalization of unequal power relations. Within this larger framework, discourses pertaining to the status and depiction of women and religion have emerged as focal points of critical analysis. Examining the origins of colonial constructions of the Orient, and of the image of the Oriental woman, in tandem

1 Meyda YegjenoQIu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1998), 38. 11 with an analysis of postcolonial and feminist responses to these constructions, can elucidate how the colonial legacy continues to resonate in contemporary discourses surrounding women and Islam.

Edward Said and the development of Orientalism

In his pioneering study of Orientalism, Edward Said contends that the relationship between the West and the Orient was determined during the colonial era through an asymmetrical and hierarchical construction of power. He describes how nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Orientalist discourse treated the Orient as an object of knowledge, demarcating it according to its geographical and cultural discontinuity with Western Europe. In this scheme, the

West assumed an unambiguous position of superiority, predominantly due to "an assumption ... that the Orient and everything in it was, if not patently inferior to, then in need of corrective study by the West."2 Said argues that such discourse was not benignly descriptive, but constituted an evaluative judgment that discursively created the "Orient" as an object of study. Using Michel Foucault's conception of the knowledge/power matrix, he demonstrates how Western scholars produced a complex representation that "is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world."3 The ideological consequence of this discursive construction was a justification of the

2 Edward Said, Orientalism 2&" Anniversary Edition (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 40-41. 3 Ibid., 12. exercise of power in the West's colonial projects and a corresponding devaluation of the Orient according to its objective status:

Knowledge means rising above immediacy, beyond self, into the foreign and distant. The object of such knowledge is inherently vulnerable to scrutiny; this object is a "fact" which ... is fundamentally, even ontologically stable. To have such knowledge of such a thing is to dominate it, to have authority over it. And authority here means for "us" to deny autonomy to "it"—the Oriental country—since we know it and it exists, in a sense, as we know it.4

Said argues that the image of the Orient "as we know it" is inherently self- referential, built upon a series of recurring citations in Orientalist scholarship that coalesce into a timeless and static image of the East. This establishes the descriptive parameters of the Orient, and underscores its creation as a discursive category that relies on the language and logic of Orientalism for its legitimacy:

[T]he Orient ("out there" towards the East) is corrected, even penalized, for lying outside the boundaries of European society, "our" world; the Orient is thus Orientalized, a process that not only marks the Orient as the province of the Orientalist but also forces the uninitiated Western reader to accept Orientalist codifications ... as the true Orient. Truth, in short, becomes a function of learned judgment, not of the material itself, which in time seems to owe its very existence to the Orientalist.5

The colonizer/colonized paradigm that emerges from this construction is inherently oppositional, casting the Orient as the West's "other" according to a set of binary descriptors embedded in essentializing characteristics. The Orient is

4 Ibid., 32. 5 Ibid., 67. 13 reductively depicted as exotic, sensual, immoral, and heathen while the West, in contrast, is familiar, rational, just, and Christian. These are not merely descriptive categories, but the principles sustaining a Western attitude of benevolent paternalism toward colonized countries and peoples. The Orient is on display- geographically, culturally, and epistemologically—for Western interest, consumption, and improvement. According to Said, then, Orientalism is an ontological project; the Orientalist image of the East is the product of rather than the foundation for Western knowledge. It does not refer to a "real" Orient, but instead "the Orient, the Oriental, and his world" are all created in and through

Orientalism's dominating discursive framework.6

Feminism and Orientalism

Said's work has been foundational in establishing the parameters of postcolonial analysis, but feminist critics have noted its failure to substantively engage discourses of gender and their role in the colonial project. Although he describes Orientalism as encouraging "a peculiarly (not to say invidiously) male conception of the world," in which "women are usually the creatures of a male power-fantasy,"7 Said motions toward but effectively elides any notion of a gendered construction of the Orient.8 Reina Lewis points out that, "for Said, in

6 Ibid., 40. 7 Ibid., 207. 8 Ibid., 188. Said is not unaware of this gap in his study. He remarks that, "an almost uniform association between the Orient and sex [is] a remarkably persistent motif in Western attitudes to the Orient," but he then goes on to admit that this rhetorical connection, "is not the province of my analysis here, alas, despite its frequently noted appearance." He thus manages to raise the question of gender while simultaneously refusing to engage it. Orientalism at least, Orientalism is a homogeneous discourse enunciated by a colonial subject that is unified, intentional and irredeemably male ... gender occurs only as a metaphor for the negative characterization of the Orientalized

Other as 'feminine' or in a single reference to a woman writer."9 To counter this lacuna in Said's work, Lewis conducts a detailed investigation of the intersection of gender and colonialism in Western women's cultural products. Tracing the incorporation of Orientalist models of representation in nineteenth-century women's visual arts and literature, she attempts to locate women as active participants in the formation and dissemination of Orientalist discourse.

Drawing attention to the structural roles of sexual and racial difference in the development of colonial subject positions, Lewis argues that shifting notions of race, nation, and gender produced the necessary conditions for the emergence of Western women's cultural agency. Rather than relegating women to the secondary role of substantiating a masculinist version of Orientalist ideology, Lewis points to a space in colonial discourse where women could establish alternative voices to reflect a position of female subjectivity. Because of their limited access to the implicitly male position of the post-Enlightenment subject, Western women appropriated the Orientalist model and its themes,

"[displacing] onto the feminized colonial other... forms of gendered exploitation now unacceptable at home."10 In this way, the Oriental woman became the

9 Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation (London: Routledge, 1996), 17-18. 10 Ibid., 27. 15 unmediated "other" in Western women's self-representations, simultaneously modifying and extending Orientalist discourse to create a racialized version of female subjectivity.

Rana Kabbani similarly maintains that a vital role was played by both racial and gendered stereotypes in the development of the colonialist worldview.11 Echoing Said, she argues that these images served as a form of justification or apology for the colonial effort. The negative projection of the East as the antithesis of the West extended an antagonistic tendency with roots in the medieval Crusades and the confrontation between Christianity and Islam. This discursive discontinuity between Orient and Occident was manifest on a variety of levels, from cultural and religious to political and military. The resultant image of the Orient served to reinforce its alien (and inferior) status and thereby validate the "civilizing" nature of imperialism. Using reason, science, and a linear, teleological view of history as the foundations for a hierarchical and evolutionary scale of human social development, the West rationalized its colonial efforts as

"civilizing missions." In this endeavour, it was supported by early anthropological writings, such as those of Herbert Spencer, which sought to rank religions and cultures according to a scale of evolutionary development.12 These works reinscribed the idea of the European male as the epitome of civilization, relegating non-white, non-Christian cultures to a lower, even "barbaric" level:

11 Rana Kabbani, Europe's Myths of the Orient: Devise and Rule (London: Macmillan Press, 1986), 4. 12 Garry W. Trompf, "Spencer, Herbert," in Encyclopedia of Religion, Vol. 13 2nd Edition, ed. Lindsay Jones (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2005), 8678-8679. 16

nineteenth-century anthropology ... was inextricably linked to the functioning of empire. Indeed, there can be no dispute that it emerged as a distinctive discipline at the beginning of the colonial era, that it became a flourishing academic profession toward its close, and that throughout its history its efforts were chiefly devoted to a description and analysis—carried out by Europeans, for a European audience—of non-European societies dominated by the West. It was the colonial cataloguing of goods; the anchoring of imperial possessions into discourse.13

Kabbani identifies two themes that underscored this colonialist construction: the East as a place of lascivious sensuality, and its depiction as inherently violent. While the former contributed to an eroticized representation of Oriental women, the latter stereotyped Oriental men as cruel masters and despots. The combination of these tendencies elicited the gendered otherness of the Oriental woman through the projection of European, and especially Victorian, male sexual fantasies, creating an Eastern woman who "fulfilled the longings of the Western imagination."15 In both literature and art, she was portrayed as exotic and erotic, a passive body objectified by Western male desire. The more general eroticization of the East noted by Said found symbolic resonance here, but when applied to women, this tendency was inherently ambivalent. The Oriental woman became both a sexual victim and a scheming seductress. Oriental men, too, were essentialized based on their relationships to women, portrayed as "captors who hold women in their avaricious grasp, who use them as chattels, as trading-

13 Kabbani, Europe's Myths of the Orient, 62. 14 Ibid., 6. 15 Ibid., 22. 16 Ibid., 26. 17 goods, with little reverence for them as human beings."17 This distinguished

Oriental men from their male European counterparts, simultaneously promoting the stereotype of the Oriental woman as a victim who needed to be saved. By depicting her as the male European's "colonial acquisition, but one that he pretended enjoyed his domination,"18 it reinforced the fantasy of the Western male as a romantic hero upon whom the Eastern woman is emotionally dependent for salvation. In its racial and sexual bias, this reductive mode of viewing Oriental women formed the foundation for the dual perception of the

Orient as "a sexual domain" and as "a domain to be colonized."19 Within the gendered construct, both aspirations were rationalized.

Kabbani's analysis shares much with the film critique developed in Laura

Mulvey's influential 1975 article, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," in which she introduces the notion of the "male gaze." Using psychoanalytic theory,

Mulvey postulates that the male gaze is operative in visual arts created by male artists explicitly for a male audience, reflecting tendencies towards projection and the sexual objectification of women. This critique has subsequently been adapted and applied to non-visual media, including textual material produced according to same criteria.20 Kabbani's analysis suggests that European literature from the colonial era falls under such a category. Through its deliberate construction of the Oriental woman as the eroticized "other," it can be read as an early, textual

17 Ibid., 78. 18 Ibid., 81. 19 Ibid., 59. 20 Lewis, Gendering Orientalism, 163. 18 example of the male gaze and its tendency toward the objectificatlon of women's bodies as a location for the projection of heterosexual male desire. By investigating the discursive function of gender in Orientalism, Kabbani demonstrates how the physically essentialized image of the Oriental woman is an object par excellence. Her very existence is contingent and contextual. In the absence of the male desire that creates her, she has no being—she exists solely as an artificial, reductionist construct in a Western male fantasy. In the same way, then, that Said describes Orientalism's role in the creation of the Orient,

Kabbani makes explicit its tendency to create the Oriental woman. She describes the European image of the Orient as "hushed into silence by its own mysteries, incapable of self-expression, mute until the Western observer lends it his voice."21 But mute, too, is the Oriental woman. As an object of knowledge, she has no voice and her body, her very physicality, is substituted to speak for her.

Meyda Yegenoglu also argues that fantasy, desire, and a subjective gaze are key elements in the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, however she positions her analysis in a deconstructive framework in order to critique the hegemony of the Western subject's claim to self-certainty, authority, and value.22 Yegenoglu maintains that the creation of the "other" in colonial discourse is the foundation for the development of the West's subjectivity: "The

'other' is not what the subject distinguishes itself from, nor the beyond of an

21 Ibid., 73. 22 YegenoQIu, Colonial Fantasies, 3. 19 absolute limit which the subject cannot pass, but the necessary possibility that makes the subject possible."23 Following Said, she holds that,

the 'truth,' 'identity,' or 'reality' of the Orient is not something that stands in an external relationship to the discourse of Orientalism and something against which we can measure the 'truthfulness' of representations ... both the category of the Orient as well as the declaration of its exteriority to discourse is constituted by the very discourse of Orientalism as the founding principle of its claim to legitimacy.24

The West creates for itself a position of authority through the act of discursively producing an "other" against which it can establish its sovereignty—there is no

"other" except in the sense that it is other-than-the-West. This ability to point to and name an "other" against which to define its dominant position validates the

West's hegemonic status as author and cultural subject of international discourse. It reflects an effect of a specific formation of power, one in which the

Orient becomes "a textual referent which is always-already entangled with its representation, always articulated within a political field of signification."25

Yegenoglu is acutely conscious of the need to address images of women and sexuality as more than merely a "sub-domain" of Orientalist discourse. Like

Kabbani, she picks up the gender debate where Said leaves off, maintaining that general Orientalist representations of otherness are achieved on the basis of inherently sexual, as well as cultural modes of differentiation. By deploying the notion of the "Western gaze," Ye§eno§lu emphasizes the relationship between

23 Ibid., 9. 24 Ibid., 16. 25 Ibid., 21-22. 20 the colonial subject's desire to dominate and his desire to see. To illustrate this, she describes the image of the veil as the principal gendered signifier in the creation of the colonialist image of both the Orient and of Oriental women:

The veil attracts the eye, and forces one to think, to speculate about what is behind it. It is often represented as some kind of mask, hiding the woman.... It is through the inscription of the veil as a mask that the Oriental woman is turned into an enigma. Such a discursive construction incites the presumption that the real nature of these women is concealed, their truth is disguised and they appear in a false, deceptive manner. They are therefore other than they appear to be.26

Enlightenment notions of modernity and knowledge instantiate a form of institutionalized power based on availability and transparency, and by obstructing the unimpeded gaze, the veil both reinforces and resists Western visual appropriation. Not only does the veil hide the woman who wears it, it also symbolically hides the "real" Orient and impedes access to it by Western knowledge and apprehension. It conceals "every single Oriental thing that the

Western subject wants to gaze at and possess; it stands in the way of his desire for transparency and penetration."27 The desire to remove the veil thus becomes the desire to reveal all that is hidden, not merely about the woman but about the

Orient itself. The discursive effects of this are unambiguously focused on gender, equating "the nature of femininity and the nature of the Orient [to position] the

Orientalist/Western colonial subject as masculine: the other culture is always like

Ibid., 44. Ibid., 48. 21 the other sex."28 The threat of the veil, however, is its possibility of allowing the woman to see without being seen. If she is able to return the look, to gaze back, then she loses her status as the object of knowledge and desire and he, in turn, loses his status as full subject through the potential displacement of the surveillant eye/I. Objectification and "feminization," then, work in complementary fashion to create and uphold the authority of Western male subjectivity.

Yegenoglu also points to an affinity of purpose between colonialist and modernist discourses. Following Gayatri Spivak, she maintains that imperialism and humanism share an emphasis on the sovereign subject's "status of authorship, authority and legitimacy.'*29 The distinction created by early anthropological work between "civilized" and "barbarian" cultures is articulated through a chronological ordering of history that temporalizes cultures based on the extent to which they do (or more accurately, do not) reflect the norm of development typified by the West. In keeping with the oppositional binaries of

Orientalist thinking, non-Western traditions are thus perceived as statically monolithic in contrast to Western progressivism. Said, too, recognizes this trend in Orientalist discourse, identifying it as the source of the Western view of the

Orient as a "passive reactor" merely responding to Western cultural, political, and social advances.30 But Yegenoglu notes a prominent level of complicity in this depiction between Western feminist and Orientalist projects. By co-opting the

Ibid., 56. Ibid., 95. Said, Orientalism, 108-109. nascent language of feminism, women's oppressed status was claimed as indicative of both Oriental cultures' backwardness and their need to abandon the cultural (specifically religious) traditions that were taken to embody practices and beliefs oppressive to women.31 In terms of the veil, a Western feminist presumption of "the naturalness of not-to-be-veiled ... is used as the universal norm to yield Muslim women as a knowable and comprehensible entity for the

West."32 Leila Ahmed succinctly captures this dual colonialist and feminist criticism, along with its inherent irony:

Even as the Victorian male establishment devised theories to contest the claims of feminism, and derided and rejected the ideas of feminism and the notion of men's oppressing women with respect to itself, it captured the language of feminism and redirected it, in the service of colonialism, toward Other men and the cultures of Other men. It was here and in the combining of the languages of colonialism and feminism that the fusion between the issues of women and culture was created. More exactly, what was created was the fusion between the issues of women, their oppression, and the cultures of Other men.33

As a result, the signifiers used by Enlightenment humanism—progress, modernization, and universalism—function in the same way as the Oriental signifier of the veil to legitimize the civilizing nature of the colonial effort, reinstating "the metonymic association between the Orient and its women."34

YegenoQIu, Colonial Fantasies, 98. 32 Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 115. 33 Ibid., 151. 34 Ibid., 99. Western women's agency and the limits of the Orientalist paradigm

Just as Western (male) individual and cultural subjectivity have their roots in the discursive Orientalist construction of an "other" against which they can establish the authority of their subject positions, postcolonial critiques such as these have revealed how Western feminism similarly supports a feminist subjectivity by representing the Oriental woman as the "other" of the Western woman. In her study of contemporary biographies of Muslim women, Gillian

Whitlock argues that the image of the passive female Third World subject

"enables and sustains the discursive self-representation of Western women as secular, liberated, individual agents."36 This process of subjective construction is implicitly intertwined with the creation of a category of agency that relies on the same oppositional definitions of "civilized" and "barbaric" previously identified as operative in Orientalist discourse.

In the same way that the West culturally constructed itself as superior to the East, Western women distinguished themselves from Oriental women to assert a position of dominance and authority. Yegenoglu notes that, "what is at stake in the unequivocal acceptance of Western feminists' lives and achievements as democratic, advanced, emancipated, in short as the norm, is the positing of a universal subject status for themselves ... [T]he declaration of an emancipated status for the Western woman is contingent upon the representations of the Oriental woman as her devalued Other and this enables

35 Gillian Whitlock, "The Skin of the Burqa: Recent Life Narratives from Afghanistan," Biography 28:1 (Winter 2005): 57. 24

Western woman to identify and preserve the boundaries of self for herself."36 The dynamics of Orientalist discursive power are evident here, not because difference is discriminated against, rather because the very notion of difference is the product of discriminatory assumptions inherent in the postulation of a universal norm that conceptually excludes some women from its definition. The implications of this are twofold. On an analytical level, it reveals a structural tendency to represent "otherness and difference as negativity" in order to sustain the subject/non-subject dichotomy.37 On a practical level, however, it also results in the discursive displacement of non-Western women. Through their relegation to the status of "otherness" or particularity, they have no access to the universal norm that defines the Western female subject position.

The dilemma that arises from erecting normative universal standards, then, is that they display a marked tendency to either marginalize or exclude some women from legitimate participation in feminist discourse. Conversely, they also have the potential to homogenize women across cultures, races, and classes in such a way that contextual variations in discriminatory practices are subsumed to a universally applicable conception of oppression extended to include all women in the same way. In the West, Black feminists who felt marginalized by the attitudes and assumptions of liberal feminism were in large part responsible for bringing this issue to the forefront of feminist discourse.

Second-wave feminism, in its attempts to address the cultural construction of

36Ye§eno§lu, Colonial Fantasies, 101,102. 37 Ibid., 104. gender, has been problematized for its too-narrow vision of women as a discursive category and its failure to account for the issues and priorities of non- middle class, non-white women. Exploring the relationship between Western sexism and racism, Elizabeth Spelman quotes Adrienne Rich to describe a tendency in academic feminist literature towards "white solipsism," defined as, "a tunnel-vision which simply does not see nonwhite experience or existence as precious or significant."38 By prioritizing gender over race as the more

"fundamental" form of oppression, feminist discourse effectively implies a consistent and ubiquitous grounding for discrimination against women, glossing over other discriminatory practices that are not based on sex. This "distorts Black women's experience of oppression by failing to note important differences between the contexts in which Black women and white women experience sexism."39 Spelman does not discount the idea that generalizations about women's experiences are possible, however she contends that there is an inherent danger that such discussions will be coloured by ethnocentric attitudes that assume all women experience sexism the same way.40

Drawing on and extending these critiques of the intersection of sexism and racism to cross-cultural discourse, postcolonial feminist analyses have openly challenged the reductionism of colonialist constructions of non-Western cultures and women. Questioning Western feminist models that rely on homogeneous

38 Elizabeth V. Spelman, "Gender & Race: The Ampersand Problem in Feminist Thought," in Feminism and 'Race', ed. Kum-Kum Bhavnani (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 75. 39 Ibid., 81. 40 Ibid., 86. categories, they have identified a tendency in feminist scholarship to reiterate a

"colonialist stance" that reproduces the racially and sexually biased language of the colonizer.41 Aihwa Ong's criticism of contemporary Western cultural discourses suggests that their masculinist and feminist perspectives share a set of Western standards that have continued to be unilaterally applied to non-

Western contexts: distinct strands of colonial discourse circulating in particular colonial societies were linked in Western imperialist definitions to colonized populations. Although there has been significant dismantling of this global political structure since the Second World War, neo- colonial preoccupations continue to haunt Western perceptions of ex-colonial societies.42

The residual Orientalist influences implicit in such homogenizing tendencies result in a failure to account for the cultural distinctions between Western and non-Western women. These discourses therefore reinstate the assumptions of cultural superiority endemic to Orientalist discourse. Valerie Amos and Pratibha

Parmar brand this trend Western "imperial feminism," contending that, "white feminists' failure to acknowledge the differences between themselves ... and

Third World women has contributed to the predominantly Eurocentric and ethnocentric theories of women's oppression."43 Marnia Lazreg suggests that a lingering evolutionary bias, carried over in social science discourse from

Uma Narayan, Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third World Feminism (London: Routledge, 1997), 45. 42 Aihwa Ong, "Colonialism and Modernity: Feminist Re-Presentations of Women in Non-Western Societies," in Feminism and 'Race', ed. Kum-Kum Bhavnani (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 109. 43 Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar, "Challenging Imperial Feminism," in Feminism and 'Race', ed. Kum-Kum Bhavnani (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 20. 27 nineteenth-century ethnology and anthropology, "is embedded in the objectification of 'different' women as the unmediated 'other', the embodiment of cultures presumed inferior and classified as 'traditional' or patriarchal.'"44 This bias maintains a hierarchical attitude through a reductive strategy of labeling that subsumes women of the Middle East under general categories such as "Muslim" or "Arab women." By obviating the considerations of regional, religious, or political disparities within such classifications, the labeling process denies the differences between women in the same way that the construction of "the

Oriental woman" elides these distinctions in traditional colonial discourse.

Moreover, the totalitarian character of this type of representation becomes an autonomous description by which Third World women are universally categorized as "oppressed." As a result, Third World feminist critiques of gender are artificially bounded "within an external conceptual frame of reference according to equally external standards."45

Chandra Mohanty's criticism of liberal Western feminism takes a similar approach. She argues that Western feminist discourse has created an image of the "Third World woman' as a singular, monolithic subject" that stands as a foil against the image of the progressive, Western woman.46 This distinction is based on negative generalizations regarding the economic status and social position of

44 Marnia Lazreg, "Decolonizing Feminism," in Feminism and 'Race', ed. Kum-Kum Bhavnani (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 282. 45 Ibid., 285, 288. 48 Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses," in Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 17. women in non-Western countries, and it produces a representation of such women that is determined by what they are not (i.e., Western) as opposed to who they are and what they actually experience. It is ultimately the result of an unstated assumption made by Western feminists "privileging ... a particular group as a norm or referent."47 Where anthropologists and ethnologists were accused of previously treating the Western, male experience as normative,

Mohanty suggests that feminist writers are currently using a limited and ethnocentric version of the Western, female experience in the same way. The consequence is a biased and distorted understanding of the ways in which the oppression of women occurs in non-Western settings.

Like Spelman, Mohanty recognizes that it is possible to make general yet concrete statements about women on the basis of their shared oppression, however this "discursively consensual homogeneity of women as a group is mistaken for the historically specific material reality of groups of women."48 By ignoring contextual details, this description fails to consider the particularities of the experiences of women who do not conform to the Western model. Mohanty's critique emphasizes that the specific manifestations of oppression vary widely, and the main danger of homogenizing women's experience, based solely on gender, is of either dismissing the particular aspects of those experiences, or of denying their validity altogether. Such economic and racial reductionism obviates the very specificity that feminist discourse attempts to articulate and that

47 Ibid., 22. 48 Ibid., 23. colonialist discourse originally denied. Accounting for women's localized situations on the basis of their specific circumstances can counter the tendency to ignore these particularities. This allows for the possibility of more contextualized and realistic representations of the nature of the oppression that postcolonial feminist discourse is attempting to articulate.

Islam in postcolonial discourse

The association between religion and non-Western cultures in early

Orientalist constructions complicates the role of religion, and particularly of Islam, in much of postcolonial discourse. In the same way that binary representations such as exotic/familiar and sensual/rational were established in oppositional and hierarchical terms to assert the dominance of the West and the "otherness" of the

East, Said remarks that European engagement with the Orient "turned Islam into the very epitome of an outsider against which the whole of European civilization from the Middle Ages on was founded."49 Minoo Moallem also points to religious distinctions as an essential element in the evaluative ranking of cultures in the

Orientalist worldview, observing that it "situates Muslims as [not only] religiously different but inferior" to Western Christians.50 As with earlier feminist critiques that uncovered the function of gender in Orientalist discourse, Moallem identifies a corollary to this judgment that reasserts the relationship between race and sex by using women as the cultural marker of Islamic inferiority:

49 Said, Orientalism, 70. 50 Minoo Moallem, Between Warrior Brother and Sacred Sister. Islamic Fundamentalism and the Cultural Politics of Patriarchy in Iran (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 42. 30

Racialization of Muslims works together with the representation of gender relations in Western discourse. Women and gender issues become the main signifiers of Muslim backwardness and difference. The condition of women in Muslim countries ... serves to define the boundaries between the civilized world of Europe and the barbaric world of Islam.51

In this confluence of Islam and Orientalist rhetoric, Marnia Lazreg identifies the foundations of a persistent critical methodology that she refers to as the "religion paradigm."52 Applied in feminist analyses of the status and treatment of Muslim women, the religion paradigm uses Orientalist and evolutionary theories to argue that Islam is "an archaic and backward system of beliefs" that is directly and unilaterally responsible for the subjugated position of women in

Muslim cultures. According to Lazreg, "Writers invoke religion as the main cause

(if not the cause) of gender inequality, just as it is made the source of underdevelopment in much of modernization theory.... Women are seen either as embodiments of Islam, or as helpless victims forced to live by its tenets."53

The religion paradigm thus reiterates the binary constructions of Orientalist discourse, reinforcing the perception of Islam as antithetical to feminist goals that have been adopted (or achieved) by women in the West. Rather than casting

Muslim women in such artificially reductive terms, Lazreg suggests that feminist scholarship needs to account for the specific historical conditions (including the legacy of colonial domination) that produce gender difference and inequality.

Ibid., 43. Lazreg, "Decolonizing Feminism," 288. Ibid., 289. 31

Islam alone cannot and should not be assumed to define those differences across time and in their entirety.

Uma Narayan argues that this adversarial positioning of Western and non-

Western cultures based on religion has contributed to the rise of fundamental religious groups in a number of Third World countries. In the context of struggles for independence, new nations rejected the legitimacy of Western colonial authority while simultaneously constructing political identities that elevated an idealized version of the indigenous culture and its values.54 The link between women and culture in these circumstances was invariably affected by colonialist representations of Third World contexts as uniform and monolithic places. Just as the Orientalists had, nationalist movements "bought into aspects of these totalizing pictures of 'their Traditions and Culture"' in order to articulate a position of difference.55 However, where colonizers construed the treatment and status of women as symptomatic of the inferiority of colonized cultures, indigenous practices and traditions were now positively adopted as a focal point for nationalist identity and resistance to Western domination. As Narayan observes,

colonial discourses that positioned Third-World cultures 'outside history' have dangerous echoes in the discourses of contemporary religious-fundamentalist political movements, which have their own reasons for misportraying certain practices and traditions as 'timeless' elements of 'National Culture.'56

Narayan, Dislocating Cultures, 14. Ibid., 53. Ibid., 20. 32

By embracing the notion of returning to an authentic, indigenous past, contemporary Third World religious-fundamentalist groups therefore reinscribe the same representations of "unchanging tradition" that characterized colonialist constructions, including an emphasis on the importance of regulating women's roles and female sexuality.

If fundamentalism can be read (in part) as the elevation of traditional values as a means of expressing objections to colonial narratives of authority, then the integration of postcolonial and feminist discourses into the study of

Islamist movements can provide a backdrop for understanding how authority has been interpreted and challenged in these contexts. Lamia Shehadeh argues that the confluence of women and religion in Islamic fundamentalist ideology is a deliberate manipulation designed to promote the attainment and retention of political authority: "the institutionalization of male interests and the subordination of women are not to be seen or understood as irrational fundamentalist policies but as carefully studied strategies grounded in politics and the hunger for power."57 The notion of control, and particularly the control of women, is central here. Similarly, Karen McCarthy Brown describes religious fundamentalism as "a reactive social movement that uses theoretical justifications to control what its adherents perceive as threatening in the world."58 In the postcolonial context, this threat is consistently affiliated with the desire to assert an independent and

57 Lamia Rustum Shehadeh, The Idea of Women in Fundamentalist Islam (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), 242. 58 Karen McCarthy Brown, "Fundamentalism and the Control of Women," in Fundamentalism and Gender, ed. John Stratton Hawley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 182. autonomous identity in the face of a history of colonial domination, and the more contemporary concern, previously noted by Aihwa Ong, to counter residual neo- colonial preoccupations that continue to exert a powerful influence on the construction of national identity. That the forms of such resistance have assumed religious fundamentalist overtones in a number of postcolonial environments is, according to the analyses above, partly a consequence of discursively produced representations of cultural and religious difference as the benchmarks of identity.

This was a process inaugurated by Orientalism but subsequently taken up in

Third World responses to it.

The debate over how, and to what extent, Western colonialist discourses have impacted the development of fundamentalist Islamist movements and women's participation in them is an ongoing one. This issue will be addressed in greater detail in Chapter 3, however at his stage it is pertinent to note that such inquiries stand at the intersection of a variety of issues—including race, gender, history, and class. As such, they reflect the continuing importance of recognizing the historical, cultural, and religious particularities of postcolonial contexts. By attempting to define and articulate what Yegenoglu calls the "complexity within the unity" of postcolonial discourse, analyses that stress the interconnection between these varied and diverse lines of inquiry will undoubtedly continue to reinforce the necessity for contextualized and contextualizing methods and theories. With this in mind, we can turn to an analysis of two specific issues involving Muslim women in postcolonial environments—women's rights and the 34 veil—to investigate how such connections are articulated in contemporary discourse. Chapter 2: Women'srights and the veil

The debate over women's human rights has proven to be a contentious issue for feminists, separating them into divergent camps on the basis of their acceptance or refutation of rights as a universal standard relevant to women in multiple and diverse contexts. Programs such as the 1979 United Nations

Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women

(CEDAW) have been upheld both as a landmark in the struggle for recognition of gender equality as a fundamental component of human rights discourse,1 and as a site of contestation for those who consider it a tacit reinscription of Western values and hegemonic authority in the postcolonial era.2 In many Muslim nations, disputes regarding the legitimacy of the deployment of women's rights have largely focused on the applicability of "universal" principles in Third World environments, particularly in light of the postcolonial preoccupation with challenging Orientalist models of representation that tend to deny the subjectivity

(and therefore the autonomy) of non-Western actors and nations.3 Within this

1See Ana Elena Obando, "How Effective is a Human Rights Framework in Addressing Gender- Based Violence," Women's Human Rights Net, http://www.whrnet.org/docs/issue- genderviolence.html (accessed May 15, 2007); Charlotte Bunch, "What Are the Implications of a Rights Based Approach for the Struggle Against Violence Against Women? An Interview with Charlotte Bunch," Women's Human Rights Net, http://www.whrnet.org/docs/interview-bunch- 0402.html (accessed May 15,2007). zSee Inderpal Grewal, "'Women's Rights as Human Rights': Feminist Practices, Global Feminism, and Human Rights Regimes in Transnationality," Citizenship Studies 3:3 (1999): 337-354; and Anouar Majid, "The Politics of Feminism in Islam," in Gender, Politics, and Islam, ed. Therese Saliba, Carolyn Allen, and Judith A. Howard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 53-93. 3 See "Saving Amina Lawal: Human Rights Symbolism and the Dangers of Colonialism," Harvard Law Review 117:7 (May 2004): 2365-2386; Moya Lloyd, "(Women's) Human Rights: Paradoxes and Possibilities," Review of International Studies 33 (2007): 91-103; and Jill Steans, "Debating 36 broader framework, the image of the veil has emerged as a key area of controversy. As an ambivalent symbol that can simultaneously be used to represent the oppression of Muslim women and their potential empowerment, its ambiguous appropriation mirrors conflicting attitudes towards the rights-based paradigm as a tool in the feminist agenda, effectively instantiating the claims of both sides of the debate.

Muslimrights versus human rights

The participation of Muslim feminists in the rights dialogue has been broadly divided into three movements, each of which defines women's rights according to a discrete set of criteria: (1) Islamic feminists, who seek to establish indigenous forms of gender activism within a reinterpreted Islamic framework by drawing upon the intellectual and religious foundations of Islam to address women's issues; (2) secular feminists, who consider Muslim women's emancipation incompatible with Islamic law, and consequently hold that "any meaningful move towards the implementation of [universal women's] rights will require a major social and intellectual overhaul, which, by necessity, will involve going beyond the restrictive framework of Islam";4 and, (3) Islamist organizations, which generally endorse Islamic states' retention of s/iari'a-based5 laws as the

Women's Human Rights as a Universal Feminist Project: Defending Women's Human Rights as a Political Tool," Review of International Studies 33 (2007): 11-27. 4 Rebecca Barlow and Shahram Akbarzadeh, "Women's Rights in the Muslim World: Reform or Reconstruction?" Third World Quarterly 27:8 (2006): 1482. 5 The term "shari'a" refers to the moral discourses and legal procedures that constitute the bases for Islamic law. Based on religious texts, tradition, precedent, and exegesis, shari'a is understood to be divinely inspired and therefore to have religious significance. 37 source of Muslim women's particular rights, and thus reject the adoption or incorporation of any other rights-based discourses that could undermine them.6

Such broad categorizations should not, of course, be taken to imply that each group is entirely disparate and homogeneous—internal dissension has developed both between and within these movements regarding the methodologies they espouse, and affiliations have been fluid as new approaches and issues arise.7 Despite their ontological instability, however, as an analytical tool these three categories are functionally constructive for a discursive investigation into the conflicting priorities of various Muslim proponents of women's rights. Taken together, they point towards theoretical and practical disparities regarding whether, how, and to what extent, Islam needs to accommodate the universal rights discourse in order to eliminate practices and institutions perceived as compromising the goal of gender equality.

Islamic feminists who support the human rights-based agenda for women are confronted with the dilemma of attempting to integrate an alternative model into a tradition that has historically construed rights according to a set of particularistic rather than universal standards. Based on a combination of shari'a codes, Muslim traditions, clerical fatwas, and government legislation, the

6 Ibid. See also Deniz Kandiyoti, "Reflections on the Politics of Gender in Muslim Societies: From Nairobi to Beijing," in Faith and Freedom: Women's Human Rights in the Muslim World, ed. Mahnaz Afkhami (London: I.B. Tauris, 1995), 26. 7 Numerous scholars have delineated between the various approaches taken by Muslim women in the rights debate. See Roja Fazaeli, "Contemporary Iranian Feminism: Identity, Rights and Interpretations," Muslim World Journal of Human Rights 4:1 (2007): Article 8,1-24; and Ziba Mir- Hosseini, "Muslim Women's Quest for Equality: Between Islamic Law and Feminism," Critical Inquiry 32 (Summer 2006): 629-645. As an example, Barlow and Akbarzadeh discuss how Fatima Memissi's position has shifted from one of secular to Islamic feminism. allocation of rights in Islam (to men as well as to women) is understood to possess religious—as well as cultural and political—legitimation.8 Abdullahi An-

Na'im notes that, in this sense, the concept of rights in the Islamic context is

"fundamentally different from that of human rights":

Whereas human rights are, by definition, universal in that they are owed to all human beings by virtue of their humanity without distinction on grounds of gender or religion, the concept of rights under shari'a is fundamentally premised on these distinctions. That is to say, there are different rights for Muslim men, Muslim women, and non-Muslims under shari'a, rather than equal rights for all, regardless of gender or religion.9

While Islamist women support this configuration as an authentic formulation of how their rights should be understood and enacted, from a feminist perspective, such a system has been deemed inherently problematic, as Eleanor Doumato makes clear in her synopsis of the repressive characteristics of the Islamic model:

women's rights [in Islam] are ... measured against the prerogatives of men: they are grounded in the right to be protected by and from men, in the right to stay home and raise children, to learn, and to preserve the dignity of the family and the culture. The way to safeguard these rights is for women not to trespass into men's public space: to remain within the family, not to drive or travel alone or without a man's permission, or manage a business alone, or work beside men, or study subjects that would lead to

8 Mahnaz Afkhami, "Introduction," in Faith and Freedom: Women's Human Flights in the Muslim World, ed. Mahnaz Afkhami (London: I.B. Tauris, 1995), 2. 9 Abdullahi An-Na'im, "The Dichotomy Between Religious and Secular Discourse in Islamic Societies," in Faith and Freedom: Women's Human Rights in the Muslim World, ed. Mahnaz Afkhami (London: I.B. Tauris, 1995), 57. See also Anouar Majid, Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 124; and Ghada Osman, "Back to Basics: The Discourse of Muslim Feminism in Contemporary Iran," Women and Language 26:1 (2003): 76. 39

working alongside men, or appear publicly in 'immodest' dress.™

At issue, then, are the prescriptive restrictions placed on women when their rights

are constructed exclusively in terms of their relationship to men, and the denial of

their potential to become active participants in the public sphere when their lives

are formally and legally circumscribed within the confines of the home and the

family.

Where proponents of the universal paradigm have contested such

formulations as explicitly contravening the mandates of gender equality

enshrined in the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of

Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), their criticisms have been countered

by Islamist governments using two separate but interconnected strategies. First,

they appeal to the immutability of what they consider to be divinely-inspired laws,

and second, they invoke the arguments of cultural relativism to legitimize existing

Islamist regulations and practices. In her detailed examination of the various

reservations to CEDAW lodged by nations such as Egypt, Morocco, and Kuwait,

Ann Mayer notes that their objections are consistently grounded in conflicts

between CEDAW articles and shah'a rules that legitimate the unequal treatment

of women, and the desire to prioritize the latter: "Muslim countries justify

deviating from the principle of full equality for women by claiming that their

domestic laws are not man-made but divinely ordained. They assert, therefore,

10 Eleanor Abdella Doumato, "The Ambiguity of Shari'a and the Politics of 'Rights' in Saudi Arabia," in Faith and Freedom: Women's Human Rights in the Muslim World, ed. Mahnaz Afkhami (London: I.B. Tauris, 1995), 154-155. that denying equality to women under their domestic laws lies outside the normal prohibitions against the use of internal rules to evade international responsibility."11 Because this rhetorical tactic locates the origins of indigenous

Islamic traditions in a "higher" source, it establishes not only the primacy of the

(divine) Muslim paradigm over the (human) international one, but fixes it in an immutable state which cannot be abrogated or altered without conceding the fallibility of the divine will.12

While this first strategy is largely internal, based on arguments deriving from the inviolability of the Islamic religious tradition, the second strategy is predominantly external, couched in the historical experiences of many Third

World nations with Western colonialism. Islamist countries have voiced objections to the very concept of "universal" rights as one that carries with it an implicitly Western bias. In view of the fact that, "for most of the Third World the existence of colonialism led the dialectic of encounter to an intellectual impasse by positing the 'other' as the enemy,"13 there is a residual and reactive sensitivity in postcolonial cultures towards the imposition of "foreign" standards that effectively dismiss indigenous traditions as unsophisticated or flawed. In the

Ann Elizabeth Mayer, "Rhetorical Strategies and Official Policies on Women's Rights: The Merits and Drawbacks of the New World Hypocrisy," in Faith and Freedom: Women's Human Rights in the Muslim World, ed. Mahnaz Afkhami (London: I.B. Tauris, 1995), 105. 12 The complete list of countries to enter CEDAW reservations includes Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Malaysia, the Maldives, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Syria, and the United Arab Emirates. While by no means the only nations to lodge formal reservations, these countries have explicitly referenced potential or existing incompatibilities between the declaration and local legislation that is based on shari'a codes. See United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women, "Declarations, Reservations and Objections to CEDAW," United Nations, http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/cedaw/reservations-country.htm (accessed April 10, 2008). 13 Afkhami, "Introduction," 4. 41 context of the rights debate, competing formulations of the primary subject in which rights should adhere—either individuals (in the case of universal rights) or groups (in the case of Muslim rights)—have contributed to "a fundamental conflict not only between different sets of 'rights' but between different views of how

'rights' should be enacted and defended."14 The reservations to CEDAW entered by some of the Muslim countries that agreed to its accession or ratification are clearly indicative of this discrepancy, in which the construction of a "universal" subject as the bearer of "universal" rights has been notably problematized. Their objections emphasize a continued preoccupation with the notion of universality as "an item of Western imperialism whereby culturally specific, Western notions of individual and society [are] being thrust upon essentially different societies and polities."15 Since the model of "universal" individual rights put forward in international protocols such as CEDAW diverges so radically from the traditional

Islamic articulation of "particular" group rights conditioned by gender and religion,

Islamist governments have adopted the rhetoric of cultural relativism to argue that their interpretation effectively trumps the mandate imposed at the international level. They argue, in other words, that the Islamic formulation of women's rights is equally as legitimate as the universalist notion, and more so in the Muslim context, given that it represents an indigenous rather than a foreign tradition. Consequently, such governments see no basis except Western cultural

14 Bronwyn Winter, "Religion, Culture and Women's Human Rights: Some General Political and Theoretical Considerations," Women's Studies International Forum 29 (2006): 381. 15 Kandiyoti, "Reflections on the Politics of Gender in Muslim Societies," 20. hubris for them to abandon or adapt local legislation in response to international conventions.

Islamic feminist responses: new interpretive strategies

Within this confrontational environment, Islamic feminists who support the universal rights-based paradigm are attempting to engage with their religious traditions in ways that can negotiate the criticisms being leveled against the rights agenda. Because the codified Islamic shari'a laws in many Islamist countries are often contradictory to contemporary notions of rights and their emphasis on the equal legal status of men and women, these activists see a pressing need for Muslim women to contribute to the reshaping of existing legislation. They are doing so in large part by developing alternative jurisprudential models based on more egalitarian understandings of their religion.

Focused on the necessity of transformation from within, some of their reforms have attempted to reconcile Islam to the rights discourse by revisiting interpretations of the Qur'an in order to extract what they understand as its explicit message of equality. Victoria Harrison notes that the reinterpretation of religious texts by Jewish, Christian, and Muslim women is a trend that has developed as a modern response, in light of feminist concerns, to their historical exclusion from the official interpretive traditions.16 In the specific context of Islam, only a few women engaged in early Qur'anic exegesis, and those who did were

16 Victoria Harrison, "Modern Women, Traditional Abrahamic Religions and Interpreting Sacred Texts," Feminist Theology 15:2 (2007): 145. largely marginalized, their work never permitted to influence formal Islamic legislation.17 One of the first Muslim women to publicly participate in the interpretive debate was Nazira Zin al-Din, who in the 1920's published two books in which she proposed that male, gender-based interpretations of the Qur'an were responsible for the inferior status of women in Islam.18 Arguing that as a

Muslim it was her religious duty to engage in Qur'anic interpretation and explanation, Zin al-Din conducted an assiduous examination of both the Qur'an and prominent works of tafsir (Qur'anic exegesis and interpretation). She determined that the traditional ascription of superiority to Muslim men over

Muslim women was social and historical rather than religious. It was the result of textually unsubstantiated claims, translated into legislation, that construed women in patriarchal terms and effectively contradicted the egalitarian spirit reflected in the language of the text, itself.19

More recently, Muslim women scholars have extended the work of challenging prevailing masculinist readings of the Qur'an by focusing on the need to examine critically how such readings were conditioned by culturally and historically contingent attitudes towards women in early Muslim societies. Riffat

Hassan makes this point explicit in her denunciation of current discriminatory

Islamist practices:

[l]t is important to stress that the Qur'an ... does not

17 Bouthaina Shaaban, "The Muted Voices of Women Interpreters," in Faith and Freedom: Women's Human Rights in the Muslim World, ed. Mahnaz Afkhami (London: I.B. Tauris, 1995), 61. 18 (bid., 64. 19 Ibid., 67. discriminate against women. Still, the sad and bitter fact of history is that the cumulative (Jewish, Christian, Hellenic, Bedouin, and other) biases which existed in the Arab-Islamic culture of the early centuries of Islam infiltrated Islamic tradition. ... Not only does the Qur'an emphasize that righteousness is identical in the case of man and woman, but it affirms, clearly and consistently, women's equality with men and their fundamental right to actualize the human potential that they share equally.20

Following this line of inquiry, Amina Wadud expresses concern that traditional tafsir, written exclusively by men, is largely reflective of the male experience and therefore only includes women to the extent determined by male vision, perspective, and desire. This, in turn, has led to a particular reading of the Qur'an that has functionally marginalized Muslim women and "been mistakenly equated with voicelessness in the text itself."21 Similarly, Asma Barlas contends that patriarchal interpretations of the Qur'an must be "unread" in order to counter a historical trend of interpretive reductionism that has consistently assigned a subordinate status to women in Muslim cultures. Descriptions of Islam as a patriarchal religion, she maintains, "confuse the Qur'an with a specific reading of it.... [We] need to keep in mind the historical contexts of its interpretations in order to understand its conservative and patriarchal exegesis."22

Feminist scholars such as these insist that Muslim women can and must reclaim the Qur'an's inherent message of equality in order to promote a less

Riffat Hassan, "Challenging the Stereotypes of Fundamentalism: An Islamic Feminist Perspective," Muslim World 91:1/2 (Spring 2001): 63. 21 Amina Wadud, Qur'an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman's Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 2. Asma Barlas, "Believing Women" in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur'an (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 4, 9. 45 discriminatory—and in their view, more authentic—version of Islam. The consequences of such reformist negotiations have both theoretical and practical implications in the rights debate. Not only do they position women as legitimate participants in the religious interpretive tradition, but they also provide the foundation for political action that seeks to institutionalize a greater degree of gender equality in Islamist countries. Islamic feminists have used the notion of religious equality to underpin demands for equality under the law, and to counter current institutions and legislation that discriminate against women's status. In

Malaysia, for example, the advocacy group Sisters in Islam (SIS) has been actively involved in using the Qur'an to bolster its position as a defender of human rights: "as Muslim women, SIS is able to fight for change from within their religion. The knowledge they derived that the Qur'an supports the universal values of equality, justice, and a life of dignity for women is also empowering them to stand up and argue with those who claim, also using the Qur'an, that women and men are not equal in Islam."23

In addition to the deployment of new exegetical strategies, Muslim reformers have challenged various articulations of fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) and shari'a family law, pointing again to the need for historical and contextual analysis to undermine the authority of discriminatory legislation. Shari'a, as noted previously, is defended by Islamist regimes on the basis of its religious origins.

23 Norani Othman, "Muslim Women and the Challenge of Islamic Fundamentalism/Extremism: An Overview of Southeast Asian Muslim Women's Struggle for Human Rights and Gender Equality," Women's Studies International Forum 29 (2006): 348. 46

But such defences are premised on a particular understanding of shari'a that posits its status as an inviolable and eternal religious institution, or what Islamist feminists have described as "an essentialist and nonhistorical understanding of

... Islamic law."24 Much like the internal criticism leveled against the adoption of a universal rights paradigm, such a monolithic construction militates against any attempt to amend contemporary legislation on the basis that it constitutes a repudiation of the divine will. In response, reformers are endeavouring to rearticulate the very notion of Islamic law in order to legitimate its status as a subject of feminist criticism. Ziba Mir-Hosseini, for example, distinguishes between shari'a as "revealed law," and fiqh as the science of jurisprudence, "the process of human endeavor to discern and extract legal rules from the sacred sources of Islam."25 While the former is "sacred, universal, and eternal," the latter is "nothing more than the human understanding of the divine will," and because it is a human creation, like all jurisprudential systems, it is fallible and subject to modification.26

Legal scholar Abdullahi An-Na'im also argues persuasively for a re- evaluation of the nature of shari'a that can open it to reinterpretation on a wider scale. An-Na'im contends that the strict dichotomy between religious and secular discourses has been exaggerated in the Muslim context, creating a situation

24 Mir-Hosseini, "Muslim Women's Quest for Equality," 641. See also, Noor Aisha Abdul Rahman, "Changing Roles, Unchanging Perceptions and Institutions: Traditionalism and its Impact on Women and Globalization in Muslim Societies in Asia," The Muslim World 97 (July 2007): 479- 507; and Ann Elizabeth Mayer, "The Islam and Human Rights Nexus: Shifting Dimensions," Muslim World Journal of Human Rights 4:1 (January 2007): Article 4,1-27. 25 Mir-Hosseini, "Muslim Women's Quest for Equality," 632. 26 Ibid., 633. where it "can be manipulated by either to exclude some people from the discussion or to give undue weight and authority to the views of others by virtue of their presumed 'special' qualifications or status in 'religious affairs.'"27 This effectively prevents the incorporation of dissenting thought or opinion and reifies the religious tradition in an artificially static condition. In the case of shari'a, An-

Na'im contests its status as an absolute and unassailable religious institution, pointing out that shari'a "was 'constructed' by Muslim scholars and jurists" and as such, was and should remain flexible and adaptive:

The so-called founding jurists of the second and third centuries were ... not engaged in a process of laying down an immutable shari'a for eternity. Rather, they were responding to the immediate needs of their communities in that particular historical context, but their work came to be taken by subsequent generations as the final and conclusive interpretation of Qur'an and sunna, and application of Islamic juridical reasoning (ijtihad).... As a product of human interpretation, shari'a should be seen as an inherently and constantly evolving and changing ethical and legal system.28

Acknowledged in this way, shari'a "is merely a historically conditioned human understanding of Islam, [subject to] alternative interpretations in the modern context which are conducive to the human rights of women."29 Adopting this contingent understanding of shari'a, Muslim women demonstrators in Saudi

Arabia protested in favour of their right to drive in 1990, exercising "their own version of ijtihad [interpretation of religious texts]" by drawing on ahadith

An-Na'im, "The Dichotomy Between Religious and Secular Discourse in Islamic Societies," 52. Ibid., 58. Ibid., 57. 48

(authoritative records of the Prophet's speech and actions) about Muhammad's wife 'Aisha, "to prove that the Prophet considered women to be competent, even exceptional, interpreters of religion."30 While their protest was ultimately unsuccessful, nevertheless it served to instantiate Muslim women's claims to authentic participation in Islamic legal reform.

In Iran, arguments in favour of shari'a reform have allied Islamic feminists with intellectuals and moderate clerics such as Mohsen Sa'idzadeh and Mohsen

Kadivar to advance the cause of gender equality. Together, they are challenging the established view of the rules of shari'a as fixed and immutable, arguing that shari'a is "time- and place-sensitive" and must therefore adapt to the demands of a new social context based on the primacy of gender concerns.31 In Islamist countries such as Iran that have formally adopted sfta/fa-based legislation, however, such collaborations have generated a crisis of contested legitimacy, with the ruling religious authorities attempting to discredit those who oppose them by calling their religious commitment into question. Reformers have thereby left themselves open to allegations of religious apostasy. Iranian clerics

Sa'idzadeh and Kadivar were both imprisoned for their support of shari'a reform, and the former was officially defrocked for overtly questioning the orthodoxy of the prevailing Islamic tradition. In addition, documentations of attacks, both verbal and physical, against members of SIS in Malaysia and the women

30 Doumato, "The Ambiguity of Shari'a and the Politics of Rights'," 151. 31 Shahra Razavi, "Islamic Politics, Human Rights and Women's Claims for Equality in Iran," Third World Quarterly 27:7 (2006): 1228. 49 protestors in Saudi Arabia all graphically illustrate the risks faced by Muslim feminists. They also indicate the difficulty of amending current legislation in an environment where the monopoly of official interpretation remains in the hands of a ruling religious elite that is disinclined to accept opposition or encourage debate. Reformers see themselves as legitimately engaging in a dialogue with a contingent reading of Islam. It appears, however, that they will continue to encounter officiaf^resistance unless, or until, more moderate interpretations of the very nature of shari'a become widely accepted.

One of the common elements in each of these examples of Islamic feminist discourse is a desire to retain a model of rights that addresses and answers internal concerns about conflicts between universal and Islamic notions of rights, and does so in such a way as to undermine the external relativist argument that construes the rights agenda as imperial or Orientalist. Through a process of adaptation and accommodation of Islamic traditions, reformers attempt to demonstrate not merely that new Islamic traditions are possible, but that they are capable of—and even demand—reconciliation with the modern universal rights paradigm and its requirements of gender equality. This, they claim, can be accomplished through the development of legitimate human rights equivalents within the Islamic framework. Others, however, are less optimistic about the prospective success of such endeavours. Anouar Majid, for example, agrees that "a critical and a thorough reassessment of Islamic traditions, including contesting several entrenched but Islamically questionable assumptions about women, are the proper platform on which to conduct dialogues and movements of liberation in the Islamic world today."32 However he rejects the application of universal rights-based discourses as the most effective tool to accomplish this. Majid argues that the preoccupation with rights obscures the political and (predominantly capitalist) economic motivations inherent in the construction of secularism as a Western imperial phenomenon.33 Like many

Islamic feminist reformers, Majid identifies shari'a as "a male-manipulated interpretation of Islam"34 and encourages challenging it from within an Islamic context, but he also recognizes that using the discourse of rights to do so may actually undermine women's emancipation rather than promoting it. By reiterating a process of Western hegemony, the universal rights paradigm can encourage the development of reactionary, anti-Western responses, indirectly providing a buttress for existing discriminatory attitudes and legislation.35 Rather than accommodating or adopting wholesale the dominant discourse on universal human rights, Majid supports self-determined religious reforms, focusing on rescinding elements of shari'a that fail to meet "the legitimate aspirations of women within the political framework of the nation-state,"36 as the most productive method to pursue a program of emancipation that subverts the imposition of Western imperial influences.

Other critics of the Islamic feminist movement propose more radical

32 Anouar Majid, "The Politics of Feminism in Islam," 54. 33 Ibid., 57. 34 Ibid., 85. 35 Ibid., 70. 36 Ibid., 84. 51 solutions, endorsing a program of secularism, rather than religious reform, as a viable and necessary implement in the pursuit of women's equality. Valentine

Moghadam expresses her reservations that the feminist project of reinterpreting religious texts can effectively challenge the Islamist conception of rights. Similarly to Majid, she questions the effectiveness of a universal construction of women's rights as an emancipatory instrument. Moghadam suggests that by working within an Islamic framework, feminist reformers are participating in the very institutions that propagate women's subordination, and may inadvertently reinscribe the formal structures of inequality that they seek to eliminate:

[S]o long as Islamic feminists remain focused on theological arguments rather than socioeconomic and political questions ... their impact will be limited at best. At worst, their strategy could reinforce the legitimacy of the Islamic system, help to reproduce it; and undermine secular alternatives.37

While Moghadam acknowledges the necessity of religious reform, she sees "an environment of secular thought and secular institutions, including a state that defends the rights of all its citizens irrespective of religious affiliations," as the only scenario conducive to the promotion and protection of women's rights.38 At issue here is the question of whether or not reformers can inculcate in Islamist cultures the potential to produce a civil society where human rights can be guaranteed according to universal rather than Muslim principles. This is a possibility that Moghadam rejects as unfeasible given the historical rigidity of

37 Valentine M. Moghadam, "Islamic Feminism and its Discontents: Towards a Resolution of the Debate," in Gender, Politics, and Islam, ed. Therese Saliba, Carolyn Allen, and Judith A. Howard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 38. 38 Ibid., 40. 52

Islamist states and their unwillingness to abandon the traditional notion of citizenship rights based on sex and religion.39 Feminist activists must, Moghadam insists, encourage the creation and development of secular strategies and institutions that can instigate reforms that move beyond the restrictive confines of

Islamic ideology.

Hijab in the rights debate

Conceptual and theoretical analyses of the universal women's rights debate have thus been instrumental in identifying the merits and drawbacks of potential strategies that can facilitate and/or obstruct the advancement of a program of gender equality in Islamist countries. Even if they have not yet resolved them, these investigations have demarcated the boundaries of a multiplicity of issues that determine both the content and the context of the women's rights dialogue. These include the tensions between religious and secular perspectives, as well as the relationship between universalist constructions and imperial or Orientalist strategies. This discursive framework can be brought to bear on particular aspects of the broader debate, including (but by no means limited to) the discourse surrounding the veil.40 While the conjunction of Muslim women and the veil in feminist and postcolonial studies

39 Ibid., 42. 40 There are a number of other issues, including discriminatory personal status laws, which have emerged as primary sites of contestation within the larger context of women's rights in Islamist societies. My focus on the practice of veiling is not intended to diminish or deny the validity of these as significant subjects of rights-based inquiry, rather to instantiate the discourse of the veil as a particular example of how the conflict over women's rights has been articulated within the discursive configuration described above. has been a subject of inquiry for some time, its resurgence since 9/11 and the subsequent military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq has been a direct consequence of increased references to, and visibility of, Muslim women both politically and in the media. While the phenomenon of veiling is neither indigenous, nor limited, to Islamic environments,42 it has nevertheless assumed a popular status as "one of the most visible Islamic mandates,"43 and a reductive symbol of Muslim women's religious tradition and practice.

Islamist arguments that support the veil for women44 have historically been derived from interpretations of three Qur'anic passages that reference the concealing of women's bodies under specific circumstances. The first of these,

Sura An-Nur (24:31), counsels women to exhibit modesty, particularly in the presence of men to whom they are not related through either birth or marriage:

And tell the believing women to lower their gaze and be modest, and to display of their adornment only that which is apparent, and to draw their veils [khimar] over their bosoms, and not to reveal their adornment save to their own husbands orfathers or husbands' fathers, or their sons or their husbands' sons, or their brothers or their

41 Scholars such as Fatima Mernissi and Leila Ahmed began to popularize this discourse in Western scholarship in the 1970s and '80s, although its colonial associations have exposed it as a rhetorical strategy developed by British and European colonizers. 42 See Fadwa El Guindi, Veil: Modesty, Privacy and Resistance (Oxford: Berg Publishing, 1999); Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Fatima Mernissi, The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women's Rights in Islam (Cambridge: Perseus Books, 1987). El Guindi points out that the veil's origins are not strictly Islamic, and that veiling was also practiced in Sumerian, Persian, Hellenic, and Byzantine cultures (13). 43 Ziba Mir-Hosseini, "The Politics and Hermeneutics of Hijab in Iran," Muslim World Journal of Human Rights 4:1 (January 2007): Article 2,1. 44 Some scholars have noted that dress prescriptions in Islam are not limited to women. See El Guindi, Veil: Modesty, Privacy and Resistance, 117; and Ashraf Zahedi, "Contested Meanings of the Veil and Political Ideologies of Iranian Regimes," Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 3:3 (Fall 2007): 77. 54

brothers' sons or sisters' sons, or their women, or their slaves, or male attendants who lack vigour, or children who know naught of women's nakedness.

The second verse, Sura Al-Ahzab (33:53), while making reference to women's privacy, does not include any mention of clothing:

O Ye who believe! ... when ye ask of them (the wives of the Prophet) anything, ask it of them from behind a curtain [hijab]. That is purer for your hearts and for their hearts.

A final passage, also from Sura Al-Ahzab (33:59), explicitly concerns an item of clothing, but its function is to identify Muslim women and so protect them from aggressive or unwanted male sexual advances:

O Prophet! Tell thy wives and thy daughters and the women of the believers to draw their cloaks [jilbab] close round them (when they go abroad). That will be better, so that they may be recognised and not annoyed.

These excerpts, and their interpretations, formed the basis for later fiqh rulings that demarcated guidelines for covering the entire female body except for the hands, the feet, and the face. However, both custom and legislation pertaining to veiling are far from uniform across the Muslim world. In part, this absence of consistency can be attributed to the scriptural references cited above.

Beyond their requirement for modesty, they do not clearly indicate how hijab as a dress code can or should be adopted by Muslim women. This ambiguity has manifested as various and competing sets of rules, based on a multiplicity of theological, juristic, and sexual theories that have conditioned Muslim legal discourses to varying degrees at different times. As Mir-Hosseini argues, "rulings 55

(ahkam) and positions on hijab are subject to the socio-political conditions and forces that shape both readings of the scared sources and the formation of jurisprudential concepts and arguments."45

Along with these diverse interpretations at the legal level, hijab has also been invested with several (often contradictory) contextual and symbolic meanings. Nineteenth-century European colonizers consistently invoked stereotypical Orientalist representations of oppressed and disenfranchised

Muslim women as a justification for their rescue through the intervention of colonial cultures, effectively identifying the discriminatory treatment of women in colonial contexts with the colonized societies themselves.46 Integral to this

Orientalist reading was the colonial interpretation of the veil, which developed into an ideological metaphor, a visual trope providing "a clinching example that interlocks 'woman' and 'tradition/Islam.'"47 While the colonizers may have been responsible for establishing the parameters of this discourse, it was taken up and rearticulated by native Muslim elites, such as Qasim Amin in Egypt, who supported the colonial project of Westernization as synonymous with progress and modernity. By accepting the Orientalist identification of Muslim women as the measure of their societies' backward condition, modernizers simultaneously endorsed the more generalized notion of the family, gender relations, and

45 Mir-Hosseini, "The Politics and Hermeneutics of Hijab in Iran," 2. 46 Amina Jamat, "Feminist 'Selves' and Feminism's 'Others': Feminist Representations of Jamaat- e-lslami Women in Pakistan," Feminist Review 81 (2005): 54. 47 Meyda YeQenoglu, "Sartorial Fabric-ations: Enlightenment and Western Feminism," in Postcolonialism, Feminism and Religious Discourse, ed. Laura E. Donaldson and Kwok Pui-lan (New York: Routledge, 2002), 84. women's status as "privileged sites of cultural distinctiveness and identity.

According to this gendered cultural construction, any meaningful social change must focus on women. The Muslim woman is construed as the embodiment of culture, therefore "the ideals of progress and modernization have to be meticulously inscribed onto her; she has to be remade."49 The most immediately obvious way to do this, according to Amin and his contemporaries, was to eliminate the visual marker that distinguished Islamic traditionalism—that is, to eliminate the veil.

As former colonies began to agitate for independence, a reactionary discourse to Westernization developed that incorporated the colonial gender model and its assumptions. In countries such as Iran, where the Pahlavi regime officially adopted the Western model as a cultural benchmark of modernity, comprehensive twentieth-century programs of reform included legislation banning women from wearing the veil. But an emerging counter to the Western- oriented model was overtly reactionary, contesting the notion of unveiling as essential for progress and instead, adopting the veil as a symbol of indigenous cultural authenticity:

The veil came to symbolize, in the resistance narrative, not the inferiority of the culture and the need to cast its customs aside in favor of those of the West, but, on the contrary, the dignity and validity of all native customs, and in particular those customs coming under fiercest colonial attack—the customs relating to women—and the need to tenaciously affirm them as a means of resistance

48 Kandiyoti, "Reflections on the Politics of Gender in Muslim Societies," 20. 49 YegenoQIu, "Sartorial Fabric-ations," 85. to Western domination.

In Iran, for example, the desire to construct an autonomous national identity was connected to both cultural and political symbolism, with women who donned the chador or headscarf communicating their rejection of the shah and of his

Westernizing program. In this context, the veil assumed a new symbolism as "a marker of protest and of a new Islamic identity."51 This trend continued and was, moreover, renewed more broadly in the Muslim world during the post- independence period in response to "imperialist meddling in regional politics and conflicts," and an increasing economic disparity between developed and underdeveloped nations:

The failure of post-independence developmentalism could be interpreted not as mere technical failures but as moral failures requiring a complete overhaul of the world views underpinning them. It is against this background that some oppositional movements have been advocating a 'just' Islamic order, invoking notions of authentic Muslim womanhood as part of a broader critique of Westernization and consumerism.52

Islamist countries seeking alternatives to Western social and political models began to institutionalize personal and family laws justified with reference to

Islamic doctrine and tradition. The unification of religious and legal codes, and the resultant conflation of national and religious identities, remains particularly focused on women, who continue to be construed in these contexts as the

Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, 164. 51 Mir-Hosseini, "The Politics and Hermeneutics of Hijab in Iran," 4. See also Ashraf Zahedi, "Contested Meanings of the Veil and Political Ideologies of Iranian Regimes," 87; and Minoo Moallem, Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Cultural Politics of Patriarchy in Iran (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 82. 52 Kandiyoti, "Reflections on the Politics of Gender in Muslim Societies," 23-4. bearers of a unique and authentic culture. As a result, reified gender roles become a distinguishing factor in the creation of Islamic national identity.53

The veil's new symbolism

Where it exists, the legal requirement to veil represents the deliberate, gendered marginalization of women in Islamist societies, but however much this assertion may resonate with the rights-based perspective, it must be balanced against homogenizing constructions that equate the veil with Muslim women's subordination to Muslim men. Discourses of the veil, both Western and Islamic, have displayed a tendency to reify its symbolic meaning around one of two antithetical positions: either it is "a patriarchal mandate that denies women their basic rights to control their own bodies and to choose what to wear," or it is "a symbol of [Muslim women's] distinct identity and their claim to religious authenticity."54 As Helen Watson observes, it is "difficult... to approach an understanding of the indigenous meaning of hijab if commentary is grounded in notions of 'freedom' and 'constraint' which derive from a Western cultural context.

In this way the veil and the question of women and Islam itself remain firmly associated, directly or indirectly, with assumptions of women's inferiority, subordination and powerlessness."55 Or, as Yegenoglu puts it, "Only if we see

53 Farida Shaheed, "Networking for Change: The Role of Women's Groups in Initiating Dialogue on Women's Issues," in Faith and Freedom: Women's Human Rights in the Muslim World, ed. Mahnaz Afkhami (London: I.B. Tauris, 1995), 82-3. 54 Mir-Hosseini, "The Politics and Hermeneutics of Hijab in Iran," 1. 55 Helen Watson, "Women and the Veil: Personal Responses to Global Process," in Islam, Globalization and Postmodernity, ed. Akbar S. Ahmed and Hastings Donnan (London: Routledge, 1994), 153-154. the veiling of woman in Muslim culture as a unique cultural experience, we can then actually learn what it is to veil or unveil as woman, rather than simply re­ setting the liberal scene and repeating commonsensical and cliched standards in the name of universal emancipation."56

One need only look to current representations of the women of

Afghanistan as "gendered slaves in need of 'saving' by the West,"57 to recognize that the tendency towards essentializing Muslim women did not end with the colonial era. As Amina Jamal notes, "contemporary calls for the—undeniably urgent—political, social and economic restructuring of Muslim societies in the new world order are in fact bolstered by an older world order in which Orientalist representations of the veil symbolized ... the oppression of Muslim women."58 In much the same way that colonial discourses silenced non-Western women through their symbolic representation as victims, Ayotte and Husain contend that,

"the United States has reinscribed an ostensibly benevolent paternalism" that constitutes "a violent knowledge of the third-world Other that erases women as subjects of international relations"59:

The rhetorical construction of Afghan women as objects of knowledge legitimated U.S. military intervention under the rubric of 'liberation' at the same time that it masked the root causes of structural violence in Afghanistan. ... [The] Taliban's overwhelming misogyny neither began nor ended with the imposition of the burqa, and the wide range of oppressive policies that the Taliban inflicted

YegenoQIu, "Sartorial Fabric-ations," 97. 57 Kevin J. Ayotte and Mary E. Husain, "Securing Afghan Women: Neocolonialism, Epistemic Violence, and the Rhetoric of the Veil," NWSA Journal 17:3 (Fall 2005): 113. 58 Jamal, "Feminist 'Selves' and Feminism's 'Others'," 54. 59 Ayotte and Husain, 113. upon women.... Yet in many cases, representations of the burqa have come to stand in for alt of the other violence done to Afghan women by an either visual or linguistic synecdoche.60 While U.S. interests in Afghanistan may not be explicitly colonial, Ayotte and

Husain argue that the appropriation of the veiled Muslim woman as an object of victimization performs a colonizing function, exercising a form of epistemic violence that reinscribes Orientalist rhetoric and offers "no possibility for women to choose to wear [the veil] out of personal preference or cultural tradition."61

Yet the veil has also assumed new symbolic meanings, specifically for

Muslim women who do exercise this very choice. In some contexts, such as the popular movements against secular governments in Turkey, Egypt, Algeria, and

Iran, many Muslim women used the veil as a symbol of resistance, adopting it as a conscious act of protest.62 In Pakistan, despite the tendency to read the image of "willfully veiled Muslim women" who actively support state-sponsored Islamist programs as "an adjunct of male religious parties,"63 Jamal contends that they are effectively renegotiating the boundaries between the secular and the religious. They can, therefore, be interpreted as subjective agents in their own right. Majid notes that, "in countries where the veil is not mandated, many women choose it both as a reaction to the failed bourgeois nationalist programs of the postindependence era (although there is still a great deal of male coercion) and as part of the mainstream, middle-class rejection of the secular ideologies that

60 Ibid, 113,115. 61 Ibid., 119. 62 Ibid., 117. 63 Jamal, "Feminist 'Selves' and Feminism's 'Others'," 62. 61 have dominated public life."64 Here again, the arguments regarding Orientalism and imperialism are relevant, because they reflect the historical reality and importance of the resistance narrative in the identity formations of postcolonial cultures.

The veil is therefore both a theoretical and historically instantiated site of contestation for Muslim women that defies unilateral or simplistic interpretation.

Its appropriation by various groups illustrates how a complex set of (sometimes conflicting) values and multivalent constructions of identity are embedded in its use as a symbol of both oppression and resistance for Muslim women. Its relationship to the universal rights debate, however, is problematized by this ambivalence. If "wearing a hijab ... may indeed be a form of enforced inequality and subservience for woman, or on the other hand it may be an empowering practice,"65 then can the wearing of it or not be constructed as a universal right?

Given the historical reality of its imposition by Islamist regimes, can (or should) the veil be deployed as a symbol of autonomy and choice? Or is it too mired in the contradiction between oppression and empowerment to have any symbolic value at all?

It is difficult to escape the negative associations of the veil without denying that it has functioned—and in some places continues to function—as a repressive practice that delimits and demarcates the rights of women. As Leila

64 Majid, "The Politics of Feminism in Islam," 71-72. 65 Jane Freedman, "Women, Islam and Rights in Europe: Beyond a Universalist/Culturalist Dichotomy," Review of International Studies 33 (2007): 42. 62

Ahmed notes, because of its multivalent characteristics, the veil has both local and global connotations which remain subject to the dynamics of prevailing discursive power: "meanings of the hijab ... can follow dominant master- narratives. ... And certainly the Tightness of patriarchy and of male authority over women is one of these globally powerful meanings."66 Surely this fact cannot and should not be ignored. The tendency in the rights debate has been to reductively argue in favour of Muslim women's right not to veil. However this position constructs veiling as an aberrant practice and homogenizes Muslim women who do veil by assuming that they are all merely passive victims of patriarchal and/or religious oppression. As Meyda Yegenoglu insightfully reminds us, "If veiling can be seen as a specific practice of marking and disciplining the body in accordance with cultural requirements, so can unveiling. ... What needs to be examined here is the presumption of the truth and naturalness of the unveiled body that the discourse of colonial feminism is predicated upon."67 If the presumed

"naturalness of the unveiled body" legitimates interventionist action against the veil, then the discursive functions and foundations of this assumption, with their implicit construction of a limited understanding of woman's agency, needs to be addressed.

"We need," says Lila Abu-Lughod, "to work against the reductive interpretation of veiling as the quintessential sign of women's unfreedom, even if

66 Leila Ahmed, "The Veil Debate—Again," in On Shifting Ground: Muslim Women in the Global Era, ed. Fereshteh Nouraie-Simone (New York: The Feminist Press at The City University of New York, 2005), 168. 67 Yegenoglu, "Sartorial Fabrications," 92. 63 we object to state imposition of [it]. Not to do so is to imply that the very issue at the heart of the rights debate, i.e., the primacy of the individual as an autonomous subject, should be sidestepped in favour of a strictly universal interpretation of the veil as inherently repressive. By obviating its potential use as a symbol of empowerment, such a position denies that women who choose to veil are actually making a choice at all, casting their actions as merely concessions to the prevailing religious, cultural, or political authorities, and further pushing the veil back towards its limited symbolism in colonialist discourse and

Orientalist rhetoric.69 Far from advancing the cause of promoting women's autonomous rights, the unilateral interpretation of the veil as a repressive symbol runs the risk of subsuming such rights under the very categories that denied women their legitimate status as subjective agents in the first place. Choice has emerged as "the missing link between contemporary Islamic and human rights discourses on hijab."70 Muslim women who use hijab as a marker of identity or as

Lila Abu-Lughod, "Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others," American Anthropologist 104:3 (September 2002): 786. 69 Recent legislative measures instituted in France and Germany banning the headscarf in certain public arenas have brought this issue into the forefront of current discourses surrounding the veil. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to address these developments, a growing amount of literature devoted to hijab in the Muslim Western diasporic context discusses similar confluences of postcolonial and feminist theories. See Falguni A. Sheth, "Unruly Muslim Women and Threats to Liberal Culture," Peace Review 18:4 (October-December 2006): 455-463; Haleh Afshar, "Can I See Your Hair? Choice, Agency and Attitudes: The Dilemma of Faith and Feminism for Muslim Women Who Cover," Ethnic and Racial Studies 31:2 (February 2008): 411-427; Bronwyn Winter, "Secularism Aboard the Titanic: Feminists and the Debate over the Hijab in France," Feminist Studies 32:2 (Summer 2006): 279-298; Judith Ezekiel, "Magritte Meets Maghreb: This is Not a Veil," Australian Feminist Studies 20:47 (July 2005): 231-243; and Kristine Ajrouch, "Global Contexts and the Veil: Muslim Integration in the United States and France," Sociology of Religion 68:3 (Fall 2007): 321-325. For an overview of the debate in Canada, see 77»e Muslim Veil in North America: Issues and Debates, ed. Sajida S. Alvi, Homa Hoodfar, and Sheila McDonough (Toronto: Women's Press, 2003). Mir-Hosseini, "The Politics and Hermeneutics of Hijab in Iran," 15. 64 a form of protest are producing new narratives that challenge existing (colonial or feminist discourses) that elide this element. Considered and contextual inquiry, rather than unilateral valuation, must be the foundation for any assessment of these narratives, and their effect on rights discourse. If it is to be legitimately and effectively deployed as an element of the universal rights debate, the veil must be acknowledged as a powerfully multivalent symbol, not as a one-dimensional representation of either oppression or its opposite. Chapter 3: Secularism, Islam, and the universal subject

Islamic feminist responses to issues such as women's rights and the veil

elucidate how Muslim women are attempting to come to terms with social and

religious demands that are specific to Islamist environments. They point to the

unique circumstances that arise when dominant religious power structures

articulate the boundaries that circumscribe women's actions, and the need to

engage with these structures in equally unique ways. Just as postcolonial

criticism has provided an analytical resource for illuminating some of the

contributing factors in the development of Islamic feminist positions, it can also

be constructively deployed to assess women's involvement in contemporary

Islamist movements. An examination of the religious/secular divide in current

scholarship on Islamism is particularly instructive in this regard, as it highlights a

subtle yet significant shift that has occurred in Orientalist discourse, one focused

on what Saba Mahmood describes as Islam's "divergence from the perceived

norms of a secular-liberal polity."1 Where the colonialist articulation of Orientalism was based on an oppositional binary that posited Islam as the "other" of

Christianity, its more current formulation has replaced Christianity with the liberal

secularism of modernity. This new paradigm, however, has been problematized

in much the same way as its predecessor. Critics have called into question the

1 Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 189. 66 legitimacy of secularism as a universal model for progress, and additionally challenged secularism's implicit denial of agency to the religious actor.

Accounting for Islamist women

Often, the fundamentalist impulse is described as a reactionary response to the essentializing and reductionist characteristics of Western colonialism, or

Western feminism, or a combination of the two. Such a conservative impulse leads many current Islamic fundamentalist movements to deny or dismiss the contextual and historical development of cultural and religious practices, using them instead as representatives of unchanging tradition to bolster their social and political authority. Uma Narayan suggests that the proliferation of fundamentalist religious groups in the postcolonial context can be read as a reactionary response to colonialist discourse and its devaluation of indigenous religious traditions.2 But, as Meyda YeQenoglu has shown, the confluence of Orientalist and feminist criticisms of colonial practices as oppressive to women are

"interwoven aspects of the same gesture."3 Within this gendered discursive framework, the figure of the "Colonized Woman" was—and is—a significant site of contestation:

The nationalist cultural pride that was predicated upon a return to "traditional values" and the rejection of "Westernization" that began under colonial rule ... re-emerges today in a variety of postcolonial

2 Uma Narayan, Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third World Feminism (London: Routledge, 1997), 14. 3 Meyda YegenoQIu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 26. "fundamentalist" movements, where returning women to their "traditional roles" continues to be defined as central to preserving national identity and cultural pride.4

It is noteworthy that, despite the restrictive nature of legal and religious controls exerted on women in Islamist countries in the name of defending cultural authenticity, women are actively engaged in the defence and dissemination of fundamentalist ideologies. Mahmood succinctly describes the dilemma that women's support for Islamism poses for feminist analysts: "why would such a large number of women across the Muslim world actively support a movement that seems inimical to their 'own interests and agendas,' especially at a historical moment when these women appear to have more emancipatory possibilities available to them?"5

Attempts to engage this question have elicited a variety of feminist responses. A "common reaction," according to Mahmood, has been to assume that Islamist women are "pawns in a grand patriarchal plan" who would, given the opportunity, gladly renounce their fundamentalist affiliations in favour of more liberatory options.6 Many feminist scholars, however, dissatisfied with the presupposition that women (as women) should unilaterally reject the practices and values of Islamist movements, have sought to avoid relying on a doctrine of

"false consciousness" wherein Muslim women are constituted only by subjection and domination. Alternatively, their responses have stressed the need to uncover

4 Narayan, Dislocating Cultures, 20. 5 Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 2. 6 Ibid, 1. 68 how women's particular agency is articulated within the fundamentalist framework. The emphasis on theories of agency and subjectivity is a reflection of more comprehensive efforts to elucidate the relationship between fundamentalism and other elements of modernity,7 including the post-

Enlightenment emphasis on the primacy of the autonomous subject. From a critical postcolonial perspective, this is especially significant in light of the way

Islamism has conflated the process of modernization with that of colonization.8

Leila Ahmed, for instance, argues that the conjunction of modernity and religion has played a vital role in the development of Islamist movements and their focus on gender: "The revitalized, reimagined Islam put forward by the

Islamic militants ... is an Islam redefining itself against the assaults of the West but also an Islam revitalized and reimagined as a result of its fertilization by and its appropriation of the languages and ideas given currency by the discourses of the West."9 She interprets the Islamist argument for the restoration of a traditional and indigenous culture as a reaction to pervasive Western political, social, and technological systems that are seen as encroaching and alien importations in the

Islamic context. This is especially problematic for women, who are considered

"the centerpiece of the Islamist agenda" because the discourses of colonial domination put them there in the first place, using the "oppression" of Muslim

7 Religious fundamentalism, as noted in the Introduction, can be read as a particularly modern phenomenon. Sarah Bracke, "Author(iz)ing Agency: Feminist Scholars Making Sense of Women's Involvement in Religious 'Fundamentalist' Movements," The European Journal of Women's Studies 10:3 (Aug. 2003): 340. 9 Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 236. women as a justification for the colonial imperative.

Bearing postcolonial feminist criticisms in mind, analyses of women's participation in fundamentalist Islamist movements have tried to acknowledge the specifics of historical and cultural contextualization in order to circumvent the essentializing and objectifying tendencies identified in Orientalist discourse. Such an approach is made all the more meaningful considering the reality of the restrictions applied to Muslim women in Islamist contexts. Yegenoglu notes that, in the postcolonial era of nationalist political projects, the identification of women with "authentic" culture ostracized them from meaningful participation in the public domain. "When women attempted to speak," she maintains, "they did not have an autonomous subject position from which they could articulate

[themselves] as women."11 In this, Yegenoglu confirms Gayatri Spivak's contention that the subaltern "cannot speak" under prevailing conditions of

Western imperial hegemony, where she is relegated to the margins of discourse:

"For the (gender-unspecified) 'true' subaltern group, whose identity is its difference, there is no unrepresentable subaltern subject that can know and speak itself."12

To counter this discursive polarization, feminist analyses incorporate strategies to establish a legitimate "voice" for Islamist women. Sarah Bracke demonstrates how scholars have construed the rise of fundamentalist groups in

10 Ibid., 237. 11 YeQenogiu, Colonial Fantasies, 129. 12 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 272. postcolonial environments as a rejection of the colonial construction of the

Oriental "other" and its implied hegemony of the Eurocentric subject.13 According to these critiques, Muslim women who choose to become involved in Islamist movements have an opportunity to delineate an agentive space for themselves; one that was expressly denied them in the colonialist discourse that reduced women to the status of objectified "other." For example, Lamia Shehadeh proposes that Muslim women, recognizing their subordinate status, act upon a desire to claim authority by seizing "the only way open to them to exercise their freedom and power."14 By supporting fundamentalist agendas, Muslim women are therefore interpreted as deliberately acceding to the unequal gender paradigm of dominant power structures in order to assert an agentive position.

Similarly, Minoo Moallem argues that Islamist women in post-revolutionary Iran are creating a legitimate discursive space from which they can articulate their concerns. Unlike Shehadeh, however, Moallem does not believe that Muslim women are accomplishing this by accepting a religiously determined form of subordination. Instead, she notes that, "Islamic fundamentalist women, far from being merely victims or followers of the Islamic male elite, have been able to articulate their own will to power through the discourse of difference."15 Moallem contends that Islamic feminists have thus complicated the relationship between

13 Bracke, "Author(iz)ing Agency," 342. 14 Lamia Rustum Shehadeh, The Idea of Women in Fundamentalist Islam (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), 247. 15 Minoo Moallem, Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Cultural Politics of Patriarchy in Iran (Berkeley: University if California Press, 2005), 152- 153. 71 religion and modernity by incorporating models of gender equality into the traditional Islamic framework.

Specific elements of modernity have likewise been brought to bear on analyses of women and Islamism, again with an eye to developing a positive model of Muslim women's agency. Lisa Taraki focuses on the historical and material specifics of gender and class relations in the postcolonial period to argue that changing economic realities in the Islamic world can account for fundamentalism's appeal to women. Taraki suggests that increased integration of women into the labour force and educational system in the modern era has resulted in a breakdown of gendered barriers in the public domain.16 Prior to the middle of the twentieth century, women from the upper and upper-middle classes had better access to education and employment than women of the middle and middle-lower classes. The recent incorporation of greater numbers of middle and lower class women into public institutions has resulted in significant changes to class composition, giving rise to feelings of resentment that have been exploited by Islamist groups. Islamist authorities frequently point to "modern" Arab women

(predominantly those from the upper classes) who adopt the values and lifestyle of the West, as symptomatic of the moral decay of Islamic society. By embracing

Islamist codes and principles, lower class women have been able to appropriate the authority of this Islamist discourse to criticize their upper class counterparts.17

Lisa Taraki, "Islam Is the Solution: Jordanian Islamists and the Dilemma of the 'Modern Woman'," The British Journal of Sociology 46:4 (Dec. 1995): 647. 17 Ibid., 649. 72

On this theory, economic and class disaffection have effectively been translated into a religiously rationalized framework. The appeal of the Islamist project to

Muslim women is thus explained by its attraction as a form of social protest and a response to shifting and unstable economic conditions.

Another element of modernity that has become a focal point for feminist research is the rise of nationalism, and the role of religion in forging a relationship between nationalism and gender. Christiane Timmerman acknowledges that economic changes have resulted in broader social participation for Muslim women, but argues that this is offset in Islamist discourse by the foregrounding of women's roles in the family.18 She notes that Islam attaches a special importance to the symbol of women as "mothers of the nation," equating the idealization of their domestic and maternal roles with the retention of an authentic Islamic identity. In the postcolonial era, emergent Islamic nations sought to establish distinct identities counterpoised against their former colonial rulers, and promoted an agenda in which women are the primary symbol that distinguishes Muslim societies from the West.19 As such, Muslim women "constitute the very basis of national identity."20 By accepting this symbolic status, Islamist women are construed as willing to adopt particular modes of behaviour to support the promulgation of a national religious character. Timmerman suggests that the

"practical benefits" of traditional customs such as veiling—that it is "cheaper than

18 Christiane Timmerman, "Muslim Women and Nationalism: The Power of the Image," Current Sociology 48:4 (Oct. 2000): 16. 19 Ibid., 24. 20 Ibid., 18. western clothing, that it "protects women against male harassment, and that it

"gives young women a greater degree of social freedom"21—function as secular rationalizations for women's participation in Islamist groups. In contrast, Therese

Saliba contends that it is necessary to rethink the European liberal assumptions that are inherent in both "feminist" and "nationalist" formulations, and that focus solely on the "contradictory implications of liberal nationalism for women."22 She points to Islamic feminists who are actively engaged in attempts to articulate a more egalitarian Islamic view of women as exemplary of the failure of Western liberal frameworks to adequately describe the Islamist impulse. By focusing on religious motivations, rather than economic or political ones, Saliba rejects the categorization of religious piety and submission as a type of "false subjectivity" within feminism. Instead, she argues that a new, non-Eurocentric framework is needed in order to understand the "localized struggles... [in] which Arab women may search for indigenous identities and gain economic and legal rights within their societies."23

The piety movement in Egypt

Saba Mahmood's research on the urban mosque movement in Egypt is consonant with the type of non-Eurocentric approach Saliba advocates. Rather than unilaterally accepting the terms of Western liberal discourse, Mahmood

IUIU. 22 Therese Saliba, "Arab Feminism at the Millennium," Journal of Women in Culture and Society 25:4 (Summer 2000): 1088. 23 Ibid., 1088, 1090. 74 interrogates the application of its models of authority and agency to the study of

Islamist women. Mahmood's work is based on fieldwork she conducted among groups of Muslim women in Cairo who gather regularly at the city's mosques to provide one another with religious pedagogical instruction. Their lessons focus on "the teaching and studying of Islamic scriptures, social practices, and forms of bodily comportment considered germane to the cultivation of the ideal virtuous self."24 Female participants in the mosque movement are engaged in an ethical project of self-realization that seeks to inculcate Islamic principles by nurturing virtues, habits, and desires. To this end, they place particular emphasis on

Islamically prescribed outward markers of female religiosity, including ritual practices (such as prayer), public modes behaviour (such as modesty), and specific forms of dress (such as the veil). Together these are taken to be "the necessary and ineluctable means" for realizing a form of religiosity that applies to their daily lives.25

As religious praxis, the piety movement in Egypt presents a paradox to feminist interpreters. On the one hand, while it marks an innovative and unique level of female participation in Islamic pedagogy, on the other, this participation

"is critically structured by, and serves to uphold, a discursive tradition that regards subordination to a transcendent will (and thus, in many instances, to male authority) as its coveted goal."26 For instance, Mahmood describes how the

24 Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 2. 25 Ibid., 31. 26 Ibid., 2-3. Mahmood notes that the mosque movement differs significantly from Islamic feminist movements in other places (for example, Iran) that emphasize the reinterpretation of the Qur'an 75 mosque participants are often confronted by practical dilemmas, such as how to abide by Islamic protocols of sex segregation in integrated workplaces and schools. The women resolve these issues by examining Islamic juristic debates and reinterpreting them in the context of their daily struggles. These efforts,

"while clearly bringing women's interpretive practices to bear upon the male exegetical tradition in new ways, also extend the logic and reach of this tradition into areas ... that might otherwise have remained outside its purview."27 In other words, participants in the mosque movement are simultaneously challenging and recapitulating the conventional Islamic understanding of women's gendered roles.

In trying to analytically conceptualize this apparent contradiction,

Mahmood problematizes Western feminist theories that rely on a narrative of resistance or subversion to posit women's agentive status. The traditional

Western construction of agency, adopted by much of feminist scholarship, is predicated upon a liberal understanding of the notion of freedom. This model is deeply rooted in the concept of individual autonomy, wherein actions are deemed

"free" only if they are willed and intentional: "In order for an individual to be free, her actions must be the consequence of her 'own will' rather than of custom, tradition, or social coercion."28 The attractiveness of the resistance narrative as

and shari'a in order to elucidate a more equitable model of gender relations. See Fereshteh Ahmadi, "Islamic Feminism in Iran: Feminism in a New Islamic Context," Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 22(2) (2006): 33-53; and Ziba Mir-Hosseini, "Muslim Women's Quest for Equality: Between Islamic Law and Feminism," Critical Inquiry 32 (Summer 2006): 629-645. 27 Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 99-100. 28 Ibid., 11. 76 an account of women's agency lies in its potential to locate this freedom—and the subject it supports—in acts of subversion. For feminists, this has provided a valuable theoretical tool in light of persistent patterns of male domination in social, political, and religious institutions:

[T]here is a tendency among scholars to look for expressions and moments of resistance that may suggest a challenge to male domination. When women's actions seem to reinscribe what appear to be 'instruments of their own oppression,' the social analyst can point to moments of disruption of, and articulation of points of opposition to, male authority.... Agency, in this form of analysis, is understood as the capacity to realize one's own interests against the weight of custom, tradition, transcendental will, or other obstacles (whether individual or collective).29

Taking its cue from the idea of a prevailing power structure that must be subverted or supported, the narrative of resistance is an either/or proposition. In the absence of the motivation to resist, actions and behaviours are perforce relegated to cooperation with, and subsumption under, the terms of the prevailing hegemonic discourse. From a feminist reading, this implies that women's actions are either resistant to, or complicit with, male authority, and only as the former are they constitutive of women's agency.

If one accepts the liberal model as a paradigmatic formulation of agency, then the practices of the women of the piety movement can only be rationalized to the extent that they represent the potential subversion of conventional gendered roles. Mahmood, however, argues against such a reductive conclusion.

29 Ibid., 8. 77

She contends that to ascribe a subversive motivation to Muslim women in this case misconstrues the nature of the desire that undergirds their actions. The resistance narrative assumes a fundamental disjunction exists between the subject's desires and the prevailing social norms in which those desires are articulated or enacted. The very question regarding why women would support

Islamism when it "clearly" contradicts their "own interests" is framed within the terms of just such a discursive logic. But this disjunction is not always and necessarily the case. On the contrary, the women of the mosque movement choose to conform to gendered mandates grounded in the Islamic theological corpus. They therefore instantiate a conjunction of individual desire and social convention:

[The] mosque movement shows that the distinction between the subject's real desires and obligatory social conventions—a distinction at the center of liberal, and at times progressive thought—cannot be assumed, precisely because socially prescribed forms of behavior constitute the conditions for the emergence of the self as such and are integral to its realization.30

Authorized models of religious behaviour are not elements of constraint that determine modes of conduct, but the framework, or what Mahmood refers to as

"scaffolding," upon which these Muslim women's self-willed obedience assumes meaning and value. While the women in the mosque movement may superficially appear be to enacting a "deplorable passivity and docility" by accepting the gendered codes of the Islamic tradition, they are in fact using these codes as a

Ibid., 149. 78 measure of their personal and ethical development. In light of the convergence between individual and social wills, Mahmood proposes that they are enacting an alternative model of agency that is socially and historically constituted by the

Islamic tradition in which it is located. Rather than reading their actions as a lack of agency, they can instead be interpreted as demonstrating a different form of agency, effectively denying the primacy and universality of the Western paradigm.

Wary of the potential criticism that her new model of agency has

"smuggled back in a subject-centered theory of agency by locating agency within the efforts of the self," Mahmood counters that the agency she describes does not implicitly inhere in the individual in the same way the liberal Western model asserts:

Even though I focus on the practices of the mosque participants, this does not mean that their activities and the operations they perform on themselves are products of their independent wills; rather, my argument is that those activities are the product of authoritative discursive traditions whose logic and power far exceed the consciousness of the subjects they enable. The kind of agency I am exploring here does not belong to the women themselves, but is a product of the historically contingent discursive traditions in which they are located.31

Because agency in this context is located in a discursive religious tradition, it challenges previous interpretations of Muslim women's actions that have sought to uncover political, economic, or other secular motivations for their involvement

Ibid., 32. in Islamist movements. Mahmood describes the piety movement as emerging in response to the perception that religious knowledge, as a means for organizing daily life, had become increasingly marginalized under modern structures of secular governance."32 The piety movement is not, as secular theorists suggest, merely about religion as a marker of ethnic distinction or national identity. In fact, several of the women Mahmood interviews are highly critical of such interpretations, seeing them as a denial of the ethical dimension of their religious activities.33 It is an integral part of Mahmood's model that the mosque movement participants use a religiously determined set of codes and values to articulate a subject position. Their agency, as she understands it, only emerges in the context of their religious engagement. Any analysis that foregrounds secular meanings, she maintains, elides this emphasis on religion as the primary dimension in determining the contours and meanings of the participants' actions.34

In developing this model, Mahmood's objective is to interrogate a particular feminist notion of agency and "uncouple" it from its political project to

"subvert and resignify the hegemonic discourses of gender and sexuality."35 She maintains that the piety movement, because of its religious focus, is only marginally concerned with questions of "rights, recognition, distributive justice, and political representation" that normally underscore the feminist political

32 Ibid., 44. 33 Ibid., 51. 34 Ibid., 14. 35 Ibid., 153. agenda. It is possible, however, to critically examine her model on a level besides this critique of political feminism, by elucidating its interaction with the tradition of secularism. Mahmood avoids overtly relying on the gendered resistance narrative, but the participants in the piety movement are enacting a form of resistance, albeit not the resistance to patriarchy or male domination that feminist analysis normally addresses. Patriarchy, after all, is not the only hegemonic discourse against which resistance can be expressed. Instead, the mosque movement women (and Mahmood, herself) can be read as actively resisting the dominant narrative of secular modernity.

This observation is intended not to undermine Mahmood's model, but to add another discursive dimension to it. Resistance (taken here to mean resistance to secularism) does not need to be reinserted as the source of agency. Rather, it is a precursor to it; it sets the stage upon which agency in a religious context is enacted. Evaluating Mahmood's model within this expanded framework creates a space where elements of postcolonial criticism are thrown into sharper relief. In her Epilogue, Mahmood notes that colonialist assumptions remain "glaringly apparent in the fact that women's active participation in contemporary Islamist movements, rather than constituting a challenge to such long-standing assumptions, is taken instead as further evidence of the profound subjugation of Muslim women."37 One can, however, engage this postcolonial assessment more fully to examine not just one hegemonic narrative in isolation,

36 Ibid., 193. 37 Ibid., 190. 81 but the intersection of multiple hegemonies in Islamic contexts. Such an approach can contribute to a more nuanced and holistic understanding of the way dominant power structures are articulated, and how Muslim women's responses to them are shaped.

Secularism and the "new" Orientalism

In order to pursue an expanded analysis of Muslim women and the narrative of secularism, it is instructive to examine this narrative's status within the modernist model to determine how it has impacted the study of Islamist movements. Modernity, Talal Asad observes, is a multidimensional project built upon a series of interrelated theoretical principles and meanings. Functionally, modernity's aim is the conjunctive institutionalization of diverse constituent elements derived from these theoretical positions, among them

"constitutionalism, moral autonomy, human rights, civil equality, industry, consumerism, freedom of the market-and secularism."38 As it is deployed in the project of modernity, two separate but interrelated aspects of secularism are pertinent here. First is its mediatory role in the construction of a universal subject; and second is its stratification of Western and non-Western cultures based on the adoption of secular standards into a revised Orientalist paradigm.

In the modern state, where citizenship is considered the primary determinant of identity, the notion of secularism functions as a democratizing

38 Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, and Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 13. principle. Salwa Ismail notes that the public, secular sphere in modernist discourse is constructed as "a neutral space," and that individuals are presumed to "come to it unmarked, that is, unburdened by their social positioning, having somehow shed the accoutrements of their social being—the most important of which are gender, class and religion."39 Secularism therefore supports an agenda of identity formation by serving as a common basis for defining citizenship.

According to Asad, it works to "transcend the different identities built on class, gender, and religion, replacing conflicting perspectives by unifying experience."40

The secular subject is therefore constructed as universal and undifferentiated within the bounds her identification with a particular nation. Her religious affiliation (if she has one) is not denied, but is relegated to the private sphere where its specificity does not contradict the universalizing impulse. The public sphere is not anti-religious, per se, but it is constructed as a-religious for particular reasons. Ismail notes that, "secular liberal arguments invoke the risks of intolerance towards difference that religion in public would bring about. They also view secular reason as neutral, hence normatively superior to religious reason, making it accessible to citizens of different doctrinal persuasions."41 In other words, secularism is democratic while religion is partisan, and delimiting them in separate spheres maintains the theoretical neutrality that secularism is intended to embody.

39 Salwa Ismail, "Islamism, Re-lslamization and the Fashioning of Muslim Selves: Refiguring the Public Sphere," Muslim World Journal of Human Rights 4(1) (2007), Article 3, 6. 40 Asad, Formations of the Secular, 5. 41 Ismail, "Islamism, Re-lslamization and the Fashioning of Muslim Selves," 9. 83

One of the functional results of this separation is that the project of modernity is predisposed to taking an exclusionary stance with regard to religion.

Implicit to the process of modernization are a unique conception of history and a devaluation of religion as the antithesis of the progress that characterizes it:

From the Enlightenment philosophes, through the Victorian evolutionist thinkers, to the experts on economic and political development in the latter half of the twentieth century, one assumption has been constant: to make history, the agent must create the future, remake herself, and help others to do so, where the criteria of successful remaking are seen to be universal. ... To that extent, history can be made only on the back of a universal teleology. Actions seeking to maintain the 'local' status quo, or to follow local models of social life, do not qualify as history making. From the Cargo Cults of Melanesia to the Islamic Revolution in Iran, they merely attempt (hopelessly) 'to resist the future' or 'turn back the clock of history.'42

Asad argues that the West defines itself, in contradistinction to non-Western cultures, according to this teleological conception of history. The West, therefore, is "modern" because it embodies historical progression "accelerating forward into an open future."43 The non-West, conversely, is mired in traditionalism, refusing to accede to the progressive secular paradigm and therefore unable (or unwilling) to participate in the modernist project.

This binary construction is thoroughly consonant with earlier descriptions of the colonial discourse of Orientalism, establishing a similar hierarchy that operates on both descriptive and evaluative levels to marginalize non-Western

Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam taltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 19. Ibid., 18. cultures and their traditions. Secularism, as part of modernity s hegemonic political project, reiterates a series of universal ontological premises that underscore the assertion of the West's superiority. According to Asad,

three senses together articulate the essence of "European civilization": it aspires to a universal (because "human") status; it claims to be distinctive (it defines modernity as opposed to tradition); and it is, by quantifiable criteria, undoubtedly the most advanced— and knows itself to be so to the extent that it now includes North America.44

Edward Said, too, recognizes an affiliation between Orientalism and secularism, noting that the essential aspects of modern Orientalist discourse are derived from older religious patterns of history and progress that have been "reconstituted, redeployed, redistributed in the secular framework."45 The impact of secularism, however, can be seen to extend beyond its influence as the framework for an appropriation and redistribution of inherited teleological structures. By forging a discursive divide between secularism and religion, the project of modernity has also reconstituted religion and the religious actor in essentialized, Orientalist terms.

This is one of the pivotal arguments developed by Anouar Majid in his examination of the dilemmas faced by present-day Islamic polities. Majid contends that the emphasis on Islamist states' need (and failure) to adopt secularist models and goals exacerbates an adversarial differentiation between

Islam and the West. By interrogating the economic aspects of modernity as a

44 Asad, Formations of the Secular, 166. 45 Said, Orientalism, 121. universal project, Majid rejects its assumption that global capitalism (what Asad refers to as "consumerism" and "freedom of the market") represents the epitome of historical progress. He acknowledges, however, that as a hegemonic discourse, the project of modernity has exercised considerable influence on the development of political and economic institutions in Islamist countries. "The

Islamist movement," he remarks, "makes sense only within the context of the world capitalist system, especially since Islamism is still largely informed by the nineteenth-century modernist agenda of 'catching up' with the West."46 The impulse to participate on an equal footing in the global marketplace is complicated by the desire to simultaneously "preserve cultural authenticity" by rejecting secularism as a Western cultural product. This is especially prevalent in countries where the capitalist model has failed to produce anticipated levels of economic prosperity. In the face of a widening economic gap between

"increasingly poorer [Third World] suppliers of raw materials" and

"hypertechnologized advanced capitalist countries," Islamic societies are relegated to a position of economic dependency that further undermines confidence in the Western model.47

Cognizant of how this economic disparity has fueled the rise of political

Islamism, Majid observes that the reactionary emphasis on retaining a unique

Islamic identity is reified into a religious hegemony that confers legitimacy upon

Anouar Majid, Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 60. 47 Ibid., 62. "the absolutists," who use "their better knowledge of—or merely their reliance on—Islamic texts (however badly interpreted) and their deployment of recognizable Islamic signifiers" to validate their authority.48 The resultant tension created between secularism and religion as competing narratives is a crucial element in the discursive construction of secularism as "progressive" and Islam as "traditional":

Religion as a different cosmology entailing its own distinct set of belief systems and practices is a troubling excess. It is especially excessive when it appears as a disruption of dominant ideologies that secure political consensus and ensure the uninterrupted march of capitalism; it is repulsively atavistic when it refuses to relinquish tradition and identity. Islam, in other words, can no longer insist on its autonomy without fundamentalizing itself; hence it is reduced—both by its critics and adherents—to banal descriptions and crude oversimplifications that perpetuate imaginary rivalries.49

Islamist countries have thus contributed to the creation of "a new form of

Orientalism" that pits secularist and religious positions against each other as competing and incompatible gestures in a battle for ascendancy.50 Not only does this tacitly reiterate Orientalist paradigms and stereotypes, according to Majid, it entrenches them in a binary opposition where Islam cannot be viewed as a legitimately progressive tradition.

Its location within the discourse of modernity also means that secularism has come to embody a series of assumptions and ideals that privilege a

Ibid., 29. Ibid, 51. Ibid, 117-118. 87 particular liberal understanding of the individual, underscoring the link between modernity and autonomy. To return to Saba Mahmood's analysis, her critique of liberal feminism's reliance on Western notions of the subject is also the critique of a larger, integrative project that seeks to universalize particular ideas and experiences as the benchmarks for legitimate agency according to the precepts of modernity. Mahmood's attempt to locate the agency of the mosque movement women outside the parameters of liberal discourse is informed by the difficulty that secularism has in dealing with the religious actor as a subject of history. In order to support her new model, Mahmood is forced to counter the secularist notion of agency and its attendant characterization of religion as contradictory to the mandates of subjective autonomy:

For those of us with well-honed secular-liberal and progressive sensibilities, the slightest eruption of religion into the public domain is frequently experienced as a dangerous affront, one that threatens to subject us to a normative morality dictated by mullahs and priests. ... Within our secular epistemology, we tend to translate religious truth as force.51

What Mahmood recognizes here is that, in trying to articulate a form of agency that rejects the ascription of secular political motivations, the very analysis that produces such a model must itself negotiate the assumptions of modernity that marginalize the religious actor merely because she is religious.

Mahmood conscientiously moves beyond the restrictive confines of Western secular investigations that, by default, interpret "religious markers of public

Mahmood, Politics of Piety, xi. 88 behaviour through the lens of identity politics."52 Because the piety movement is not merely "a recoding of nationalist sentiments in religious idioms,"53 Mahmood's analysis must foreground its religious character. To obfuscate this emphasis would be to misunderstand the constructive role religion plays in establishing the parameters for the agency of the mosque movement participants. This is precisely the sort of the critique enjoined by Majid when he argues that, "secular structures fit badly in cultures in which human agency is constantly negotiating its boundaries with those of the Revelation, in which accommodation to the divine intent is a fundamental principle."54 To understand the religious actor, one must question the modernist assumption that she is, by definition, coerced or determined because her desires conform to those of the religious context in which she acts.

The hegemony of secularism and its relegation of religion to the private sphere thus reiterate the essential features of the Orientalist paradigm.

Postcolonial theory has shown that the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized is based on a program of devaluation. Premised on the notion that the East is inferior to the West because of a traditionalism rooted in religion,

Orientalism is not just about the construction of a binary opposition between East and West. It is also about the constructed division between secularism and religion, a division implicit in the project of modernity and its assumption that the

Ibid., 192. Ibid., 118. Majid, Unveiling Traditions, 117. discourse of secularism is the only legitimate framework for establishing individual autonomy. As with other binaries identified in postcolonial and feminist critiques, a hierarchy is established in and through such constructions, in this case privileging the secular over the religious actor according to the ascendant terms of liberal modernity. The unwillingness (or incapacity) to recognize the religious subject as an agent, and not a passive victim, is predicated upon the universality of the Western model of subjectivity and its reliance on secular understandings of freedom and autonomy. Interrogating the discourse of secularism uncovers the way in which it is always already imbedded in assumptions about its own authority. Like the discourse of Orientalism, secularism creates a discursive space to assert its own dominance and legitimacy by marginalizing the non-secular perspective and denying its validity.

In assuming a similar set of binaries to reestablish a similar discursive agenda, secularism has effectively usurped the role of colonial Orientalism, becoming one of the constituent elements in a reorganized Orientalist discourse. Religion, and in particular Islam, has become secularism's rhetorical "other."

The veil debate reprised

Within the modernist framework of the secular/religious divide, the discourse of Orientalism has therefore undergone a subtle yet significant shift, one that has particular resonance in terms of the veil debate. Where colonial

Orientalism construed the veil as the symbol of women's segregation and oppression and therefore the primary visual signifier of the inferiority of Islamic 90 cultures, under the terms of secularist discourse, the veil has acquired a modified series of meanings. In current scholarship, the veil has been variously described as "a reaction against the secular feminism of the West";55 "an affirmation of an

Islamic identity and morality and a rejection of Western materialism, consumerism, commercialism, and values";56 and the performatively enacted resistance to "both the patriarchal and the colonial narratives."57 Many of the veil's contemporary meanings are therefore embedded in the narratives of resistance and identity politics. In each of the instances presented above, its adoption is interpreted as Muslim women reclaiming the veil for their own purposes, exercising a choice that allows them to refute ascriptions of submissiveness and instantiate their agency. Whether in the context of challenging Western feminism, Western secularism, or Western Orientalism, the veil has been ascribed a constructive role in Muslim women's articulations of a subject position confronting dominant narratives that threaten to reduce the veil— and the women who wear it—to a symbol of subordination.

It is the unique set of circumstances in which Muslim women find themselves that has determined the various ways the veil has been appropriated.

The emphasis on the veil's political dimensions is repeatedly stressed in feminist

55 Helen Watson, "Women and the Veil: Personal Responses to Global Process," in Islam, Globalization and Postmodernity, ed. Akbar S. Ahmed and Hastings Donnan (London: Routledge, 1994), 152. 56 Fadwa El Guindi, "Gendered Resistance, Feminist Veiling, Islamic Feminism," Ahfad Journal 22:1 (June 2005): 60. 57 Leila Ahmed, "The Veil Debate—Again," in On Shifting Ground: Muslim Women in the Global Era, ed. Fereshteh Nouraie-Simone (New York: The Feminist Press at The City University of New York, 2005), 167. 91 formulations in order to point to the necessity of recognizing Muslim women's indigenous struggles to negotiate the power structures operative in Islamist contexts. These structures are neither limited to local varieties of institutionalized patriarchy, nor to trans-cultural narratives of modernity and secularism that exert a universalizing impulse in an increasingly globalized world. They include a male- dominated version of Islam that marginalizes female participation in the public and political arenas, as well as Orientalist constructions that construe the veil as a material instrument concretizing women's gendered subordination. By foregrounding the veil's political implications, Muslim women who choose to adopt it are interpreted as active participants in indigenous projects to establish a legitimate position from which to challenge this marginalization. The efficacy of the veil as a tool in these narratives of resistance is intertwined with its association with specific interpretations of women's religiously prescribed modesty, and the codes of dress and behaviour that derive from this mandate.

The veil cannot be extricated out of these meaning-inducing/producing matrices and unilaterally posited as a univalent symbol. To understand how Muslim women articulate their lives and their relationship to their bodies, we must unravel the contested meanings of the veil as they are interpreted and appropriated in specific cases, a project whose scope is limited only by the analytical boundaries we draw to circumscribe its varied and contextual uses.

In her study of women in post-revolutionary Iran, Minoo Moallem notes that, "[it] is a mistake to read women's acceptance of the fundamentalist 92 encouragement to wear the black chador as a sign of either passivity or religiosity. Women perceived it as rather a gendered invitation to political participation and as a sign of membership, belonging, and complicity."58 However it is precisely this focus on the politicizing of the veil of which Mahmood is openly critical:

[The] veil and the commitments it embodies, not to mention other kinds of Islamic practices, have come to be understood through the prism of women's freedom and unfreedom such that to ask a different set of questions about this practice is to lay oneself open to the charge that one is indifferent to women's oppression. The force this coupling of the veil and women's (un)freedom commands is equally manifest in those arguments that endorse or defend the veil on the grounds that it is a product of women's "free choice" and evidence of their "liberation" from the hegemony of Western cultural codes.59

Mahmood cautions that the discourse of freedom precludes thinking about the veil in terms of its adoption as an Islamic religious practice, an act that cannot be properly or productively appreciated when attention is drawn away from its religious dimension. But does this mean that the political implications of the veil must be completely subsumed to its use as a signifier of religious codes and values?

This question effectively reiterates how the veil instantiates the tension between religion and secularism inherent in the new Orientalist paradigm. Under the terms of this discursive opposition, veiling is either, as Mahmood contends, a

Moallem, Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister, 110. Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 195. religious act or, as the narrative of resistance suggests, a political one. This reiterates a binary construction that prioritizes either secular or religious interpretations. But the veil can be political without devolving into a tool of "liberal political theory."60 It can represent Muslim women's agency—an autonomous choice—despite being consistent with prevailing social custom or religious tradition because its meaning is enmeshed in a variety of power structures, not only the one that determines it as an Islamically prescribed imposition. Muslim women, located at the intersection of prevailing secularist and religious ideologies, are navigating the interstices between local Islamist and non-local secular narratives that both influence the veil's potential meanings. Adopting the veil can be, as Mahmood has shown, a religious act while concurrently renouncing the values of secularism as inimical to the development of Muslim women as ethical, religious beings. This approach does not deny the existence or validity of veiling (or unveiling) as a discursive political act embedded in the process of identity formation. What it does do is prevent such discourses from foreclosing the possibility that the veil can be interpreted in terms other than those of the dominant discourse of political and secular motivations. It opens a space in which religion can be something other than a coercive instrument of women's subordination, and in doing so it challenges the liberal secularist assumptions regarding the constitution of the subject.

60 ibid. Conclusion

One of most trenchant insights of feminist and postcolonial theories has been their explicit recognition that value and authority are unequally ascribed in and through particular kinds of discourse. As theoretical positions, both articulate a point of resistance—feminism to the discourse of patriarchy, and postcolonialism to the discourse of Orientalism. In doing so, they challenge a reading of asymmetrical relations of power between individuals and groups as an inevitable or irremediable consequence of difference. Beyond formal criticism, they create the possibility for alternative modes of discourse that undermine universalizing or discriminatory models of legitimacy and meaning. This potential to interrogate and disrupt dominant narratives has made feminism and postcolonialism instrumental in articulating the discursive oppositions inherent in contemporary debates involving women and Islam.

Separately and together, feminist and postcolonial critiques have been deployed in the discussions surrounding women's human rights in the Islamic context, disclosing the contextual factors that have contributed to positions on both sides of the debate. Proponents and opponents of universal rights have both recognized the need to engage with rights as a universal paradigm antithetical to particular Islamist formulations. Universal rights have therefore been variously emphasized as a Western hegemonic construct that reinscribes

Orientalist assumptions regarding the inferiority of non-Western cultures. By 95 integrating alternative interpretations of the Qur'an and shari'a into the rights debate, Islamic feminists have focused on reworking the women's rights agenda within the context of Islamic history and religious traditions. Their efforts instantiate the potential to disrupt not only the male-dominated discourse of

Islamist clerics and regimes that would keep women marginalized in Muslim societies, but also the assumption that Western programs and paradigms are unilaterally applicable in non-Western environments. Context, then, is the determining factor that militates against the wholesale acceptance of either dominant discourse unquestioningly and in its entirety.

Similarly, feminist and postcolonial critiques have underscored the multiple meanings of the veil that have emerged in the context of modernity. Rather than conceding to the Orientalist construction of the veil as inherently oppressive to

Muslim women, new discursive approaches recognize the veil's potential both as a symbol of the rejection of colonialism, and as a site of resistance to contemporary Western models of secularism and femininity. By insisting upon the contextualized analysis of the conditions under which Muslim women adopt of the veil, these new discourses have rejected its unilateral signification as either repressive or empowering. As Saba Mahmood's research shows, it is only by listening to the women who wear the veil that we can understand how their submission, resistance, and agency are construed.

Finally, because Orientalist discourse supports a reading of Muslim women as passive victims rather than agents, feminist and postcolonial critiques have also contributed to a reworking of the notion of the secular liberal subject as the only legitimate model for agency. Colonial constructions of Muslim women depicted them as silent bodies, repressed by the weight of tradition and religious mandates that constrain their choices and actions. By homogenizing Third World women and their experiences, such images elide the possibility to read Muslim women as active subjects with the potential to either participate in or resist the dominant discursive tradition. Interrogating the liberal secular subject as a product of the project of modernity has allowed feminism and postcolonialism to critically engage how the agent is constructed through the articulation of a secular/religious divide. Models of agency that recognize the religious actor as a different, but no less legitimate, type of agent have therefore disrupted the tenuous overextension of the post-Enlightenment subject as a universal foundation for subjectivity.

The discourse of Orientalism did not disappear with the end of the

European colonial era. Its effects remain despite the fact that former colonies gained independence from their colonial rulers. In some ways, those effects are more insidious now because the discourse of difference is not overtly based on a political paradigm of ruler and ruled. Instead, the new Orientalism is premised on the superiority of Western notions of secular modernity and the economic disparities endemic to globalization. This does not make it any less real, or blunt the impact of its discursive formulations. On the contrary, it recapitulates the same binaries that devalue certain cultures and worldviews in order to assert the 97 supremacy of others. That it does so in a reorganized fashion has made it no less susceptible to the assumptions of the original Orientalist paradigm. It is in the context of Orientalism as a persistent discursive framework that Minoo

Moallem notes,

The need to engage with gendered Orientalism is no longer a flourish of postcolonial criticism but a sine qua non, since it is under the sign of a veiled woman that we increasingly come to recognize ourselves not only as gendered and heteronormative subjects but also as located in the free West, where women are not imprisoned. These images are still used to justify a civilizing mission that began in the age of colonial modernity and continues to give meaning to our contemporary world.1

Orientalism during the colonial era was largely determined by the construction of a geographical East and West, the division between them substantiated through the discursive construction of the Orient as Europe's culturally inferior antithesis.

This opposition has been tenaciously reinscribed since the nineteenth century, despite the erosion of borders that is assumed to characterize an increasingly integrated and globalized world. Orientalism has exhibited an extremely functional adaptability in its discursive practices and principles. As Reina Lewis notes, "the hegemonic knowledges about the East that Said sees as fundamental to imperialism are still there.... Orientalism is never static, but perpetually fending off or responding to challenges from within and without."2

1 Minoo Moallem, Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Cultural Politics of Patriarchy in Iran (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 161. 2 Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation (London: Routledge, 1996), 237. 98

Ultimately, what feminist and postcolonial approaches affirm is the need to challenge universal discursive formulations that fail to account for the particularity of Muslim women's actions and the contexts in which they live. The continued debate over the veil as a universal signifier is a pivotal example of how ignoring this contextual approach can quickly reify contending interpretations around misplaced universals. When Lila Abu-Lughod cautions that, "veiling itself should not be confused with, or made to stand for, lack of agency,"3 her warning reinstates the necessity to account for the unique circumstances that inhere in the postcolonial context in which Muslim women have been problematically denied agentive status according to masculinist and Orientalist constructions. But

Myra Macdonald's observation cautions just as strongly against the false universalism of reading the veil as a positive symbol for Muslim women: "Just as we mistake negative readings of the veil as universally applicable, we may equally hear new liberal voices granting insight into all Muslim women's subjectivities."4 Muslim women in Islamist countries are negotiating power structures that are unique to those environments, and only by taking account of these structures can we better understand the role that religion plays in their lives.

The new Orientalism has inherited much of its content—and its force— from its past. As the foregoing analysis has shown, it continues to impact

3 Lila Abu-Lughod, "Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others," American Anthropologist 104:3 (September 2002): 786. 4 Myra Macdonald, "Muslim Women and the Veil: Problems of Image and Voice in Media Representations," Feminist Media Studies 6:1 (2006): 15. discussions that focus on Islam and Muslim women by essentiahzing both. Islam and its "traditionalism" are still depicted as the antithesis of Western progress, and Muslim women are still depicted as passive victims forced into submission by its tenets. An awareness of these tendencies, and a desire to avoid their reductive inscriptions, informs much of the scholarly work devoted to women and

Islam today. In the wake of 9/11, Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad notes that the United

States is witnessing a resurgence of the veil as a symbol of public Islamic identity.5 By donning the headscarf, young American Muslim women are expressing their solidarity with Muslim women worldwide to renounce the growing anti-Islamic sentiments in the West.

Over the centuries, Muslims and Westerners have engaged in endless debates over whether the veil should be vilified or defended. For every criticism raised in the West, a counter argument was developed in defense of Muslim womanhood.... With each encounter, the veil has acquired new meaning and significance as it has been appropriated as a symbol of identity threatened by a ruthless enemy.6

While Haddad's analysis focuses on the veil and its meanings from a North

American diasporic perspective, her observations reflect positions in support of the veil that have likewise been articulated in other Western countries, as well as in Islamist nations. That these positions have transgressed the borders of nations to be appropriated by Muslim women in the West is significant. It points to the way that meanings of the veil are impacted both locally and internationally, and

5 Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, "The Post-9/11 Hijab as Icon," Socblogy of Religion 68:3 (Fall 2007): 253. 6 Ibid., 256. 100 how the construction of those meanings is a product of multiple discourses operating on a variety of levels. Given the reality of our increasingly globalized world, critical accounts such as Haddad's of Muslim women in the West will only deepen our understanding of these discourses, and broaden how feminist and postcolonial critiques can be applied to this process. 101

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