AN ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS OF
Azadeh Ghanizadeh for the degree of Master of Arts in English presented on May 13, 2019.
Title: Islam, Feminism, and Third-Worldism: Gender Equality in Muslim Spaces.
Abstract approved: ______
Elizabeth Sheehan Ana Milena Ribero
This project investigates the ways in which conceptions of women and gender in Islam are articulated within discourses of modernity, freedom, and justice. Considering the ways in which third-world literature and scholarship interacts with, and creates, multiculturalist discourse, this paper examines representation, spokesmanship, and the role of the cosmopolitan humanities in creating and uncovering “other” knowledge. Approaching this study from a decolonial and Islamic feminist perspective, I look to Persepolis as an example of how neoconservative ideologies in Iranian women’s diaspora writing aid the maintenance of racial hierarchies in third- and first-world societies. Narratives like Persepolis, I argue, conceal neoconservative ideologies in multiculturalist disguise while providing a false sense of communion with the “other.” Viewing Persepolis in its distinctly feminist projections, I suggest that the rhetoric of the eternally oppressed Muslim woman is recycled in this text representing Muslim women as victimized in yet another instance of pandering to a decidedly anti-Islamic Western readership. Against this trend, I turn to the Palestinian context in examining the role and representation of women in Islam as it bears upon conceptions of freedom within “traditional” and “modern” societies. Palestinian film Bar Bahar illustrates how feminist critique can avoid colluding with the colonialist forces by illustrating how patriarchal colonialism and masculinist Islam as relying on the same Orientalist frameworks to falsely agitate
for women’s liberation. Emphasizing the need for alternative cosmologies and worldviews in a continually homogenizing world, I argue for new directions in feminism, namely, Islamic approaches to feminist thinking, to avoid white-dominant feminism and prioritize the liberation of all women. Examining Iranian women’s diaspora writing and feminist Palestinian cinema, I argue for the necessity and viability of a feminist Islam to avoid both colonialism and masculinist Islam.
©Copyright by Azadeh Ghanizadeh May 13, 2019 All Rights Reserved
Islam, Feminism, and Third-Worldism: Gender Equality in Muslim Spaces
by Azadeh Ghanizadeh
A THESIS
submitted to
Oregon State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts
Presented May 13, 2019 Commencement June 2019
Master of Arts thesis of Azadeh Ghanizadeh presented on May 13, 2019
APPROVED:
Co-Major Professor, representing English
______Co-Major Professor, representing English
Director of the School of Writing, Literature and Film
Dean of the Graduate School
I understand that my thesis will become part of the permanent collection of Oregon State University libraries. My signature below authorizes release of my thesis to any reader upon request.
Azadeh Ghanizadeh, Author
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author expresses sincere appreciation to Dr. Elizabeth Sheehan and Dr. Ana Milena Ribero for their patience, dedication, and support in the making of this project.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page 1 Introduction...…………………………………………………………………….1
2 Article One: “Iran, Revolution, Diaspora: An Islamic Feminist Perspective on Iranian Women’s Writing………………………………………………………….7
3 Article Two: Islam, Feminism, and Third-Worldism: The Case of Palestine….33
DEDICATION
To the people of the Third World.
Ghanizadeh 1
Introduction Islam, Feminism, and Third-Worldism: Gender Equality in Muslim Spaces. This project examines feminist discourse from an Islamic feminist perspective. The two major forces involved in this study of feminist discourse about Muslim women, are global colonialism and the various patriarchal ideologies that presume to contest it. While larger economic and political forces are often ignored in Western gender-equality debates, Islamic feminism, in the ethic of women of color feminism, understands patriarchy in its connection to global hierarchies of wealth and power.1 The ruthless appropriation of third-world resources, by first-world nations, is of central concern in this study of women’s freedom in Muslim spaces.2 In this vein, I view any discussion about sexism in Muslim spaces as susceptible to colonialist manipulation and agree with Muslim feminist scholars’ approach to feminism as a project that, if related to Muslim women’s issues, must be articulated within an Islamic framework. In this approach, both Western patriarchal feminism and mindless traditionalism are contested with the aim of making an anti-hegemonic feminism that prioritizes the freedom of women both as individuals and within the collective context of their communities. Inspired by the original non- alignment and Bandung movement, I understand feminist Islamic projects as diverging from both masculinist Islam and global colonialism in recognition of their mutuality and interdependence.3 To this end, I examine the Iranian graphic novel, Persepolis, and feminist
Palestinian film Bar Bahar to illustrate the various ways in which feminist discourse can reproduce, or contest, hegemonic views of women’s liberation. I argue, ultimately, for the necessity and viability of an Islamic feminism, which seeks the liberation of Muslim women within the larger global and third-world context. Islamic feminism draws on the fundamentally anti-patriarchal message of Tawhid (divine unity) to articulate an anti-sexist ethos toward gender equality as bound to the freedom Muslim communities in the larger context of the third-world. Ghanizadeh 2
Women’s equality efforts, especially when they are informed by Western conceptions of freedom and white feminist ethics, often fail to produce anti-sexist outcomes. For women’s liberation to be effective, both patriarchy and Western hegemony must be contested, and their affinities must be made visible. Western feminist study and activism must recognize the ways in which the production of masculinist Islam relies on rhetorics of Western encroachment and exploitation to sustain legitimacy in the eyes of Muslim communities threatened by Western designs. Highlighting the ways in which imperialism and anti-imperialism are contested on the backs of Muslim women, an Islamic feminist analysis views gender and sexual politics as integral to both Western feminist discourse and Islamic teachings and practice. In this spirit, scholars such as Amina Wadud, Leila Ahmed, and Fatima Mernissi argue that Western feminists often articulate concerns for women from within an Orientalist framework in which “other” women are victimized by an eternally oppressive culture. These accounts are not simply reductive or misguided, they indicate larger ideological biases informed by trenchant anti-Islamic attitudes that prevent holistic understandings of women’s situation in Muslim spaces. Addressing the misapprehension of gender issues in Muslim spaces, Islamic feminist analysis critiques certain reactionary and masculinist versions of Islam in Muslim communities, demonstrating how this type of Islamic project, though viewing itself as anti-imperialist and liberatory, is implicated not only in the oppression of Muslim women, but by extension, the maintenance of third-world subjugation. In these masculinist versions of Islam, an implicit acceptance of colonial understandings of Muslim women’s role and representation in society is apparent and the psychological impacts of colonization (and the internalization of colonialist rhetoric by colonized peoples) are disclosed. While these two seemingly opposed forces (masculinist Islam and colonialist feminism) vie for control of Muslim women’s bodies, the third-world sinks Ghanizadeh 3 further into debt slavery, instability, and violence. To address this crisis, I argue that both believers and non-believers must realize the emancipatory potential within Islam and address the ongoing and increasing problem of imperialism as well as an androcentric monopoly on Islamic knowledge production and leadership. Ultimately, I argue, the gender question will decide the fate of the third-world.
Gender issues in Muslim spaces must be viewed within the larger crisis of global capitalism as addressed by the Bandung and non-alignment movement, if gender and Islam are to be a productive site of ethical questioning in feminist academic spaces.4 Muslims are overwhelmingly located within the third-world context where war, famine, and financial dependency constantly shake the social fabric, making it difficult for women to agitate for gender-equality when the collective will and existence of their people is being constantly threatened by war and theft (Mernissi 6). Western feminists must recognize this third-world history and context, and its relationship to Western colonialism, if they are to genuinely mobilize for women’s rights and not just repeat the same bad-faith arguments which conceal political and economic forces behind cultural criticism.
While addressing colonialist trends in Western feminist discourse, Islamic feminist scholarship engages with sacred texts, histories, and teachings and highlights the liberatory dimension of Islam in its uniquely anti-hierarchical ethics. As Amina Wadud argues, the principle of Tawhid forbids all forms of hierarchy and promotes balanced power relations as foundational to Islamic thought and practice.5 The liberatory dimensions of the Tawhidic paradigm are further apparent in Muslim women’s ongoing rise to positions of leadership in all areas of Islamic social and intellectual development, including education, knowledge production, military and political leadership; however, the vested interests of both Western imperialists and Ghanizadeh 4
Muslim ruling elites require the erasure of these profoundly anti-hierarchical elements in the sacred teachings. In a contemporary climate witnessing the rapid and extensive erasure of cultures, languages, and traditions across the world, feminist analysis must include indigenous, non-Western knowledges if anti-sexist efforts are to be anti-colonial and anti-racist.
Simultaneously, believers and proponents of third-worldism must hear the egalitarian voice within Islam and recognize the centrality of Tawhid as a founding principle that always/already dictates fair gender relations.
Undertaking the multiple political and economic states involved with feminist discourse in Muslim contexts, in “Iran, Revolution, Diaspora: An Islamic Feminist Perspective on Iranian
Women’s Writing,” I argue that a relationship between neoconservative ideology and liberal multiculturalism emerges in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. I argue that so-called global, or third- world, literatures are used by a liberal, multiculturalist literary establishment to calm Western audiences’ anxieties about their role in perpetuating colonialist violence. In this article, I discuss
Persepolis as emblematic of a distorted liberalist attitude that can only engage with the “other” in terms that reproduce and stabilize a certain sense of self—that is, a self that is not implicated in a colonialist world-system that suffocates the vitality of non-white “others.” I argue that Persepolis not only presents a narrow, ideologically laden, account of the Iranian story, it also re-animates trenchant anti-Islamic biases within American social consciousness. Its telling of an upper-class
Iranian exilic story, in its distinctly classist and anti-Islamic character, obscures internal hierarchies in third-world nations, and the role of these hierarchies in supporting white-dominant ideologies in the first world. Persepolis conceals simplistic, Eurocentric ideas in liberal multiculturalist disguise to aid the maintenance colonial world-systems—world-systems which justify racial hierarchy and violence against third-world peoples. Ghanizadeh 5
In “Islamic Feminism and Third-Worldism: The Case of Palestine” I examine women’s liberation discourse as it bears upon Palestinian women’s situation in the context of Zionist occupation to illustrate a certain paradoxical, but not uncommon union, between Western and
Islamic conceptions of gender in Islam. In this study, I rely on Palestinian feminist cinema, specifically Bar Bahar by Maysaloun Hammoud, to argue that Western feminist accounts of
Muslims women’s oppression are not only patriarchal, biased, and misguided, they are also implicated in the creation and maintenance of a reactive masculinist Islam which views women as culture-bearers and guardians of tradition while nonetheless approving the use of modern military devices and technologies of war. Both projects view their own efforts as pro-woman and both projects fail to realize this promise. What these failures do provide are insights into the psychology of colonized people and the mechanisms of internalization that promote specifically orientalist conceptions of the feminine “other” in masculinist Islamic terms. Bar Bahar illustrates these affinities when situating a critique of masculinist Islam in the context of Zionist occupation where direct and visible pressures of colonialism are depicted in their involvement with exacerbating social instability and increasing intellectual rigidity—a predicament that fails to empower women (as masculinist Islam purports to do) and fails to contest colonialism. Relying on Islamic feminist theories, I argue that Muslim leadership has, in many cases, and because of the pressures of colonialist intrusion, not only failed the promises of Islam but also failed to relieve the people of the third world from colonialist violence. Bar Bahar notes this crisis of leadership in Muslim communities and argues for solidarity between women, and, by extension, unity between suppressed peoples in their collectivity, as the antidote to both masculinist Islams and colonialist violence. Ghanizadeh 6
An Islamic feminist approach, relying not only on contemporary scholars and thinkers but also on a historical and original chain of Islamic emancipatory ideas, contests the disingenuous gender-parity efforts of Western, white feminism and also addresses misguided
“liberatory” discourses within the Ummah.6 At a time where third-world resources and vitality are ruthlessly exploited by first-world institutions, and Muslim male leaders are exposed for misogynistic and deeply misguided understandings of the role of Islam in our collective human destiny, Islamic feminism looks to the egalitarian message of Islam, the one that calls for equality within difference, to fight for the dignity of all subordinated beings and revives the ethical message of unity, solidarity, and emancipation for all of creation.7
Ghanizadeh 7
Article One
Iran, Revolution, Diaspora: An Islamic Feminist Perspective on Iranian Women’s Writing
Within Western conceptions of women’s emancipation, race, religion, and imperialism remain central to debates about women and Islam. These debates consider the possibility of an
Islamic feminism and often reject Islam, and Islamic ideas, as providing any aid to women’s liberation projects.8 Anti-Islamic rhetoric remains common and acceptable within feminist scholarship, emanating from both white, first-world intellectuals and third-world intellectuals writing in the first-world academy.9 While anti-Islamic perspectives are predictable among white, Western feminisms, the rise of anti-Islamic sentiment among third-world intellectuals suggests that certain entanglements between global capitalism, secularist ideologies, and migratory flows to the Western world inform feminist knowledge production. This paper examines the intricacies of domination within and across nations and notes how these realities influence, and are influenced by, multicultural discourses in the academy. I focus on Iranian women’s memoir writing, scholarship about these popular works, and suggest that certain class and ethnic specificities involved in pre-migration social composition inform the anti-Islamic consensus in women’s Iranian diaspora writing. I suggest that these works are misapprehended as diverse and inclusive when they are ideologically neo-conservative in ways that reinscribe white-domination and white-dominant worldviews.10 Specifically, the anti-Islamic consensus in these writings displaces harmful understandings of Iranians onto Islam and Muslims. This paper demonstrates how anti-Islamic sentiment, as it is housed within academic, multicultural discourses of diversity, maintains and perpetuates white supremacy.
Racism is maintained through the reordering and management of otherness.11 In Iranian women’s diaspora writing, this occurs when attempts to diffuse harmful conceptions about Iran Ghanizadeh 8 and Iranians leads to the denunciation of Islam and Muslims.12 In this case, proponents of diversity appear to inadvertently create acceptable and unacceptable categories of difference in ways that often align with whiteness and white-dominant ideology as in the case of excising
Islam from Iranian identity in the writings of Iranian diaspora women. The following examples of anti-Islamic rhetoric in these writings suggest that certain ethnic and class hierarchies within home nations, and their influence on ideological positions, are erased when bodies move West to write for English-speaking audiences. Pre-migration social composition can inform our understanding of diversity practice in the academic humanities and how it is linked to
Islamophobic discourses among Iranians in diaspora.
The links and affinities between anti-racism and racism informs literary expression and social consciousness: census reports indicate that by 2042 racialized subjects are set to become the demographic majority in America. The United States is, therefore, moving in the direction of a post-race society but not one in which race and racism will no longer dictate social order.
Instead, as demographic metrics gesture to the triumphs of diversity in America, social practices and deeply-embedded worldviews remain Western and white-dominant.13 This unceasing “white ascendance,” as Jasbir Puar defines it, re-appears in new and shifting versions of difference that are (re)invented in accordance with the latest political crisis and the latest need for justifying questionable foreign and domestic policies (25). Inconsistencies between demographic metrics and the realities of social, political, and economic inequalities sustained and exacerbated by white supremacy suggest that the future of white supremacy is an expansion of white domination precisely through the language and practice of inclusion. Relying on Puar’s framework, I argue that Iranian diaspora popular and academic writing illustrates the acceptable ethnic as secular, Ghanizadeh 9 cosmopolitan, and enabled by capital flow while the unacceptable ethnic is illustrated (or ignored) as Muslim, provincial, and displaced by capital flow.14
Affinities between liberal multiculturalism and socio-economically informed white- dominant perspectives appear in representations of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. For example,
Marjane Satrapi’s famous memoir Persepolis begins with a summary of the revolution in a chapter ominously titled “The Veil.”15 Satrapi begins narrating this complicated event with the image of the veil, which immediately conveys, or perhaps confirms, popular narratives about
Islam and Islamic otherness to Western audiences. Westerns audiences approach this text through an imagination saturated with misguided ideas about women and gender in Islam and will likely view the Islamic revolutionary project in the usual terms of fundamentalism and clashing civilizations.16 Centering the veil in this way reduces the Islamic revolutionary project to ideology and religion, erasing the vital geopolitical and economic events that informed the
1979 crisis.17 During this time, Western economic activities in Iran produced income inequality and social instability which created a social composition in which middle and upper-class
Iranians benefited from affiliation with the colonial presence while those in the lower classes saw their situation worsen after the colonial encounter.18 Framing the revolution in heavily cultural terms while serving it for Western consumption, obscures the role of economic domination and the formation of Westernized ruling classes prior to, and centrally leading to, the 1979 revolution.
Beyond reductive illustrations of Islamic veiling practices and the attendant erasure of economic conditions influencing the revolution, Satrapi’s account of the Islamic revolution is informed by Eurocentric bias. For example, while reflection on her contradictory religious and Ghanizadeh 10
“modern” sentiments, Satrapi remarks that her view is religious while also, and in contradistinction, being modern.
Satrapi, in this frame, remarks, “I really didn’t know what to think about the veil. Deep down I was very religious but as a family we were very modern and avant-garde” (6). In Satrapi’s view, the religious and the modern are fundamentally distinct, a view that not only draws from, and reproduces, Eurocentric epistemes but also reanimates harmful thinking about civilized
(modern) subjects and uncivilized (religious) subjects. Within such a construction, religion, namely Islam, becomes an insurmountable “other” that must be overcome through a civilizing project. Talal Assad argues, “secularism defines itself against an “other,” which becomes, in effect, the object of its redemptive project”; noting how separatist conceptions of reason and religion not only limit this discussion into narrow Western epistemic terms, but also justify imperialist attitudes toward others who need saving by Western “reason” (13). In this sense, Satrapi’s framing of Islam and modernity as separate, dichotomous categories says more about a certain Eurocentric worldview on her part then it says anything about the character of modernity or religion. Her separation of modernity and religion into terms that ultimately serve Eurocentric imperialism illustrates how so-called subaltern or diverse literatures can align with white-dominant worldviews. Ghanizadeh 11
Persepolis, though created for the purpose of, and viewed as, promoting diverse perspectives, recreates hierarchies within and outside Iran by presenting dominant narratives by dominant Iranians as representative of a comprehensive Iranian story. For example, in her account of Iran and the 1979 revolution, Satrapi does not discuss notable features of pre- and post-revolutionary Iranian migratory flow to Western countries. While Satrapi does provide some contextual remarks about Iranian social composition before and after the revolution, her depiction glosses over important details, and, therefore, aligns with dominant Western perspectives on the revolution as exemplified by notable feminist Gloria Steinem’s endorsement on the back cover of Persepolis. Gloria Steinem describes Persepolis as having “the intimacy of a memoir, the irresistibility of a comic book, and the political depth of a conflict between fundamentalism and democracy.” While this view of the revolution is repeated in popular and academic writing, it contrasts with other views understand this event as anti-colonial and emancipatory. In this second perspective, the revolution responds to specific colonial injustices, such as the funneling of Iranian oil into British and American commercial channels, a predicament which benefited a small, Westernized elite in Iran while the rest of the nation starved. Robert E. Looney’s Economic Origins of the Iranian Revolution, describes the food crisis which followed Western economic involvement, “two-thirds of the agricultural population faced poor nutritional intake.” (45).19 In other words, it was bread and not veiling or religious ideology that primarily influenced the overthrow of the monarchy. While Persepolis does cover some aspects of revolutionary history, it avoids discussing certain details, which, notably, disclose complicities between Westernized Iranian elites and the colonial monarchy (backed by the United States government) which ruled Iran in the years leading up to the revolution. Which leads us to the Iranian diaspora and its cultural expression, “the most distinctive feature of Ghanizadeh 12
Iranian post-revolutionary migration is its middle- and upper-class character,” indicating that the fleeing ruling classes who now reside in America as minorities hold, unsurprisingly, royalist and anti-Islamic perspectives (Ansari 122). Therefore, while Persepolis does provide a subaltern perspective in some sense, it also conveys the attitudes of those dominant groups within Iran who fled the revolution’s egalitarian reordering of society. These ruling classes are defined by some scholars as a “global coalition of dominant groups” whose ruling ideas are represented in literary and cultural terms for Western consumption (Prashad 278).20
Class and ethnic specificities inform political attitudes in Persepolis and critically shape the notable anti-Islamic consensus visible in popular and academic writings by Iranian women.21
We see this in a scene relating the hospitalization of Satrapi’s uncle who tries to get official permission to leave the country for medical purposes. In the story, his wife, Satrapi’s aunt, she is enraged at finding her former window washer—who, because of the Islamic revolution, is now able to dictate the life and death of the formerly ruling classes—as arbitrator at the hospital:
I went to see the hospital director. You won't believe it. Know who he is? My old
window washer! I pretended not to know him so as not to humiliate him. With the
borders closed, only the very sick can go abroad. It's his third coronary. He needs an
operation abroad or he'll die! We'll do our best. If God wills it, he'll get better. […]
Thanks to a beard and suit this idiotic window washer...runs a hospital now! My
husband's fate depends on a window washer! (121).
Contempt for the lower classes, and a sense of their having a rightful place, is sharply apparent in
Aunt Firouzeh’s frustration, a frustration that is informed by attachments to an Iran that sustained the well-being of some Iranians at the expense of others. These attachments to class privileges are further visible in Satrapi’s response to an interviewer asking her about the Islamic revolution: Ghanizadeh 13
The basic culture is not that the woman is nothing—Iran is not Saudi Arabia—the
women, they are educated, they are cultivated, they work. You have women that are
judges, they are doctors, they are journalists, they work. So these women, when you tell
them that their witness doesn't count as much as that of the guy who is going to wash
the windows […] (Root 151).
Satrapi’s assessment of the revolution not only renders poor Iranian women invisible but also confirms certain decolonial theoretical interventions which describe the modern world-system as
“an association of social interests between the dominant groups […] of countries with unequally articulated power, rather than an imposition from the outside” (Quijano 166). In the case of
Persepolis, Satrapi is a member of the “dominant groups” in Iran who benefit from, and are thus receptive to, the colonial presence. Thus, it makes sense for Satrapi’s work to address the literary establishment in the English-speaking world who are dominant groups within the American colonial context. Quijano’s understands inequality in terms that surpass the nation-state or region as the unit of analysis, and, instead, views the world-system as the primary unit of analysis in a move that clarifies the intricate nature of inequality and coloniality in the contemporary world- system. Drawing on Quijano’s account, I argue that westernized elite emigres from Iran narrate the Iranian story in ways that secure their own group’s interests refuting, in effect, the idea that multicultural literatures give voice to diverse perspectives. Instead, multicultural literatures enable communication and reassurance between the dominant groups in different nations.
In Satrapi’s work, for example, class differences dictate transnational mobility or enclosure in meaningful ways, but these differences are invisible in the story. Satrapi migrates to
Austria under conditions that vastly differ from the migration of refugees or asylum seekers.22
One can imagine that were Satrapi a Muslim refugee, under the scrutiny of the Immigration and Ghanizadeh 14
Naturalization Service, dealing with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees or interacting with border guards, she and her story would be less well-received by the intended audience. This indicates how stories that are critical of other cultural regimes, regimes that may pose as rivals to the Western model, are more well-received by Western audiences then stories that criticize Western systems. In this sense, and at least partly, multicultural literatures serve as a platform for alliances between dominant groups who, as Gloria Fisk argues, can process their anxieties about complicities with unjust socio-political systems through literary dialogue.23
Similarly, in critical discussions of Persepolis, so-called different narratives recreate sameness in ways that favor dominant peoples and groups and promote white ascendance.24 In
Typhaine Leservot’s “Occidentalism: Rewriting the West in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis,”
Leservot argues for a re-reading of the usual postcolonial understandings of contemporary
Iranian-US relations. Against theses post-colonial readings of Iran-US relations, which are primarily focused on wealth and power differentials and the attendant exploitation of third-world resources, Leservot argues that the 1979 crisis was really a matter of internal political failure and domestic mismanagement:
Far from playing its traditional postcolonial role as the everlasting dominant paradigm
from which postcolonial nations have difficulties escaping, the West, in Satrapi’s
memoir, is reconstructed by Iranians not to respond to the West but to deal with their own
domestic (political) issues (126.)
Leservot’s commentary on the 1979 revolution denies the extensive influence of US imperialism and confirms the ideological tone of Persepolis, which frames the Iranian revolutionary project as primarily bound up in a reactionary Islamic fundamentalism. What this account ignores is the decolonial and egalitarian elements of the revolution and the admirable attempt to create Ghanizadeh 15 alternative societies within a global world-system that has failed the promises of modernity.25
Ignoring certain significant elements of the Iranian revolutionary project, and confirming an already biased Western audience’s assumptions about the revolution, Persepolis hardly provides a view from the south Persepolis, instead, provides a mirror with just enough traces of otherness to suggest the participation of alterity.
Liberal, multicultural narratives like Persepolis aim to provide an encounter between East and West, and yet, we see again a meeting of West and West, a squeezing out of genuine alterity, and a re-inscription of a secular, Western worldview.26 In Leservot’s review of Persepolis, and the historical event it narrates, she suggests that postcolonial readings of U.S/Iran relations have over-emphasized power differentials between these regions which, according to her, are interacting on more equal terms then postcolonial discourse suggests. Leservot denies
“postcolonial readings of Western influences as necessarily neo-colonial,” emphasizing instead, the amiability of relations between Iranians and the West (Leservot 121). Leservot’s argument, however, contrasts with the facts of global economic and political disparities.27 Wealth and power remains in the same old colonial hands and making the case, as Leservot does, for the visibility of imagined neglected harmonies between the West and Iran not only irrelevant but obscurantist. In trying to articulate in equivalency that is false, Leservot remarks on a scene in
Persepolis where Satrapi sits in dialog with influential figures in her life. Leservot argues, “the visual juxtaposition of Descartes, Marx, and her God on one double-page creates […] a heterogenous picture of the West where opposing philosophies do occur” (121). For Leservot,
Satrapi’s consumption of Western ideas and products in this scene suggests mutuality and harmony between the two nations. This reading, however, contrasts with the economic and political realities that enable this exchange. Western organizations destabilized (and continue to Ghanizadeh 16 destabilize) governments and economies in Iran, negating any possibility of mutuality between
Iran and the U.S when aggressions are undeniable and increasing. Perhaps Leservot views cultural exchange as separate from political and economic realities? Why does Leservot prefer imagining mutuality even when it runs counter to historical fact?28
Susan Stanford Friedman’s “Wartime Cosmopolitanism: Cosmofeminism in Virginia
Woolf’s Three Guineas and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis” contains another example of how implicit white-dominant perspectives in Persepolis inform critics’ understanding of colonial inequality. In this critique, Friedman identifies tendencies to categorize migration within “high” and “low” terms as an approach that conceals other types of migration, such as migration from
“the side,” she argues:
Cosmopolitanism from the side better captures the wartime cosmopolitanism
of Three Guineas and Persepolis because the prevailing rhetorics of above and below, old
and new, elite and vernacular do little to describe the liminal positions of Woolf and
Satrapi as resistant women within and outside the nation (24-25).
Friedman argues that defining migration in “high” and “low” terms denies the ambiguity of
Satrapi’s position as a resistant woman. Satrapi’s resistance, however, is a collusion with
Western assimilative capitalism, suggesting that Stanford Friedman’s view of resistance is informed by Eurocentric assumptions about Islam and Muslim-majority societies. Stanford
Friedman’s suggestion that migratory flow should no longer be viewed in “high” and “low” terms (due to the erasure of types of resistance that surpass these qualifiers) relies on a conception of resistance which coheres with Eurocentric capitalism. In this move, the transnational subject mobilized by capital flow is normativized against the transnational subject displaced by capital flow. Ignoring differences in transnational migration does not open space for Ghanizadeh 17 unanticipated modes of resistance, as Stanford Friedman suggests. Ignoring differences in transnational mobility erases critical economic, ethnic, and ideological factors that inform and maintain a world-system that enables the lives of some persons and communities at the expense of others.
In addition to inspiring criticism that denies colonial difference between and within nations, Persepolis’ negative and reductive handling of the Islamic revolution inspires anti-
Islamic attitudes among audiences. Mary Ostby reviews the “stereotype-defying” memoir as a paragon of diversity among literatures and cites Leservot in arguing that the crises leading up to revolution was not significantly imperialist in nature:
contrary to any notion of the Islamic revolution as a historical rupture, Iranian culture is
the product of mutually constitutive contact in which it both shaped and was shaped by
other cultures—both Western and non-Western (570).
Ostby affirms Leservot’s view of the Islamic revolution as not prominently the result of Western aggression against Iran. This view is congruent with Satrapi’s vision of Iranian revolutionary history, a view which obscures geopolitical differences in a colonial world-system forcing third- world peoples into perpetual debt and subordination. Ostby insists on the same mutuality and amiability of exchange between Iran and the West that Satrapi encourages in Persepolis:
One need look no further than Marji’s transcultural-countercultural teenage wardrobe—a
headscarf coupled with a punk denim jacket adorned with a Michael Jackson button—to
understand that even in the pervasive, xenophobic language of gharbzadegi
(“Westoxification” or “Occidentosis”) in Iran, there have always been multiple registers Ghanizadeh 18
of influence and conscious, deliberate, even playful adaptation of Western ideas and
styles (570).
Ostby, like Leservot, views intercultural exchange between Iran and the U.S as an act of mutuality. Yet, it is simply a matter of fact that Iran was pulled into the same disastrous financial dependencies that Vijay Prashad carefully covers in The Darker Nations. In addition, considering the looming influence of the International Monetary Fund, the disastrous lending practices of the
World Bank, the expropriation of national oil resources, and the food crisis following these events, Ostby’s account of cross-cultural exchange as a “playful adaptation of Western ideas and styles,” contrasts with the economic and political realities facing a majority of third-world peoples. Persepolis, and the criticism it inspires, obscures geopolitical violence to assuage
Western audiences’ anxieties about transnational conflicts and their own role in benefiting from the consequences of these conflicts.
Another example of Eurocentrism in liberal multiculturalist disguise appears in Hilary
Chute’s Graphic Women: Life Narratives and Contemporary Comics. Chute’s shrewd and incisive analysis of Persepolis comes to a halt when she argues that the memoir form is especially popular among Iranian women because of the freedom enabled by liberal, Western societies. Chute notably quotes an Iranian woman, a scholar of diaspora studies, Persis Karim, to further her own point about the popularity of Iranian women’s memoir writing:
memoir may have a particular resonance for Iranian and Iranian-American women
writers because it confers a kind of self-authorization that women in Iran have typically
been denied because of a male-dominated literary tradition that discourages women’s
voices and women’s revelation (Chute 139). Ghanizadeh 19
Chute not only assumes the literary freedoms enjoyed by Western women, she also betrays certain assumptions about what happens when subaltern speakers are quoted in making statements about subaltern women and their situation in home societies. In this perspective, we assume that if a subaltern figure approves of any given view, then that view is authorized and stripped of any problematic aspects by the endorsement.29 In addition to relying on the same essentialist (and racist) logic that conflates one ethnic subject with the entire ethnic community, this, often well-intended, approach stands behind the practice of giving certain subaltern subjects a conspicuous platform on which they may report on their heritage in ways that pleases biased
Western audiences. Contrary to Chute’s claim about why Iranian women choose memoir, I argue that the prevalence of memoir is linked to the desire on the part of dominant audiences to consume stories verifying their own beliefs about the uncivilized ‘other’ and their mistreatment of women. In this familiar move, a seemingly categorical anti-Islamic sentiment is justified in the language of care and concern for women, leading this discussion to another liberal multiculturalist disguise: white-dominant feminism speaking through the ethnic subject.
While Persepolis is implicitly Eurocentric in its narration of Iran, Iranian women’s feminist writings in the Western academy openly and insistently reject Islamic approaches to feminist struggle, based, again, on a spurious understanding of women’s situation in Islam.
Iranian women’s academic feminist writing deliberates gender parity in terms that categorically reject Islam. As Fanon noted in “Racism and Culture,” a popular contemporary strand of racist thinking bypasses biological terms and articulates bias in cultural terms instead. This is apparent in Iranian women’s feminist scholarship which argues for the separation of Islam and feminism based on a comparison of cultures in Islamic and secular societies. In Shahrazad Mojab’s critique Ghanizadeh 20 of Islamic feminism, for example, Mojab assumes the ultimacy of Western culture and views women’s equality as a uniquely Western innovation:
The regime of rights in general and women's rights in particular are products of the
democratization struggles in Western societies. The question of rights is inseparable from
citizenship, the democratic state and civil society, all of which are Western concepts
and realities [sic]. It would be appropriate, therefore, to examine the 'Islamic feminist'
project in light of the Western experience which has, despite claims to the contrary,
shaped all the discourses of rights among the Muslims (137).
Mojab assumes the superiority of Western ideas and cultures, disregards the influence of global wealth and power disparities in shaping these cultures, and ignores how these disparities impact gender equality within and outside Western societies. Her assessment of the limits and possibilities of secular, or Islamic, feminism is grounded in a view of culture separate from political and economic realities. In this approach, Muslims are detached from their larger third- world context (Majid 12-19). Incidentally, the separation of cultures and religions from economics and politics, and the erasures produced as a result, promote the ruling regime sustaining the Eurocentric ethnic scholar writing in the first-world academy. Mojab’s critique of
Islamic feminism not only limits the possibilities of feminist inquiry, but also assumes that when the subaltern speaks, she is speaking with a veracity that only her ethnic subjectivity can provide.
In the work of Heiedeh Moghissi, similar arguments for the removal of Islam from feminist inquiry appear in similarly categorical terms. Moghissi’s perspective exemplifies the kind of view that Ramon Grosfoguel describes as “socially located in the oppressed side of the colonial difference,” but thinking, epistemically, from the perspective of dominant groups (213).
Moghissi calls outright for the erasure of Islamic feminism: Ghanizadeh 21
Moreover, given that the doubting and questioning of Islamic legal practices are life-
threatening activities in almost all Islamic societies, and the critical individual can be
persecuted for blasphemy (kofr), the responsibility for opening a dialogue on these issues
falls on the shoulders of the Middle Eastern scholars, inside or outside the academy, who
live in the West, free of such threats. (Moghissi 83)
Moghissi assumes that Middle Eastern scholars writing in the Western academy do not face censorship or aggression; contrary to this understanding, Edward Said, in his memoir, describes being censored and harassed when writing about Middle-Eastern issues from an anti-Western, anti-hegemonic perspective. Contrary to Moghissi’s claims, ruling cultural regimes protect those
Middle Eastern scholars and critics who promote the interests of the ruling regime and sanction those scholars who critique it. By assuming the freedom of women in secular societies and the entrapment of critics in Muslim societies, Moghissi’s understanding of inequality and injustice suggests Eurocentric bias and white-dominant thinking.
Class and ethnic specificities, and their attendant worldviews, do not disappear when bodies move West. In the case of Persepolis and Iranian women’s feminist scholarship, anti-
Islamic attitudes are prominent in émigré communities which, though socially located on the subaltern side of the colonial divide, have ideological commitments congruent with the dominant side of the colonial divide. On these intricacies of domination, Jasbir Puar remarks:
The ascendency of whiteness […] is not strictly delimited to white subjects though it is
bound to multiculturalism as defined and deployed by whiteness. The ethnic aids the
project of whiteness through participation in global economic privileges that then fraction
him or her away from racial alliances. (31) Ghanizadeh 22
Puar tracks the complicities between queer white masculinity and white ascendance in her analysis of anti-Islamic sentiment in post-911 America. In a similar fashion, I argue that certain migrant and ethnic subjects are authorized and folded into the national body against other kinds of migrant and ethnic subjects who are excised in accordance with white ascendance. This is not to suggest, however, that global inequalities have surpassed North/South binaries, or that wealth and power are not concentrated along the same old colonial patterns. This does suggest, however, that these old colonial patterns have splintered into intricate subgroups, creating an alliance between transnational, Westernized turbo-elites, who have a wide readership among
English-speaking audiences, whose narratives and worldview conceal complicities with Western powers and white ascendance.
Yet, from the consensus we see in Iranian literature and scholarship, the mere presence of a third-world scholar implies a balanced, rigorous, and of course “diverse” practice of knowledge production. This understanding of difference and inclusion, as Sara Ahmed reminds us, views difference and inclusion in purely visual terms, a view which originates in, and perpetuates, a white imagination (173). Equipped with this view, we can recall that it is projected that by 2042
United States population demographics will shift to majority-minority, but the majoritarian presence of ethnic bodies will not sanitize America of white domination and racism. The rise of anti-racist initiatives have already been placed into the service of whiteness; in “The Crisis of the
University in the Context of Neoaparteid,” Nelson Maldonado-Torres argues, “diversity is a concept that can have some usefulness […] but it must be properly situated alongside other less ambiguous concepts and within an emancipatory and decolonial rather than liberal framework”
(99). Maldonado-Torres argues that liberal multiculturalism is overwhelmingly a tool of white supremacy, at least in academic spaces, mapping the consequences of analytic approaches that Ghanizadeh 23 ignore the intricacies of domination as they shift and mutate in a globalizing world. In the case of
Iranian diaspora literature and scholarship, and in recognition of the promises and perils of multiculturalism in academic and popular knowledge production, it is important to note that migratory flow from the global south does not inherently reduce white supremacy, but in a seemingly paradoxical move, can strengthen it.
Many Iranian diaspora writers deny affinities between Islam and feminism, and Iranian literatures overwhelmingly opine against the evils of Islam while migrant intellectuals focus on the excesses of Islamic theocracies to justify the presumed successes of Western feminisms.30
One wonders if they even like falafel. Recalling that migration is complicated and informed by internal hierarchies linked to specific regions, I argue that the anti-Islamic consensus within
Iranian women’s diaspora writing is rooted in the perspective of a global elite. It is important to note that current Iranian diaspora scholars are from the Northern provinces, are often light- skinned, and hail from the middle or upper classes prior to migration; therefore, when Iranian intellectuals ignore or brush over certain radical and egalitarian elements of the Islamic revolution, their own ideological complicities, informed by dominant status, may be bound up in these attitudes. While the failures of the Islamic revolution are legion, the revolution did create a space for alternative modes of inhabiting modernity—an accomplishment that even drew the attention of embittered Western philosophers like Foucault, who met with the Ayatollah in
1978.31
While primarily responding to economic imperialism, the Islamic revolutionary project also intervenes in the politics of knowledge. Decolonial theoretical insights describe the links between conceptions of reason and rationality and describe their involved in the maintenance of power and justification of violence against otherized peoples (Quijano 169). While few would Ghanizadeh 24 deny that the Islamic revolution fell short of its many promises, it succeeds in shifting consumer- producer relations between the West and Iran. In the case of media and film, Iranian cinema has become a major player in the world of film production, doing the much-needed work of demonstrating that other regions of the world do, in fact, think, “the anti-Western politics of the postrevolutionary Islamic state enabled a reversal of the filmic flow, which used to move from the West into Iran, so it now moves out from Iran” (Moallem 27). It is important to note that it is precisely the Islamic censorship laws enacted by the postrevolutionary regime, and their insistence on films drawing material from indigenous sources, that has decentered the Western gaze and its attendant political, economic, and epistemic hegemonies.
Having discussed Eurocentric critiques of Islam in popular and academic writing by
Iranian women, I now turn to an example of feminist critique that draws from indigenous sources and remains critical of patriarchy. Under the Shadow, a 2016 Iranian diaspora film written and directed by Babak Anvari, is a horror story set in 1980’s in the height of the Iran/Iraq war. Set in
Tehran, Under the Shadow not only passes the Bechdel Test, it also effectively critiques Islamic veiling laws enacted after the revolution and centers women’s issues. The shadow, in this case, refers to both mandatory veiling, in all its androcentric biases, and the continued colonial interferences in Iran as the unfold during the Iran/Iraq war. This film weaves anti-Eurocentric critique with anti-patriarchal critique by alluding to events such as the Iran Contra Affair and depicting a djinn in an Islamic prayer chador.32 This djinn, which alludes to post-revolutionary anxieties about the role of religion in society, arrives after an American bomb is dropped on an apartment complex containing the central characters. In other words, the arrival of the djinn reflects both the contemporary crisis haunting Iranian social consciousness and the colonial forces that shape them. Under the Shadow opens with Shideh, a young mother, learning that her Ghanizadeh 25 appeal process has been denied and that she is barred from attending university because of her political involvement in the Islamic revolution. Shideh, a revolutionary activist who has remained in Iran after the events of 1979, sits across from a cleric and arbitrator telling her, in harsh and uncompromising terms, that she will not be admitted. In a scene showcasing the multivocal character of the revolutionary movement (two different and contending revolutionary actors find themselves on opposite sides of the newly-born Islamic nation) Shideh is excluded from university, perhaps, it is implied, because she is a woman. This conclusion is bound up in other, subtler, examples of misogynistic thinking visible throughout the film. For example,
Shideh’s landlord accuses her of failing to lock the garage door, implying that because she is the only women in the building who drives a car, it must be her negligence causing the problem.
Shideh’s husband makes a vague claim about how Shideh is negligent of their daughter, Dorsa, and should behave in a more conventionally motherly fashion toward her. Under the Shadow portrays the many faces of sexism in a society that questions woman’s competence in every area of life, whether private or public, and maps the contradictions and absurdities of patriarchal social systems.
While Under the Shadow deals with sexism and day-to-day bias, it also acknowledges the role of on-going Western meddling in shaping these crises within contemporary Iranian society. The djinn that torments Shideh and Dorsa, as mentioned, notably appears after a missile lands on the roof of Shideh’s apartment building. The missile does not detonate. In the chaos,
Shideh’s daughter, Dorsa, tells her mom that she saw an apparition. Once the missile is removed, it leaves a rupture in the ceiling. This becomes the place of entry and exit for the djinn who initiates a campaign of fitna against Shideh and Dorsa. The Islamic notion of fitna, meaning sedition, civil strife, temptation, and chaos, is associated with the first civil war in Islam, the one Ghanizadeh 26 that erupted soon after the death of the prophet, an event which continues to haunt the Ummah in as Shia/Sunni. It is important to note that the Iran/Iraq war broke out two years after the Islamic revolution, after Saddam Hussaain made territorial claims on Iran’s oil rich Khuzestan province.
The Reagan administration armed both Iran and Iraq during this conflict—a textbook example of fitna—prolonging and amplifying this war that killed hundreds of thousands of people.
Paralleling the fitna that the Reagan administration stirred between Iran and Iraq, the djinn hides
Dorsa’s doll and starts telling Dorsa that her mom has taken it away. The djinn also hides
Shideh’s workout cassette which Shideh later finds in the garbage, a reality that implicates Dorsa as the only other person in the house. The sowing of fitna, civil unrest, in this household alludes to the strategic and calculating fitna imposed on Iran and Iraq during the Reagan administration and, thus, performs a double-edged critique of imperialism and patriarchy. While Under the
Shadow critiques sexist oppression in post-revolutionary Iran by focusing, in some sense, on the private sphere, it folds the narrative into a larger social and historical event showcasing the impact of imperialist intrusion on internal social development. By centering the stories of women and drawing on indigenous knowledge, Under the Shadow is critical of both native patriarchal practices and the colonial forces exacerbating them.
As the djinn’s aggressions escalate, Shideh flees her home forgetting to wear the veil. She is promptly picked up by revolutionary guards and sent to jail where she is reminded of her main duty in life, to guard her modesty, by another cleric. They send her home. Shideh, pushed back into the private sphere, returns to an escalated haunting; the djinn absorbs Dorsa into her chador.
Shideh throws herself into the attack creating, perhaps, the most visually striking scene in the film so far in which the protagonist is shown drowning in the djinn’s prayer chador and clawing at the fabric. This heavy-handed symbolism makes a clear statement about women’s struggles in Ghanizadeh 27 the Islamic republic while avoiding Eurocentrism and acknowledging the critical influence of colonization. Anchoring its critique in indigenous ideas and cultural references, this diaspora film, despite not being under censorship by the Islamic Republic, nonetheless avoids the kind of
Eurocentric critique we see in Persepolis. In its very title, Under the Shadow, indicates a dual- critique of patriarchy and imperialism highlighting how women’s situation in postrevolutionary
Iran is always informed by imperialism: the shadow is a demonic entity haunting the private space of women; the shadow is an American-made missile sold through Israeli channels.
In the spirit of Nawal Sadawi, and her insistence on gender liberation projects attending to both internal patriarchal machinations and imperialisms, Islamic feminism looks to indigenous cultural legacies for anti-sexist thought and organizing. Nawal Sadawi’s argument about the narration of the human story originating, overwhelmingly, “from the point of view of the rulers and not of the peoples who have been ruled,” provides some insight into the anti-Islamic consensus in Iranian women’s diaspora writing (87). To this end, this paper investigates the ways in which modernity, Islam, and women's liberation are conceived within the politics and hierarchies of knowledge and how the creation of subaltern knowledge production is involved in the maintenance of white domination. The presence of ‘other’ knowledge and ‘other’ knowers, and their socio-economic positioning within different and changing colonial contexts, informs contemporary Western ideas about diversity and what it means to include diverse voices.
Considering the misapprehensions emerging in global literatures, and the Eurocentric character of dominant Iranian narratives in women’s diaspora writing, new tools are needed for understanding race and race relations. Iranian emigres often play up and benefit from ethnic ambiguity both within Iran and upon arrival in Western countries, often for the sake of survival.
Aside from obvious examples of the ethnically-ambiguous term “Persian,” at best used to hide Ghanizadeh 28 the more Islamically charged “Iranian” and at worst tied to a notorious and often-ignored Aryan myth, many Iranians in diaspora ride ethnic ambiguity as part of a larger assimilationist agenda striving toward access to whiteness and all its attendant privileges.33 This kind of performative whiteness is apparent in many migrant communities and is one example of complicity between white supremacy and ethnic subjects. The vested economic interests of upwardly mobile
Iranians, and their attendant worldviews, are welcomed in and given a conspicuous platform in a liberal academy anxious to appear multicultural and inclusive. Yet, the wealth and power of the world still rests largely in Western and white hands, as evident by continued imperialist aggression against Iran and the larger Middle East, as well as increasing racist elitism within the
United States. Meanwhile, nondominant and indigenous perspectives face erasure and obscurity in a white supremacist, colonialist world-system that requires endless expansion and hegemony.
Iran, and the Iranian revolutionary project, however flawed, continue to stand against capitalism and its always/already forceful whiteness; in doing so, it faces pressure from those Iranians who accept the vagrant American dream and its violent expansionism.
Ghanizadeh 29
Article Two Islamic Feminism and Third-Worldism: The Case of Palestine Palestinian women are located within and between two highly visible systems of power:
Zionist settler colonialism and patriarchy. While imperialist ideologies are often discussed in anti-colonial discourse, the gendered and sexual layers of coloniality are less widely engaged.34
In the case of Palestine, certain links between the logics of colonial domination and seemingly native or authentic ideas of gender and sexuality interact in ways that obscure the specificities of gender and sexuality within colonialism. Feminist Islamic critique addresses Palestinian women’s situation by foregrounding gender and sexuality when addressing both patriarchal colonialism and masculinist Islam.35 In this approach, sexism is understood as not exclusive to specific peoples or cultures but always involved in global, Eurocentric hierarchies of wealth and power. As a result, feminist Islamic critique illustrates how sexist oppression can function through seemingly paradoxical affinities between colonial forces and specific branches of masculinist thinking within Islamic discourse. Examining these entanglements between feminism and anti-colonialism, as it relates to the third-world context, I argue that critiques of patriarchy must address colonialism and consider the viability of a feminist ethic based in Islamic principles in striving toward a pan-ethnic, feminist solidarity in support of the well-being of all women.
Maysaloun Hammoud’s Bar Bahar performs this kind of feminist Islamic critique in its focus on
Muslim women’s situation within the larger context of settler colonialism. Bar Bahar performs and Islamic feminist critique by presenting Muslim women’s stories in ways that cut against
Western conceptions of Muslim women’s subjugation as well as native, and seemingly Islamic, conceptions of women’s empowerment, addressing, in effect, both the history of gender equality in Islam and the on-going distortions of this history as it is informed by the ongoing colonial encounter. Drawing on third-worldism and feminism, I argue that Islam, and its dangerously Ghanizadeh 30 egalitarian spirit, is emancipatory for women in its commitment to alternative civilizational paths and divergence from ruling regimes of truth and knowledge.
When I refer to Islam, I refer to the Islam of Allah, not the one from Saudi Arabia.36
Disparities in the meaning, let alone practice, of Islam range from the notorious Saudi Dawah movement to counter-terrorisms rhetorics in American news and media.37 In my usage, I understand Islam in its ethical and “stubbornly egalitarian” spirit which insists on equality and justice—despite the codification of Islam and its transformation into absolute monarchies and conquering powers throughout the centuries (Ahmed 63).38 While I understand any reading of
Islam as interpretative and not absolute, I also view the sacred discourse as emerging within a specific historical context and addressing a specific society—and system of power. Thus, while recognizing a characteristic indeterminacy in Islam, and its susceptibility to multiple and conflicting interpretations, I argue that feminist readings of Islam align with core ethical principles which center justice and emancipation from tyranny. It is this egalitarian voice that
Islamic feminism excavates when agitating for women’s rights whether that occurs in academic discussions or in activism.39
In this discussion, Islamic feminism refers to areas of Islamic discourse that privilege egalitarian readings of Islam and view gender equality as an important site of ethical questioning.40 In many cases, this emancipatory element in Islamic thinking is ignored by chroniclers and scholars while other elements of Islam, those which appear to endorse hierarchy or gender hierarchy, are viewed as authentic or credible in a tradition of suppression that has been questioned and critiqued throughout Islamic intellectual history.41 Aside from addressing an entrenched and ongoing monopoly on sacred knowledge production, Islamic feminism draws on central Islamic principles to remind both believers and non-believers that all forms of hierarchy Ghanizadeh 31 and domination are forbidden in Islam. Leading feminist and Islamic studies scholar Amina
Wadud grounds this argument in the founding principle of Tawhid, or Islamic monotheism.
Tawhid undergirds all elements of Islamic teaching with defiance of Tawhid constituting the ultimate transgression, shirk, or idolatry.42 Wadud argues that Islamic monotheism, as articulated in Tawhid, advances a distinctly feminist ethic in its insistence on the unified, singular nature of
Allah:
the tawhidic paradigm maintains the metaphysics of Allah’s supremacy, located at the top
[…] it removes the female’s dependency on the male and returns her to a direct line with
the divine. As a result of placing the female as well as the male—human agents before
Allah—in a direct line with the divine, the human-to-human relationship can only be
constructed horizontally, as one of mutuality and reciprocity (271).
Tawhid dictates that Allah, and none but Allah, is supreme and any who defy the supremacy of
Allah are guilty of the prime directive within in Islam which places lordship exclusively in the substance of Allah—and nowhere else. The very meaning of the word “Islam” refers to an engaged submission to the unequivocal singularity of Allah and the inherent profanity of equating Allah’s singularity with that of any other being. In other words, to subordinate women to men is to break faith with this central principle of Tawhid. The Tawhidic ideas, as Islamic historian Weibke Walther argues, articulates a multiplicity within difference and is concerned with cohesion among disparate elements:
In this examination of the position of women in Islam, it should be borne in mind that
Islam was the uniting bond for different ethnic elements and cultural traditions. Despite
an all-embracing religion, a variety of opinions was possible and thus differing
viewpoints may be found. Ghanizadeh 32
As Walther notes, when it comes to difference, Islamic principles of unity within difference aid the overcoming of tension and violence the problem of violence as it follows from disparity.
Despite the suppression of this radical, emancipatory character of Islam, Muslim women continue to hear in the divine message a call for equality and continue to bewilder Western observers by insisting that, as Muslim feminist historian Leila Ahmed argues “Islam is not sexist” (66). The Islamic principle of Tawhid promotes a uniquely feminist perspective wherein
Allah is the most high and all other beings as co-equal in this world.43
The emancipatory potential of Islam echoes in anti-patriarchal and anti-imperial projects—most notably, the original Bandung project and nonalignment movement, the Islamic
Revolution in Iran, and contemporary Arab spring uprisings.44 Proponents of the Bandung movement similarly called for a revival of native intellectual paradigms and understood non- alignment as recognition of the failures of liberalism in the first world and the failure of communism in the second world, calling, instead, for ideas grounded in alternative bodies of knowledge and ways of knowing. Islamic feminism departs from Western and white feminist approaches in sharing this same ethic of indigenous revival and anti-imperialism which follows from situating Muslim women’s issues within the larger third-world history and context. Islamic feminism, however, departs from third-worldism in recognizing the socio-psychological effects of colonialism on native consciousness: third-worldism has made some important moves, but, ultimately, the third-world project floundered because of the greed of third-world elites and the inattention paid to the gender and sexual politics following colonial contact. Ultimately, I echo
Maysaloun Hammoud in arguing that the fate of third-worldism, or liberation from the forces of global assimilative capitalism and all its attendant ailments, hinges on the gender question. Ghanizadeh 33
Islamic feminism examines the unique and intricate situation of women existing at the nexus of white supremacy and patriarchy. In this study, the Zionist occupation of Palestine provides unique and extensive insights into how colonialism interacts with and supports rigid, masculinist notions of gender notions which re-embed women, and the third-world, into oppression and exploitation. Islamic feminist critique notes the influence of the colonial encounter on sacred knowledge production while also noting certain evasive tendencies, bad- faith arguments, and mechanisms of collusion within native discourses, discourses which often deflect responsibility away from Muslims and Muslim leadership. The Palestinian situation provides a unique test case illustrating how gender hierarchy and coloniality are mutual and interdependent systems that can only be dismantled in conjunction with one another.45
The promise of third-worldism can only be realized through immediate reparation of the gender hierarchy. This is the central argument in Maysaloun Hammoud’s 2016 film Bar Bahar which describes the story of three Palestinian roommates residing in Tel Aviv, Israel, roommates and women and who are, incidentally, part of the twenty percent Palestinian minority population living in the Israeli state. Bar Bahar, meaning “In Between,” addresses both Zionist supremacy and masculinist Islam by highlighting the ways in which these two seemingly opposed systems unite in the oppression of Muslim women.
Complicity, Solidarity, and the Limits of Western Feminism:
Bar Bahar begins by listing credits in red English text against a black background. In the middle of listing these credits, which, notably, appear in the colors of the Palestinian flag, an ambiguous whipping sound overlays the rolling credits which abruptly ends and is replaced by an intimate scene between two women. This scene contains a set and characters never again seen in the story: two women are engaged in cosmetic grooming while one of them provides Ghanizadeh 34 patriarchal advice, “Don’t talk loud, men don’t like women who raise their voice. Remember to always say a kind word and cook him good food. Remember to put on perfume and keep your body smooth so that when he desires you, he knows where to find you.” This depiction of internalized sexism provides several insights into the paradoxes of sexist domination within the
Palestinian, and larger Middle Eastern, context. First, we are shown how easily victims of patriarchy become agents of patriarchy, how sexism lurks in the language of care and alliance, and how minorities within minoritized groups are especially susceptible to reinstating domination—even when it harms their own interests. By opening the film with an image of sexism enacted by women, this scene foregrounds complicity as an important element in discourses of domination and oppression. Following this abrupt framing, we are introduced to
Laila, a defense lawyer, Salma, a queer Christian woman and bartender, and Nour a computer science student and hijabi.46 By addressing the intricacies of inequality as they bear upon complicity and consent, director Maysaloun Hammoud, self-identified feminist and anti-Zionist, gestures to what uprising, or intifada, might look like if collusion is replaced with solidarity and resistance.
While Bar Bahar opens with an image of complicity, and thus, foregrounds the theme of complicity, it also, and importantly, positions this scene in the private space of the home and draws a comparison between Western and Islamic social paradigms and how they can sustain or subvert women’s liberation. Bar Bahar illustrates a common occurrence in many Muslim communities: congregation in women-only spaces, such as homes and bathhouses, where the performance of femininity occurs in a communal ritual that speaks to differences between
Western and Islamic theories of self and other.47 Although the result of masculinist ideas and social norms, these women-only spaces are not only common in a lot of Muslim communities, Ghanizadeh 35 they also open a field of opportunity and solidarity for women within the larger patriarchal social order. That Islamic societies are often marked by a communitarian leaning has been extensively noted, yet the possibilities this creates for feminist organizing are less obvious. In Bar Bahar, this scene, though representing collusion with patriarchy, also notes the different cultural context in which complicity—and thus resistance—takes place and gestures to alternative fields of action against patriarchy as a result.48 While unity between women fuels the central plotline in Bar
Bahar, ideas of unity against a more powerful oppressor also alludes to the larger struggle for freedom from the Zionist yoke thereby linking the emancipation of women with the emancipation of the third-world.
Bar Bahar, situated in Zionist Israel, compares the social and subjective climates grounding sexism and argues for multiple approaches to feminist intervention, arguing, ultimately, for the emancipatory potential of Islam in promoting feminist projects. Considering the emphasis on unity within Islam and its extension to gender-liberation projects, Bar Bahar, by stressing communitarian ethics in Islamic societies, alludes to feminist possibilities in non-
Western philosophical traditions. For example, Simone Beauvoir argument in her famous The
Second Sex that women:
live dispersed among men, tied by homes, work, economic interests, and social
conditions to certain men—fathers or husbands—more closely than to other women. As
bourgeoisie women, they are in solidarity to bourgeoisie men and not with women
proletariats; as white women, they are in solidarity with white men and not with black
women […] they lack the concrete means to organize themselves into a unit that could
posit itself in opposition [to patriarchy] (8). Ghanizadeh 36
Though speaking in universal terms, this alienation between women Beauvoir notes characterizes women’s situation in Western contexts where individualism undergirds conceptions of self and society. Beauvoir’s account of women’s alienation is, I argue, the product of larger Western epistemic trends in Western thought. This kind of alienation is, I argue, absent in Islamic societies where the subject/object rupture never occurred and where views of personhood and community are articulated in accordance with the Tawhidic paradigm. Intersubjective relations between women, therefore, as they are illustrated in Bar Bahar, alludes to this uniquely feminist,
Tawhidic worldview within Islam.
Multiplicity and Singularity in the Tawhidic Paradigm:
In Bar Bahar, the central plot is launched by the arrival of a new roommate, Nour, a traditional and conservative student and misfit in the society of Laila and Salma who are both presented as hip, trendy, and morally dubious—at least according to dominant Islamic interpretations of morality. Though vastly different in lifestyle and character, the three women become quickly unified in anti-patriarchal solidarity in reflection of feminist possibilities in social systems informed by Islamic principles of Tawhid. For example, when Nour first arrives,
Salma and Laila are waking from a long night of carousing. Laila and Salma are notably disheveled, dressed and made up in their party attire, and presented in terms that would be scandalous to a devout Muslim observer. Nour especially takes in Laila’s revealing dress in a cold look while Laila returns her scrutiny in a moment of tension between the two characters thrown into comic relief by Laila’s remarking to Nour, “you can let go of your suitcase, we won’t snatch it.” Laila acknowledges the tension between herself and Nour by stating, out loud, what Nour is assuming about them: that they are morally suspicious, and possibly promiscuous, women. This initial encounter importantly illustrates contrasting social sensibilities within Ghanizadeh 37 contemporary Palestinian communities, cutting against homogenous representations of not only
Muslims but also Muslim women.
In addition to illustrating Muslims as non-monolithic, these initial hesitations between
Laila, Salma, and Nour quickly evolve into anti-patriarchal solidarity—an outcome that continues to allude to critical differences in Western and Islamic epistemes. In other words, the unity we see between these characters contrasts with Beauvoir’s characterization of women in
Western societies. The plotline of the misfit roommate, which sustains entire seasons in
American television series, becomes tired after 30 minutes in a society that does not view “other minds” as a problem.49 The quick union between these disparate characters in Bar Bahar speaks to the ways in which certain Islamic epistemic paradigms can be more conducive to social, and especially feminist, organizing that which informs Western paradigms. Though there are also films in Western media about women resisting patriarchy together, I argue that these depictions are not characteristic of Western social order, and women’s situation in Western societies, which is individualizing. I argue that the divided-to-united narrative arc in Bar Bahar is highly characteristic of women’s situation in Muslim spaces and gestures to the necessity and viability of Islamic ideas in feminist projects.
Patriarchal Colonialism and Masculinist Islam:
Perhaps the most incisive Islamic feminist critique in Bar Bahar occurs in the development and actions of Wissam, fiancé of Nour. Wissam illustrates the worst possible example of the influence of colonialism in the shaping of a Muslim male colonized subject who has internalized colonialist and orientalist messages about women. Islamic studies scholar
Wiebke Walther notes how an account by a German orientalist, regarding Muslim women, discloses the prominence of misunderstandings about Muslim women in Western thought. Ghanizadeh 38
Walther cites this account whereby Muslim women are “‘the most decisive expression of Islamic thinking’” and “‘the essential nucleus of Islam in general’” are representative of colonialist fetishistic thinking about Muslim women (21). Since the orientalist view is unconsciously, and obscenely, preoccupied with Muslim women, and, as scholars have argued, sexist oppression in
Muslim-majority contexts are linked to the historical and on-going colonial encounter, the
Orientalizing and fetishizing gaze is often taken up by native societies. In other words, the sexualizing and fetishizing gaze, as it centralizes the bodies of women, becomes a central site of maintaining—or resisting—European hegemony.50 Leila Ahmed notes this process in her study of British colonial occupation in Egypt and argues that colonialist fetishism of Muslim women has shaped, and continues to shape, Islamic identity formation:
When it came to the cultures of other men, white supremist views, androcentric and
paternalistic convictions, and feminism came together in harmonious and actually
entirely logical accord in the service of the imperial idea (152).
Ahmed’s account stresses the role of colonialist fantasies about women and how these fantasies freeze and narrow conceptions of Muslim womanhood in ways that are taken up and reproduced by the colonized group. In a similar analysis Jasbir Puar argues, “in a situation of conflict, societies tend to ‘defame’ the ‘conduct’ of women belonging to the other society; they accuse the
‘other’ women of either sexual libertinism or sexual narrow-mindedness” a reality which impacts the colonialism and resistance to it (135). Ahmed and Puar’s accounts describe how gender and sexuality inform colonial conflicts and Hammoud’s characterization of Wissam, as a figure that represents a colonized male psyche rife with internalized perceptions of women and gender, describes one way in which these forces play out in the lives of colonized people. Ghanizadeh 39
Thus far, Wissam and Nour appeared to be a typical devout Muslim couple engaged in a chaste union wherein they maintain physical and sexual distance while getting to know each other for eventual marriage. In one instance of this routine, Nour accidentally ruins the food and has only cookies and soft drinks to serve him for dinner. Wissam is inordinately troubled by this interruption and complains about the food, arguing that this failure is related to Nour’s proximity with “corrupt” women and her absorption of their corruption, “you are eating the same garbage as them […] you have lost the ability to see how corrupt they are.” He brings up an ongoing and increasingly heated contention: Nour’s refusal to move out of the apartment and expedite the marriage. Nour tries to reason with him, stating that she is satisfied with her housing situation and does not feel like it is the right time to marry due to approaching final examinations. Wissam slams Nour’s beverage out of her hand and as she sits down and cries, sits beside her, and starts pulling at her hijab. She resists and he quickly assaults her. This development in the plot notes two things: how Wissam’s fixation with purity originates in a Western fetishistic imagination perversely intrigued with the sexuality of the feminine other. And second, this incident, in a move that appears to be exclusively addressing discursive trends in the Muslim community, argues that woman’s attire has nothing to do with her susceptibility to sexual assault.
Hammoud’s depiction of Wissan’s false piety echoes Ahmed’s argument in which Western patriarchal views, in their ceaseless fixation on the bodies of ethnic women, set the terms in which native patriarchal thinking articulates Muslim womanhood. Wissam thereby participates in the maintenance of a violent colonialist system that dictates his perception of women, morality, and Islamic piety as evidenced by his willingness to breaching his own rules of moral conduct when he agrees to an illicit meeting with a disguised Laila. While the first point accounts for the colonialist violence that is always/already informing conceptions of women in Ghanizadeh 40
Muslim communities, the second point places responsibility back into the hands of believers. By addressing the ways in which the male colonized psyche is destabilized by colonial domination and comes to, paradoxically, view women and gender within the very same terms that have been decided by the colonial imagination, Bar Bahar is feminist, anti-colonial, and engaged in Islamic discourse. By addressing a specific discursive trend in Muslims communities, Bar Bahar is similarly anti-masculinist and pro-Islam.
Wissam’s assault on Nour certainly performs a kind of inward-facing critique against discourses of piety, chastity, and modesty suggesting that these discourses lead to violence against women. Yet, far from recreating stereotypes about violent Muslim men, this scene provides a narrative illustration of Leila Ahmed’s argument about, “the internalization and replication of the colonialist perception” within the male colonized psyche (Ahmed 160). She argues that colonial fixations with veiling (and thus Muslim women’s bodies) have come to determine, in reactive fashion, native resistance to colonialism in a move that inadvertently reproduces the colonialist gaze. After the arrival of the colonizers, Muslims, noting a certain perverse fascination with women’s bodies, with the veil especially, came to ardently affirm the veil, even mandate in law as in the case of Iran, in a gesture that belies anti-colonial resistance by reanimating the terms of a colonial view. In a tragic paradox, the colonizers decided both the terms of subordination of colonized people and the terms on which the subordinated would later articulate their resistance: on the backs and bodies of Muslim women. As many Muslim feminist scholars and historians have noted, there is not a single line in the Quran demanding women cover their heads (Ahmed 55; Majid 111; Mernissi 180). This does not, however, delegitimize
Muslim women wearing the veil, nor does it negate the empowerment derived from veiling nor does it delegitimize the veil functioning as a symbol of anti-colonial resistance. It does, however, Ghanizadeh 41 confirm certain colonial premises on which ideas of Muslim womanhood is articulated and indicates that a sense of “mutilated identity” informs the sudden rise in veiling after colonial contact (Majid 94). Wissam’s violence against Nour occurs in terms decided by colonial discourse and its narrow understandings of what it means to be a woman of faith— understandings which are, of course, formed in the colonialist imagination and perversely preoccupied with Muslims women’s bodies. Thus, in presenting Wissam’s actions as one prominent example of the workings of a Muslim male colonized psyche, Bar Bahar performs an
Islamic feminist critique in its anti-colonial ethos and stands apart from white feminist critiques of veiling which categorically denounce Islam and ignore the intricacies of colonial domination in the making of feminist discourse.
Wissam’s character and actions exemplify affinities between colonialist worldviews and masculinist Islam. In this case, a wounded colonized male subject adopts and reanimates the colonialist view of women’s bodies while believing that his ideas and actions are not only justified by Islam but also resistant to colonization. Hammoud further describes how a society under siege, in this case the Palestinian and larger Muslim society, can come to view the oppression of women as consistent with Islamic values. She does this by discussing uses of certain hadith and their placement into the service of masculinist Islam. In this example of
Islamic feminist critique, we see a scene featuring Nour and Wissam, in a typical androcentric, intersubjective model wherein efforts to control woman and limit her movements are concealed in the language of care and protection. In this typical patriarchal schema, the official story is that woman is vulnerable to man’s inherently virile nature and must be guarded against his advances.
Woman is then pushed into the corners of society and excluded from full participation and membership in the life of the community. We see this in Wissam and Nour’s relationship when Ghanizadeh 42 they discuss their marriage and future together, and Wissam says, “I talked to my uncle, Abu
Fuad, who talked to his friend the headmaster. He promised to give you a job at his school. Even though, as far as I’m concerned it would be better if you stayed home.” Nour responds, “You know that one salary is not enough, I have to help you,” to which Wissam responds with a commonly misused hadith, “The prophet Mohammad peace be upon him said: ‘Do not prevent your women from going to the mosque though their homes be better for them.” To which Nour obediently responds with an affirmative “Peace Be Upon Him.” Hammoud’s discussion of this hadith is critically feminist and Islamic in its illustration of this hadith as a sexist tool and its situation of this discussion within larger global and colonial settings. A brief foray into Islamic history illustrates how the prophet would occasionally pander to male frustrations during moments of chaos as a peace-keeping tactic.51 During the early years of the Islamic social movement, moments of strife and instability were handled through specific enactments of social control—which included pandering to male frustrations—as a way of maintaining peace within a climate of chaos. This is equally true of the Palestinian situation (and the larger Muslim community) which is overwhelmingly located in an increasingly volatile third-world context facing not only military intervention but also debt slavery. Muslims, and certainly Palestinians, are vulnerable as a collective, and Bar Bahar illustrates how this vulnerability plays out in the subordination of women. Hammoud’s illustration of Wissam’s masculinist Muslim piety, as it relates to violence against Nour, alludes to the siege of Medina and comments on the relationship between women’s subordination and foreign domination.
Orientalist Productions of Muslim Womanhood:
Hammoud’s illustration of a popular and often sexist Islamic hadith in the context of
Zionist occupation, or a community under siege, articulates the influence of colonization in the Ghanizadeh 43 making of masculinist versions of Islam. Her critique of Wissam’s false piety highlights both the distortion of the sacred faith within Muslim communities and accounts for why such distortions occur in the first place: the pressure of colonialist occupation creates desperation and foments sexism—a reality which speaks to the white feminist agenda and its misguided “support” of
Muslim women. Proponents of white feminism debate the situation of Muslim women in ways that overwhelmingly focus on culture or Islam or Islamic governments instead of focusing on alleviating the pressure their governments enact against third-world communities. This approach disregards the well-being of the community and favors individual women in an enactment of the
“death by culture” thesis articulated by Umm Narayan. Narayan argues that Western, white feminist approaches ignore how violence against women follows from European ideas of individualism, rights and citizenship theories, and capitalism but attributes social problems in
Muslims communities as especially cultural or especially bound up in tradition. Hammoud comments on this issue of individual freedom and group cohesion when Laila, Salma, and Nour avoid official channels of resolution in their private handling of the assault. There is no talk whatsoever of calling the police despite Laila being a lawyer and having close access to the legal apparatus. They never consider litigation against Wissam which notes an awareness of the shared sense of vulnerability involved in Palestinian life under Zionist rule. Hammoud’s usage of this popular hadith alludes to the mechanisms by which an external threat (colonialism) provokes masculinist frustrations within a community that reacts by suppressing its own vulnerable members. In this specific usage and representation of a commonly misused hadith, Hammoud’s critical move is feminist and Islamic because it engages with Islamic worldviews, it notes the role of colonialism in shaping these views, and it holds both colonial discourse and seemingly Ghanizadeh 44 native and so-called “authentic” understandings of resistance to account for re-subordinating women in the name of Islam.
Western Narratives of Muslim Manhood:
Continuing to oscillate between critiquing Western misconceptions of women’s situation in Muslim communities and critiquing sexist interpretations of Islam, Hammoud refutes another common narrative about Muslim women which centers on her safety within the family. When
Nour and Wissam share the news of their break up with Nour’s father, Wissam, of course, puts the blame on Nour saying that “she has changed, I don’t recognize her anymore.” Contrary to one possible audience expectation, which is that Nour will be indicted by her father, her father’s incredulity is directed instead at Wissam. Against prominent assumptions about Muslim women’s situation within the private sphere of family, Nour’s father immediately tells Wissam “I don’t see anything about her that’s changed. You are the one who has changed,” and unceremoniously throws him out of the shop. In a Western social climate that often queries the safety of Muslim women in their families (honor killings, rape, arranged marriage) and in which policy decisions are made based on these assumptions, it is important to represent this other, and not uncommon, Muslim father figure.52 Hammoud pairs this to Salma’s interaction with her father, who, after finding out that she is gay, reacts with violent homophobia. Maysaloun
Hamoud may have been deliberate in framing the Muslim father as the hero and the Christian father as the villain in a contrapuntal reading of simplistic Western understandings of Muslims and Christians. While the representation of the Muslim father cuts against certain assumptions about Muslim men, the depiction of the Christian father does not cut against prominent readings of Christian men. It does, however, note that Middle East is a multi-confessional community and that believers are not drones whose subscription to one or another religion determines their Ghanizadeh 45 behavior. In this vein, it is important to note that a high official in the Canadian parliament introduced legislation to accept only Christian refugees into Canada on the basis that Muslims and Christians are bound to follow certain patterns of conduct making Christian Arabs more compatible with Western society. Hamoud reminds us, however, that these Muslims and
Christians are still people and their conduct is not pre-determined by devotional ties, a point that is important to both believers and non-believers whose intellectual rigidities are heightening in a secularist age. Hamoud may have created this pairing of the Muslim father as hero and the
Christian father as villain as a commentary on secularism and the secularist view that it alone can save women from misogyny. Far from common understandings of Muslim women and their safety within their families, in this case we see a compassionate father who does not hesitate in unequivocally supporting his daughter’s word against the word of her fiancé.
Native Discourse and New Intifadas:
While addressing the contrasting cultural arenas in which feminism may arise and promoting Islamic alternatives to Western feminism, Bar Bahar also addresses certain problematic discursive trends within Muslim discourse. First, Maysaloun Hammond discusses topics and represents Palestinian women’s lives in ways that strike her Muslim and Arab audience as inappropriate and taboo. Bringing these topics into public view provides much- needed visibility to women’s issues. Yet, Hammoud extends this feminist intervention in the
Palestinian cinema landscape when she shows her viewers an example of Palestinian life in Tel
Aviv where life unfolds under relatively normal conditions (as opposed to depictions of
Palestinians in prisons or in the occupied territories, depictions which dominate Palestinian cinema). By setting the story in the dazzling set of Tel Aviv, Hammoud not only addresses taboo, she also articulates resistance in a different mood, with a different kind of persuasive Ghanizadeh 46 power and aesthetic, enabling modes of relating to the Palestinian struggle that could inspire new feelings and new intifadas against Zionism.53 Palestinian cinema is saturated with images of suffering Palestinians: abused, murdered, and brutalized by the Zionist occupation.54 The prominence of violent and militaristic narratives in Palestinian cinema reproduce masculinism and patriarchy whereas Bar Bahar’s light-heartedness and depiction of another face, a joyful face of the Palestinian struggle, has a distinctly feminist tone—one that resists the occupation through affirmation, aspiration, and love rather than reaction, suffering, and force55 Showing this other face of Palestinian resistance to Zionist violence expands the possibilities of by introducing a new kind of persuasive power into media production—one that rides affectively inspires aspiration rather than fear. Representations of Palestinian resistance remain affectively and aesthetically repetitive and locked in appeals to anguish and suffering. Bar Bahar creates a different kind of relatability and activates different kinds of empathies that allow audiences to relate to the Palestinian situation in different and more compelling terms.
Conclusion:
Bar Bahar articulates an Islamic feminist ethos in its representation of Palestinian women as nonhomogeneous and in its narrative setting being an Islamic culture and episteme—one that is, importantly, conducive to feminism and gender equality. While Bar Bahar does not specifically draw on Islamic laws or teachings to articulate a feminist vision, it is nonetheless
Islamic and feminist because it is set in the larger cultural context of a society informed by
Islamic principles. In this vein, Bar Bahar addresses and refutes Western narratives and gestures to a dubious reliance Western regimes have on certain representations of Muslim women’s victimhood within the project of empire. By setting this discussion of Muslim women’s situation in the unique but also representative context of Palestine, Bar Bahar discusses women’s situation Ghanizadeh 47 within the collective struggle facing Palestinians living under Zionist occupation. In so doing,
Bar Bahar compares individualistic and collective impulses within Western and Islamic social paradigms and argues for the viability of Islamic thought in feminist struggle, highlighting especially Western feminist approaches that fail to contest Eurocentric hegemony and thus fail the promise of feminism. Bar Bahar compares Islamic and white feminist approaches to women’s liberation and argues for the necessity and viability of a feminism informed by Islamic ideas. By highlighting collectivity in this way, Bar Bahar alludes to the larger suffocation of third-world peoples and the on-going theft of third-world resources as they relate to rhetorics of gender equality. It is in this anti-colonial spirit that Hammoud’s depiction of Palestinian women in Israel contests Eurocentric assumptions about Muslim women and critiques native failures in gainfully addressing this predicament.
Bar Bahar describes how masculinist conceptions of Islam are inimical to the third-world project and suggests that liberation can only follow from unity and understanding of the present colonial context in its relation to gender and sexuality. Maysaloun Hammoud’s articulation of women’s freedom in Muslim spaces not only refutes Eurocentric understandings of women in
Islam and so-called “authentic” Islamic understandings of women’s role in society, it demonstrates how these seemingly opposed narratives collude in their oppression of women.
Interestingly, and unsurprisingly, Bar Bahar is denounced by both Israeli news outlets and an orthodox Muslim leadership who has gone as far as to declare a fatwa against the Hammoud and her work. What is curious about this enactment of fatwa, or Islamic sanction, is that it is the first fatwa since the 1968 denunciation of the Balfour declaration and its dispossession of Palestinians from their ancestral lands. In this instance, sexist reasoning underlying the behaviors and actions of Muslim leaders is poignantly revealed: this Muslim religious leader, like Wissam, avoids the Ghanizadeh 48 real problems facing the community and turns instead to the actions and representations of women in cinema. In this real-life example of Muslims viewing women and gender within fetishistic terms decided by an orientalist, colonialist imagination, we see how third-world resistance is neutralized through a reactive insistence on the very same terms in which colonial power was and is articulated: Muslim women. That this local Muslim center of leadership broke its decades-long silence to condemn a feminist film further demonstrates the entrenched and deeply distorting nature of masculinist Islam and its replication of untoward preoccupations with
Muslim women’s bodies and the resultant entrapment of Muslim leadership and discourse in misguided efforts that do not aid their communities. The fate of Palestinian liberation, and by extension the fate of the third-world project, hinges on Muslim communities’ ability to realize the emancipatory potential in Islam in its mutually anti-imperial and anti-patriarchal character.
As many have noted, despite being historically suppressed, the ethical voice in Islam resounds, for example, in Islam becoming a Black protest religion in the United States and in Muslim women’s continued insistence that Islam is not sexist; as Ali Mazrui notes, “the gender question should be reexamined, as the gender revolution was intended in Islam but never took off”
(Mazrui 533). The relationship between divine opposition to gender hierarchy in Islam and the fate of third-worldism in Bar Bahar illustrates how false piety and internalized orientalist perceptions of women’s visibility and mobility in society hinder social development and betray the message of Islam.
Wissam assaults Nour in a scene which illustrates the ways in which the colonialist imagination, and the colonialist view of ethnic women, is paradoxically reproduced in the name of “authentic” Islamic adherence to divine will and anti-imperialist resistance. In this case, the colonized subject adopts colonialist patriarchal thinking and destabilizes into violence. The Ghanizadeh 49 violence enacted by Wissam against Nour alludes to the state of emergency in which colonized communities exist and thus highlights the political, financial, and psychological domination informing this context. Hammoud alludes to this when showing how a prominent hadith is levied against women without attention to its original context (and haunting similarity) also, to the present context. Matching the original context of the hadith (of a community under siege) to a similar contemporary context (Palestinians living under colonial occupation) Hammoud’s representation of women’s situation between patriarchy and imperialism performs an Islamic feminist critique by addressing a prominent view within Muslim communities about women’s role in society. Hammoud illustrates how vulnerable communities tend to misdirect attention to the vulnerable within the community in a recuperative move that alleviates feelings of precarity felt by the collective in their vulnerable state—particularly those who view themselves as its rulers. By examining this hadith in her film, Hammoud critiques the workings of patriarchal ideology and indicts the destabilizing effects of colonialism (Zionism) and masculinist Islam, thus discrediting white feminist arguments about the plight of Muslim women and exposing the misguided and masculinist discourses of “authentic” Islam and indigenous revival. Within this precarious third-world context, criticism must avoid recreating the conditions of precarity that destabilize all societies around the world. As Hamoud illustrates, third-world independence is to be decided at the nexus of anti-imperialism and women’s liberation, making conceptions of women and gender in Islam a productive site of ethical questioning and the most opportune site of potential change among both believers and nonbelievers and in recognition of the divine message of equality and social justice in Islam. Ghanizadeh 50
References
1 This is the case in Fatima Mernissi’s political writings about the colonial stakes involved in representations of Muslim women’s oppression in Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World. Similar views are apparent in Leila Ahmed’s Women and Gender in Islam: Historic Roots of a Modern Debate and in Amina Wadud, Saba Mahmood, and Asma Barlas’ writings. 2 The current financial usury I refer to is discussed at length in Vijay Prashad’s The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third-World (276). 3 The Bandung project refers to the original 1955 conference in Indonesia, a meeting of African and Asian nations which began an effort against the subordination of third-world nations. A detailed history of this project is outline in Prashad’s The Darker Nations.
5 Amina Wadud makes this argument in the “Ethics of Tawhid and Qiwamah,” article in the collective volume Men in Charge?: Rethinking Authority in Islamic Legal Tradition. 6 Linked to the Tawhidic idea of unity, the “Ummah” refers to the global home of Islam traversing across nations, regions, race, and class. 7 Famous Islamic leader and anti-colonial scholar, Tariq Ramadan, son of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hasan al Bana, was recently found guilty of rape and abuse of women, Muslim and otherwise. Ramadan’s behavior was received with mixed reaction in the Muslim community, particularly in the statements of famous anti-Zionist scholar Hamid Dabashi. Dabashi wrote an article condemning neoconservative political commentator, Asra Nomani’s, condemnation of Ramadan in a critique that essentially blamed Muslim women for stirring up Islamophobia. This exchange exemplifies the confused and muddled nature of discourses relating to Muslim women both within and outside Muslim communities. 8 See Susan Okin’s Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?, in which she claims that “a deep and growing tension between feminism and multiculturalist concern for protecting cultural diversity,” simmers in feminist thought. Also, see Martha Nussabum’s A Plea for Difficulty, and her remarks about Okin’s work, “she is right to say that the current liberal interest in multiculturalism holds grave dangers for women’s equality.” While these refer to larger debates about multiculturalism, scholars such Heiedeh Moghissi, Afsaneh Najmabadi, and Reza Afshari, have rejected the possibility of an Islamic feminism. 9 First, I use the term “third-world” deliberately in its non-alignment and Bandung spirit—for a biography of the short-lived third-world project, see The Darker Nations by Vijay Prashad and “The World without Bandung, or for a Polycentric System with No Hegemony,” by Samir Amin. Second, in reference to Iranian women scholars who oppose Islamic feminism, I am thinking of Shahrzad Mojab, Hammed Shahidian, Heiedeh Moghisi, and Paria Ghastili. Popular novelists that present similar views are Azar Nafisi and Azadeh Moaveni. 10 I am borrowing Howard Winant’s definition of neoconservativism from his essay “Behind Blue Eyes: Whiteness and Contemporary US Racial Politics. In his usage, neoconservatism is an ideology that conceals racism and white supremacy in liberal, pro-diversity terms. 11 In The Reorder of Things: the University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference, Roderick Ferguson argues that radical contributions from ethnic studies and women’s studies have been stripped of their critical power and appropriated by a liberal academia that uses these discourses to boost and justify itself. Ghanizadeh 51
12 This consensus is apparent in three vastly popular memoirs by Iranian women: Reading Lolita in Tehran, Persepolis, and Lipstick Jihad. In Iranian women’s scholarly writing, feminists such as Afsaneh Najmabadi, Heideh Moghissi, Shahrzad Mojab, and Valentine Moghadam make similar moves. All three memoirs critique Islam in ways that call for its erasure and all four feminist scholars call for the removal of Islam from feminist considerations. Both Iranian feminist scholars and popular writers rely on dubious Western epistemic frameworks in their criticisms of Islam and Islamic feminism. 13 I agree with decolonial analysis in its view of coloniality existing outside the domain of nation states. In other words, when I refer to the West, the West in all its violence and erasure, I’m not referring to Biggie and Pac—I’m referring to using parsley as a seasoning, viewing other minds as a problem, and the global economic and political hierarchy that is maintained by racialization. 14 Class differentiation is critical to this discussion because religious beliefs in Iran are often patterned along economic lines. 15 The veil is a blanket term used in the West to describe the head scarf used by some Muslim women in accordance with their faith practice. There are many types of veiling informed by various understandings of Islam. 16 I am referring to Samuel Huntington’s infamous “clash of civilizations” thesis in his book of the same title. He argues that conflicts between the so-called East and West are largely due to insurmountable cultural disagreements—a view that erases the influence of economics and politics in East/West relations. See “The Clash of Civilizations?” in Foreign Affairs, vol. 72, no. 3, 1993. 17 For a summary of key events leading up to the Iranian revolution please see Vijay Prashad’s The Darker Nations, page 75, titled, “Tehran.” 18 Leila Ahmed describes this often-repeated pattern appearing Middle East and North Africa contexts following Western domination, “The lower-middle and lower classes, who were generally adversely affected by or experienced no benefits from the economic and political presence of the West had a different perspective on the colonizer’s culture and ways than did the upper classes and new middle-class intellectuals trained in Western ways, whose interests were advanced by affiliation with Western culture and who benefited economically from the British presence” (147). While Ahmed is describing events in Egypt during the British occupation, this pattern, she notes has repeated in many Middle Eastern societies “in one way or another” and influences a discourse that still informs our understandings of gender in the Middle East today (130). 19 For an in-depth look into how food scarcity and income inequality influenced the revolution, see chapter 3 of Robert E Looney’s Economic Origins of the Iranian Revolution, titled “Developments in Agriculture.” 20 Relying on Prashad’s The Darker Nations, I suggest that diaspora voices are those of dominant Iranians, an “international turbo elite” who benefit from, and support the use of, economic imperialism to bind the majority of Iranians into perpetual debt and poverty while themselves enjoying the wealth of their nation through the protection of Western governments. See The Darker Nations Page 278. 21 Azadeh Moaveni’s Lipstick Jihad and Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran are vastly popular memoirs by Iranian women whose handling of the Islamic revolutionary project is biased, one-sided, and categorically opposed to any aspect of this on-going project. Ghanizadeh 52
22 Satrapi’s migration experience is, “limited to institutions (hotels, resorts, schools, businesses) that isolate them from having to deal with the local culture in a substantial way and on its own terms” (Klapcsik 71). These differences must be recognized to understand how the Islamic revolutionary project is understood in Western countries. 23 See Gloria Fisk’s Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature, where she draws out the collusion between dominant groups, their literary expression, and the consequences of singular stories that appear to be multivocal or diverse when they are univocal and homogenous. 24 I am relying on Jasbir Puar’s articulation of “difference within sameness, and of difference containing sameness,” where she tentatively maps the boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable ethnicity as it is received by the liberal West (Puar 26). 25 Vijay Prashad, in his The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World discusses the failures of the current global, capitalist world-system and its catastrophic pillaging of third- world resources. He argues that “the third-world was not a place, it was a project,” it is in this organized project of non-alignment with Western economic and political imperialism that I locate the Iranian revolutionary project. 26 In “Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature,” Gloria Fisk makes a similar argument about the hidden investments Western readers have in global, or multicultural, literature, “[global literature] fosters sensations of proximity that ease geopolitical concerns,” affirming the links between liberal multiculturalism and dubious intellectual investments in diversity discourse. Fisk, Gloria. Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature. Columbia University Press, 2018. Page 10. 27 The G-7 (Canada, France, U.S, U.K, Germany, Japan, Italy), own more than half of all the world’s wealth and extract much of it from third-world nations. Vijay Prashad notes, “In 1970, when the third-world project was intact, the sixty states classified as “low income” by the World Bank owed commercial lender and international agencies $25 billion. Three decades later, the debt of these countries ballooned to $523 billion […] over the course of three decades, the sixty states paid $523 billion in principle and interest on loans worth $540 billion. The alchemy of international usury binds the darker nations.” Page 277. 28 The 1953 coup enacted by the CIA against the democratically elected, and secular, government of Mohammad Mossadegh, is an example of U.S aggression against sovereign nations—a reality which belies the possibility of neutral cultural exchange between Iran and the U.S. 29 Among Muslim communities in diaspora, some native subjects are viewed as serving as mouthpieces in efforts to denounce Islam, often based in gender, a move that is largely viewed as an act of self-interest by the native who disregards community well-being. Salman Rushdie is a famous example of this tension. In specific examples of women who participate in this, I am thinking of figures like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Irshad Manji, and Asra Nomani—all three prominent women in the conversations about Muslims in the West and all three given a conspicuous platform on which they unilaterally condemn Islam. When Hilary Chute makes a comment about women’s freedom in Iran and uses an Iranian woman’s voice to corroborate it, for many Muslims, this may signal the same old tactics used by, in this case, native women to promote self-interest at the expense of the community. 30 I am again referring to Shahrzad Mojab, Heideh Moghissi, and other Iranian women feminists who accept the superiority of Western ideas and the ultimacy of nation-states, rights and citizenship theories, and other dubious (and uninterrogated) Western social science paradigms. Ghanizadeh 53
31 Foucault visited with Ayatolla Khomeini during the early revolutionary period and wrote about the events unfolding in Iran. He did not, however, publish those writings. See Ghamari- Tabrizi’s Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment. 32 The chador is a covering that conceals the entire body, except for the face, and is worn within or outside the home. The home chador is usually made of colorful and floral fabrics and is the veil of choice during prayer. The outdoor chador is normally all black or navy blue and it almost always worn by women in public service. The djinn in this story appears in a home chador, further emphasizing the enclosure of women into the private sphere in the aftermath of the revolution. 33 For a study of Aryanist discourse in Iranian home and diaspora communities, please see Reza Zia-Ebrahimi’s “Self-Orientalization and Dislocation: The Uses and Abuses of the 'Aryan' Discourse in Iran.” 34 Maria Lugones, in “The Coloniality of Gender” remarks on the less prominent exploration of the sexual and gendered elements of colonialism as an unexplored area of anti-colonial study. 35 A famous example of this kind of Islamic feminist critique appears in the works of Nawal Sadawi’s The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World. 36 “The Global Dawah Movement” is an insidious missionary movement spreading the questionable Saudi Wahhabist sect of Islam. There is little written about this movement though many Muslims are aware of its existence. 37 For a detailed account of how “Islam,” has been reduced to a catch-all term that primarily invoking fear and insurmountable otherness in American social consciousness, please see Edward Said’s Covering Islam: How the Media and Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World. 38 Leila Ahmed’s work argues that the spirit of Islam is uniquely and insistently egalitarian and justice-focused standing in tension with certain practices in the founding discourses in Women and Gender in Islam (57-63). Additionally, for an overview of societal changes following the prophet’s death, especially the formative century after this event, please see John Esposito’s Islam: The Straight Path, page 37-44. Esposito describes how the grass-roots Muslim community rose to the position of caliphate and even absolute monarchy within a few centuries after the prophet’s death. There has been ample debate among Muslim scholars who wonder if Islam was ever supposed to become an imperial power or if the fundamental principles of Islam, that is, realizing a just society based on equality, are consonant with the monarchy that it became. 39 The most notable examples of feminist activism within Muslim-majority contexts include NGO’s like Musawa, Sedaa, Sisters in Islam, Al-Huda, and the Aurat Foundation. 40 As apparent in the works of Fatima Mernissi, who pays special attention to the social and political context in which the original revelations occurred, and Asma Barlas, who engages in hermeneutic and exegetical study of the Quran, a feminist voice has always existed in the sacred discourse—including the original divine disclosure in the 7th century. This included the activities of women during the time of the prophet’s revelation; that is, women were leading prayers, going into battle as armed combatants, and deciding how to organize the community as public leaders (Ahmed 61, 70; Mernissi 34). 41 Mahmoud Mohamad Taha, author of The Second Message of Islam, along with figures such as Muhamad Abdu and Jamal Al Din Al Afghani, are contemporary examples of Muslim thinkers who stress the egalitarian elements of Islam. 42 The Kabbah, the central site of holy pilgrimage in Islam, was originally a temple containing numerous idols worshiped by the disparate clans living on the Arabian Peninsula. When the Ghanizadeh 54
prophet dismantled the old system and replaced it with Islam, he smashed the idols in the Kabbah in affirmation of the oneness of Allah (Mernissi 189). 43 This is not to suggest that Christian (or multiplicitous) conceptions of god are inherently oppressive. Multiplicity has its own emancipatory potential as evidenced by Dussel’s liberation theology. 44 The anti-colonial revolution in Iran owes a great deal of its success to a Shia clerical network and a Shia protest culture that emphasizes revolt against injustice; Behrooz Ghamar-Tabrizi, in Foucault in Iran, argues that the revolution was not “hijacked” by clerics, nor was religion a secondary element, the revolution was Islamic at its core (19-23). Similar events occurred in Sunni-majority Egypt with the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood and the successful defeat of the British occupation. For a summary of Islamic anti-colonialism in contemporary Egypt, please sees Leila Ahmed Women and Gender in Islam pages 189-207. 45 This is due to the highly visible systems of power and control in the Palestinian context replete with check-points, curfews, and the largest open-air prison in the world: Gaza. 46 “Hijabi” is a casual term used among Muslims to refer to woman who wear some type of head covering. 47 Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, contemporary Sudanese philosopher and political theorist, in his essay “The Individual and Community in Islam” argues that the Islamic principle of Tawhid lays to rest long-debated questions about individual and communal well-being in society. 48 Just as Tawhid informs social consciousness in many Islamic cultural contexts, in contrast, Western conceptions of subjectivity are founded on the Cartesian subject articulated through multiplicity or division. In the Cartesian account of subjectivity, a being, or subject, is understood in terms of “the Enlightenment notion of an abstract, isolated individual, unencumbered with ties to others (Kheel 6). 49 In Western philosophy, the so-called “problem of other minds” raises the question of “how to justify the almost universal belief that others have minds very like our own” (Stanford Encyclopedia Philosophy). This existential questioning of others and other minds is emblematic of Western alienation and skewered perceptions of self and other. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/other-minds/ 50 Which is not to say that androcentric bias did not exist before colonialism, it simply existed differently. It is important to note, however, that in the medieval Islamic period, multiple women rose to the highest seat in the Islamic empire: the sultanate. For a history of sultana’s, please see Fatima Mernissi’s The Forgotten Queens of Islam. 51 In the case of this hadith, the city in which the young Muslim community had gathered during its evolution was under siege and members of the prophet’s household were being specifically targeted and harassed (Mernissi 85-101). When new Muslims in this new experimental community came to him about the harassment of women, the Prohet made this comment about women staying at home. 52 Rahaf Alqunun, the Saudi Arabian teenager who raised a media storm in early 2019 by gaining emergency asylum in Canada, exemplifies the Western preoccupation with Muslim women and Muslims women’s safety within the family. In this example, a woman who is fleeing family violence (family violence inspired by “Islam”) is granted immediate asylum but a women, notably a women wearing the full-face veil (niqab) fleeing famine in Yemen are ignored. This speaks, yet again, to the barely-hidden desires on the part of Western audiences to construct salvation narratives about Muslim women and ignore the real reasons behind the vulnerability of Muslim women: imperialism and debt slavery. Ghanizadeh 55
53 Intifada means uprising, in this case an uprising against the Israeli occupation, and there have been two incidents of Intifada so far, one in 1987 and one in 2000. Neither of them succeeded in overthrowing the occupation. 54 There are many examples of this type of cinema in the Palestinian film landscape. Examples of this type of women’s cinema are Salt of this Sea and 3000 Nights which follow the same patterns established by works made by men—that is, they are somber and anguished. 55 I am referring to Nietzsche’s articulation of affirmation and reaction as it relates to sickness and health. In Nietzsche’s account, weakened or suppressed figures are susceptible to reactive tendencies and resentment. This condition, according to Nietzsche, not only pollutes the subject with resentment, it also forecloses the possibility of dealing with subjugation in affirmative, enabling ways.
Ghanizadeh 56
Works Cited
Afary, Janet and Anderson, Kevin B. Foucault and the Iranian Revolution Gender and the
Seductions of Islamism. University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Ahmed, Leila. Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate. Yale
University Press, 1992.
Ahmed, Leila. Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate. Yale
University Press, 1992.
Ahmed, Sara. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Duke University
Press, 2012.
Amin, Samir. “The World without Bandung, or for a Polycentric System with No Hegemony.”
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol. 17, no. 1, 2016, pp. 7–11.
Ansari, Maboud. Parrillo, Vincent N. Rethinking Today's Minorities. Greenwood Press, 1991.
Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford University
Press, 2003.
Chute, Hillary L. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. Columbia
University Press, 2010.
Cragg, Kenneth, and Musa'ad, Ishaq. The Theology of Unity; Translated from the Arabic by
Ishaq Musa'ad and Kenneth Cragg. Allen and Unwin, 1966.
Dussel, Enrique D, and Mendieta, Eduardo. Beyond Philosophy: Ethics, History, Marxism, and
Liberation Theology. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003. Ghanizadeh 57
Esposito, John L. Islam: The Straight Path. Oxford University Press, 1988.
Fanon, Frantz. Toward the African Revolution: Political Essays. Monthly Review Press, 1967.
Fisk, Gloria. Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature. Columbia University Press, 2018.
Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Wartime Cosmopolitanism: Cosmofeminism in Virginia Woolf's
Three Guineas and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis.” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature,
vol. 32, no. 1, 2013, pp. 23–52.
Gashtili, Paria. "Is an "Islamic Feminism" Possible?: Gender Politics in Contemporary Islamic
Republic of Iran." Philosophical Topics Vol 41 (2013): Page 124-125.
Ghamari-Tabrizi, Behrooz. Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment.
University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
Grosfoguel, Ramón. “Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political Economy:
Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality.” Transmodernity, vol. 1,
no. 1, 2011, pp. 1–36. Huntington, Samuel. “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign
Affairs, vol. 72, no. 3, 1993, p. 22.
Hyslop, Alec, "Other Minds", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2018 Edition),
Edward N. Zalta
Jacir, Annemarie, and Kanopy. Salt of This Sea.Kanopy Streaming, 2014.
Keddie, Nikki R., and Afghani, Jamal al-Din. An Islamic Response to Imperialism; Political and
Religious Writings of Sayyid Jamal Ad-Din "Al-Afghani". University of California Press,
1968.
Kheel, Marti. Nature Ethics: An Ecofeminist Perspective. Rowman & Littlefield, 2008. Ghanizadeh 58
Klapcsik, Sandor. “Acculturation Strategies and Exile in Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis.” Journal
of Multicultural Discourses, vol. 11, no. 1, 2015, pp. 1–15.
Leservot, Typhaine. “Occidentalism: Rewriting the West in Marjane Satrapi's PerséPolis.”
French Forum, vol. 36, no. 1, 2011, pp. 115–130.
Looney, Robert E. Economic Origins of the Iranian Revolution. Pergamon Press, 1982.
Majid, Anouar. Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World. Duke
University Press, 2000.
Majid, Anouar. Unveiling Traditions : Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World. Duke
University Press, 2000.
Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. “The Crisis of the University in the Context of Neoapartheid: A
View from Ethnic Studies.” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-
Knowledge, vol. 10, no. 1, 2011, pp. 91–100.
Masri, Mai, et al. 3000 Nights. Intramovies, 2015.
Maysaloun Hamoud: Palestinian director on plaudits, death threats and big screen
success." CNN Wire, 4 Jan. 2018. Academic OneFile
Mazrui, Ali. “Islam and the End of History.” American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, vol.
10, no. 4, 1993, pp. 512-548.
Mernissi, Fatima. Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World. Addison-Wesley
Publications, 1992.
Mernissi, Fatima. Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World. Addison-Wesley
Publishers, 1992. Ghanizadeh 59
Mernissi, Fatima., and Lakeland, Mary Jo. The Forgotten Queens of Islam. University of
Minnesota Press, 1993.
Mernissi, Fatima., and Mazal Holocaust Collection. The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist
Interpretation of Women's Rights in Islam. Addison-Wesley Publishers, 1991.
Mignolo, Walter D, and Madina V Tlostanova. “Theorizing from the Borders.” European Journal
of Social Theory, vol. 9, no. 2, 2006, pp. 205–221.
Mignolo, Walter., and Escobar, Arturo. Globalization and the Decolonial Option. Introduction.
Routledge, 2010.
Mignolo, Walter., and Escobar, Arturo. Globalization and the Decolonial Option. Routledge,
2010.
Mir-Hosseini, Ziba, et al. Men in Charge?: Rethinking Authority in Muslim Legal Tradition.
Oneworld, 2015.
Moallem, Minoo. Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister: Islamic Fundamentalism and the
Politics of Patriarchy in Iran, University of California Press, 2005.
Moghissi, Haideh. "Islamic Feminism Revisited." Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa
and the Middle East Vol 31.1 (2011): 76-84.
Mojab, Shahrzad. "Theorizing the Politics of 'Islamic Feminism'" Feminist Review Vol 69
(2001.): 124-46.
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, and Samuel, Horace Barnett. The Genealogy of Morals. Boni and
Liveright, 1918. Ghanizadeh 60
Ostby, Marie. “Graphics and Global Dissent: Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, Persian Miniatures,
and the Multifaceted Power of Comic Protest.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern
Language Association of America, vol. 132, no. 3, 2017, pp. 558–579.
Prashad, Vijay. The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World. New Press:
Distributed by W.W. Norton, 2007.
Prashad, Vijay. The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World. New Press, 2007.
Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Duke University
Press, 2007. Page 25.
Puar, Jasbir. “Citation and Censorship: The Politics of Talking About the Sexual Politics of
Israel.” Feminist Legal Studies, vol. 19, no. 2, 2011, pp. 133–142.
Quijano, Aníbal, and Therborn, Sonia. “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality.” Cultural Studies
(London, United Kingdom), vol. 21, no. 2-3, 2007, pp. 168–178.
Ramon Grofoguel’s, “The Epistemic Decolonial Turn.” Cultural Studies, vol. 21, no. 2-3, 2007,
pp. 211–223.
Ribero, Ana Milena. “Acceptable Heterogeneity: Brownwashing Rhetoric in President Obama's
Address on Immigration.” Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society, vol. 5, no. 2,
2015, pp. 1–7.
Root, Robert. “Interview with Marjane Satrapi.” Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, vol.
9, no. 2, 2007, pp. 147–57.
Saʻdawi, Nawal., and Hatatah, Sharif. The Hidden Face of Eve : Women in the Arab World.
Beacon Press, 1982. Ghanizadeh 61
Saʻdawi, Nawal., and Hatatah, Sharif. The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World.
Beacon Press, 1982.
Said, Edward W. Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the
Rest of the World. Vintage Books, 1997.
Taha, Mahmud Muhammad. The Second Message of Islam. Syracuse University Press, 1987.
The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference. Roderick
Ferguson.
Walther, Wiebke. Women in Islam. M. Wiener Publications, 1993.
Winant, Howard. “Behind Blue Eyes: Whiteness and Contemporary US Racial Politics.” New
Left Review, no. 225, 1997, p. 73
Zia-Ebrahimi, Reza. “Self-Orientalization and Dislocation: The Uses and Abuses of the 'Aryan'
Discourse in Iran.” Iranian Studies: Journal of the International Society for Iranian
Studies, vol. 44, no. 4, 2011, pp. 445–472.