Gender Equality and Muslim Women: Negotiating Expanded Rights in Muslim Majority and Immigrant Contexts

chapter 7 Gender Equality and Muslim Women: Negotiating Expanded Rights in Muslim Majority and Immigrant Contexts Rema Hammami1 Abstract This paper addresses contemporary debates about Muslim women’s rights and equality through re-visiting a fundamental debate in Western feminism: the conundrum of equality versus difference. At the end of the twentieth century, Muslim women’s inequality and lack of rights came to play an active role in the rhetoric and politics of the ‘Clash of Civilizations’. In both Muslim majority and minority contexts, dominant public discourse increasingly posed gender equality and Muslim identity as mutually exclusive and conflicting choices for women and society at large. This problematic view reflects a politics of gender where Muslim women’s rights have become a stand- in for various imperial, national and identitarian agendas that in the process ignores and silences the desires and needs of the very women it claims to represent. This paper attempts to cast light on the different nature these debates take when they are re-positioned among the women concerned—women in Muslim majority and minority contexts seeking a more just gender order within their societies and communities. Rather than seeing contemporary debates around gender equality among women in Muslim majority and minority contexts as incommensurable with those of their Western counterparts, this paper seeks to address how desires for equality with recognition of difference is a basic dilemma shared by women in any context seeking a more just gender order. Introduction At the end of the twentieth century, Muslim women’s lack of rights and inequality came to play an active role in the rhetoric and politics of the ‘Clash of Civilizations’. Longstanding assumptions about Islam and women (or how women’s inequality is foundational to Islamic culture and religion) became 1 Fourth holder of the Prince Claus Chair, 2005–2006. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��4 | doi ��.��63/9789004�697�9_��9 Rema Hammami - 9789004269729 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 08:19:44AM via free access Gender equality and Muslim women 119 wedded in alarming ways to intense ideological conflicts and debates that had immediate political implications in the real world. In foreign policy, the Bush administration in the US used the ‘liberation’ of Afghani women from the oppressive Islam of the Taliban in their arsenal of justifications for invasion and regime change (Abu-Lughod 2002; Kandiyoti 2007, 2011). Across Europe, pitched battles broke out over the right of Muslim women to wear Islamic dress in public (in what became known as the ‘burqa wars’). Propelled by right-wing political movements, these divisive debates thrust the issue of Muslim women’s oppression within immigrant communities onto national agendas, forcing governments to create commissions and legislation to grapple with everything from Muslim women’s ‘forced marriage’ to their right to wear headscarves in public schools (Dustin 2006; Najmabadi 2006; Scott 2007; Gole & Billaud 2012). And in the contemporary Middle East, the rights of Muslim women have also been thrust onto national agendas and placed at the centre of polarized debates, most recently in the democratic transitions taking place in Egypt and Tunisia where their rights have become the terrain on which political forces battle out their contending ideological visions of their society and polity’s future (Elsadda 2011; FIDH 2011; Atassi 2012; ElKouny 2012). What is common to all these conflicts in which Muslim women’s rights or inequality have been invoked (be it in the ‘war on terror’, in Europe or in the Muslim majority contexts of Tunisia and Egypt) is that they are not fundamentally about the very women they claim to be concerned with. Instead, a range of highly charged conflicts and agendas has been played out using ‘Muslim women’ as their stand-in. In the ‘war on terror’, women’s rights and equality have been made a measuring stick in the politics of demarcating the civilized ‘us’ from the barbaric ‘them’, thus being a means to claim a ‘just war’ (regard- less of the use of torture and forced rendition). In Europe, the real nature of the debate has been immigration, cultural integration and legacies of rac- ism (Scott 2007; Parvez 2011). In relation to the Arab Spring, women’s rights and equality have been the stand-in for struggles over religious versus secu- lar ideologies and their role in modern democratic governance (Moustafa & Quraishi-Landes 2012). In all three cases, Muslim women have been the terrain on which wider forms of identity politics have been fought. In the ‘war on terror’, they were used to express the civilizational identity of the West. In the ‘burqa wars’, rather than being about rights and equality for Muslim women immigrants, more profoundly they were used to debate what it means to be French or European and how immigration policy should relate to issues of national identity. In Egypt and Tunisia, whether women should have rights and what rights they should have is fundamentally a debate about the role of Shari’a in national identity: To what extent does religion as a source of identity Rema Hammami - 9789004269729 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 08:19:44AM via free access 120 hammami need to be encoded in the laws and policies of the modern state and society (Kandioyti 2011a)? But where does equality enter into these debates? The calls for Muslim women’s integration in European cultural contexts encompass a number of arguments about their equality and inequality. On the one hand, they are seen as inhabiting an Islamic sub-culture that is founded on their innate inequality with Muslim men. And on the other hand, their membership in their religio- ethnic communities makes impossible their ability to enjoy the gender equality that accrues to women of the dominant culture, be it French, Danish or Dutch. Thus, in relation to these polarized debates in the European context, Muslim women are offered an either/or proposition: either to remain in inequality within their religion and community or to achieve full equality by leaving them behind and integrating into the dominant culture. The logic of these choices is that gender equality and cultural difference are made mutually exclusive categories. Only by assimilation (i.e. erasing their cultural difference) can Muslim women attain gender equality as it is provided by the dominant culture. The dominant debates in contemporary Egypt and to a lesser extent Tunisia go in the opposite direction but also tend to provide women with an either/ or proposition based on the equality/difference dualism. In the discourse of religious conservatives and dominant Islamist groups, the choice offered to women is this: either remain attached to your religious heritage and accept that men and women are fundamentally different and therefore unequal or forsake your religious identity (our collective difference) for gender equality (Abu-Odeh 2004; FIDH 2011; Kandiyoti 2011b; Mir-Hosseini 2011; Tadros 2011a). In other words, we once again have gender equality and cultural difference being made mutually exclusive categories, where Islamic conservatives and Islamist political movements assert that women cannot lay claim to Islamic identity and gender equality at the same time. In this paper, I want to show how the politics of gender vis-à-vis Muslim women—or “processes of appropriation, contestation and re-interpretation of positions on gender relations and rights by state, non-state and global actors” (Kandiyoti 2011a)—has foreclosed spaces for them to voice their own range of desires for gender equality. Rather than assuming—as these dominant debates do—that gender equality is an inherent good (or bad) aspiration for Muslim women, I aim to show that the contradictions and dilemmas inherent in the ‘equality feminism’ that marked the experience of feminist movements in the North America and Europe a generation ago remain salient today for Muslim women trying to negotiate an expansion of their rights across varying contexts. I consciously focus on the concept of equality (versus equity), because it has been the foundational (albeit often problematic) principle for women’s Rema Hammami - 9789004269729 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 08:19:44AM via free access Gender equality and Muslim women 121 rights struggles historically and globally. The equality principle is the legal basis for the United Nations’ most powerful convention on gender rights. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) of 1979 suggests the degree to which the concept of equality remains the central and normative term for women’s rights struggles in the contemporary world. In contrast, while the notion of gender ‘equity’ has increasingly taken hold in the language of the development industry since the 1990s, it has been criticized for de-politicizing women’s rights agendas because it is based on subjective notions of fairness between the sexes rather than on legal principles of non-discrimination and substantive equality (or equality of outcomes).2 I end the paper with a personal example of debates around gender equality among women in a Muslim majority context when there is a space free from the adverse effects of the ‘politics of gender’: my Gender Studies classroom in the occupied West Bank. Rather than being a utopian case, I offer the example as exemplary of the myriad though invisible “third spaces” (Soja 1996) through- out the region and across Muslim minority contexts in which women grapple with the promise and problems inherent in gender equality as a basis for a more just gender order. Sameness versus Difference Over thirty years ago, the dilemmas and contradictions of gender equality became a core debate within Western feminism. The principle of demand- ing full equality between the sexes that had guided feminist activism since the 1960s became in the 1980s the centre of conflict over the very meaning of feminism itself, in what is now known as the equality/difference debates (Phillips 1987, 1999, 2000; Fraser 1998; Scott and Keates 1999).

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