“Between Orientalism and Postmodernism: the Changing Nature of Western Feminist Thought Towards the Middle East”

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“BETWEEN ORIENTALISM AND POSTMODERNISM: THE CHANGING NATURE OF WESTERN FEMINIST THOUGHT TOWARDS THE MIDDLE EAST”

SHADI HAMID Oxford University

Abstract

1980s postmodernism provided a viable theoretical alternative to existing discourses. Where pre-postmodern second-wave feminism subscribed to prescriptive notions of what a woman should or should not be, postmodern feminists (or post-feminists) instead articulated a much more diverse, malleable, morally and culturally relative notion of what it means to be a woman. This new relativist approach meant that feminists were now making a conscious effort to engage with third-world women in a way that acknowledged cultural particularities. Today Muslim women are struggling to find a place for themselves. Western feminists have the potential to play an important role in the process of change in the Muslim world. The nature of this role has yet to be determined. In recent decades, Western feminists have had a tendency to superimpose their own culturally specific notions of equality on the Muslim world. Now, there is the risk that a new generation of postmodern intellectuals will decide to slowly disengage. With this in mind, finding the middle ground has never been more urgent.

Few words are more controversial than the word “feminism.” Few words can elicit such a wide range of charged emotion. For some, it is a word which conveys freedom and liberation from patriarchal oppression. For others, it represents a merciless attack on the institution of the family. For yet others, feminism is just another means with which the West can destroy the culture and traditions of the Third World. Like most other things, feminism—as a concept and as a movement—deﬁes easy characterization. Over the course of the last forty years, since the heady days of sixties radicalism, feminism has mor- phed and evolved in response to rapidly changing conditions and circumstances. What it is today is certainly not what it once was. As countries and cultures interact in an increasingly globalized

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world, feminists have been forced to address a variety of challeng- ing questions. Obviously, feminists care about their female counterparts in the Third World. But it is one thing to care; it is another to decide on a specific course of action. In their interaction with those still hurting from the scars of the colonialist project, feminists have found themselves in a catch-22. If they get involved in women’s rights issues in cultural settings they are not familiar with, they run the risk of offending local sen- sibilities and will almost inevitably be accused of imposing Western values on unwilling populations. On the other hand, if they choose not to act in the name of cultural sensitivity, then they are essen- tially staying silent in the face of injustice, a morally problematic situation for those whose very raison d’être is helping women fight the oppression of patriarchy. Feminists have struggled to come to terms with this dilemma— a dilemma which continues to plague women’s rights activists to this very day. In this article, I will try to put this dilemma in perspective, examining how different feminists have addressed this issue and, hopefully by the end, provide some tentative suggestions on how to proceed. For the purposes of this article, and in light of recent international events, I have chosen to focus on the Middle East. The moral dilemmas that feminists face is nowhere more evi- dent than in this troubled region.

A U R B Feminism was (and still is) a Western construct. The movement for gender equality arose out of the Enlightenment ideals of freedom, equality and the dignity of the human person. In the works of John Stuart Mill and Mary Wollstonecraft, two of the earliest and most inﬂuential feminists, we constantly see references to reason, rationality and objectivity. Unfortunately, with these apparently lofty ideals came Western exceptionalism and its negative aspects—ethnocen- trism, racism and imperialism. Through the colonialist project, Western “modern” thought was introduced to the future nations of the Third World. And since then we have witnessed the uneasy relationship between feminism—with all of its Western intellectual and philosophical baggage—and the non-Western world. Hawwa 4,1_f4_76-92I 5/24/06 5:04 PM Page 78

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Second-wave feminism, which gained ascendancy in the 1960s, 70s, and early 80s, was very much a product of Enlightenment thought with its almost messianic belief in unlimited progress. Feminists, at this point, had a less nuanced view of the world than their more relativist sisters would in later years. They emphasized the universality of their mission. For the most part, it did not occur to them that women in other parts of the world had their own culturally speciﬁc notion of “women’s rights.” Reina Lewis and Sara Mills note that, “second wave Anglo-American feminist theory had generalized from western middle-class women’s experiences and developed a form of theorizing—‘sisterhood is global’—which assumed that those white concerns were the concerns of women everywhere” (2003: 4). Second-wave feminists were supposed to come together as women and not as anything else—not as black women, not as Arab women, and not as Catholic women. The common and over- riding denominator was supposed to be the oppression at the hands of men that each and every woman experienced. When second-wave feminists looked outside of their own borders, they did so from a position of dominance, power and presumed superiority. They saw societies that seemed to them to be stuck in time, consumed by outdated ideas of tradition and religion. Little eﬀort was made to understand these “backward” cultures on their own terms. Instead, Western feminists tended to look at Third World women as a composite, monolithic group of powerless women lacking any agency. What resulted was a cultural gap that did not bode well for relations between Western feminists and their non- Western counterparts.

W F   M W It would be useful here to look at some speciﬁc examples of anti- Muslim bias in Western feminist thought. For the purposes of historical perspective, I will begin more than 200 years ago with a brief look at Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792. This work, which still stands today as one of the seminal feminist texts, is replete with casual references to the backwardness of Muslim women and the religion of Islam in general. Referring to English women, Wollstonecraft says: “In the true style of Mahomentanism, [they] are treated as a kind of subordinate Hawwa 4,1_f4_76-92I 5/24/06 5:04 PM Page 79

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beings, and not as part of the human species, when improvable reason is allowed to be the digniﬁed distinction which raises men above the brute creation” (1992: 80). Here she uses characteristic Enlightenment-era language to create an oppositional binary between the subhuman Mahometans and then men, presumably European, who rise above brute creation because of their “improvable reason.” Later, she makes another off handedly reductionist comment: “Beauty, he declares, will not be valued, or even seen, after a couple have lived six months together . . . why, then, does he say that a girl should be educated for her husband with the same care as for an Eastern harem?” (1992: 191). Similarly, in the Subjection of Women, published in 1861, John Stuart Mill asserts that, “[Christianity] has been the religion of the progressive portion of mankind, and Islamism, Brahminism, etc. have been those of the stationary portions” (1997: 46). If we fast forward to 1952, the same themes reappear in Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex when she informs the reader that “when the family and the private patrimony remain beyond question the bases of society, then woman remains totally submerged. This occurs in the Moslem world . . . the veiled and sequestered Moslem woman is still today in most social strata a kind of slave” (1997: 84). Despite the fact that a relatively small number of women wore the veil at the height of Arab secular nationalism, the Orientalist image of the oppressed, secluded veiled woman continued unabated in Western literature. Muslim women were seen as passive, sexless beings covered up in masses of cloth, a sharp contrast to the self- assured “sexually liberated” women of the advanced West. We should note, however, that this was not always the way the matter was perceived. Interestingly, during the colonial period, Muslim women were stereotyped as sensual, seductive, and sexually charged. In contrast, white women would emphasize and accen- tuate their whiteness, which was supposed to connote purity (Bulbeck 1998: 129). The veiled woman was seen as mysterious, almost phan- tasmic. Her very inaccessibility made her all the more desirable in the European mind. The colonist sought to control and conquer all, including native women. But, face to face with the veiled woman, the European lost his power. Control eluded him and reciprocity was denied. After all, she could see him, but he could not see her. It is this inability “to ﬁx and control that is unsettling and terrifying Hawwa 4,1_f4_76-92I 5/24/06 5:04 PM Page 80

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yet so seducing” (Yegenoglu 2003: 548). In the end it did not really matter whether they were active or passive, sexed-up or sexless— Muslim women were always othered, invariably deﬁned as the opposite of their Western counterparts. In the late 1970s, with the rise of political Islam across the Muslim world, Westerners were bombarded with negative images of angry, bearded men who apparently locked their women in the kitchen. Common stereotypes which were already widely held were strengthened and reinforced. Feminist circles were no exception. Published by Zed Press in 1980, Juliet Minces’s audaciously titled The House of Obedience: Women in Arab Society serves as a revealing example of the lingering residue of easy reductonism. Muslim women are portrayed as uniformly oppressed, powerless in the face of reli- giously induced patriarchy. As one might expect, the veil for Minces, symbolizes this oppression. Her repeated usage of “we” (read: progressive, enlightened, liberated Western women) and “they” (read: the ignorant, tradition-bound, oppressed veiled Muslim women) is telling. Her articulation of this binary is similar to that of John Stuart Mill nearly 120 years before: “While women elsewhere gradually liberated themselves—to some extent—from the total supremacy of men, most women in the Muslim world continued to be totally subordinate. They live under a system which has barely changed despite the undeniable evolution of their societies” (1980: 14). More troubling, however, is Minces’s disrespect for Muslim religious obli- gations when she equates women’s liberation with eating pork, having pre-marital relations and drinking alcohol (49). A true pre-postmodern feminist, Minces begins the book by saying that her extensive travels have given her the ability to “situate the Arab world fairly precisely” (vii). It would seem that she is trying to persuade the reader that she is an objective, neutral observer interested only in the truth. She uses the language of Enlightenment discourse to justify what is clearly an ethnocentric analysis. The point of reference is always the West. Consequently, just as the West represents the center, so too does the Western feminist, presumably far ahead of her time. Hawwa 4,1_f4_76-92I 5/24/06 5:04 PM Page 81

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F  P It is impossible to say exactly when postmodernism began (to even come up with a tentative date would be a decidedly un-postmodern thing to do). In any case, we can say that the emphasis on “het- erogeneity” in the 1960s foreshadowed the postmodern obsession with “difference.” The first real stirrings of this new intellectual movement came in the mid to late 1970s. By the 1980s, postmodernism had come into its own, providing a viable theoretical alternative to existing discourses. One of the seminal works that expounded on postmodern theory was Jean-Francois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition. In his analysis, Lyotard emphasizes the importance of context, arguing that decisions should be made based on local circumstances and conditions. He seems to capture the essence of postmodernity when he refers to its “incredulity towards meta- narratives” (1984: xxiv). Postmodernism, with its skepticism toward absolute values and any absolute notion of progress, provides a stark contrast with the Enlightenment belief in transcendent, universal values. Where the Enlightenment project saw mankind’s potential for infinite and unfet- tered advancement, postmodernism saw the destruction and disil- lusionment that this “progress” left in its wake. Postmodernism, as well as post-structuralism and post-colonial thought, ended up having a marked influence on the evolution of feminist thought. Where pre-postmodern second-wave feminism subscribed to prescriptive notions of what a woman should or should not be, postmodern feminists (or postfeminists) have instead articulated a much more diverse, malleable, morally and culturally relative notion of what it means to be a woman. The new relativist approach meant that feminists were now making a conscious effort to engage with third-world women in a way that acknowledged cultural and locational particularities. Postmodern relativism has become pervasive in feminist thought with the success of writers like bell hooks, Gloria Joseph, Audre Lord, Elizabeth Spelman and others. What, though, has the advent of postmodernism meant for Western feminist interaction with the Muslim world? There has been an undeniable improvement in the way Western feminists look at the Middle East and the Third World in general. The work of Edward Said, specifically the publication of Orientalism in 1978, represented a turning point in academic circles. Hawwa 4,1_f4_76-92I 5/24/06 5:04 PM Page 82

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Despite this new recognition of cultural specificity, there remains a less noticeable but still pervasive bias in the works of many modern-day feminists. This is not to say that these feminists are will- fully malicious. In fact, the opposite is true. They often come with good intentions, but their knowledge of the Muslim world is often limited. We see this in the overgeneralizations and stereotypical constructions used to describe conditions in hot spots like Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Palestinian territories. In the 1990s, many women’s rights activists became involved in campaigns against honor killing in Jordan and female genital mutilation in Egypt. These NGO-initiated efforts failed to have any noticeable effect on the societies that they were presumably trying to change. Western NGOs, with their secular orientation, were at a loss when it came to understanding the dynamic interplay between religion, culture, and politics in the Muslim world. Perhaps more problematic is the inability of many Western feminists to come to terms with the headscarf, or ˙ijàb. The ˙ijàb some- how manages to evoke a surprising amount of indignation and vitriol. In early 2004, nearly every feminist group in France endorsed President Jacques Chirac’s call to ban the headscarf. The issue here is not whether or not the ˙ijàb is actually mandated by Islam or whether it is merely a cultural manifestation of Islam. The fact is that many Muslims do choose, of their own free will, to wear the headscarf. From the perspective of many Muslim women, wearing the ˙ijàb is a way in which to assert one’s identity and, more impor- tantly, to assert one’s autonomy and independence. Understood this way, the ˙ijàb is in keeping with feminist ideals insofar as it provides women the opportunity to reassert their moral and political agency. Yet, in the name of women’s rights, French feminists advocated suppressing the individual choice and personal freedom of Muslim women. With the ban on ˙ijàb now in place, thousands of women are being denied the right to make their own decisions about what they can or cannot wear.

H     C R? When it came to the ˙ijàb, French feminists were unable to understand the religious issues at stake. On the opposite side of the spectrum, Hawwa 4,1_f4_76-92I 5/24/06 5:04 PM Page 83

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though, there are some who would like to take cultural relativism to its illogical and dangerous extreme. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, for example, writes British attempts to abolish suttee—a tradition in which a woman burns herself to death after her husband dies— had the effect of denying the agency and “voice consciousness” of the Indian women involved (1998: 297). For Spivak, any cultural interference on the part of the West is seen with suspicion. Similarly, Joyce Trebilcot insists: “I do not try to get other wim- min to accept my beliefs in place of their own” (1988: 1). This would be an act of discursive violence. In response to Trebilcot, Spivak and the extreme relativists, Alison Assiter argues for a more balanced approach, stressing the need to “accept some limitation on our relativism and suggest, as a minimum, a value is more emancipatory than another if it has the effect of removing a person of a group of people from subjugation” (1996: 84). Other feminists try to resolve the dilemma by arguing for an emphasis on empowerment rather than emancipation. Empowerment, however, is a vague term that can be used and understood in a variety of different ways. Women can, after all, empower themselves to work against women’s equality, as we shall see later in the article. Similarly problematic is the emphasis on agency and personal choice that has become the hallmark of recent feminist writing. In her book At the Heart of Freedom, Drucilla Cornell’s main argument is that “a person’s freedom to pursue her own happiness in her own way is crucial for any person’s ability to share in life’s glo- ries” (1998: 18). Throughout the book, she says that women should be free to use their freedom in any way they see fit. Her frequently stated—and, in my opinion, incorrect—assumption is that freedom will necessarily lead to equality. What happens when women use their agency to refuse Western standards of progress? Freedom, after all, at its very essence, entails the right to make a decision that others may think of as indisputably wrong or backwards. Like Cornell, Judith Butler, in “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism,’” also privileges agency over any fixed notion of what a woman should be. Butler seems willing to accept the logical consequences of a feminism that puts empowerment over emancipation, admitting “that the category is uncon- strained, even that it comes to serve antifeminist purposes, will be part of the risk of this procedure” (1995: 16). Hawwa 4,1_f4_76-92I 5/24/06 5:04 PM Page 84

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T “A-F”  F These questions of empowerment versus emancipation and the nature of freedom are especially thorny in the Middle Eastern context. As I will attempt to show here, many Muslim women exer- cise their agency in ways that may appear perplexing to even the most open-minded of Westerners. . . . She sat elegantly on the floor near the foyer of the house, her dark, provocative eyes closely monitoring those who entered. When men were about to pass near her, she pulled the outer layer of the niqàb over her head, completely covering her face (Abdo 2000: 139). So begins Geneive Abdo’s description of “Mona” in No God but God: Egypt and the Triumph of Islam, her seminal account of Islamism in Egypt. To call Mona a unique young woman would be something of an understatement. Could such a woman, so intent on secluding herself in a sea of darkness, be a feminist? Mona organizes a dars, or religious lesson, for more than a hun- dred fellow American University in Cairo students, each week in her parents’ luxurious villa. Mona also happens to be the daugh- ter of a member of parliament from the ruling secular National Democratic Party. Interestingly, Mona sees her style of dress as a means of self-empowerment and self-affirmation: “After I had my first baby, I went to a dars and I felt I wanted to be a better Muslim. Then I promised God I wouldn’t go out of the house without a ˙ijàb. Then, gradually, I began wearing the niqàb. My niqàb is my freedom, because it lets me choose who does and who doesn’t see me” (140). In Egypt, niqàb is well outside the bounds of the Islamic main- stream and is seen by many as extreme. What, then, explains the visible minority of niqàb-wearers such as Mona who go against the grain of society? Mona’s choice to wear niqàb can be seen as a paradoxical act of self-affirmation, political protest, and rebellion— three things usually associated with Western feminism. In the example of Sudan we see similar tensions. In her essay “Gender, Religious Identity, and Political Mobilization in Sudan,” Sondra Hale (1994) discusses her interviews with three leading Sudanese women activists, Nagwa Kamal Farid, Wisal al-Mahdi, and Hikmat Sid-Ahmed. Farid was Sudan’s first female shariah Hawwa 4,1_f4_76-92I 5/24/06 5:04 PM Page 85

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judge, al-Mahdi is a lawyer and activist, while Sid-Ahmed is a for- mer government representative for the National Islamic Front (NIF), the most prominent Islamist party in the country. Sid-Ahmed, in the interview, explains her views on female equality: “We know that women are different from men. Women, by their nature, sometimes forget” (Hale 1994: 158–159). al-Mahdi goes further, spewing the standard male-dominance talking points: “In a situation of somebody taking a . . . knife and stabbing another, a woman would be so much excited that she would not recognize exactly what happened, because after all, a woman is weaker than a man and all her nervous system is made different” (160). This is blatant anti-feminist rhetoric. Yet, later in the interview, all three agreed that men oppress women. al-Mahdi, in particular, says something that would make any feminist proud: [Arab men] are against women, and that is why we are much against them. We know our rights; we have learned the Quran and Shariah; we know what Shariah gives us . . . and . . . we are standing up for our sex. We are working in the NIF to praise women and to make women have a better status and to tell the world that we are as equal as men and are as efficient as men and we are as educated as men and we are as good as men and as great as men (160). Such contradictions leave the casual observer confused. What is going on here? As Hale remarks, these women activists have accepted a patriarchal discourse that sees women as weak, emotional, and irrational. At the same time, in their public lives, they show a patent disregard for traditional gender boundaries and are known for their “militancy and defiance” (161). In Kuwait, we see perhaps the most perplexing examples of women mobilizing to ensure their continued domination under men. Two Islamic feminist groups, Bayadar al-Salam and Islamic Care Society actually made their opposition to women’s suffrage one of their signature issues (al-Mughni 1997: 203). A petition was signed by more than 1000 women declaring that “true believing Muslim women support the rejection [of the women’s suffrage bill] and dis- approve of any debauchery. We ask that the debate on this matter be closed forever” (203). Nearly all feminist organizations in Kuwait agree that women’s primary role is in the home. Numerous groups came together in 1994 to form an umbrella coalition called Hawwa 4,1_f4_76-92I 5/24/06 5:04 PM Page 86

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the Federation of Kuwaiti Women’s Associations (FKWA). Their mission was to “raise women’s awareness of their religion, their identity, and their role in the family” (205). The ostensibly more secularist Women’s Cultural and Social Society (WCSS) was the only group that did not join FKWA. And, indeed, WCSS does support equal political rights for women, yet even it buys into a distinctly patriarchal paradigm, emphasizing women’s “mission as mothers, wives, and paid workers” (206). What we are seeing here, are examples of what has been termed “contradictory consciousness” (MacLeod 1991: 160). Women are saying one thing, but acting in a way that implies the opposite of their stated opinions on gender. Azam Torab refers to this con- fusing phenomenon as “an ethnographic situation in which an individual accepts dominant cultural version of gender, yet also speaks and behaves in ways which contest them” (Quoted in Hegland 1994: 198). I have gone through these fascinating—and troubling—examples in order to convey the complex nature of women’s issues in the Middle East. My aim is simply to demonstrate that understanding women’s movements in the region is not necessarily an easy task even for the most informed observer. Too often, we in the West are tempted to look at Muslim women as a homogenous group of powerless women. Instead, the examples above illustrate a more nuanced, complicated picture. On the one hand, Muslim women do have a clearly discernible desire to assert themselves as women, yet at the same time they feel that they must stay true to certain rigid gender constructions in order to hold on to a cultural and religious identity they see as being under attack. The paradoxes of women’s activism that I outlined above are a reflection of this very conflict. They are also a reflection of the processes of negotiation and renegotiation that are continuously taking place in a rapidly changing world.

L A: P  P It is clear that Muslim women are struggling to ﬁnd a place for themselves. With this in mind, Western feminists have the potential to play an important role in the ongoing process of change in Hawwa 4,1_f4_76-92I 5/24/06 5:04 PM Page 87

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the Muslim world. With financial resources and organizational know- how, they can provide much needed assistance on the ground to local activists. Western feminists, though, will hurt their own cause if they do not make an effort to understand local customs, traditions, and religious practices. In order to change a society, one must work within that society’s cultural and religious framework. As the Sudanese activist-intellectual Abdullah An-Naim notes: To seek secular answers is imply to abandon the field to the fundamentalists who will succeed in carrying the vast majority of the pop- ulation with them by citing religious authority for their policies and theories. Intelligent and enlightened Muslims are therefore best advised to remain within the religious framework and endeavor to achieve the reforms that would make Islam a viable modern ideology. (Quoted in Voll 1990: vii) It is no accident that, historically, the most successful feminist organizations in the Muslim world have been those with an Islamic flavor. Huda Sharawi’s secularist Egyptian Feminist Union (EFU) of the 1930s and 40s usually receives the most academic attention in the West. Yet records indicate that Zaynab al-Ghazali’s Muslim Women’s Society—an explicitly religious organization affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood—was “exponentially” larger than Sharawi’s (El Guindi 2003: 602). The smallest feminist organization in Egypt at the time was headed by Doria Shafik, who was, not coincidentally, seen as extremely Europeanized and not grounded in the religious and cultural milieu of Egypt. Most Western feminists tend to be secular in orientation and this, not surprisingly, creates problems when dealing with the deeply religious societies of the Muslim world. Drucilla Cornell, for example, remarks that “for many women throughout the world, the real struggle is for freedom from religion, not tolerance of it” (1998: 152). One hopes she isn’t referring to the Middle East—a region of the world where secularism has played its course and now is, as a blueprint for society, weak and discredited. To publicly declare that one is a secularist is an easy way to commit political suicide in the Muslim world. A case in point is Nawal al-Saadawi, the renowned author and feminist and once a towering figure in Arab politics. While she is often hailed in the Western press as a feminist hero, she has, because of her aggressively secular views, found herself Hawwa 4,1_f4_76-92I 5/24/06 5:04 PM Page 88

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increasingly isolated and with few allies. With this in mind, Western feminists would be well-advised to tread carefully when addressing religious concerns in the Muslim world. It is also important to realize that there is a historical legacy which has negatively shaped Muslim perceptions of Western feminism. As Leila Ahmed notes, “the colonial powers and their agents, and in particular the missionaries through the schools they founded did indeed explicitly set out to undermine Islam through the training and remolding of women” (1989: 144). Women, because of the symbolic and cultural power invested in them, have been the battle- ground on which the epic struggle between Islam and secularism, East and West has been fought. More generally, given the West’s history of colonial and post-colonial dominance in the region, it should not be surprising that anything even vaguely associated with the West is looked at with suspicion. As a result, Western feminists, before they even begin, are already starting from a disadvantage. A keen awareness of the West’s destructive role in the region coupled with a pronounced sense of liberal guilt has pushed many postmodern feminists to disengage from cross-cultural interaction with the Muslim world. “What right do we have to tell others what they should do?” is the common refrain. But this seems little more than a reactionary posture. If we take this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion, then ultimately each person will only be able to speak for him or herself. The end result is a debilitating form of reverse orientalism. Ranjana Khanna puts it eloquently when she observes that postmodern sensitivities can often lead to “paralysis, or a rather self-satisfied navel gazing on the part of some who ago- nize about how to be ethical when it comes to dealing with gender politics outside of one’s own context” (2001: 101). This postmodern silence, although masked in good intentions, is ultimately no different in effect than the silence of right-wing isola- tionists who scream “America first.”

C People of conscience, no matter what their ethnic or religious back- ground, have a duty to speak out against oppression when they see it. To turn one’s cheek in the name of relativism is morally Hawwa 4,1_f4_76-92I 5/24/06 5:04 PM Page 89

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irresponsible. By virtue of their relative privilege, it would seem that Western women have a responsibility to consider the plight of the less privileged. Yes, we have done wrong in the past, but why must we remain prisoners to history and hostages to the past? Disengagement is the postmodern option. The more prudent option, however, would be for Westerners to engage the Third World more intelligently and with an eye to the cultural and religious com- plexities of the societies they are trying to change. For decades, the oppressed of the Third World have all too often been victims of the discursive violence of Western intellectuals. Letting oppressed peoples speak for themselves is vital, but that does not mean that what they say is necessarily right or true. The risk always exists that the hegemonic discourse of a given society can potentially distort people’s perception to the point where pri- orities become muddled. In this sense, outsiders have the advantage (and, sometimes, disadvantage) of external perspective which may reveal something which would otherwise remain hidden from those on the inside ( Jaggar 2000). Western feminists also have a tendency to exaggerate the revo- lutionary potential of women’s groups in the Third World. Drucilla Cornell argues that Third World feminists “do not need us as sav- iors, particularly as the United States has one of the highest incest and rape rates in the world” (1998: 171). Surprisingly, an argument as tenuous as this one is often used in this and many other contexts. The logic goes that if Westerners have their own problems— which they certainly do—then they have no right to speak about problems in other parts of the world. This is a convenient excuse for inaction. In any case, it is not altogether clear what the cor- relation is between rape rates in the US and helping Third World nations. Another commonly cited argument against engagement is that America should not “impose” its values on non-Western countries. Although such an argument would on the surface appear to be relativist, it actually reﬂects a kind of Eurocentric condescension. There is, after all, nothing intrinsically Western about freedom, democracy, or gender equality. To deny the universality of these values is to say that some people can have freedom but others cannot, that some women can free themselves from the shackles of patriarchy but other women cannot—simply because the latter happened to Hawwa 4,1_f4_76-92I 5/24/06 5:04 PM Page 90

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not have been born in the West. For too long, “cultural specificity” has been used to justify pervasive double standards in Western approaches to human rights abuses in the Middle East. It is true that the notion of gender equality arose out of a specifically Western Enlightenment context. But, as Abdullah An- Naim remarks, we must “appreciate that the specific origin of an idea or institution does not mean that it cannot achieve universal acceptance” (1997: 17). Moreover, the West should not be ashamed of its values and ideals. Nor should we avoid the undeniable fact that women have more rights and freedoms in the West than they do in any other region of the world. The discourse of Enlightenment rationalism has often led to the oppression and subjugation of non-Western peoples. But this doesn’t mean that the Western faith in the continuing progress of mankind is a sham. Rather, recent events have borne out the impressive ability of the West to evolve and change for the better. The very fact that we have moved from a racist, exclusionary, colonialist discourse to a more diverse, accepting, and culturally sensi- tive discourse proves the power of emancipatory progress. All we need to do is look at America ninety years ago and look at it today. Then, African-Americans were treated as subhuman, not allowed to drink out of the same water fountains as whites. Women were not allowed to vote. Although we still have much work to do, it would be hard to deny that we have come a long way. But then comes the inevitable question: doesn’t Islam stand in the way of such progress? After all, there are many who would argue that Islam and gender equality are incompatible. Islam, though, is not a static religion, although ironically, both Western feminists and Islamic fundamentalists seem to think that it is. In the post-colonial context, Islamists have tied the Muslim world’s failures to its contamination with what they see as foreign, alien sources. But this hostility to anything Western is not so much a religious act as it is political. And in any case it wasn’t always like this. It was precisely their tolerance of “non-Islamic” viewpoints and their embrace of intellectual diversity that helped propel the Muslims of the Abbasid era to unparalleled heights during the 9th and 10th centuries. It was then that the Islamic world reached its zenith. Far from isolating itself, Islamic civilization was absorbing other cultures and evolving as a result, resulting in a remarkably Hawwa 4,1_f4_76-92I 5/24/06 5:04 PM Page 91

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rich synthesis. Specifically, the influence of Greek thought played a central role in the development of early Islamic philosophy. Just as Islam was able to absorb “non-Islamic” ideas in the 9th century, there is no reason to think that it cannot do the same today. There is nothing in the Quran or in the example of the Prophet Muhammad that necessarily contradicts the notion of gender equality. In fact, I would go further and argue that the equality of women has always existed as a potential possibility within Islamic scripture. For more than thirteen centuries, this potentiality has been denied. That is where the West can play a pivotal role. The West can remind the Muslim world of its own potential—a potential in which Islam becomes not a source for regression, but a source for change, innovation, and progress. However, I do not believe that the West should remake the Middle East in its own image. Rather, I believe that, because the notions of freedom, equality and women’s rights are universal, they can be re-interpreted and articulated in ways that recognize the importance of cultural context. As An-Naim argues, “local acceptance enriches the universal idea by giving it meaning and relevance to people’s lives” (1997: 2). Thus far, the efforts of Western feminists have not been particularly successful in the Muslim world. But, in this article, I hope that I have provided a paradigm and a vision that outlines some broad parameters for cross-cultural engagement. In recent decades, Western feminists have had a tendency to superimpose their own culturally specific notions of equality on the Muslim world. Now, there is the risk that a new generation of postmodern intellectuals will decide to slowly disengage. With this in mind, finding the middle ground has never been more urgent.

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