A Quiet Revolution (37 page)

Many academics, as I noted, were shocked at the blatant coopting of the issue of the “oppression of women in Islam” in the service of im-

perial wars and domination. For us it was an all too distressing instance of déjà vu all over again. Lila Abu Lughod quickly published an article ad- dressing the matter. Citing Laura Bush’s words, including her assertion that “the fight against terrorism is also a fight for the dignity of women,” and referring to Cromer as well as to Spivak’s famous phrase about white men saving brown women from brown men, Abu Lughod pointed out the “haunting resonances” that the theme of the oppression of women in other cultures had for anyone familiar with colonial history.
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She noted also that she had been called by a reporter from PBS’s
Newshour with Jim Lehrer
in connection with Laura Bush’s address and asked such questions as “Do Muslim women believe ‘x’? Are Muslim women ‘y’? Does Islam allow ‘z’?” Why, Abu Lughod asked, was the media focused on asking questions about Islam while ignoring what was crucial to what Afghan women were suffering: the “history of the devel- opment of repressive regimes in the region and the U.S. role in this his- tory.” Instead of “political and historical explanations,” wrote Abu Lughod, “experts were being asked to give religious-cultural ones. In- stead of questions that might lead to the exploration of global intercon- nections, we were offered ones that worked to artificially divide the world into separate spheres—recreating an imaginative geography of West ver- sus East, us versus Muslims, cultures where First Ladies give speeches versus others where women shuffle around in burqas.”
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Besides becoming a common topic in the media and in the national political conversation, “women’s oppression in Islam” became a theme that was taken up in a raft of books that quickly became best sellers. These books were almost all, as Saba Mahmood, who wrote an essay an- alyzing them in some detail, has pointed out, in the genre of “native tes- timonials”: autobiographical works in which the authors, all women, attested to their personal sufferings under Islam.
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The first of these to appear was Norma Khouri’s
Forbidden Love: A Harrowing Story of Love and Revenge in Jordan
(
2002
). This book, which became a best seller, told the purportedly “true” story of the author’s life in Jordan and her eye-witness account of the murder, in an “honor-

crime,” of her best friend by her Muslim father for her liaison with a Christian man. Soon, however, an investigative reporter revealed that Khouri had not lived in Jordan since she was three and that a Jordanian

women’s organization committed to fighting honor crimes had notified the publisher of numerous errors in the book. The publishers withdrew the book, and, in the debate that ensued over why publishers did not vet purportedly nonfiction books more carefully, one publishing executive pointed out that in the post-
9
/
11
era there had been a strong demand for nonfiction books that “perpetuate negative stereotypes about Islamic men.”
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Other books in this genre that Mahmood analyzes include Azar Nafisi’s
Reading Lolita in Tehran,
Carmen bin Laden’s
My Life in Saudi Arabia,
Irshad Manji’s
Trouble with Islam,
and Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s
Caged Virgin
and
Infidel
. All were among the “top-selling nonfiction books of the season” in America and Europe, notes Mahmood.
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Nearly all, too, have been scathingly criticized by academics working in the field of Islam, including feminist academics such as Mahmood. Among the first and fiercest such critical reviews to appear was Hamid Dabashi’s critique of
Reading Lolita in Tehran
in his article “Native Informers and the Mak- ing of the American Empire.” Noting that a spate of such books had flooded the market since the commencement of the U.S. war on terror- ism and as the U.S. had entered its “most belligerent period in recent... history,” Dabashi observed that
Reading Lolita in Tehran
was notable for its “unfailing hatred for everything Iranian.” Nafisi’s book, Dabashi maintained, drew on “legitimate concerns about the plight of Muslim women” but deployed these concerns in the service of “U.S. ideological

. . . global warmongering.” In Nafisi’s depiction, noted Dabashi, Islam was represented as “vile, violent and above all abusive of women—and thus fighting against Islamic terrorism,
ipso facto,
is also to save Muslim women from the evil of their men.”
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Dabashi makes reference in his article to Nafisi’s strong connec- tions with well-known neoconservatives, and in her essay Mahmood sys- tematically explores the neoconservative connections and politics of all of the writers mentioned above. Norma Khouri, for example, Mahmood notes, received support “from the highest offices in the Bush adminis- tration,” including from Richard Cheney and his daughter Elizabeth. Nafisi, Mahmood asserts, had “deep links with leading neoconservative think tanks” and received endorsement from Bernard Lewis, the “Ori- entalist ideologue,” writes Mahmood, whose views inspired the “current

U.S. imperial adventure in the Middle East.” Furthermore, Mahmood observes, Nafisi’s “support for the Bush agenda of regime change is well- known.”
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Mahmood also points out similar connections that Irshad Manji and Ayaan Hirsi Ali have with neoconservatives and their agendas. Both writers, writes Mahmood, were supporters of the invasions of Afghan- istan and Iraq and enjoyed the support of neoconservatives. Manji, for example, received high praise from Daniel Pipes, with whom she ap- peared at Israeli fundraising events. Hirsi Ali enjoyed the support of the right-wing People’s Party in Holland. When the Dutch immigration services threatened to repeal her citizenship when it was discovered that she had fabricated her story of flight from the threat of an oppressive Muslim marriage in her immigration application, she was immediately offered a fellowship in the United States at the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute. Hirsi Ali also was mentioned as appear- ing, as we saw earlier, alongside other luminaries such as Ann Coulter and Rick Santorum at the Islamo-Fascist Awareness Week organized by David Horowitz. Both Manji’s and Hirsi Ali’s works, as Mahmood and others have noted, are contemptuous and abusive of Muslims. Filled with “historical errors and willful inaccuracies about Islam,” they generally depict Muslims as “unparalleled” in their “barbarity and misogyny.”
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Such writers are invaluable to the neoconservatives, Mahmood ar- gues, because they can deliver the message of women’s oppression in Islam in “authentic Muslim women’s voice,” a message that fosters feel- ings of hostility toward Islam and Muslim men under the guise of con- cern for Muslim women, feelings that in turn translate into support for war in Muslim countries as legitimate and morally justified. Thus, ar- gues Mahmood, while anti-Muslim feelings in Europe and America after

9
/
11
were “partly responsible” for the popularity of such books, the “ar-

guments of these authors read like a blueprint for the neoconservative agenda for regime change in the Middle East.” And, she maintains, “they would never have been able to achieve this success without the formida- ble support of the conservative political industry in Europe and the United States.”
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Clearly Dabashi and Mahmood and others have a point that while the “oppression of women in Islam” theme appears to be centered on

concern for Muslim women, its implicit message is that of reinforcing anti-Islamic stereotypes, and thus such works are useful in helping to “manufacture consent” in justifying attack on Muslim-majority coun- tries. As Mahmood notes throughout her essay, stories in native voice recounting the personal sufferings of Muslim women can deliver this message particularly effectively. They can reach a far wider audience than, for example, David Horowitz or even Ann Coulter might.

The critiques of such writers as Dabashi and Mahmood bring out the important political dimensions which the theme of the “oppression of women in Islam” has in the West in our time. Similarly, these critiques also bring out how the tradition inaugurated by Cromer stretches in fact all the way from Cromer to Horowitz. Cromer was a well-known an- tifeminist in relation to English women, yet he presented himself as someone concerned about Islamic oppression of women.

Mahmood’s findings also suggest that the tradition of the reartic- ulation in native voice of the imperialist theses about the inferiority of Islam, an inferiority showcased by Islam’s “oppression” of women, a tra- dition that first clearly emerged in Amin’s work, is also a tradition that continues to thrive.

Amin was by no means a feminist according to my understanding of feminism.
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A fervent and uncritical admirer of European cultures and most particularly of European man, his book was to a large extent a tirade against the “backwardness” of Muslims. And it was also though an impassioned plea for change and improvement in Muslim society—a plea that was essentially a plea for the adoption of the ways of Europe. This is not to say that admiration of Europe and the West is not in many ways entirely warranted and that there are many Western institutions that certainly would be worthy of being adapted and adopted by others. But there is also much that is invaluable about the cultural and intellec- tual heritages and ways of living of other societies, including Muslim- majority societies.

Was Amin deliberately and consciously lending support through his work to the imperialist agenda of the day—or did he, rather, con- sider himself a reformer working, writing, and thinking out of a passion to improve the condition of Egypt and of his fellow Egyptians? I believe that despite the evident contempt in his work for Egyptians, and his lav-

ish and uncritical admiration for all things European, including Euro- pean-style patriarchy, Amin nevertheless considered himself to be a pro- feminist reformer. By the same token, it would be reasonable for us not to make any assumptions as to authorial intentions of contemporary writers. Rather, we should assume authorial intentions to be in the end inscrutable—even as, at the same time, we accept Mahmood’s and Da- bashi’s analyses as enormously illuminating as to the conditions and forces, political and otherwise, that are at work in our times, affecting the reception of books such as those they discuss.
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For indeed this phenomenon that Dabashi and Mahmood analyze

—of the commercial success of works that apparently mobilize Ameri- can readers’ sympathies on behalf of Muslim women in the very period when the United States was engaging in ways unprecedented in its his- tory in wars in Muslim-majority countries—is a phenomenon that dis- tinctly calls for analysis and explanation. And it is unquestionably a phenomenon whose dynamics and implications need to be understood well beyond the academy.

For, as Mahmood pointed out, it was quite remarkable that in the midst of the searing destruction under way in Afghanistan and Iraq, de- struction that brought enormous loss of life for women and children, such losses apparently “failed to arouse the same furor among most Euro-Americans” as did the “individualized accounts of women’s suf- fering under Islam’s tutelage.”
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Similarly, Abu Lughod asks in “The Ac- tive Social Life of ‘Muslim Women’s Rights’”—an essay written, as Abu Lughod notes, in the context of “violence against (Muslim) women in- flicted in war and by militaries, not just in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also

in Palestine, as in the Israeli attack on Gaza that was launched in De- cember
2008
”—“Where is the global feminist campaign against killing such significant numbers of (mostly) Muslim women? Or maiming them, traumatizing them, killing their children, sisters, mothers, hus-

bands, fathers and brothers.”
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For many of us, particularly those who have worked for years on issues of women’s rights in Islam and in Muslim societies, these glaring disparities in our times between the notion of purported concern for the sufferings of Muslim women commonplace in our public conver-

sation and the simultaneous seeming indifference and unconcern among many Americans and Europeans to the mounting death counts, maiming, and trauma suffered by mostly Muslim women and children was a sobering experience. Mahmood points out how the “discourses of feminism and democracy have been hijacked to serve an imperial proj- ect,” then goes on to warn that “unless feminists rethink their complic- ity in this project . . . feminism runs the risk of becoming more of a handmaiden of empire in our age than a trenchant critic of the Euro- American will to power.”
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Abu Lughod goes on to propose the fundamental rethinking of the very subject of “women in Islam” and of “Muslim Women’s Rights” in light of the way in which the topic is being invoked and manipulated today in the service of political ends that, in reality, have nothing to do with improving Muslim women’s rights or living conditions and that, indeed, may actually kill, maim, and traumatize many Muslim women. I, too, have found myself wondering if the subject of the “oppres- sion of women in Islam"—coming to us charged and loaded with the legacies of Cromer and his ilk, legacies that are capable evidently of tak- ing on renewed life and force in the West in fraught political times in re- lation to Islam—is any longer a useful or even valid topic. Already in the

late
1990
s and thus even before our recent wars the palpably shifting cli-

mate in the West as regards Muslims and particularly Muslim minori- ties was giving both Aisha and myself pause as regards our work on women and Islam—as I described in the Introduction. Of course I con- tinue to believe (as Abu Lughod and others evidently do too) that the rights and conditions of women in Muslim-majority societies often are acutely in need of improvement, as indeed they are in many other soci- eties. But the question now is how we address such issues while not al- lowing our work and concerns to aid and abet imperialist projects, including war projects that mete out death and trauma to Muslim women under the guise and to the accompaniment of a rhetoric of sav- ing them.