[Discussion] Why Feminism Is AWOL on Islam

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City Journal.


Winter 2003 | Vol. 13, No. 1
 



Why Feminism Is AWOL on Islam
 



Kay S. Hymowitz

 

Letter A.rgue all you want with many feminist policies, but few quarrel with
feminism's core moral insight, which changed the lives (and minds) of women
forever: that women are due the same rights and dignity as men. So, as news
of the appalling miseries of women in the Islamic world has piled up, where
are the feminists? Where's the outrage? For a brief moment after September
11, when pictures of those blue alien-creaturely shapes in Afghanistan
filled the papers, it seemed as if feminists were going to have their
moment. And in fact the Feminist Majority, to its credit, had been
publicizing since the mid-90s how Afghan girls were barred from school, how
women were stoned for adultery or beaten for showing an ankle or wearing
high-heeled shoes, how they were prohibited from leaving the house unless
accompanied by a male relative, how they were denied medical help because
the only doctors around were male. 
But the rest is feminist silence. You haven't heard a peep from feminists as
it has grown clear that the Taliban were exceptional not in their extreme
views about women but in their success at embodying those views in law and
practice. In the United Arab Emirates, husbands have the right to beat their
wives in order to discipline them-"provided that the beating is not so
severe as to damage her bones or deform her body," in the words of the Gulf
News. In Saudi Arabia, women cannot vote, drive, or show their faces or talk
with male non-relatives in public. (Evidently they can't talk to men over
the airwaves either; when Prince Abdullah went to President Bush's ranch in
Crawford last April, he insisted that no female air-traffic controllers
handle his flight.) Yes, Saudi girls can go to school, and many even attend
the university; but at the university, women must sit in segregated rooms
and watch their professors on closed-circuit televisions. If they have a
question, they push a button on their desk, which turns on a light at the
professor's lectern, from which he can answer the female without being in
her dangerous presence. And in Saudi Arabia, education can be harmful to
female health. Last spring in Mecca, members of the mutaween, the Commission
for the Promotion of Virtue, pushed fleeing students back into their burning
school because they were not properly covered in abaya. Fifteen girls died.
You didn't hear much from feminists when in the northern Nigerian province
of Katsina a Muslim court sentenced a woman to death by stoning for having a
child outside of marriage. The case might not have earned much
attention-stonings are common in parts of the Muslim world-except that the
young woman, who had been married off at 14 to a husband who ultimately
divorced her when she lost her virginal allure, was still nursing a baby at
the time of sentencing. During her trial she had no lawyer, although the
court did see fit to delay her execution until she weans her infant. 
You didn't hear much from feminists as it emerged that honor killings by
relatives, often either ignored or only lightly punished by authorities, are
also commonplace in the Muslim world. In September, Reuters reported the
story of an Iranian man, "defending my honor, family, and dignity," who cut
off his seven-year-old daughter's head after suspecting she had been raped
by her uncle. The postmortem showed the girl to be a virgin. In another
family mix-up, a Yemeni man shot his daughter to death on her wedding night
when her husband claimed she was not a virgin. After a medical exam revealed
that the husband was mistaken, officials concluded he was simply trying to
protect himself from embarrassment about his own impotence. According to the
Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, every day two women are slain by male
relatives seeking to avenge the family honor. 
The savagery of some of these murders is worth a moment's pause. In 2000,
two Punjabi sisters, 20 and 21 years old, had their throats slit by their
brother and cousin because the girls were seen talking to two boys to whom
they were not related. In one especially notorious case, an Egyptian woman
named Nora Marzouk Ahmed fell in love and eloped. When she went to make
amends with her father, he cut off her head and paraded it down the street.
Several years back, according to the Washington Post, the husband of Zahida
Perveen, a 32-year-old pregnant Pakistani, gouged out her eyes and sliced
off her earlobe and nose because he suspected her of having an affair. 
In a related example widely covered last summer, a teenage girl in the
Punjab was sentenced by a tribal council to rape by a gang that included one
of the councilmen. After the hour-and-a-half ordeal, the girl was forced to
walk home naked in front of scores of onlookers. She had been punished
because her 11-year-old brother had compromised another girl by being been
seen alone with her. But that charge turned out to be a ruse: it seems that
three men of a neighboring tribe had sodomized the boy and accused him of
illicit relations-an accusation leading to his sister's barbaric
punishment-as a way of covering up their crime.
Nor is such brutality limited to backward, out-of-the-way villages.
Muddassir Rizvi, a Pakistani journalist, says that, though always common in
rural areas, in recent years honor killings have become more prevalent in
cities "among educated and liberal families." In relatively modern Jordan,
honor killings were all but exempt from punishment until the penal code was
modified last year; unfortunately, a young Palestinian living in Jordan, who
had recently stabbed his 19-year-old sister 40 times "to cleanse the family
honor," and another man from near Amman, who ran over his 23-year-old sister
with his truck because of her "immoral behavior," had not yet changed their
ways. British psychiatrist Anthony Daniels reports that British Muslim men
frequently spirit their young daughters back to their native Pakistan and
force the girls to marry. Such fathers have been known to kill daughters who
resist. In Sweden, in one highly publicized case, Fadima Sahindal, an
assimilated 26-year-old of Kurdish origin, was murdered by her father after
she began living with her Swedish boyfriend. "The whore is dead," the family
announced.
As you look at this inventory of brutality, the question bears repeating:
Where are the demonstrations, the articles, the petitions, the resolutions,
the vindications of the rights of Islamic women by American feminists? The
weird fact is that, even after the excesses of the Taliban did more to forge
an American consensus about women's rights than 30 years of speeches by
Gloria Steinem, feminists refused to touch this subject. They have averted
their eyes from the harsh, blatant oppression of millions of women, even
while they have continued to stare into the Western patriarchal abyss,
indignant over female executives who cannot join an exclusive golf club and
college women who do not have their own lacrosse teams.
But look more deeply into the matter, and you realize that the sound of
feminist silence about the savage fundamentalist Muslim oppression of women
has its own perverse logic. The silence is a direct outgrowth of the way
feminist theory has developed in recent years. Now mired in self-righteous
sentimentalism, multicultural nonjudgmentalism, and internationalist
utopianism, feminism has lost the language to make the universalist moral
claims of equal dignity and individual freedom that once rendered it so
compelling. No wonder that most Americans, trying to deal with the realities
of a post-9/11 world, are paying feminists no mind. 
To understand the current sisterly silence about the sort of tyranny that
the women's movement came into existence to attack, it is helpful to think
of feminisms plural rather than singular. Though not entirely discrete
philosophies, each of three different feminisms has its own distinct reasons
for causing activists to "lose their voice" in the face of women's
oppression.
The first variety-radical feminism (or gender feminism, in Christina Hoff
Sommers's term)-starts with the insight that men are, not to put too fine a
point upon it, brutes. Radical feminists do not simply subscribe to the
reasonable-enough notion that men are naturally more prone to aggression
than women. They believe that maleness is a kind of original sin.
Masculinity explains child abuse, marital strife, high defense spending,
every war from Troy to Afghanistan, as well as Hitler, Franco, and Pinochet.
As Gloria Steinem informed the audience at a Florida fundraiser last March:
"The cult of masculinity is the basis for every violent, fascist regime."
Gender feminists are little interested in fine distinctions between radical
Muslim men who slam commercial airliners into office buildings and soldiers
who want to stop radical Muslim men from slamming commercial airliners into
office buildings. They are both examples of generic male violence-and
specifically, male violence against women. "Terrorism is on a continuum that
starts with violence within the family, battery against women, violence
against women in the society, all the way up to organized militaries that
are supported by taxpayer money," according to Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, who
teaches "The Sexuality of Terrorism" at California State University in
Hayward. Violence is so intertwined with male sexuality that, she tells us,
military pilots watch porn movies before they go out on sorties. The war in
Afghanistan could not possibly offer a chance to liberate women from their
oppressors, since it would simply expose women to yet another set of
oppressors, in the gender feminists' view. As Sharon Lerner asserted
bizarrely in the Village Voice, feminists' "discomfort" with the Afghanistan
bombing was "deepened by the knowledge that more women than men die as a
result of most wars." 
If guys are brutes, girls are their opposite: peace-loving, tolerant,
conciliatory, and reasonable-"Antiwar and Pro-Feminist," as the popular
peace-rally sign goes. Feminists long ago banished tough-as-nails women like
Margaret Thatcher and Jeanne Kirkpatrick (and these days, one would guess,
even the fetching Condoleezza Rice) to the ranks of the imperfectly female.
Real women, they believe, would never justify war. "Most women, Western and
Muslim, are opposed to war regardless of its reasons and objectives," wrote
the Jordanian feminist Fadia Faqir on OpenDemocracy.net. "They are concerned
with emancipation, freedom (personal and civic), human rights, power
sharing, integrity, dignity, equality, autonomy, power-sharing [sic],
liberation, and pluralism." 
Sara Ruddick, author of Maternal Thinking, is perhaps one of the most
influential spokeswomen for the position that women are instinctually
peaceful. According to Ruddick (who clearly didn't have Joan Crawford in
mind), that's because a good deal of mothering is naturally governed by the
Gandhian principles of nonviolence such as "renunciation," "resistance to
injustice," and "reconciliation." The novelist Barbara Kingsolver was one of
the first to demonstrate the subtleties of such universal maternal thinking
after the United States invaded Afghanistan. "I feel like I'm standing on a
playground where the little boys are all screaming 'He started it!' and
throwing rocks," she wrote in the Los Angeles Times. "I keep looking for
somebody's mother to come on the scene saying, 'Boys! Boys!' "
Gender feminism's tendency to reduce foreign affairs to a Lifetime Channel
movie may make it seem too silly to bear mentioning, but its kitschy naiveté
hasn't stopped it from being widespread among elites. You see it in widely
read writers like Kingsolver, Maureen Dowd, and Alice Walker. It turns up in
our most elite institutions. Swanee Hunt, head of the Women in Public Policy
Program at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government wrote, with Cristina Posa
in Foreign Policy: "The key reason behind women's marginalization may be
that everyone recognizes just how good women are at forging peace." Even
female elected officials are on board. "The women of all these countries
should go on strike, they should all sit down and refuse to do anything
until their men agree to talk peace," urged Ohio representative Marcy Kaptur
to the Arab News last spring, echoing an idea that Aristophanes, a dead
white male, proposed as a joke 2,400 years ago. And President Clinton is an
advocate of maternal thinking, too. "If we'd had women at Camp David," he
said in July 2000, "we'd have an agreement."
Major foundations too seem to take gender feminism seriously enough to
promote it as an answer to world problems. Last December, the Ford
Foundation and the Soros Open Society Foundation helped fund the Afghan
Women's Summit in Brussels to develop ideas for a new government in
Afghanistan. As Vagina Monologues author Eve Ensler described it on her
website, the summit was made up of "meetings and meals, canvassing,
workshops, tears, and dancing." "Defense was mentioned nowhere in the
document," Ensler wrote proudly of the summit's concluding
proclamation-despite the continuing threat in Afghanistan of warlords,
bandits, and lingering al-Qaida operatives. "[B]uilding weapons or
instruments of retaliation was not called for in any category," Ensler
cooed. "Instead [the women] wanted education, health care, and the
protection of refugees, culture, and human rights." 
Too busy celebrating their own virtue and contemplating their own
victimhood, gender feminists cannot address the suffering of their Muslim
sisters realistically, as light years worse than their own petulant
grievances. They are too intent on hating war to ask if unleashing its
horrors might be worth it to overturn a brutal tyranny that, among its
manifold inhumanities, treats women like animals. After all, hating war and
machismo is evidence of the moral superiority that comes with being born
female. 
Yet the gender feminist idea of superior feminine virtue is becoming an
increasingly tough sell for anyone actually keeping up with world events.
Kipling once wrote of the fierceness of Afghan women: "When you're wounded
and left on the Afghan plains/And the women come out to cut up your
remains/Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains." Now it's clearer
than ever that the dream of worldwide sisterhood is no more realistic than
worldwide brotherhood; culture trumps gender any day. Mothers all over the
Muslim world are naming their babies Usama or praising Allah for their sons'
efforts to kill crusading infidels. Last February, 28-year-old Wafa Idris
became the first female Palestinian suicide bomber to strike in Israel,
killing an elderly man and wounding scores of women and children. And in
April, Israeli soldiers discovered under the maternity clothes of
26-year-old Shifa Adnan Kodsi a bomb rather than a baby. Maternal thinking,
indeed.
The second variety of feminism, seemingly more sophisticated and especially
prevalent on college campuses, is multiculturalism and its twin,
postcolonialism. The postcolonial feminist has even more reason to shy away
from the predicament of women under radical Islam than her maternally
thinking sister. She believes that the Western world is so sullied by its
legacy of imperialism that no Westerner, man or woman, can utter a word of
judgment against former colonial peoples. Worse, she is not so sure that
radical Islam isn't an authentic, indigenous-and therefore
appropriate-expression of Arab and Middle Eastern identity.
The postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault, one of the intellectual
godfathers of multiculturalism and postcolonialism, first set the tone in
1978 when an Italian newspaper sent him to Teheran to cover the Iranian
revolution. As his biographer James Miller tells it, Foucault looked in the
face of Islamic fundamentalism and saw . . . an awe-inspiring revolt against
"global hegemony." He was mesmerized by this new form of "political
spirituality" that, in a phrase whose dark prescience he could not have
grasped, portended the "transfiguration of the world." Even after the
Ayatollah Khomeini came to power and reintroduced polygamy and divorce on
the husband's demand with automatic custody to fathers, reduced the official
female age of marriage from 18 to 13, fired all female judges, and ordered
compulsory veiling, whose transgression was to be punished by public
flogging, Foucault saw no reason to temper his enthusiasm. What was a small
matter like women's basic rights, when a struggle against "the planetary
system" was at hand? 
Postcolonialists, then, have their own binary system, somewhat at odds with
gender feminism-not to mention with women's rights. It is not men who are
the sinners; it is the West. It is not women who are victimized innocents;
it is the people who suffered under Western colonialism, or the descendants
of those people, to be more exact. Caught between the rock of patriarchy and
the hard place of imperialism, the postcolonial feminist scholar gingerly
tiptoes her way around the subject of Islamic fundamentalism and does the
only thing she can do: she focuses her ire on Western men. 

 

 


 
 
 
U.S. feminists should be protesting the brutal oppression of Middle Eastern
women. But doing 
so would reveal 
how little they 
have to complain about at home.
 

 


Feminism Behind the Veil
Feminists in the West may fiddle while Muslim women are burning, but in the
Muslim world itself there is a burgeoning movement to address the miserable
predicament of the second sex-without simply adopting a philosophy whose
higher cultural products include Sex and the City, Rosie O'Donnell, and the
power-suited female executive.
The most impressive signs of an indigenous female revolt against the
fundamentalist order are in Iran. Over the past ten years or so, Iran has
seen the publication of a slew of serious journals dedicated to the social
and political predicament of Islamic women, the most well known being the
Teheran-based Zonan and Zan, published by Faezah Hashemi, a well-known
member of parliament and the daughter of former president Rafsanjani.
Believing that Western feminism has promoted hostility between the sexes,
confused sex roles, and the sexual objectification of women, a number of
writers have proposed an Islamic-style feminism that would stress "gender
complementarity" rather than equality and that would pay full respect to
housewifery and motherhood while also giving women access to education and
jobs.
Attacking from the religious front, a number of "Islamic feminists" are
challenging the reigning fundamentalist reading of the Qur'an. These
scholars insist that the founding principles of Islam, which they believe
were long ago corrupted by pre-Islamic Arab, Persian, and North African
customs, are if anything more egalitarian than those of Western religions;
the Qur'an explicitly describes women as the moral and spiritual equals of
men and allows them to inherit and pass down property. The power of
misogynistic mullahs has grown in recent decades, feminists continue,
because Muslim men have felt threatened by modernity's challenge to
traditional arrangements between the sexes.
What makes Islamic feminism really worth watching is that it has the
potential to play a profoundly important role in the future of the Islamic
world-and not just because it could improve the lot of women. By insisting
that it is true to Islam-in fact, truer than the creed espoused by the
entrenched religious elite-Islamic feminism can affirm the dignity of Islam
while at the same time bringing it more in line with modernity. In doing
this, feminists can help lay the philosophical groundwork for democracy. In
the West, feminism lagged behind religious reformation and political
democratization by centuries; in the East, feminism could help lead the
charge.
At the same time, though, the issue of women's rights highlights two reasons
for caution about the Islamic future. For one thing, no matter how much
feminists might wish otherwise, polygamy and male domination of the family
are not merely a fact of local traditions; they are written into the Qur'an
itself. This in and of itself would not prove to be such an impediment-the
Old Testament is filled with laws antithetical to women's equality-except
for the second problem: more than other religions, Islam is unfriendly to
the notion of the separation of church and state. If history is any guide,
there's the rub. The ultimate guarantor of the rights of all citizens,
whether Islamic or not, can only be a fully secular state.
 



To this end, the postcolonialist eagerly dips into the inkwell of gender
feminism. She ties colonialist exploitation and domination to maleness; she
might refer to Israel's "masculinist military culture"-Israel being white
and Western-though she would never dream of pointing out the "masculinist
military culture" of the jihadi. And she expends a good deal of energy
condemning Western men for wanting to improve the lives of Eastern women. At
the turn of the twentieth century Lord Cromer, the British vice consul of
Egypt and a pet target of postcolonial feminists, argued that the
"degradation" of women under Islam had a harmful effect on society. Rubbish,
according to the postcolonialist feminist. His words are simply part of "the
Western narrative of the quintessential otherness and inferiority of Islam,"
as Harvard professor Leila Ahmed puts it in Women and Gender in Islam. The
same goes for American concern about Afghan women; it is merely a "device
for ranking the 'other' men as inferior or as 'uncivilized,' " according to
Nira Yuval-Davis, professor of gender and ethnic studies at the University
of Greenwich, England. These are all examples of what renowned Columbia
professor Gayatri Spivak called "white men saving brown women from brown
men." 
Spivak's phrase, a great favorite on campus, points to the postcolonial
notion that brown men, having been victimized by the West, can never be
oppressors in their own right. If they give the appearance of treating women
badly, the oppression they have suffered at the hands of Western colonial
masters is to blame. In fact, the worse they treat women, the more they are
expressing their own justifiable outrage. "When men are traumatized [by
colonial rule], they tend to traumatize their own women," Miriam Cooke, a
Duke professor and head of the Association for Middle East Women's Studies,
told me. And today, Cooke asserts, brown men are subjected to a new form of
imperialism. "Now there is a return of colonialism that we saw in the
nineteenth century in the context of globalization," she says. "What is
driving Islamist men is globalization." 
It would be difficult to exaggerate the through-the-looking-glass quality of
postcolonialist theory when it comes to the subject of women. Female suicide
bombers are a good thing, because they are strong women demonstrating
"agency" against colonial powers. Polygamy too must be shown due
consideration. "Polygamy can be liberating and empowering," Cooke answered
sunnily when I asked her about it. "Our norm is the Western, heterosexual,
single couple. If we can imagine different forms that would allow us to be
something other than a heterosexual couple, we might imagine polygamy
working," she explained murkily. Some women, she continued, are relieved
when their husbands take a new wife: they won't have to service him so
often. Or they might find they now have the freedom to take a lover. But, I
ask, wouldn't that be dangerous in places where adulteresses can be stoned
to death? At any rate, how common is that? "I don't know," Cooke answers,
"I'm interested in discourse." The irony couldn't be darker: the very people
protesting the imperialist exploitation of the "Other" endorse that Other's
repressive customs as a means of promoting their own uniquely Western
agenda-subverting the heterosexual patriarchy.
The final category in the feminist taxonomy, which might be called the
world-government utopian strain, is in many respects closest to classical
liberal feminism. Dedicated to full female dignity and equality, it
generally eschews both the biological determinism of the gender feminist and
the cultural relativism of the multiculti postcolonialist. Stanford
political science professor Susan Moller Okin, an influential, subtle, and
intelligent spokeswoman for this approach, created a stir among feminists in
1997 when she forthrightly attacked multiculturalists for valuing "group
rights for minority cultures" over the well-being of individual women. Okin
admirably minced no words attacking arranged marriage, female circumcision,
and polygamy, which she believed women experienced as a "barely tolerable
institution." Some women, she went so far as to declare, "might be better
off if the culture into which they were born were either to become extinct .
. . or preferably, to be encouraged to alter itself so as to reinforce the
equality of women."
But though Okin is less shy than other feminists about discussing the plight
of women under Islamic fundamentalism, the typical U.N. utopian has her own
reasons for keeping quiet as that plight fills Western headlines. For one
thing, the utopian is also a bean-counting absolutist, seeking a pure,
numerical equality between men and women in all departments of life. She
greets Western, and particularly American, claims to have achieved freedom
for women with skepticism. The motto of the 2002 International Women's
Day-"Afghanistan Is Everywhere"-was in part a reproach to the West about its
superior airs. Women in Afghanistan might have to wear burqas, but don't
women in the West parade around in bikinis? "It's equally disrespectful and
abusive to have women prancing around a stage in bathing suits for cash or
walking the streets shrouded in burqas in order to survive," columnist Jill
Nelson wrote on the MSNBC website about the murderously fanatical riots that
attended the Miss World pageant in Nigeria. 
As Nelson's statement hints, the utopian is less interested in freeing women
to make their own choices than in engineering and imposing her own elite
vision of a perfect society. Indeed, she is under no illusions that, left to
their own democratic devices, women would freely choose the utopia she has
in mind. She would not be surprised by recent Pakistani elections, where a
number of the women who won parliamentary seats were Islamist. But it
doesn't really matter what women want. The universalist has a comprehensive
vision of "women's human rights," meaning not simply women's civil and
political rights but "economic rights" and "socioeconomic justice." Cynical
about free markets and globalization, the U.N. utopian is also unimpressed
by the liberal democratic nation-state "as an emancipatory institution," in
the dismissive words of J. Ann Tickner, director for international studies
at the University of Southern California. Such nation-states are
"unresponsive to the needs of [their] most vulnerable members" and seeped in
"nationalist ideologies" as well as in patriarchal assumptions about
autonomy. In fact, like the (usually) unacknowledged socialist that she is,
the U.N. utopian eagerly awaits the withering of the nation-state, a
political arrangement that she sees as tied to imperialism, war, and
masculinity. During war, in particular, nations "depend on ideas about
masculinized dignity and feminized sacrifice to sustain the sense of
autonomous nationhood," writes Cynthia Enloe, professor of government at
Clark University.
Having rejected the patriarchal liberal nation-state, with all the
democratic machinery of self-government that goes along with it, the utopian
concludes that there is only one way to achieve her goals: to impose them
through international government. Utopian feminists fill the halls of the
United Nations, where they examine everything through the lens of the
"gender perspective" in study after unreadable study. (My personal
favorites: "Gender Perspectives on Landmines" and "Gender Perspectives on
Weapons of Mass Destruction," whose conclusion is that landmines and WMDs
are bad for women.)
The 1979 U.N. Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women
(CEDAW), perhaps the first and most important document of feminist
utopianism, gives the best sense of the sweeping nature of the movement's
ambitions. CEDAW demands many measures that anyone committed to democratic
liberal values would applaud, including women's right to vote and protection
against honor killings and forced marriage. Would that the document stopped
there. Instead it sets out to impose a utopian order that would erase all
distinctions between men and women, a kind of revolution of the sexes from
above, requiring nations to "take all appropriate measures to modify the
social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women" and to eliminate
"stereotyped roles" to accomplish this legislative abolition of biology. The
document calls for paid maternity leave, nonsexist school curricula, and
government-supported child care. The treaty's 23-member enforcement
committee hectors nations that do not adequately grasp that, as Enloe puts
it, "the personal is international." The committee has cited Belarus for
celebrating Mother's Day, China for failing to legalize prostitution, and
Libya for not interpreting the Qur'an in accordance with "committee
guidelines." 
Confusing "women's participation" with self-determination, and numerical
equivalence with equality, CEDAW utopians try to orchestrate their perfect
society through quotas and affirmative-action plans. Their bean-counting
mentality cares about whether women participate equally, without asking what
it is that they are participating in or whether their participation is
anything more than ceremonial. Thus at the recent Women's Summit in Jordan,
Rima Khalaf suggested that governments be required to use quotas in
elections "to leapfrog women to power." Khalaf, like so many illiberal
feminist utopians, has no hesitation in forcing society to be free. As is
often the case when elites decide they have discovered the route to human
perfection, the utopian urge is not simply antidemocratic but verges on the
totalitarian. 
That this combination of sentimental victimhood, postcolonial relativism,
and utopian overreaching has caused feminism to suffer so profound a loss of
moral and political imagination that it cannot speak against the
brutalization of Islamic women is an incalculable loss to women and to men.
The great contribution of Western feminism was to expand the definition of
human dignity and freedom. It insisted that all human beings were worthy of
liberty. Feminists now have the opportunity to make that claim on behalf of
women who in their oppression have not so much as imagined that its promise
could include them, too. At its best, feminism has stood for a rich idea of
personal choice in shaping a meaningful life, one that respects not only the
woman who wants to crash through glass ceilings but also the one who wants
to stay home with her children and bake cookies or to wear a veil and fast
on Ramadan. Why shouldn't feminists want to shout out their own profound
discovery for the world to hear?
Perhaps, finally, because to do so would be to acknowledge the freedom they
themselves enjoy, thanks to Western ideals and institutions. Not only would
such an admission force them to give up their own simmering resentments; it
would be bad for business. 
The truth is that the free institutions-an independent judiciary, a free
press, open elections-that protect the rights of women are the same ones
that protect the rights of men. The separation of church and state that
would allow women to escape the burqa would also free men from having their
hands amputated for theft. The education system that would teach girls to
read would also empower millions of illiterate boys. The capitalist
economies that bring clean water, cheap clothes, and washing machines that
change the lives of women are the same ones that lead to healthier, freer
men. In other words, to address the problems of Muslim women honestly,
feminists would have to recognize that free men and women need the same
things-and that those are things that they themselves already have. And
recognizing that would mean an end to feminism as we know it.
There are signs that, outside the academy, middlebrow literary circles, and
the United Nations, feminism has indeed met its Waterloo. Most Americans
seem to realize that September 11 turned self-indulgent sentimental
illusions, including those about the sexes, into an unaffordable luxury.
Consider, for instance, women's attitudes toward war, a topic on which
politicians have learned to take for granted a gender gap. But according to
the Pew Research Center, in January 2002, 57 percent of women versus 46
percent of men cited national security as the country's top priority. There
has been a "seismic gender shift on matters of war," according to pollster
Kellyanne Conway. In 1991, 45 percent of U.S. women supported the use of
ground troops in the Gulf War, a substantially smaller number than the 67
percent of men. But as of November, a CNN survey found women were more
likely than men to support the use of ground troops against Iraq, 58 percent
to 56 percent. The numbers for younger women were especially dramatic.
Sixty-five percent of women between 18 and 49 support ground troops, as
opposed to 48 percent of women 50 and over. Women are also changing their
attitudes toward military spending: before September 11, only 24 percent of
women supported increased funds; after the attacks, that number climbed to
47 percent. An evolutionary psychologist might speculate that, if females
tend to be less aggressively territorial than males, there's little to
compare to the ferocity of the lioness when she believes her young are
threatened.
Even among some who consider themselves feminists, there is some grudging
recognition that Western, and specifically American, men are sometimes a
force for the good. The Feminist Majority is sending around urgent messages
asking for President Bush to increase American security forces in
Afghanistan. The influential left-wing British columnist Polly Toynbee, who
just 18 months ago coined the phrase "America the Horrible," went to
Afghanistan to figure out whether the war "was worth it." Her answer was not
what she might have expected. Though she found nine out of ten women still
wearing burqas, partly out of fear of lingering fundamentalist hostility,
she was convinced their lives had greatly improved. Women say they can go
out alone now.
As we sink more deeply into what is likely to be a protracted struggle with
radical Islam, American feminists have a moral responsibility to give up
their resentments and speak up for women who actually need their support.
Feminists have the moral authority to say that their call for the rights of
women is a universal demand-that the rights of women are the Rights of Man.
 

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face=3DArial><span
      =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:#333399;font-weight:bo=
ld'>Winter
      2003 | Vol. 13, No. 1</span></font></b><font color=3Dblack><span
      style=3D'color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
      </td>
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  =
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bsp;</o:p></span></font></p>
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cellpadding=3D0 width=3D390
   style=3D'width:292.5pt;mso-cellspacing:0in;mso-padding-alt:0in 0in =
0in 0in'>
   <tr height=3D39 style=3D'mso-yfti-irow:0;height:29.25pt'>
    <td width=3D390 height=3D39 valign=3Dtop =
style=3D'width:292.5pt;padding:0in 0in 0in 0in;
    height:29.25pt'>
    <p class=3DMsoNormal><font size=3D3 color=3Dblack face=3D"Times New =
Roman"><span
    style=3D'font-size:12.0pt;color:black'><img width=3D1 height=3D1 =
id=3D"_x0000_i1027"
    src=3D"cid:image002.gif@01C2C13F.78623E40" =
border=3D0><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
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0in 0in'>
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style=3D'mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:
    auto'><b><font size=3D5 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:18.0pt;
    font-family:Arial;color:black;font-weight:bold'>Why Feminism Is =
AWOL on
    Islam</span></font></b><font color=3Dblack><span =
style=3D'color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
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man"><span
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    auto'><i><font size=3D3 color=3D"#cc0000" face=3D"Times New =
Roman"><span
    style=3D'font-size:12.0pt;color:#CC0000;font-style:italic'>Kay S. =
Hymowitz</span></font></i><font
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style=3D'color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
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alt=3D"Letter A."
    border=3D0 v:shapes=3D"Picture137"><![endif]><font size=3D2 =
color=3Dblack
    face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>rgue
    all you want with many feminist policies, but few quarrel with
    feminism's core moral insight, which changed the lives (and minds) =
of
    women forever: that women are due the same rights and dignity as =
men. So,
    as news of the appalling miseries of women in the Islamic world has =
piled
    up, where are the feminists? Where's the outrage? For a brief =
moment
    after September 11, when pictures of those blue alien-creaturely =
shapes in </span></font><st1:country-region><st1:place><font
      size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:
      =
Arial;color:black'>Afghanistan</span></font></st1:place></st1:country-re=
gion><font
    size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:
    Arial;color:black'> filled the papers, it seemed as if feminists =
were going
    to have their moment. And in fact the Feminist Majority, to its =
credit, had
    been publicizing since the mid-90s how Afghan girls were barred =
from
    school, how women were stoned for adultery or beaten for showing an =
ankle
    or wearing high-heeled shoes, how they were prohibited from leaving =
the house
    unless accompanied by a male relative, how they were denied medical =
help
    because the only doctors around were male. </span></font><font =
color=3Dblack><span
    style=3D'color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
    <p class=3DMsoNormal =
style=3D'mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:
    auto'><font size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;
    font-family:Arial;color:black'>But the rest is feminist silence. =
You
    haven't heard a peep from feminists as it has grown clear that the
    Taliban were exceptional not in their extreme views about women but =
in
    their success at embodying those views in law and practice. In the =
United
    Arab Emirates, husbands have the right to beat their wives in order =
to
    discipline them-"provided that the beating is not so severe as
    to damage her bones or deform her body," in the words of the =
<i><span
    style=3D'font-style:italic'>Gulf News</span></i>. In =
</span></font><st1:country-region><st1:place><font
      size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:
      Arial;color:black'>Saudi =
Arabia</span></font></st1:place></st1:country-region><font
    size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:
    Arial;color:black'>, women cannot vote, drive, or show their faces =
or talk
    with male non-relatives in public. (Evidently they can't talk to =
men
    over the airwaves either; when Prince Abdullah went to President
    Bush's ranch in Crawford last April, he insisted that no female
    air-traffic controllers handle his flight.) Yes, Saudi girls can go =
to
    school, and many even attend the university; but at the university, =
women
    must sit in segregated rooms and watch their professors on =
closed-circuit
    televisions. If they have a question, they push a button on their =
desk,
    which turns on a light at the professor's lectern, from which he =
can
    answer the female without being in her dangerous presence. And in =
</span></font><st1:country-region><st1:place><font
      size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:
      Arial;color:black'>Saudi =
Arabia</span></font></st1:place></st1:country-region><font
    size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:
    Arial;color:black'>, education can be harmful to female health. =
Last spring
    in </span></font><st1:City><st1:place><font size=3D2 color=3Dblack =
face=3DArial><span
      =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Mecca</span></f=
ont></st1:place></st1:City><font
    size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:
    Arial;color:black'>, members of the <i><span =
style=3D'font-style:italic'>mutaween</span></i>,
    the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue, pushed fleeing students =
back
    into their burning school because they were not properly covered in =
<i><span
    style=3D'font-style:italic'>abaya</span></i>. Fifteen girls =
died.</span></font><font
    color=3Dblack><span =
style=3D'color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
    <p class=3DMsoNormal =
style=3D'mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:
    auto'><font size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;
    font-family:Arial;color:black'>You didn't hear much from feminists
    when in the northern Nigerian =
</span></font><st1:place><st1:PlaceType><font
      size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:
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size=3D2
     color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;
     color:black'> of </span></font><st1:PlaceName><font size=3D2 =
color=3Dblack
      face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Katsina</span><=
/font></st1:PlaceName></st1:place><font
    size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:
    Arial;color:black'> a Muslim court sentenced a woman to death by =
stoning
    for having a child outside of marriage. The case might not have =
earned much
    attention-stonings are common in parts of the Muslim
    world-except that the young woman, who had been married off at 14 =
to
    a husband who ultimately divorced her when she lost her virginal =
allure,
    was still nursing a baby at the time of sentencing. During her =
trial she
    had no lawyer, although the court did see fit to delay her =
execution until
    she weans her infant. </span></font><font color=3Dblack><span
    style=3D'color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
    <p class=3DMsoNormal =
style=3D'mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:
    auto'><b><font size=3D4 color=3D"#666666" face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:
    =
13.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#666666;font-weight:bold'>Y</span></font>=
</b><font
    size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:
    Arial;color:black'>ou didn't hear much from feminists as it emerged
    that honor killings by relatives, often either ignored or only =
lightly
    punished by authorities, are also commonplace in the Muslim world. =
In
    September, Reuters reported the story of an Iranian man, "defending
    my honor, family, and dignity," who cut off his seven-year-old
    daughter's head after suspecting she had been raped by her uncle. =
The
    postmortem showed the girl to be a virgin. In another family =
mix-up, a
    Yemeni man shot his daughter to death on her wedding night when her =
husband
    claimed she was not a virgin. After a medical exam revealed that =
the
    husband was mistaken, officials concluded he was simply trying to =
protect
    himself from embarrassment about his own impotence. According to =
the Human
    Rights Commission of Pakistan, every day two women are slain by =
male
    relatives seeking to avenge the family honor. </span></font><font
    color=3Dblack><span =
style=3D'color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
    <p class=3DMsoNormal =
style=3D'mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:
    auto'><font size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;
    font-family:Arial;color:black'>The savagery of some of these =
murders is
    worth a moment's pause. In 2000, two Punjabi sisters, 20 and 21 =
years
    old, had their throats slit by their brother and cousin because the =
girls
    were seen talking to two boys to whom they were not related. In one
    especially notorious case, an Egyptian woman named Nora Marzouk =
Ahmed fell in
    love and eloped. When she went to make amends with her father, he =
cut off
    her head and paraded it down the street. Several years back, =
according to
    the <i><span style=3D'font-style:italic'>Washington =
Post</span></i>, the
    husband of Zahida Perveen, a 32-year-old pregnant Pakistani, gouged =
out her
    eyes and sliced off her earlobe and nose because he suspected her =
of having
    an affair. </span></font><font color=3Dblack><span =
style=3D'color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
    <p class=3DMsoNormal =
style=3D'mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:
    auto'><font size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;
    font-family:Arial;color:black'>In a related example widely covered =
last
    summer, a teenage girl in the </span></font><st1:place><font =
size=3D2
     color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-fam=
ily:Arial;
     color:black'>Punjab</span></font></st1:place><font size=3D2 =
color=3Dblack
    face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>
    was sentenced by a tribal council to rape by a gang that included =
one of
    the councilmen. After the hour-and-a-half ordeal, the girl was =
forced to
    walk home naked in front of scores of onlookers. She had been =
punished
    because her 11-year-old brother had compromised another girl by =
being been
    seen alone with her. But that charge turned out to be a ruse: it =
seems that
    three men of a neighboring tribe had sodomized the boy and accused =
him of
    illicit relations-an accusation leading to his sister's
    barbaric punishment-as a way of covering up their =
crime.</span></font><font
    color=3Dblack><span =
style=3D'color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
    <p class=3DMsoNormal =
style=3D'mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:
    auto'><font size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;
    font-family:Arial;color:black'>Nor is such brutality limited to =
backward,
    out-of-the-way villages. Muddassir Rizvi, a Pakistani journalist, =
says
    that, though always common in rural areas, in recent years honor =
killings
    have become more prevalent in cities "among educated and liberal
    families." In relatively modern Jordan, honor killings were all but
    exempt from punishment until the penal code was modified last year;
    unfortunately, a young Palestinian living in Jordan, who had =
recently
    stabbed his 19-year-old sister 40 times "to cleanse the family
    honor," and another man from near Amman, who ran over his =
23-year-old
    sister with his truck because of her "immoral behavior," had
    not yet changed their ways. British psychiatrist Anthony Daniels =
reports
    that British Muslim men frequently spirit their young daughters =
back to
    their native </span></font><st1:country-region><st1:place><font =
size=3D2
      color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;
      =
color:black'>Pakistan</span></font></st1:place></st1:country-region><fon=
t
    size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:
    Arial;color:black'> and force the girls to marry. Such fathers have =
been
    known to kill daughters who resist. In =
</span></font><st1:country-region><st1:place><font
      size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:
      =
Arial;color:black'>Sweden</span></font></st1:place></st1:country-region>=
<font
    size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:
    Arial;color:black'>, in one highly publicized case, Fadima =
Sahindal, an
    assimilated 26-year-old of Kurdish origin, was murdered by her =
father after
    she began living with her Swedish boyfriend. "The whore is
    dead," the family announced.</span></font><font color=3Dblack><span
    style=3D'color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
    <p class=3DMsoNormal =
style=3D'mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:
    auto'><b><font size=3D4 color=3D"#666666" face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:
    =
13.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#666666;font-weight:bold'>A</span></font>=
</b><font
    size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:
    Arial;color:black'>s you look at this inventory of brutality, the =
question
    bears repeating: Where are the demonstrations, the articles, the =
petitions,
    the resolutions, the vindications of the rights of Islamic women by
    American feminists? The weird fact is that, even after the excesses =
of the
    Taliban did more to forge an American consensus about women's =
rights
    than 30 years of speeches by Gloria Steinem, feminists refused to =
touch
    this subject. They have averted their eyes from the harsh, blatant
    oppression of millions of women, even while they have continued to =
stare
    into the Western patriarchal abyss, indignant over female =
executives who
    cannot join an exclusive golf club and college women who do not =
have their
    own lacrosse teams.</span></font><font color=3Dblack><span =
style=3D'color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
    <p class=3DMsoNormal =
style=3D'mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:
    auto'><font size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;
    font-family:Arial;color:black'>But look more deeply into the =
matter, and
    you realize that the sound of feminist silence about the savage
    fundamentalist Muslim oppression of women has its own perverse =
logic. The
    silence is a direct outgrowth of the way feminist theory has =
developed in
    recent years. Now mired in self-righteous sentimentalism, =
multicultural
    nonjudgmentalism, and internationalist utopianism, feminism has =
lost the
    language to make the universalist moral claims of equal dignity and
    individual freedom that once rendered it so compelling. No wonder =
that most
    Americans, trying to deal with the realities of a post-9/11 world, =
are
    paying feminists no mind. </span></font><font color=3Dblack><span
    style=3D'color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
    <p class=3DMsoNormal =
style=3D'mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:
    auto'><b><font size=3D4 color=3D"#666666" face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:
    =
13.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#666666;font-weight:bold'>T</span></font>=
</b><font
    size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:
    Arial;color:black'>o understand the current sisterly silence about =
the sort
    of tyranny that the women's movement came into existence to attack,
    it is helpful to think of feminisms plural rather than singular. =
Though not
    entirely discrete philosophies, each of three different feminisms =
has its
    own distinct reasons for causing activists to "lose their
    voice" in the face of women's oppression.</span></font><font
    color=3Dblack><span =
style=3D'color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
    <p class=3DMsoNormal =
style=3D'mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:
    auto'><font size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;
    font-family:Arial;color:black'>The first variety-radical feminism =
(or
    gender feminism, in Christina Hoff Sommers's term)-starts with
    the insight that men are, not to put too fine a point upon it, =
brutes.
    Radical feminists do not simply subscribe to the reasonable-enough =
notion that
    men are naturally more prone to aggression than women. They believe =
that
    maleness is a kind of original sin. Masculinity explains child =
abuse,
    marital strife, high defense spending, every war from =
</span></font><st1:City><st1:place><font
      size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:
      Arial;color:black'>Troy</span></font></st1:place></st1:City><font =
size=3D2
    color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;
    color:black'> to </span></font><st1:country-region><st1:place><font =
size=3D2
      color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;
      =
color:black'>Afghanistan</span></font></st1:place></st1:country-region><=
font
    size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:
    Arial;color:black'>, as well as Hitler, Franco, and Pinochet. As =
Gloria
    Steinem informed the audience at a =
</span></font><st1:State><st1:place><font
      size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:
      =
Arial;color:black'>Florida</span></font></st1:place></st1:State><font
    size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:
    Arial;color:black'> fundraiser last March: "The cult of masculinity
    is the basis for every violent, fascist regime."</span></font><font
    color=3Dblack><span =
style=3D'color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
    <p class=3DMsoNormal =
style=3D'mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:
    auto'><font size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;
    font-family:Arial;color:black'>Gender feminists are little intereste=
d in
    fine distinctions between radical Muslim men who slam commercial =
airliners
    into office buildings and soldiers who want to stop radical Muslim =
men from
    slamming commercial airliners into office buildings. They are both =
examples
    of generic male violence-and specifically, male violence against
    women. "Terrorism is on a continuum that starts with violence =
within
    the family, battery against women, violence against women in the =
society,
    all the way up to organized militaries that are supported by =
taxpayer
    money," according to Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, who teaches "The
    Sexuality of Terrorism" at California State University in Hayward.
    Violence is so intertwined with male sexuality that, she tells us, =
military
    pilots watch porn movies before they go out on sorties. The war in =
</span></font><st1:country-region><st1:place><font
      size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:
      =
Arial;color:black'>Afghanistan</span></font></st1:place></st1:country-re=
gion><font
    size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:
    Arial;color:black'> could not possibly offer a chance to liberate =
women
    from their oppressors, since it would simply expose women to yet =
another
    set of oppressors, in the gender feminists' view. As Sharon Lerner
    asserted bizarrely in the <i><span =
style=3D'font-style:italic'>Village Voice</span></i>,
    feminists' "discomfort" with the =
</span></font><st1:country-region><st1:place><font
      size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:
      =
Arial;color:black'>Afghanistan</span></font></st1:place></st1:country-re=
gion><font
    size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:
    Arial;color:black'> bombing was "deepened by the knowledge that =
more
    women than men die as a result of most wars." </span></font><font
    color=3Dblack><span =
style=3D'color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
    <p class=3DMsoNormal =
style=3D'mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:
    auto'><b><font size=3D4 color=3D"#666666" face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:
    =
13.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#666666;font-weight:bold'>I</span></font>=
</b><font
    size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:
    Arial;color:black'>f guys are brutes, girls are their opposite:
    peace-loving, tolerant, conciliatory, and reasonable-"Antiwar
    and Pro-Feminist," as the popular peace-rally sign goes. Feminists
    long ago banished tough-as-nails women like Margaret Thatcher and =
Jeanne
    Kirkpatrick (and these days, one would guess, even the fetching =
Condoleezza
    Rice) to the ranks of the imperfectly female. Real women, they =
believe,
    would never justify war. "Most women, Western and Muslim, are =
opposed
    to war regardless of its reasons and objectives," wrote the =
Jordanian
    feminist Fadia Faqir on OpenDemocracy.net. "They are concerned with
    emancipation, freedom (personal and civic), human rights, power =
sharing,
    integrity, dignity, equality, autonomy, power-sharing [<i><span
    style=3D'font-style:italic'>sic</span></i>], liberation, and
    pluralism." </span></font><font color=3Dblack><span =
style=3D'color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
    <p class=3DMsoNormal =
style=3D'mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:
    auto'><font size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;
    font-family:Arial;color:black'>Sara Ruddick, author of <i><span
    style=3D'font-style:italic'>Maternal Thinking</span></i>, is =
perhaps one of
    the most influential spokeswomen for the position that women are
    instinctually peaceful. According to Ruddick (who clearly didn't =
have
    Joan Crawford in mind), that's because a good deal of mothering is
    naturally governed by the Gandhian principles of nonviolence such =
as
    "renunciation," "resistance to injustice," and
    "reconciliation." The novelist Barbara Kingsolver was one of
    the first to demonstrate the subtleties of such universal maternal =
thinking
    after the </span></font><st1:country-region><st1:place><font =
size=3D2
      color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;
      color:black'>United =
States</span></font></st1:place></st1:country-region><font
    size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:
    Arial;color:black'> invaded =
</span></font><st1:country-region><st1:place><font
      size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:
      =
Arial;color:black'>Afghanistan</span></font></st1:place></st1:country-re=
gion><font
    size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:
    Arial;color:black'>. "I feel like I'm standing on a playground
    where the little boys are all screaming 'He started it!' and
    throwing rocks," she wrote in the <i><span =
style=3D'font-style:italic'>Los
    Angeles Times</span></i>. "I keep looking for somebody's mother
    to come on the scene saying, 'Boys! Boys!' "</span></font><font
    color=3Dblack><span =
style=3D'color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
    <p class=3DMsoNormal =
style=3D'mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:
    auto'><font size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;
    font-family:Arial;color:black'>Gender feminism's tendency to reduce
    foreign affairs to a Lifetime Channel movie may make it seem too =
silly to
    bear mentioning, but its kitschy naivet=E9 hasn't stopped it from =
being
    widespread among elites. You see it in widely read writers like =
Kingsolver,
    Maureen Dowd, and Alice Walker. It turns up in our most elite =
institutions.
    Swanee Hunt, head of the Women in Public Policy Program at =
Harvard's
    Kennedy School of Government wrote, with Cristina Posa in <i><span
    style=3D'font-style:italic'>Foreign Policy</span></i>: "The key =
reason
    behind women's marginalization may be that everyone recognizes just
    how good women are at forging peace." Even female elected officials
    are on board. "The women of all these countries should go on =
strike,
    they should all sit down and refuse to do anything until their men =
agree to
    talk peace," urged Ohio representative Marcy Kaptur to the <i><span
    style=3D'font-style:italic'>Arab News</span></i> last spring, =
echoing an idea
    that Aristophanes, a dead white male, proposed as a joke 2,400 =
years ago.
    And President Clinton is an advocate of maternal thinking, too. "If
    we'd had women at Camp David," he said in July 2000, "we'd
    have an agreement."</span></font><font color=3Dblack><span
    style=3D'color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
    <p class=3DMsoNormal =
style=3D'mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:
    auto'><font size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;
    font-family:Arial;color:black'>Major foundations too seem to take =
gender
    feminism seriously enough to promote it as an answer to world =
problems.
    Last December, the Ford Foundation and the Soros Open Society =
Foundation
    helped fund the Afghan Women's Summit in Brussels to develop ideas =
for
    a new government in Afghanistan. As <i><span =
style=3D'font-style:italic'>Vagina
    Monologues</span></i> author Eve Ensler described it on her =
website, the
    summit was made up of "meetings and meals, canvassing, workshops,
    tears, and dancing." "Defense was mentioned nowhere in the
    document," Ensler wrote proudly of the summit's concluding
    proclamation-despite the continuing threat in Afghanistan of
    warlords, bandits, and lingering al-Qaida operatives. "[B]uilding
    weapons or instruments of retaliation was not called for in any =
category,"
    Ensler cooed. "Instead [the women] wanted education, health care, =
and
    the protection of refugees, culture, and human rights." =
</span></font><font
    color=3Dblack><span =
style=3D'color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
    <p class=3DMsoNormal =
style=3D'mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:
    auto'><font size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;
    font-family:Arial;color:black'>Too busy celebrating their own =
virtue and
    contemplating their own victimhood, gender feminists cannot address =
the
    suffering of their Muslim sisters realistically, as light years =
worse than
    their own petulant grievances. They are too intent on hating war to =
ask if
    unleashing its horrors might be worth it to overturn a brutal =
tyranny that,
    among its manifold inhumanities, treats women like animals. After =
all,
    hating war and machismo is evidence of the moral superiority that =
comes
    with being born female. </span></font><font color=3Dblack><span
    style=3D'color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
    <p class=3DMsoNormal =
style=3D'mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:
    auto'><font size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;
    font-family:Arial;color:black'>Yet the gender feminist idea of =
superior
    feminine virtue is becoming an increasingly tough sell for anyone =
actually
    keeping up with world events. Kipling once wrote of the fierceness =
of
    Afghan women: "When you're wounded and left on the Afghan
    plains/And the women come out to cut up your remains/Just roll to =
your
    rifle and blow out your brains." Now it's clearer than ever
    that the dream of worldwide sisterhood is no more realistic than =
worldwide
    brotherhood; culture trumps gender any day. Mothers all over the =
Muslim
    world are naming their babies Usama or praising Allah for their =
sons'
    efforts to kill crusading infidels. Last February, 28-year-old Wafa =
Idris
    became the first female Palestinian suicide bomber to strike in =
Israel,
    killing an elderly man and wounding scores of women and children. =
And in
    April, Israeli soldiers discovered under the maternity clothes of
    26-year-old Shifa Adnan Kodsi a bomb rather than a baby. Maternal =
thinking,
    indeed.</span></font><font color=3Dblack><span =
style=3D'color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
    <p class=3DMsoNormal =
style=3D'mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:
    auto'><b><font size=3D4 color=3D"#666666" face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:
    =
13.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#666666;font-weight:bold'>T</span></font>=
</b><font
    size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:
    Arial;color:black'>he second variety of feminism, seemingly more
    sophisticated and especially prevalent on college campuses, is
    multiculturalism and its twin, postcolonialism. The postcolonial =
feminist
    has even more reason to shy away from the predicament of women =
under
    radical Islam than her maternally thinking sister. She believes =
that the
    Western world is so sullied by its legacy of imperialism that no =
Westerner,
    man or woman, can utter a word of judgment against former colonial =
peoples.
    Worse, she is not so sure that radical Islam isn't an authentic,
    indigenous-and therefore appropriate-expression of Arab and
    Middle Eastern identity.</span></font><font color=3Dblack><span
    style=3D'color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
    <p class=3DMsoNormal =
style=3D'mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:
    auto'><font size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;
    font-family:Arial;color:black'>The postmodern philosopher Michel =
Foucault,
    one of the intellectual godfathers of multiculturalism and =
postcolonialism,
    first set the tone in 1978 when an Italian newspaper sent him to =
Teheran to
    cover the Iranian revolution. As his biographer James Miller tells =
it,
    Foucault looked in the face of Islamic fundamentalism and saw . . . =
an
    awe-inspiring revolt against "global hegemony." He was
    mesmerized by this new form of "political spirituality" that,
    in a phrase whose dark prescience he could not have grasped, =
portended the
    "transfiguration of the world." Even after the Ayatollah
    Khomeini came to power and reintroduced polygamy and divorce on the
    husband's demand with automatic custody to fathers, reduced the
    official female age of marriage from 18 to 13, fired all female =
judges, and
    ordered compulsory veiling, whose transgression was to be punished =
by public
    flogging, Foucault saw no reason to temper his enthusiasm. What was =
a small
    matter like women's basic rights, when a struggle against "the
    planetary system" was at hand? </span></font><font =
color=3Dblack><span
    style=3D'color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
    <p class=3DMsoNormal =
style=3D'mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:
    auto'><font size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;
    font-family:Arial;color:black'>Postcolonialists, then, have their =
own
    binary system, somewhat at odds with gender feminism-not to mention
    with women's rights. It is not men who are the sinners; it is the
    West. It is not women who are victimized innocents; it is the =
people who
    suffered under Western colonialism, or the descendants of those =
people, to be
    more exact. Caught between the rock of patriarchy and the hard =
place of
    imperialism, the postcolonial feminist scholar gingerly tiptoes her =
way
    around the subject of Islamic fundamentalism and does the only =
thing she
    can do: she focuses her ire on Western men. </span></font><font
    color=3Dblack><span =
style=3D'color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
    </td>
   </tr>
  </table>
  <p class=3DMsoNormal><font size=3D3 color=3Dblack face=3D"Times New =
Roman"><span
  style=3D'font-size:12.0pt;color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
  </td>
  <td valign=3Dtop style=3D'padding:0in 0in 0in 0in'>
  <table class=3DMsoNormalTable border=3D0 cellspacing=3D0 =
cellpadding=3D0
   style=3D'mso-cellspacing:0in;mso-padding-alt:0in 0in 0in 0in'>
   <tr height=3D1 style=3D'mso-yfti-irow:0;height:.75pt'>
    <td width=3D14 height=3D1 valign=3Dtop =
style=3D'width:10.5pt;padding:0in 0in 0in 0in;
    height:.75pt'>
    <p class=3DMsoNormal style=3D'mso-line-height-alt:.75pt'><font =
size=3D3
    color=3Dblack face=3D"Times New Roman"><span =
style=3D'font-size:12.0pt;
    color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
    </td>
    <td height=3D1 valign=3Dtop style=3D'padding:0in 0in 0in =
0in;height:.75pt'>
    <p class=3DMsoNormal><font size=3D1 color=3Dblack face=3D"Times New =
Roman"><span
    =
style=3D'font-size:1.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;color:black'><o:p>&nb=
sp;</o:p></span></font></p>
    </td>
   </tr>
   <tr style=3D'mso-yfti-irow:1;mso-yfti-lastrow:yes'>
    <td valign=3Dtop style=3D'padding:0in 0in 0in 0in'>
    <p class=3DMsoNormal><font size=3D3 color=3Dblack face=3D"Times New =
Roman"><span
    =
style=3D'font-size:12.0pt;color:black'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></font></=
p>
    </td>
    <td width=3D233 valign=3Dtop style=3D'width:174.75pt;padding:0in =
0in 0in 0in'>
    <table class=3DMsoNormalTable border=3D0 cellspacing=3D0 =
cellpadding=3D0 width=3D233
     style=3D'width:174.75pt;mso-cellspacing:0in;mso-padding-alt:0in =
0in 0in 0in'>
     <tr height=3D1053 =
style=3D'mso-yfti-irow:0;mso-yfti-lastrow:yes;height:789.75pt'>
      <td width=3D233 height=3D1053 valign=3Dtop bgcolor=3Dblack =
style=3D'width:174.75pt;
      background:black;padding:0in 0in 0in 0in;height:789.75pt'>
      <table class=3DMsoNormalTable border=3D0 cellspacing=3D0 =
cellpadding=3D0
       width=3D233 =
style=3D'width:174.75pt;mso-cellspacing:0in;mso-padding-alt:
       30.0pt 30.0pt 30.0pt 30.0pt'>
       <tr style=3D'mso-yfti-irow:0;mso-yfti-lastrow:yes'>
        <td style=3D'padding:30.0pt 30.0pt 30.0pt 30.0pt'>
        <p class=3DMsoNormal =
style=3D'mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:
        auto'><font size=3D3 color=3Dblack face=3D"Times New =
Roman"><span
        =
style=3D'font-size:12.0pt;color:black'>&nbsp;<o:p></o:p></span></font></=
p>
        <p class=3DMsoNormal =
style=3D'mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:
        auto'><font size=3D3 color=3Dblack face=3D"Times New =
Roman"><span
        =
style=3D'font-size:12.0pt;color:black'>&nbsp;<o:p></o:p></span></font></=
p>
        <p class=3DMsoNormal =
style=3D'mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:
        auto'><font size=3D3 color=3Dblack face=3D"Times New =
Roman"><span
        =
style=3D'font-size:12.0pt;color:black'>&nbsp;<o:p></o:p></span></font></=
p>
        <p class=3DMsoNormal =
style=3D'mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:
        auto'><font size=3D3 color=3Dwhite face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:12.0pt;
        font-family:Arial;color:white'>U.S. feminists should be =
protesting the
        brutal oppression of Middle Eastern women. But doing <br>
        so would reveal <br>
        how little they <br>
        have to complain about at home.</span></font><font =
color=3Dblack><span
        style=3D'color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
        </td>
       </tr>
      </table>
      <p class=3DMsoNormal><font size=3D3 color=3Dblack face=3D"Times =
New Roman"><span
      =
style=3D'font-size:12.0pt;color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
      </td>
     </tr>
    </table>
    <p class=3DMsoNormal><font size=3D3 color=3Dblack face=3D"Times New =
Roman"><span
    =
style=3D'font-size:12.0pt;color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
    </td>
   </tr>
  </table>
  <p class=3DMsoNormal><font size=3D3 color=3Dblack face=3D"Times New =
Roman"><span
  style=3D'font-size:12.0pt;color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
  </td>
 </tr>
</table>

<p class=3DMsoNormal><font size=3D3 color=3Dblack face=3D"Times New =
Roman"><span
style=3D'font-size:12.0pt;color:black;display:none;mso-hide:all'><o:p>&n=
bsp;</o:p></span></font></p>

<table class=3DMsoNormalTable border=3D0 cellspacing=3D0 =
cellpadding=3D0
 style=3D'mso-cellspacing:0in;mso-padding-alt:0in 0in 0in 0in'>
 <tr height=3D16 style=3D'mso-yfti-irow:0;height:12.0pt'>
  <td height=3D16 valign=3Dtop style=3D'padding:0in 0in 0in =
0in;height:12.0pt'>
  <p class=3DMsoNormal><font size=3D3 color=3Dblack face=3D"Times New =
Roman"><span
  =
style=3D'font-size:12.0pt;color:black'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></font></=
p>
  </td>
 </tr>
 <tr style=3D'mso-yfti-irow:1;mso-yfti-lastrow:yes'>
  <td width=3D516 valign=3Dtop style=3D'width:387.0pt;padding:0in 0in =
0in 0in'>
  <table class=3DMsoNormalTable border=3D0 cellspacing=3D3 =
cellpadding=3D0 width=3D516
   bgcolor=3D"#CCCCCC" =
style=3D'width:387.0pt;mso-cellspacing:2.2pt;background:
   #CCCCCC'>
   <tr style=3D'mso-yfti-irow:0;mso-yfti-lastrow:yes'>
    <td width=3D508 style=3D'width:381.0pt;padding:.75pt .75pt .75pt =
.75pt'>
    <p class=3DMsoNormal =
style=3D'mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:
    auto'><b><font size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;
    font-family:Arial;color:black;font-weight:bold'>Feminism Behind the =
Veil</span></font></b><font
    color=3Dblack><span =
style=3D'color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
    <p class=3DMsoNormal =
style=3D'mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:
    auto'><font size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;
    font-family:Arial;color:black'>Feminists in the West may fiddle =
while
    Muslim women are burning, but in the Muslim world itself there is a
    burgeoning movement to address the miserable predicament of the =
second
    sex-without simply adopting a philosophy whose higher cultural
    products include Sex and the City, Rosie O'Donnell, and the
    power-suited female executive.</span></font><font =
color=3Dblack><span
    style=3D'color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
    <p class=3DMsoNormal =
style=3D'mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:
    auto'><font size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;
    font-family:Arial;color:black'>The most impressive signs of an =
indigenous
    female revolt against the fundamentalist order are in Iran. Over =
the past
    ten years or so, Iran has seen the publication of a slew of serious
    journals dedicated to the social and political predicament of =
Islamic
    women, the most well known being the Teheran-based Zonan and Zan, =
published
    by Faezah Hashemi, a well-known member of parliament and the =
daughter of
    former president Rafsanjani. Believing that Western feminism has =
promoted
    hostility between the sexes, confused sex roles, and the sexual
    objectification of women, a number of writers have proposed an
    Islamic-style feminism that would stress "gender
    complementarity" rather than equality and that would pay full =
respect
    to housewifery and motherhood while also giving women access to =
education
    and jobs.</span></font><font color=3Dblack><span =
style=3D'color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
    <p class=3DMsoNormal =
style=3D'mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:
    auto'><font size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;
    font-family:Arial;color:black'>Attacking from the religious front, =
a number
    of "Islamic feminists" are challenging the reigning
    fundamentalist reading of the Qur'an. These scholars insist that =
the
    founding principles of Islam, which they believe were long ago =
corrupted by
    pre-Islamic Arab, Persian, and North African customs, are if =
anything more
    egalitarian than those of Western religions; the Qur'an explicitly
    describes women as the moral and spiritual equals of men and allows =
them to
    inherit and pass down property. The power of misogynistic mullahs =
has grown
    in recent decades, feminists continue, because Muslim men have felt
    threatened by modernity's challenge to traditional arrangements
    between the sexes.</span></font><font color=3Dblack><span =
style=3D'color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
    <p class=3DMsoNormal =
style=3D'mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:
    auto'><font size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;
    font-family:Arial;color:black'>What makes Islamic feminism really =
worth
    watching is that it has the potential to play a profoundly =
important role
    in the future of the Islamic world-and not just because it could
    improve the lot of women. By insisting that it is true to Islam-in
    fact, truer than the creed espoused by the entrenched religious
    elite-Islamic feminism can affirm the dignity of Islam while at the
    same time bringing it more in line with modernity. In doing this, =
feminists
    can help lay the philosophical groundwork for democracy. In the =
West,
    feminism lagged behind religious reformation and political =
democratization
    by centuries; in the East, feminism could help lead the =
charge.</span></font><font
    color=3Dblack><span =
style=3D'color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
    <p class=3DMsoNormal =
style=3D'mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:
    auto'><font size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;
    font-family:Arial;color:black'>At the same time, though, the issue =
of
    women's rights highlights two reasons for caution about the Islamic
    future. For one thing, no matter how much feminists might wish =
otherwise,
    polygamy and male domination of the family are not merely a fact of =
local
    traditions; they are written into the Qur'an itself. This in and of
    itself would not prove to be such an impediment-the Old Testament =
is
    filled with laws antithetical to women's equality-except for
    the second problem: more than other religions, Islam is unfriendly =
to the
    notion of the separation of church and state. If history is any =
guide,
    there's the rub. The ultimate guarantor of the rights of all
    citizens, whether Islamic or not, can only be a fully secular =
state.</span></font><font
    color=3Dblack><span =
style=3D'color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
    </td>
   </tr>
  </table>
  <p class=3DMsoNormal><font size=3D3 color=3Dblack face=3D"Times New =
Roman"><span
  style=3D'font-size:12.0pt;color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
  </td>
 </tr>
</table>

<p class=3DMsoNormal><font size=3D3 color=3Dblack face=3D"Times New =
Roman"><span
style=3D'font-size:12.0pt;color:black;display:none;mso-hide:all'><o:p>&n=
bsp;</o:p></span></font></p>

<table class=3DMsoNormalTable border=3D0 cellspacing=3D0 =
cellpadding=3D0 width=3D390
 style=3D'width:292.5pt;mso-cellspacing:0in;mso-padding-alt:0in 0in 0in =
0in'>
 <tr height=3D12 style=3D'mso-yfti-irow:0;height:9.0pt'>
  <td width=3D390 height=3D12 valign=3Dtop =
style=3D'width:292.5pt;padding:0in 0in 0in 0in;
  height:9.0pt'>
  <p class=3DMsoNormal style=3D'mso-line-height-alt:9.0pt'><font =
size=3D3
  color=3Dblack face=3D"Times New Roman"><span =
style=3D'font-size:12.0pt;color:black'><img
  width=3D390 height=3D1 id=3D"_x0000_i1030" =
src=3D"cid:image004.gif@01C2C13F.78623E40"
  border=3D0><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
  </td>
 </tr>
 <tr style=3D'mso-yfti-irow:1;mso-yfti-lastrow:yes'>
  <td width=3D390 valign=3Dtop style=3D'width:292.5pt;padding:0in 0in =
0in 0in'>
  <p class=3DMsoNormal =
style=3D'mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto'><b><font
  size=3D4 color=3D"#666666" face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:13.5pt;font-family:
  Arial;color:#666666;font-weight:bold'>T</span></font></b><font =
size=3D2
  color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;
  color:black'>o this end, the postcolonialist eagerly dips into the =
inkwell of
  gender feminism. She ties colonialist exploitation and domination to
  maleness; she might refer to Israel's "masculinist military
  culture"-Israel being white and Western-though she would
  never dream of pointing out the "masculinist military culture" of
  the <i><span style=3D'font-style:italic'>jihadi</span></i>. And she =
expends a good
  deal of energy condemning Western men for wanting to improve the =
lives of
  Eastern women. At the turn of the twentieth century Lord Cromer, the =
British
  vice consul of Egypt and a pet target of postcolonial feminists, =
argued that
  the "degradation" of women under Islam had a harmful effect on
  society. Rubbish, according to the postcolonialist feminist. His =
words are
  simply part of "the Western narrative of the quintessential otherness
  and inferiority of Islam," as Harvard professor Leila Ahmed puts it =
in <i><span
  style=3D'font-style:italic'>Women and Gender in Islam</span></i>. The =
same goes
  for American concern about Afghan women; it is merely a "device for
  ranking the 'other' men as inferior or as
  'uncivilized,' " according to Nira Yuval-Davis, professor
  of gender and ethnic studies at the University of Greenwich, England. =
These
  are all examples of what renowned Columbia professor Gayatri Spivak =
called
  "white men saving brown women from brown men." </span></font><font
  color=3Dblack><span =
style=3D'color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
  <p class=3DMsoNormal =
style=3D'mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto'><font
  size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;
  color:black'>Spivak's phrase, a great favorite on campus, points to =
the
  postcolonial notion that brown men, having been victimized by the =
West, can
  never be oppressors in their own right. If they give the appearance =
of
  treating women badly, the oppression they have suffered at the hands =
of
  Western colonial masters is to blame. In fact, the worse they treat =
women,
  the more they are expressing their own justifiable outrage. "When men
  are traumatized [by colonial rule], they tend to traumatize their own
  women," Miriam Cooke, a Duke professor and head of the Association =
for
  Middle East Women's Studies, told me. And today, Cooke asserts, brown
  men are subjected to a new form of imperialism. "Now there is a =
return
  of colonialism that we saw in the nineteenth century in the context =
of
  globalization," she says. "What is driving Islamist men is
  globalization." </span></font><font color=3Dblack><span =
style=3D'color:
  black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
  <p class=3DMsoNormal =
style=3D'mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto'><font
  size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;
  color:black'>It would be difficult to exaggerate the
  through-the-looking-glass quality of postcolonialist theory when it =
comes to
  the subject of women. Female suicide bombers are a good thing, =
because they
  are strong women demonstrating "agency" against colonial powers.
  Polygamy too must be shown due consideration. "Polygamy can be
  liberating and empowering," Cooke answered sunnily when I asked her
  about it. "Our norm is the Western, heterosexual, single couple. If =
we
  can imagine different forms that would allow us to be something other =
than a
  heterosexual couple, we might imagine polygamy working," she =
explained
  murkily. Some women, she continued, are relieved when their husbands =
take a
  new wife: they won't have to service him so often. Or they might find
  they now have the freedom to take a lover. But, I ask, wouldn't that =
be
  dangerous in places where adulteresses can be stoned to death? At any =
rate,
  how common is that? "I don't know," Cooke answers,
  "I'm interested in discourse." The irony couldn't be
  darker: the very people protesting the imperialist exploitation of =
the
  "Other" endorse that Other's repressive customs as a means
  of promoting their own uniquely Western agenda-subverting the
  heterosexual patriarchy.</span></font><font color=3Dblack><span
  style=3D'color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
  <p class=3DMsoNormal =
style=3D'mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto'><b><font
  size=3D4 color=3D"#666666" face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:13.5pt;font-family:
  Arial;color:#666666;font-weight:bold'>T</span></font></b><font =
size=3D2
  color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;
  color:black'>he final category in the feminist taxonomy, which might =
be
  called the world-government utopian strain, is in many respects =
closest to
  classical liberal feminism. Dedicated to full female dignity and =
equality, it
  generally eschews both the biological determinism of the gender =
feminist and
  the cultural relativism of the multiculti postcolonialist. Stanford =
political
  science professor Susan Moller Okin, an influential, subtle, and =
intelligent
  spokeswoman for this approach, created a stir among feminists in 1997 =
when
  she forthrightly attacked multiculturalists for valuing "group rights
  for minority cultures" over the well-being of individual women. Okin
  admirably minced no words attacking arranged marriage, female =
circumcision,
  and polygamy, which she believed women experienced as a "barely
  tolerable institution." Some women, she went so far as to declare,
  "<i><span style=3D'font-style:italic'>might</span></i> be better off =
if
  the culture into which they were born were either to become extinct . =
. . or
  preferably, to be encouraged to alter itself so as to reinforce the =
equality
  of women."</span></font><font color=3Dblack><span =
style=3D'color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
  <p class=3DMsoNormal =
style=3D'mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto'><font
  size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;
  color:black'>But though Okin is less shy than other feminists about
  discussing the plight of women under Islamic fundamentalism, the =
typical U.N.
  utopian has her own reasons for keeping quiet as that plight fills =
Western
  headlines. For one thing, the utopian is also a bean-counting =
absolutist,
  seeking a pure, numerical equality between men and women in all =
departments
  of life. She greets Western, and particularly American, claims to =
have
  achieved freedom for women with skepticism. The motto of the 2002
  International Women's Day-"Afghanistan Is Everywhere"-was
  in part a reproach to the West about its superior airs. Women in =
Afghanistan
  might have to wear burqas, but don't women in the West parade around =
in
  bikinis? "It's equally disrespectful and abusive to have women
  prancing around a stage in bathing suits for cash or walking the =
streets
  shrouded in burqas in order to survive," columnist Jill Nelson wrote =
on
  the MSNBC website about the murderously fanatical riots that attended =
the
  Miss World pageant in Nigeria. </span></font><font =
color=3Dblack><span
  style=3D'color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
  <p class=3DMsoNormal =
style=3D'mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto'><font
  size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;
  color:black'>As Nelson's statement hints, the utopian is less =
interested
  in freeing women to make their own choices than in engineering and =
imposing
  her own elite vision of a perfect society. Indeed, she is under no =
illusions
  that, left to their own democratic devices, women would freely choose =
the
  utopia she has in mind. She would not be surprised by recent =
Pakistani
  elections, where a number of the women who won parliamentary seats =
were
  Islamist. But it doesn't really matter what women want. The
  universalist has a comprehensive vision of "women's human
  rights," meaning not simply women's civil and political rights
  but "economic rights" and "socioeconomic justice."
  Cynical about free markets and globalization, the U.N. utopian is =
also
  unimpressed by the liberal democratic nation-state "as an =
emancipatory
  institution," in the dismissive words of J. Ann Tickner, director for
  international studies at the University of Southern California. Such
  nation-states are "unresponsive to the needs of [their] most =
vulnerable
  members" and seeped in "nationalist ideologies" as well as
  in patriarchal assumptions about autonomy. In fact, like the =
(usually)
  unacknowledged socialist that she is, the U.N. utopian eagerly awaits =
the
  withering of the nation-state, a political arrangement that she sees =
as tied
  to imperialism, war, and masculinity. During war, in particular, =
nations
  "depend on ideas about masculinized dignity and feminized sacrifice =
to
  sustain the sense of autonomous nationhood," writes Cynthia Enloe,
  professor of government at Clark University.</span></font><font =
color=3Dblack><span
  style=3D'color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
  <p class=3DMsoNormal =
style=3D'mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto'><b><font
  size=3D4 color=3D"#666666" face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:13.5pt;font-family:
  Arial;color:#666666;font-weight:bold'>H</span></font></b><font =
size=3D2
  color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;
  color:black'>aving rejected the patriarchal liberal nation-state, =
with all
  the democratic machinery of self-government that goes along with it, =
the
  utopian concludes that there is only one way to achieve her goals: to =
impose
  them through international government. Utopian feminists fill the =
halls of
  the United Nations, where they examine everything through the lens of =
the
  "gender perspective" in study after unreadable study. (My
  personal favorites: "Gender Perspectives on Landmines" and
  "Gender Perspectives on Weapons of Mass Destruction," whose
  conclusion is that landmines and WMDs are bad for =
women.)</span></font><font
  color=3Dblack><span =
style=3D'color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
  <p class=3DMsoNormal =
style=3D'mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto'><font
  size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;
  color:black'>The 1979 U.N. Convention on the Elimination of =
Discrimination
  Against Women (CEDAW), perhaps the first and most important document =
of
  feminist utopianism, gives the best sense of the sweeping nature of =
the
  movement's ambitions. CEDAW demands many measures that anyone =
committed
  to democratic liberal values would applaud, including women's right =
to
  vote and protection against honor killings and forced marriage. Would =
that
  the document stopped there. Instead it sets out to impose a utopian =
order
  that would erase all distinctions between men and women, a kind of =
revolution
  of the sexes from above, requiring nations to "take all appropriate
  measures to modify the social and cultural patterns of conduct of men =
and
  women" and to eliminate "stereotyped roles" to accomplish
  this legislative abolition of biology. The document calls for paid =
maternity
  leave, nonsexist school curricula, and government-supported child =
care. The
  treaty's 23-member enforcement committee hectors nations that do not
  adequately grasp that, as Enloe puts it, "the personal is
  international." The committee has cited Belarus for celebrating
  Mother's Day, China for failing to legalize prostitution, and Libya =
for
  not interpreting the Qur'an in accordance with "committee
  guidelines." </span></font><font color=3Dblack><span =
style=3D'color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
  <p class=3DMsoNormal =
style=3D'mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto'><font
  size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;
  color:black'>Confusing "women's participation" with
  self-determination, and numerical equivalence with equality, CEDAW =
utopians
  try to orchestrate their perfect society through quotas and
  affirmative-action plans. Their bean-counting mentality cares about =
whether
  women participate equally, without asking what it is that they are
  participating in or whether their participation is anything more than
  ceremonial. Thus at the recent Women's Summit in Jordan, Rima Khalaf
  suggested that governments be required to use quotas in elections "to
  leapfrog women to power." Khalaf, like so many illiberal feminist
  utopians, has no hesitation in forcing society to be free. As is =
often the
  case when elites decide they have discovered the route to human =
perfection,
  the utopian urge is not simply antidemocratic but verges on the =
totalitarian.
  </span></font><font color=3Dblack><span =
style=3D'color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
  <p class=3DMsoNormal =
style=3D'mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto'><b><font
  size=3D4 color=3D"#666666" face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:13.5pt;font-family:
  Arial;color:#666666;font-weight:bold'>T</span></font></b><font =
size=3D2
  color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;
  color:black'>hat this combination of sentimental victimhood, =
postcolonial
  relativism, and utopian overreaching has caused feminism to suffer so
  profound a loss of moral and political imagination that it cannot =
speak
  against the brutalization of Islamic women is an incalculable loss to =
women
  and to men. The great contribution of Western feminism was to expand =
the
  definition of human dignity and freedom. It insisted that all human =
beings
  were worthy of liberty. Feminists now have the opportunity to make =
that claim
  on behalf of women who in their oppression have not so much as =
imagined that
  its promise could include them, too. At its best, feminism has stood =
for a
  rich idea of personal choice in shaping a meaningful life, one that =
respects
  not only the woman who wants to crash through glass ceilings but also =
the one
  who wants to stay home with her children and bake cookies or to wear =
a veil
  and fast on Ramadan. Why shouldn't feminists want to shout out their
  own profound discovery for the world to hear?</span></font><font =
color=3Dblack><span
  style=3D'color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
  <p class=3DMsoNormal =
style=3D'mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto'><font
  size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;
  color:black'>Perhaps, finally, because to do so would be to =
acknowledge the
  freedom they themselves enjoy, thanks to Western ideals and =
institutions. Not
  only would such an admission force them to give up their own =
simmering
  resentments; it would be bad for business. <br>
  The truth is that the free institutions-an independent judiciary, a
  free press, open elections-that protect the rights of women are the
  same ones that protect the rights of men. The separation of church =
and state
  that would allow women to escape the burqa would also free men from =
having
  their hands amputated for theft. The education system that would =
teach girls
  to read would also empower millions of illiterate boys. The =
capitalist
  economies that bring clean water, cheap clothes, and washing machines =
that
  change the lives of women are the same ones that lead to healthier, =
freer
  men. In other words, to address the problems of Muslim women =
honestly,
  feminists would have to recognize that free men and women need the =
same
  things-and that those are things that they themselves already have. =
And
  recognizing that would mean an end to feminism as we know =
it.</span></font><font
  color=3Dblack><span =
style=3D'color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
  <p class=3DMsoNormal =
style=3D'mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto'><b><font
  size=3D4 color=3D"#666666" face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:13.5pt;font-family:
  Arial;color:#666666;font-weight:bold'>T</span></font></b><font =
size=3D2
  color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;
  color:black'>here are signs that, outside the academy, middlebrow =
literary
  circles, and the United Nations, feminism has indeed met its =
Waterloo. Most
  Americans seem to realize that September 11 turned self-indulgent =
sentimental
  illusions, including those about the sexes, into an unaffordable =
luxury.
  Consider, for instance, women's attitudes toward war, a topic on =
which
  politicians have learned to take for granted a gender gap. But =
according to
  the Pew Research Center, in January 2002, 57 percent of women versus =
46
  percent of men cited national security as the country's top priority.
  There has been a "seismic gender shift on matters of war,"
  according to pollster Kellyanne Conway. In 1991, 45 percent of U.S. =
women
  supported the use of ground troops in the Gulf War, a substantially =
smaller
  number than the 67 percent of men. But as of November, a CNN survey =
found
  women were <i><span style=3D'font-style:italic'>more</span></i> =
likely than men
  to support the use of ground troops against Iraq, 58 percent to 56 =
percent.
  The numbers for younger women were especially dramatic. Sixty-five =
percent of
  women between 18 and 49 support ground troops, as opposed to 48 =
percent of
  women 50 and over. Women are also changing their attitudes toward =
military
  spending: before September 11, only 24 percent of women supported =
increased
  funds; after the attacks, that number climbed to 47 percent. An =
evolutionary
  psychologist might speculate that, if females tend to be less =
aggressively
  territorial than males, there's little to compare to the ferocity of
  the lioness when she believes her young are =
threatened.</span></font><font
  color=3Dblack><span =
style=3D'color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
  <p class=3DMsoNormal =
style=3D'mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto'><font
  size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;
  color:black'>Even among some who consider themselves feminists, there =
is some
  grudging recognition that Western, and specifically American, men are
  sometimes a force for the good. The Feminist Majority is sending =
around
  urgent messages asking for President Bush to increase American =
security
  forces in Afghanistan. The influential left-wing British columnist =
Polly
  Toynbee, who just 18 months ago coined the phrase "America the
  Horrible," went to Afghanistan to figure out whether the war "was
  worth it." Her answer was not what she might have expected. Though =
she
  found nine out of ten women still wearing burqas, partly out of fear =
of
  lingering fundamentalist hostility, she was convinced their lives had =
greatly
  improved. Women say they can go out alone now.</span></font><font
  color=3Dblack><span =
style=3D'color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
  <p class=3DMsoNormal =
style=3D'mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto'><font
  size=3D2 color=3Dblack face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;
  color:black'>As we sink more deeply into what is likely to be a =
protracted
  struggle with radical Islam, American feminists have a moral =
responsibility
  to give up their resentments and speak up for women who actually need =
their
  support. Feminists have the moral authority to say that their call =
for the
  rights of women is a universal demand-that the rights of women are =
the
  Rights of Man.</span></font><font color=3Dblack><span =
style=3D'color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
  </td>
 </tr>
</table>

<p class=3DMsoNormal><font size=3D2 face=3DArial><span =
style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></font></p>

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