[Discussion] bk rev.: Gender, Politics, and Islam

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

Therese Saliba, Carolyn Allen, and Judith A. Howard, eds. Gender,
Politics, and Islam. Studies in Islamic Law and Society Series. Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 2002. 354 pp. Bibliography, index.
$39.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-2267-3428-5; $21.00 (paper), ISBN 0-2267-3429-3.
*Reviewed by:* Lamia Ben Youssef Zayzafoon, Department of English,
Faculty of Arts and Humanities of Sousse, Tunisia.
*Published by:* H-Gender-MidEast <http://www.h-net.msu.edu/%7Egend-mid/>
(November, 2004)
Postcolonial, Feminist, and Islamic Studies

This book is a timely response to Bernard Lewis and Samuel P.
Huntington's thesis of the civilizational clash between Islamic
fundamentalism and Western modernity as well as the rescue narrative of
the "Muslim woman" generated by the 9/11 events and the U.S. war in
Afghanistan. In contrast to the decontextualized images of the "Muslim
woman" circulating in the American mass media, which depict the veil as
an icon of Islamic fundamentalism and Islam as the enemy of the "Muslim
woman" and Western democracy, the nine articles in this book construct
Islamic identity as a heterogeneous and historically situated concept.
Refuting the Orientalist stereotype of the "Muslim woman" as a passive
victim, the contributors to this book emphasize the agency of Muslim
women and their constant struggle as they juggle the conflicting demands
of their individual and collective identities. This study shows that
Muslim women's lives are conditioned not only by their gender, religion,
and culture, but also by their class, race, nationality, Western
imperialism, and the power structures of the global market.

In chapter 1, "Islamic Feminism and Discontents: Towards a Resolution of
the Debate," Valentine M. Moghadam relies on a Marxist-feminist
methodology to analyze the reformist and feminist debates within the
Islamic Republic of Iran and the Iranian expatriate feminist and leftist
circles in Europe and North America. Rejecting what Muslim feminists
call today "the 'correct' reading of Islamic texts" and the possibility
for gender equality and minority rights within an Islamic reformist
framework, she argues for the separation of mosque and state (p. 38).
While understanding the discursive theological strategy of Muslim
feminists, she fears that their exclusive focus on the Qur'an will
hamper their access to socioeconomic and political power. Because of
Islamic feminism's affinities to Western feminism, she calls for a
broader definition of global feminism, one that not only includes Muslim
women but also seeks to "transform socio-economic structures, political
power, and international relations" which affect women's lives worldwide
(p. 45).

Chapter 2, "The Politics of Feminism in Islam" by Anouar Majid stands
out as a defense of Islamic feminism. Critiquing clerical orthodox Islam
and Western global capitalism, the author reconceptualizes Islamic
feminism within a more expansive concept of Islam, one which is
"democratic, anti-patriarchal and anti-imperialist" (p. 56). Advocating
women's rights from an Islamic paradigm, he calls for the "reassessment
of Islamic traditions" (p. 54), the reintroduction of the consensus
practice, and the abandonment of the Shari'a law. Majid also exposes how
the discourses of Orientalism, Islamic orthodoxy, and the hegemonic
structures of imperialism condition almost all attempts to talk about
Muslim women. While praising Muslim feminist scholars like Leila Ahmed,
Mernia Lazreg, Nawal al Saadawi, and Leila Abouzid, he attacks Tahar Ben
Jelloun for catering to a Western audience and Fatima Mernissi for
championing the capitalist model of Western secularism.

This article can be read, in the author's own words, as one of those
"changing images" of "defensive Islam" (p. 71). As Majid puts it, "the
rejection of certain Western secular models in the age of late
capitalism is consequently a survival imperative for Muslim people, not
just a fanatical reaction to 'progress'" (p. 75). The originality of
this study lies in the introduction of the reformist thought of the
executed Sudanese scholar Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, who has been discarded
from public memory in the Arabic world. However, because of its
apologetic framework, the article presents some contradictions. The
first concerns Majid's views on what is sacred in the Islamic faith.
While dismissing secularism as a Western import and arguing that the
Muslim world rejects and condemns, as the Rushdie case demonstrates,
"the secularization of the Revelation and of the Prophet's life,", he
offers as a reformist model The Second Message of Islam (1987), the book
over which Taha was executed for apostasy (p. 72). If, as Majid argues,
Muslims throughout the world have rejected Rushdie's postmodern
desacralization of the Qur'an and the Prophet's life, why will they
accept the abrogation of the Shari'a law and the Medinese Revelation
that Taha and his disciple Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im advocate? Who has
the power to negotiate Revelation? What are the foundational principles
of Islam? And who determines them? Where do Muslim women stand in Taha's
"revolutionary" reading and interpretation of the Qur'an? The article
remains silent over these questions. A further contradiction exists
between the author's call for a "redefined Islam" and his injunction to
preserve this redefined Islam "as a viable alternative" to
Westernization (p. 85). While conceding that Islamic cultures get
constantly transformed and reinvented, the author believes that cultures
(if reformed) can be strategically frozen and "preserve[d]" (p. 85).
Finally, Mernissi privileges, not al Jahiliya as Majid argues, but early
Islam. As a matter of fact, she locates her reformist agenda not in
Western secularism but in spiritual Islam. For Mernissi, "the democratic
glorification of the human individual, regardless of sex, race, or
status, is the kernel of the Muslim message" (p. 19). Although he
critiques her, Majid shares with Mernissi both her idealization of the
early Islamic period and her anthropological understanding of culture as
a set of beliefs and practices confined within some geographic boundaries.

In chapter 3, "The Power Paradox in Muslim Women's Majales: North-West
Pakistani Mourning Rituals as Sites of Contestation over Religious
Politics, Ethnicity, and Gender," Mary Elaine Hegland focuses on the
agency and social histories of three Shi'a ethnic groups (Mohajirs,
Pukhtun, and Qizilbash) in Peshawar, Pakistan. She examines how the
dominant Mohajir ritual serves to reinforce the fundamentalist Shi'a
worldview of the Mohajirs at the expense of other ethnic groups'
languages and ritual styles. While inclusive of all classes, only elite
women can host and manage these majales. Even though she concedes that
Shi'a women are not defined by their religion alone, and that other
factors like ethnicity, nationality, and class come into play, in
jumping from the Battle of Karbala (680 A.D.) to Pakistan's partition
from India (1947), Hegland creates a historical gap of 1322 years, thus
dehistoricizing the lives of the women she is studying. Shi'a Islam and
South Asia emerge in this article as "themed"[1] or pre-narrated spaces,
where fundamentalism and "the control of females" are held as the
"central" aspects of the Shi'a "faith" and South Asian culture (p. 124).
In Hegland's article, there is no space for the Shi'a gendered subaltern
to speak, whether fundamentalist, moderate, or liberal.

Chapter 4: Julie Peteet's "Icons and Militants: Mothering in the Danger
Zone" provides a counterview to the decontextualized image of the
demonic Palestinian mother who celebrates the death of her children in
the U.S. mass media. Through her ethnographic study of Palestinian women
living in the refugee camps in Lebanon and the West Bank, Peteet
examines how the nationalist discourse of "maternal sacrifice," although
patriarchal, provides Palestinian mothers with a limited agency to
critique the leadership of the Palestinian movement. Focusing on class,
she argues that most of these women who lost children in the Palestinian
struggle are poor women who are often dismissed as politically immature
by the upper class educated Palestinian activists. Besides allowing the
subjects of her study like Um Muhammad, Um Khalid, Um Saleh, and Um Ali
to speak, Peteet explains to her Western audience that the mother of the
martyr ululates, not because she does not understand the value of human
life, but "in defiance at the forces that caused the death" of her child
(p. 146). The mother of the martyr cannot display her grief in public;
she "lamented and bewailed privately." Peteet's contribution lies also
in her original study of the interrelations between gender, exile, and
citizenship in the Palestine National Charter.

In chaper 5, "Elusive Bodies: The Politics and Aesthetics among Yemeni
Elite Women," Gabriele vom Bruck studies the taboos that must be adhered
to by all Yemeni women and explains how both the practice and avoidance
of taboos associated with the female body (such as dress, odors, voices,
dress style, and cosmetics) serve to mark individual and social
identity. Because the use of cosmetics serves to delineate the social
difference between married and unmarried women, a married woman's
abstention from adorning herself constitutes a subversive act to the
Yemeni gender ideology. While the tafritah is an all-women's social
gathering, it is not free from patriarchal surveillance as women often
control and police the lives of other women on behalf of men.

Chapter 6: Elora Shehabuddin's "Contesting the Illicit: Gender and the
Politics of Fatwas in Bangladesh" investigates the fatwas against poor
women in the rural areas of Bengladesh, and argues that these are mostly
issued by a local male elite eager to maintain their power amidst the
profound economic and political transformations affecting Bengladesh.
These fatwas are deployed not only against women who commit adultery,
but also against those who have an "increasing access to credit,
employment, and educational opportunities outside the home" (p. 209).
Shehabuddin's contribution lies in moving the deadlock in feminist
scholarship on Muslim women, from the issue of Islam's compatibility
with women's rights, to the challenge of postcoloniality and the failure
of the Islamic nation states like Bengladesh to protect the rights of
all its male and female citizens. Shehabuddin superbly demonstrates how
poor women juggle secularist and Islamic feminist agendas in ways that
best serve their economic, social, and political interests.

In chapters 7 and 8, S. M. Shamsul Alam's "Women in the Era of Modernity
and Islamic Fundamentalism: The Case of Taslima Nasrin of Bangladesh"
and Amel Amireh's "Framing Nawal El Saadawi: Arab Feminism in a
Transnational World" deal with the hegemonic discursive and political
structures which condition the production and reception of the works of
Muslim women activists in their home countries and the West. Shamsul
Alam argues it is a mistake to read the fatwa against Nasrin as a clash
between Islamic fundamentalism and modernity because such binarism
forecloses the possibility of "gendered subaltern self-representation"
(p. 236). Instead Nasrin's work should be read as a subversive critique
of both the Islamist and the male-centered nationalist/modernist
discourses in Bengladesh. Showing the imbalance of power in the cultural
exchange between East and West, Amireh investigates the differences in
El Saadawi's writings in Arabic and translation as well as the reception
of her novels in the Arab and Western academic and non-academic circles.
Amireh argues that despite El Saadawi's struggle against
misappropriation, she presents herself in an image which often
reinforces Western stereotypes about Muslim women. To redress this,
Amireh calls for a new method of reading Muslim women, one which will
investigate how the meanings of their texts are framed and distorted by
the context of reception.

In chapter 9, "Muslim Women: Negotiations in the Third Space," Shahnaz
Khan borrows Homi Bhabha's concept of "hybridized subjectivity in the
third space" to explore the ways in which Muslim women living in North
American diasporic communities create a hybrid form of agency as they
negotiate the intersecting discourses of Islamism, Orientalism, and
multiculturalism which regulate their lives (p. 306). For Karima, an
Arab Muslim who immigrated from Iran, the role of a Muslim woman in
Canada is reduced to the control of her daughters' bodies with no
"spiritual or ritual requirements" (p. 321). The story of the East
Indian Karima, the Lesbian Muslim woman who immigrated from Uganda,
shows that Islamic identity is not monolithic and that Muslim women are
often caught in the double bind to defend Islam against racist
non-Muslims and Muslim women against radical Islam. Khan invites
activists and scholars to view Muslim women "as active agents in the
third space" (p. 332) and Muslim culture "as a multiple, shifting, and
contradictory site" (p. 334).

This book is a brilliant contribution to the fields of postcolonial,
feminist, and Islamic studies. As a part of a graduate student seminar,
this collection will provide a wonderful forum for discussion and
critical analysis. I believe the most original contribution of this work
lies in its relocation of the modernist binarism between Islamic
tradition and Western democracy to the issue of legalistic Islam and the
failure of the modern Islamic state to protect and include its citizens
(including the gendered subaltern) in the political and economic power
structures of the postcolonial nation state. The book is an excellent
extension in postcolonial studies of scholarly works like Mahmood
Mamdani's Subject and Citizen: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of
Late Colonialism (1996).

Note

[1]. Patricia Yaeger, Introduction: Narrating Space: The Geography of
Identity (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1996), p. 18.