The many and different Muslim women’s voices unheard in Feminist theory

Abstract

The instrumental use of Muslim women’s experiences as a symbol and justification for Western countries interventions is not a new business and was not employed for the first time in the post September 11th “war on terror” campaigns. Indeed, the production of stereotypes of Muslim women in political platforms can be tracked back to different colonial enterprises. Clearly, as Lughod (2002) has highlighted, the consistent resort to a cultural framing through the equation women/religion/suffering has always been a tool to hide political and economic interests and consequently to bury more complex political and historical developments. In the academic sphere, debates on Muslim women also widened. However, as Lila Abu-Lughod (2002) contended, the efforts were almost put solely on denouncing the great violent and oppressive contexts where those women were living under the barbaric violations perpetrated to them by Islamist movements. Otherwise, if a scholar tried to problematize the cultural framing of Muslim women’s questions, she (or he) would very likely be accused of cultural relativism (Lughod, 2002).

Therefore, a sole and unproblematic focus on the suffering of Muslim women is not only futile, but also contributes to reify the old Orientalist perceptions on Islam and Muslim women, and to provide intellectual foundations for Western imperialist wars. The objective of this article, on the contrary, is to raise another set of questions, which I believe to be more urgent. These questions aim at both unpacking Muslim women as a discursive category, and understanding the major challenges their experiences impose on secular feminist conceptions of agency. I contend that addressing these questions is more urgent for different reasons. Firstly, I argue vigorously that apart from the obsessive and somehow blind criticism that religion is inherently patriarchal and consequently oppressive to women, scholarship especially from within feminist theory remained oblivious to a more systematic and self-reflexive engagement with religion and Muslim women. In addition, I argue that surprisingly, even in a period of post-Orientalist deconstruction, which supposedly would have already dismissed those essentialist and repressive accounts of Muslim women and Islam, subtle but very important remnants can still be found on the so called “corrective” postcolonial feminist scholarship on Muslim women.

Indeed, there is a plurality of work on Muslim women in the social sciences. However, they are scattered and apparently separated by their own agendas and claims, with very few attempts at dialogue or debate. Hence, a systematic account of this diversity has been missing, one which could provide an up to date appraisal of the state of scholarship and activism on Muslim women, and build a firm foundation for advancing knowledge both of the subject itself and on interdisciplinary efforts like the one I advance here. Therefore, while doing a systematic and critical literature review, oriented specifically by an interdisciplinary approach, I expect this article to fill part of this gap and raise crucial questions in order to build knowledge of the intersection between Muslim women’s studies and feminist theory. It is here where more research is certainly needed in order to reduce the gulf that exists between both areas.

The introduction of this article outlines briefly the ways through which Muslim women have been approached as a discursive category, constructing stereotypes of Muslim women in political platforms, as well as on the academic stage. Politically, the production of stereotypes can be tracked back to different colonial enterprises and more recently to the interventions by Western countries that comprised the “war on terror” campaign. On the academic stage, these stereotypes were reproduced in the sole efforts to denounce the great violent and oppressive contexts where those women are living, as previously mentioned.

The first section is concerned with the exclusion of religion and more specifically of Muslim women’s experiences from history and feminist knowledge production, including IR feminist studies. I acknowledge that the ontological and epistemological openness in feminist and gender studies in international relations and other areas ensured the recognition of the existence of differences and of multiple “layers” of identities which affect sexed bodies in distinct ways. These were crucial to challenge Eurocentric narratives as the only legitimate source of knowledge production. However, I put forward in this section that despite a greater plurality in feminist studies, there is still a silence from feminist theorists regarding religious women’s experiences, and hence, the importance of religion to women (Salem, 2013). Using the work of Phyllis Mack (2003) I argue that one of the reasons for this gap resides in the metanarrative of secularization, which is the basis of secular feminist scholarship. Within this analytical framework, I analyse how the conceptions of agency and emancipation underlying the different strands of secular feminism are limiting to the different voices and experiences of Muslim women. 

The second section addresses the challenges Islamic feminism imposes to feminist notions of agency. As religion is seen as inherently patriarchal and oppressive to women, Islamic feminism or any other effort to pursue gender equality from within an Islamic framework would be taken as contradictory or incompatible. By locating the struggle within a religious framework, and at the same time claiming for the existence of what seems to be the untouchable foundations of Islam, Islamic feminists are cast away from secular feminisms. I argue that those experiences of activists and scholars make serious challenges to the notions of agency based on rationality and secularity as the only pillars whereby women can struggle for and reach gender equality. As a result, Islamic feminism(s)’s experiences also help to unsettle and complicate some binaries which feminist theory has been contributing to reify, such as secular/spiritual; reason/obscurantism; science/religion; freedom/oppression; modern/backward.

In the third section, the article discusses some of the piety women’s movements anchored on Saba Mahmood’s work on pietistic agency, firstly in order to highlight the inability of most feminist scholarship in capturing the diversity of Muslim women’s voices; second to denounce the perilous nature of encapsulating women’s agency solely within “the entelechy of liberatory politics”. These movements advance very different agendas and orientations from the Islamic feminist ones. Those agendas are precisely what denounce the subtle but very important remnants of Orientalist assumptions, particularly its adherence to secular-liberal values, and the teleological conceptions of modernity (Lakhani, 2008).

I conclude the article arguing that rather than neglecting the important achievements feminism promoted in the lives of women in different parts of the world, the main intention of this work was to provincialize (to borrow the expression from Chakrabarty) the secular and liberal accounts of agency, feminism, empowerment, freedom and so on, locating them in the historical, political and cultural context that produced the desires that animate them.