Human Rights: Righting Muslim women

War? What war?

The build-up to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan brought images of burqa- and abaya-clad women to the American TV screen. Suddenly, Muslim women were at the centre of political debate in a country where people have little knowledge about Islam, and Muslim culture remains largely represented by stereotypes such as Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. The Bush Administration used real accounts of the subjugation of Muslim women by the Taliban as instruments of war propaganda meant to justify their expansionist military agenda under the dubious and supposedly noble guise of “liberating” Afghan women.

Few in the Muslim world, least of all women, are strangers to the debilitating cost that these wars have imposed on the struggles of Muslim women. Indeed, these wars have done much to set Muslim women’s struggles for equality back hundreds of years. What Muslim woman will arrange rallies and protests for women’s rights when her house is being bombed and her husband or brother being carried away by US forces?

Despite this, there are people in the American neo-conservative camp who would like to paint themselves as the “great friends and allies” of Muslim women. One of them is Christina Hoff Sommers, a researcher at the neo-conservative think tank The American Enterprise Institute. In a recent essay dramatically titled “The Subjection of Islamic Women And The Fecklessness of US Feminism“, Ms. Sommers takes on the task of telling Muslim women that their real friends are not on the war-opposing American Left, but on the family-loving, morality upholding American Right.

Glossing over the fact that she shares office space with increasingly vocal supporters of “regime change” in Iran, supporters of torture of the prisoners in Guantanamo, and the very architects of the invasion of Iraq, Sommers sets out to convince Muslim women (which she incorrectly and condescendingly refers to as “Islamic” women) that it is in fact not her camp, but rather feminists on the American Left who must be chastised for their pre-occupation with flighty concerns, while Muslim women like Pakistani Minister Zille Huma are paying with their lives in their struggle for women’s equality.

Sommers strategy is simple. Harnessing the reality that Muslim women in countries like Pakistan and Iran are unlikely to sympathise with relatively trivial concerns of Western feminists such as focusing on issues like excessive dieting and plastic surgery, she tries to attract them to the fold of the American Right.

Feminists on the Western Left, Sommers argues, are unconcerned with the plight of their sisters in these foreign countries and uninterested in upholding family values or religious faith – all of which are so important to Muslim women. She capitalises on the dubious reputation of the concept of “feminism” in the Muslim world and, fully aware of the imperialist allusions that accompany the term in post-colonial societies like Pakistan, praises Muslim women for “not waiting for Western feminists to come to their rescue”. Generously patting Muslim women on the back by praising reform initiatives like those headed by the American Society for Muslim Advancement, Sommers imagines her new friends, Muslim women, to be some sort of hapless fools desperately hungry for a few lines of glowing admiration in an American periodical.

And indeed, it is a few lines. For all her sly argumentation and the title of her essay, Sommers spends pathetically little time either quoting Muslim women or the writings of women activists from countries like Pakistan, Iran, and Iraq etc. Only one Muslim woman’s writings (Fatima Mernissi) are quoted in the essay, and Sommers fails to provide even a single quote from women’s rights activists actually working in the Muslim world. The bulk of her essay is devoted to a deconstruction of feminists on the Western Left. Indeed, for all her concern about “Islamic” women, Sommers does not seem to consider them worthy enough to actually incorporate their perspective in any significant way into the debate. Their voices are relegated to the margins of the essay, engaged with only when they support Sommers’ own agenda against Western feminists on the American Left.

It is in this last fact that the biggest caution must be asserted. Arguments like Sommers follow the condescending strategy that na�ve Muslim women, beguiled by all the flattery, will suddenly forget the tragedies unleashed on them by the devastating wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the oppressive tactics of the war against terror.

Her argument erroneously assumes that Muslim women have singular identities interested only in gender equality and unaffected by the ravages of war and persecution. A Pakistani or Iranian woman, struggling for gender equality and against religious extremism, would never support an invasion of her country by neo-conservatives who use “women’s liberation” as an excuse to invade other countries. The fact that the neo-conservative project has imposed this choice on Muslim women – one in which they must either accept the risk of having their struggles for justice and equality be used as war propaganda or remain silent about their suffering – has been a major setback to the cause of women’s rights in the Muslim world. Indeed, any debate on the issue is incomplete without addressing it.

Ultimately, “The Subjection of Islamic Women” is yet another illustration of the American Right’s tendency to use Islam and Muslim women in an argument that has little to do with them. It is obvious, given the time she spends criticising them, that Sommers has serious political misgivings against those on the American Left. Dragging Muslim women into this fight on the back of the premise that Western feminists have not done enough for them seems little more than a ruse to strengthen her own agenda against the American Left.

Rafia Zakaria is associate editor of altmuslim.com and an attorney and member of the Asian American Network Against Abuse of Women.  She teaches courses on constitutional law and political philosophy. This article previously appeared in Daily Times (Pakistan).