Saadia Toor: The fact that the meme of the Muslim woman who must be saved from Islam and Muslim men – through the intervention of a benevolent western state – 11 years after the very real plight of Afghan women was cynically deployed to legitimise a global war, and long after the opportunism of this imperialist feminism was decisively exposed, points to a serious and deep investment in the assumptions that animate these claims. These assumptions come out of a palpable dis-ease with Islam within the liberal mainstream and portions of the Left, a result of the long exposure to Orientalist and Islamophobic discourses.
Within this liberal discourse, secularism is posited as the necessary prerequisite for achieving equal rights for women. Crucially, democracy is often seen as a problem for securing such liberal rights within the Arab/Muslim world. The less-than-enthusiastic support for the Arab Spring by liberals on the basis of a fear that the Muslim Brotherhood would come to power (thereby implying that the human rights/women’s rights record of the regimes they were replacing was somehow better) illustrates the liberal anxiety regarding democracy when it comes to the Arab/Muslim ‘world’ and hints at the historical relationship between women’s movements and authoritarian regimes in the postcolonial period.
Despite the existence of a very real gendered racial project at the heart of the war on terror, and the mainstream acceptance of the violence that it enables on Muslim men in particular and Muslim families/communities in general (since Muslim men do not exist in a vacuum), a new front of international feminists and human rights advocates has emerged to challenge what they see as the international human rights community’s inordinate focus on Muslim men as victims. This focus, they argue, constitutes a betrayal of Muslim women – and of human rights advocates in Muslim communities and countries fighting against Islamic fundamentalism – because it occludes the role of Muslim men (all Muslim men, not specific ones) as perpetrators of violence against (all) Muslim women. And so, in the case of Anwar al-Awlaki, the efforts of the Centre for Constitutional Rights to uphold the constitutional rights of American citizens (leave alone lesser humans) to a fair trial were actually reviled.
Even as the United States officially begins to wind down its war in Afghanistan, the GWoT – recently rebranded as the Overseas Contingency Operation by President Obama – is spreading and intensifying across the ‘Muslim world’, and we can expect to hear further calls for the United States and its allies to save Muslim women. At the same time, we are seeing the mainstreaming and institutionalisation of a gendered anti-Muslim racism within the west, which means that we can also expect to see more of the discourse which pits the rights of Muslim men against those of Muslim women.
All this is not to deny the very real violence and oppression faced by Muslim women, or to deny the Taliban’s violent gender politics. However, it is to caution against seeing Muslim women as exceptional victims (of their culture/religion/men), and to point out both that there are family resemblances between the violence suffered by women across the world and that there is no singular ‘Muslim woman’s experience’. It is to note, as Malalai Joya keeps reminding us, that violence against women in Afghanistan is not the purview of religious forces such as the Taliban; the warlords of the Northern Alliance and the American occupation are also perpetrators. And then there is the structural violence of poverty, which is exacerbated by the long years of war and occupation. More here.