The article below speaks to a recent posting and commentary on this list
on, as they say, "many levels".
FC
The Subjection of Islamic Women and the fecklessness of American feminism.
by Christina Hoff Sommers
05/21/2007, Volume 012, Issue 34, Weekly Standard Magazine
The subjection of women in Muslim societies--especially in Arab nations and
in Iran--is today very much in the public eye. Accounts of lashings,
stonings, and honor killings are regularly in the news, and searing memoirs
by Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Azar Nafisi have become major best-sellers. One
might expect that by now American feminist groups would be organizing
protests against such glaring injustices, joining forces with the valiant
Muslim women who are working to change their societies. This is not happening.
If you go to the websites of major women's groups, such as the National
Organization for Women, the Ms. Foundation for Women, and the National
Council for Research on Women, or to women's centers at our major colleges
and universities, you'll find them caught up with entirely other issues,
seldom mentioning women in Islam. During the 1980s, there were massive
demonstrations on American campuses against racial apartheid in South
Africa. There is no remotely comparable movement on today's campuses
against the gender apartheid prevalent in large parts of the world.
It is not that American feminists are indifferent to the predicament of
Muslim women. Nor do they completely ignore it. For a brief period before
September 11, 2001, many women's groups protested the brutalities of the
Taliban. But they have never organized a full-scale mobilization against
gender oppression in the Muslim world. The condition of Muslim women may be
the most pressing women's issue of our age, but for many contemporary
American feminists it is not a high priority. Why not?
The reasons are rooted in the worldview of the women who shape the concerns
and activities of contemporary American feminism. That worldview is--by
tendency and sometimes emphatically--antagonistic toward the United States,
agnostic about marriage and family, hostile to traditional religion, and
wary of femininity. The contrast with Islamic feminism could hardly be
greater.
Writing in the New Republic in 1999, philosopher Martha Nussbaum noted with
disapproval that "feminist theory pays relatively little attention to the
struggles of women outside the United States." Too many fashionable gender
theorists, she said, have lost their dedication to the public good. Their
"hip quietism . . . collaborates with evil."
This was a frontal assault, and prominent academic feminists chastised
Nussbaum in the letters column. Joan Scott of the Institute for Advanced
Study in Princeton pointed out the dangers of Nussbaum's "good versus evil
scheme." Wrote Scott, "When Robespierre or the Ayatollahs or Ken Starr seek
to impose their vision of the 'good' on the rest of society, reigns of
terror follow and democratic politics are undermined." Gayatri Spivak, a
professor of comparative literature at Columbia, accused Nussbaum of "flag
waving" and of being on a "civilizing mission." None of the letter writers
addressed her core complaint: Too few feminist theorists are showing
concern for the millions of women trapped in blatantly misogynist cultures
outside the United States.
One reason is that many feminists are tied up in knots by multiculturalism
and find it very hard to pass judgment on non-Western cultures. They are
far more comfortable finding fault with American society for minor
inequities (the exclusion of women from the Augusta National Golf Club, the
"underrepresentation" of women on faculties of engineering) than
criticizing heinous practices beyond our shores. The occasional feminist
scholar who takes the women's movement to task for neglecting the plight of
foreigners is ignored or ruled out of order.
Take psychology professor Phyllis Chesler. She has been a tireless and
eloquent champion of the rights of women for more than four decades. Unlike
her tongue-tied colleagues in the academy, she does not hesitate to speak
out against Muslim mistreatment of women. In a recent book, The Death of
Feminism, she attributes the feminist establishment's unwillingness to take
on Islamic sexism to its support of "an isolationist and America-blaming
position." She faults it for "embracing an anti-Americanism that is toxic,
heartless, mindless and suicidal." The sisterhood has rewarded her with
excommunication. A 2006 profile in the Village Voice reports that, among
academic feminists, "Chesler arouses the vitriol reserved for traitors."
But Chesler is right. In the literature of women's studies, the United
States is routinely portrayed as if it were just as oppressive as any
country in the developing world. Here is a typical example of what one
finds in popular women's studies textbooks (from Women: A Feminist
Perspective, now in its fifth edition):
The word "terrorism" invokes images of furtive organizations. . . . But
there is a different kind of terrorism, one that so pervades our culture
that we have learned to live with it as though it were the natural order of
things. Its target is females--of all ages, races, and classes. It is the
common characteristic of rape, wife battery, incest, pornography,
harassment. . . . I call it "sexual terrorism."
The primary focus is on the "terror" at home. Katha Pollitt, a columnist at
the Nation, talks of "the common thread of misogyny" connecting Christian
Evangelicals to the Taliban:
It is important to remember just how barbarous and cruel the Taliban were.
Yet it is also important not to use their example to obscure or deny the
common thread of misogyny that connects them with Focus on the Family and
the Christian Coalition. . . .
In a similar vein, journalist Barbara Ehrenreich characterizes Christian
evangelical movements as "Christian Wahhabism," using the name of the sect
that is the state religion of Saudi Arabia and the inspiration for Osama
bin Laden. Eve Ensler, lionized author of The Vagina Monologues, makes the
same point somewhat differently in her popular lecture "Afghanistan is
Everywhere":
We all have different forms of enforced burqas. Every culture has it.
Whether it's an idea or a fascist tyranny of what women are supposed to
look like--so that women go to the extremes of liposuction, anorexia and
bulimia to achieve it--or whether it's being covered in a burqa, we all
have deep, profound, ongoing daily forms of oppression.
On most American campuses there are small coteries of self-described
"vagina warriors" looking for ways to expose and make much of the ravages
of patriarchy. Feminists like Pollitt, Ehrenreich, and Ensler can cite
several decades of women's studies research supporting the charge that our
culture is ruinous for women. Many scholars--including Camille Paglia,
Daphne Patai, Noretta Koertge, Diana Furchtgott-Roth, Christine Rosen, and
myself--have questioned the quality of the findings and warned that the
studies are twisted and unreliable. But academic feminists rarely engage
with such criticism. They dismiss it as "backlash."
Soon after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Katha Pollitt wrote the introduction
to a book called Nothing Sacred: Women Respond to Religious Fundamentalism
and Terror. It aimed to show that reactionary religious movements
everywhere are targeting women. Says Pollitt:
In Bangladesh, Muslim fanatics throw acid in the faces of unveiled women;
in Nigeria, newly established shariah courts condemn women to death by
stoning for having sex outside of wedlock. . . . In the United States,
Protestant evangelicals and fundamentalists have forged a powerful
right-wing political movement focused on banning abortion, stigmatizing
homosexuality and limiting young people's access to accurate information
about sex.
Pollitt casually places "limiting young people's access to accurate
information about sex" and opposing abortion on the same plane as throwing
acid in women's faces and stoning them to death. Her hostility to the
United States renders her incapable of distinguishing between private
American groups that stigmatize gays and foreign governments that hang
them. She has embraced a feminist philosophy that collapses moral
categories in ways that defy logic, common sense, and basic decency.
Eve Ensler takes this line of reasoning to equally ludicrous lengths. In
2003 she gave a lecture at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University in
which, like Pollitt, she claimed that women everywhere are oppressed and
subordinate:
I think that the oppression of women is universal. I think we are bonded in
every single place of the world. I think the conditions are exactly the
same [her emphasis]. I think the nature of the oppression--whether it's
acid burning in one country, or female genital mutilation in another, or
gang rapes in the parking lots in high schools of the suburbs--it's the
same idea. . . . The systematic global oppression of women is completely
across the globe.
Though Ensler's perspective is warped, her courage and desire to help are
commendable. She went to Afghanistan during the reign of the Taliban and
smuggled out now-famous footage of a terrified woman in a burqa being
executed at close range by a man with an AK-47. Ensler has firsthand
knowledge of the unique horrors of Islamic gender fascism. But her
"feminist theory" obliterates distinctions between what goes on in
Afghanistan and what goes on in Beverly Hills:
I went from Beverly Hills where women were getting vaginal laser
rejuvenation surgery--paying four thousand dollars to get their labias
trimmed to make them symmetrical because they didn't like the imbalance.
And I flew to Kenya where [women were working to stop] the practice of
female genital mutilation. And I said to myself, "What is wrong with this
picture?"
A better question is: What is wrong with Eve Ensler? These two surgical
phenomena are completely different in both scale and purpose. The number of
American women who undergo "vaginal labial rejuvenation" is minuscule:
There were 793 such procedures in 2005, according to the American Society
of Plastic Surgeons. By contrast, a World Health Organization 2000 fact
sheet reports: "Today, the number of girls and women who have undergone
female genital mutilation is estimated at between 100 and 140 million. It
is estimated that each year, a further 2 million girls are at risk of
undergoing FGM."
The women who elect laser surgery, moreover, are voluntarily seeking relief
from physical irregularities that cause them embarrassment or inhibit their
sexual enjoyment. The practitioners of genital mutilation, in countries
such as Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia, believe that removing
sensitive parts of the anatomy is the best way to control young women's
sexual urges and assure chastity. Genital cutting causes great pain and
suffering and often permanently impairs a female's capacity for sexual
pleasure. Thus, the intentions of the handful of American adults who choose
labial surgery for themselves are exactly the opposite of those of the
African parents and elders who insist on cutting the genitals of millions
of girls.
Given her capacity for conceptual confusion, it is perhaps not surprising
that Ensler cites "gang rape in a suburban high school parking lot" to show
how women in America are menaced. Yes, that is an atrocity. But it happens
rarely, and America's allegedly "misogynist" culture reacts to it with
revulsion and severe punishments.
Happily, not all women's groups follow the lead of the Enslers, the
Pollitts, and the women's studies theorists. The Feminist Majority
Foundation (FMF) has been intelligently fighting the mistreatment of women
in the Muslim world for several years. In 1997, in a heroic effort to
expose the crimes of the Taliban, Eleanor Smeal, the president of FMF, with
the help of Mavis and Jay Leno, created a vital national campaign complete
with rallies, petitions, and fundraisers. It was a good example of what can
be achieved when a women's group seriously seeks to address the
mistreatment of women outside the United States. The FMF, working with
human rights groups, helped to persuade the United States and the United
Nations to deny formal recognition to the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. It
helped convince the oil company UNOCAL not to build a pipeline across
Afghanistan, and it brought the oppression of women living under radical
Islamic law into clear relief for all the world to see.
But Smeal and her organization soon found themselves attacked by the same
monitors of rectitude who disparaged Martha Nussbaum. Ann Russo, director
of women's and gender studies at Chicago's DePaul University (writing in
the International Feminist Journal of Politics), accused the FMF of
practicing a kind of "imperial feminism." Said Russo:
The FMF's campaign narrative is one of colonialist protection rather than
of solidarity. . . . [It] capitalizes on the images of prominent white
Western women, like Mavis Leno, Eleanor Smeal and other women politicians
and celebrity figures, who construct themselves as "free" and "liberated"
and thus in the best position to "save" Afghan women.
Today, the Feminist Majority Foundation continues to support Muslim women
around the world, but the effort has lost much of its momentum. Most of the
foundation's current work is directed against what it perceives as
injustices suffered by women in America.
On February 20, 2007, a Pakistani women's rights activist and provincial
minister for social welfare, Zilla Huma Usman, was shot to death by a
Muslim fanatic for not wearing a veil. And he had a second reason for
killing her: She had encouraged girls in her community to take part in
outdoor sports. The plight of women like Usman does not figure in NOW's
"Six Priority Items," although Global Feminism is one of the 19 subjects it
designates as "Other Important Issues." NOW hardly mentions Muslim women,
except in the context of the demand that the U.S. military withdraw from
Iraq. So what sort of issue does the flagship feminist organization
consider important?
NOW has just launched a 2007 "Love Your Body" calendar as part of its
ongoing initiative of the same name. The body calendar warns of an increase
in eating disorders and includes a photograph celebrating the shape of
pears. There is also an image of the Statue of Liberty with the caption,
"Give me your curves, your wrinkles, your natural beauty yearning to
breathe free." The calendar bears these inspiring words: "None of us is
free until we are all free."
To breathe free, college women are encouraged to organize "Love Your Body"
evenings. NOW suggests they host "Indulgence" parties: "Invite friends over
and encourage them to wear whatever makes them feel good--sweat suits, flip
flops, pajamas--and serve delicious, decadent foods or silly snacks without
the guilt. Urge everyone to come prepared to talk about their feelings and
experiences."
This is pathetic. To be sure, serious eating disorders afflict a small
percentage of women. But much larger numbers suffer because poor eating
habits and inactivity render them overweight, even obese. NOW should not be
encouraging college girls to indulge themselves in ways detrimental to
their well-being. Nor should it be using the language of human rights in
discussing the weight problems of American women.
The inability to make simple distinctions shows up everywhere in
contemporary feminist thinking. The Penguin Atlas of Women in the World,
edited by geographer Joni Seager, is a staple in women's studies classes in
universities. It was named "Reference Book of the Year" by the American
Library Association and has received other awards. Seager, formerly a
professor of women's studies and chair of geography at the University of
Vermont, is now dean of environmental studies at York University in
Toronto. Her atlas, a series of color-coded maps and charts, documents the
status of women, highlighting the countries where women are most at risk
for poverty, illiteracy, and oppression.
One map shows how women are kept "in their place" by restrictions on their
mobility, dress, and behavior. Somehow the United States comes out looking
as bad in this respect as Uganda: Both countries are shaded dark yellow, to
signify extremely high levels of restriction. Seager explains that in parts
of Uganda, a man can claim an unmarried woman for his wife by raping her.
The United States gets the same rating because, Seager says, "state
legislators enacted 301 anti-abortion measures between 1995 and 2001."
Never mind that the Ugandan practice is barbaric, while the activism
surrounding abortion in the United States is a sign of a contentious and
free democracy working out its disagreements. Besides which, Seager's
categories obscure the fact that in Uganda, abortion is illegal and "unsafe
abortion is the leading cause of maternal mortality" (so states a 2005
report by the Gutt macher Institute), while American abortion law, even
after the recent adoption of state regulations, is generally considered
among the most liberal of any nation.
On another map the United States gets the same rating for domestic violence
as Pakistan. Seager reports that in the United States, "22 percent-35
percent of women who seek emergency medical assistance at hospital are
there for reasons of domestic violence." Wrong. She apparently misread a
Justice Department study showing that 22 percent-35 percent of women who go
to hospitals because of violent attacks are there for reasons of domestic
violence. When this correction is made, the figure for domestic-violence
victims in emergency rooms drops to a fraction of 1 percent. Why would
Seager so uncritically seize on a dubious statistic? Like many academic
feminists, she is eager to show that American women live under an
intimidating system of "patriarchal authority" that is comparable to those
found in many less developed countries. Never mind that this is wildly false.
Hard-line feminists such as Seager, Pollitt, Ensler, the university gender
theorists, and the NOW activists represent the views of only a tiny
fraction of American women. Even among women who identify themselves as
feminists (about 25 percent), they are at the radical extreme. But in the
academy and in most of the major women's organizations, the extreme is the
mean. The hard-liners set the tone and shape the discussion. This is a sad
state of affairs. Muslim women could use moral, intellectual, and material
support from the West to improve their situation. But only a rational,
reality-based women's movement would be capable of actually helping. Women
who think that looking like a pear is an essential human right are not
valuable allies.
The good news is that Muslim women are not waiting around for Western
feminists to rescue them. "Feminists in the West may fiddle while Muslim
women are burning," wrote Manhattan Institute scholar Kay Hymowitz in a
prescient 2003 essay, "but in the Muslim world itself there is a burgeoning
movement to address the miserable predicament of the second sex." The
number of valiant and resourceful Muslim women who are devoting themselves
to the cause of greater freedom grows each and every day.
They have a heritage to build on. There have been organized women's
movements in countries such as Iran, Lebanon, and Egypt for more than a
century. And many women in Turkey, Morocco, and Tunisia already enjoy
almost Western levels of freedom. But as radical Islam tightens its grip in
places like Iran and rural Pakistan, and as it increasingly threatens
Muslim women everywhere, even some devoutly religious women are quietly
organizing to resist. Mehrangiz Kar, an Iranian human rights lawyer, now a
researcher at Harvard Law School, predicts that "a feminist explosion is
well on its way."
Islamic feminists believe that women's rights are compatible with Islam
rightly understood. One of their central projects is progressive religious
reform. Through careful translation and interpretation of the Koran and
other sacred texts, scholars challenge interpretations that have been used
to justify sexist customs. They point out that forced veiling, arranged
marriages, and genital cutting are rooted in tribal paganism and are
nowhere enjoined by the Koran. Where the Koran explicitly permits a
practice such as the physical chastisement of wives by husbands, the
feminist exegetes try to show that, like slavery, the practice is
anachronistic and incompatible with the true spirit of the faith. This kind
of interpretation of scripture has been practiced by Jewish, Christian, and
Islamic scholars for centuries. Now Islamic women want to play a part in
it, and nothing in Islamic law, they believe, prohibits their doing so.
This past November more than 100 Muslim lawyers, scholars, and activists
from 25 countries gathered in New York City for the express purpose of
supporting the modernization of Islamic jurisprudence and reviving the
spirit of ijtihad, a once vibrant Islamic tradition of independent thinking
and reasoning about sacred texts. The organizing group, the Women's Islamic
Initiative in Spirituality and Equity (WISE), plans to launch an
international shura, a consultative council of Muslim women leaders who
will advise religious and political leaders on women's issues. They are
also establishing a scholarship fund for the training of gifted female
students to become Koranic scholars, or muftia. These women would be
licensed to render fatwas, religious judgments that, while nonbinding,
drive custom and practice in Islamic societies.
The WISE participants were a who's who of Muslim women lawyers, writers,
and rights advocates. Perhaps the most affecting speaker was Mukhtar Mai.
She is the Pakistani woman who, in 2002, was gang-raped by four men because
of crimes allegedly committed by her brother. After the rape, which was
sanctioned by an all-male village council, Mukhtar Mai was expected to
preserve the "honor" of her family by killing herself. Instead, she and her
family went to the police, even at the risk of being charged for the
"crime" of being raped. A local imam, outraged by her treatment, denounced
the attack in his Friday sermon. Reporters soon appeared, and Mukhtar's
case became a cause célèbre.
The conference participants varied widely in their politics and their
relation to Islam. Unlike the present American feminist movement, which has
no place for traditionally religious women, Islamic feminism is inclusive.
Some of its proponents wear the veil, others oppose it. Some want
egalitarian mosques, others don't mind traditional arrangements where men
and women are separated. Even a few non-Muslims were present. What unites
them in feminism is their commitment to the universal dignity of women.
They are all vehemently opposed to such practices as forced marriages,
honor killings, genital cutting, child marriage, and wife-beating. They are
passionately dedicated to the educational, economic, legal, and political
advancement of women.
The feminism that is quietly surging in the Muslim world is quite different
from its contemporary counterpart in the United States. Islamic feminism is
faith-based, family-centered, and well-disposed towards men. This is
feminism in its classic and most effective form, as students of women's
emancipation know. American women won the vote in the early 20th century
through the combined forces of progressivism and conservatism. Radical
thinkers like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Victoria Woodhull, and Alice Paul
played an indispensable role, but it was traditionalists like Frances
Willard (president of the Women's Christian Temperance Union) and Carrie
Chapman Catt (founder of the League of Women Voters) who brought the cause
of women's suffrage into the mainstream.
In particular, Frances Willard--today an almost forgotten figure--was
beloved and immensely famous at the time of her death in 1898. She had a
gift for reaching out to devoutly religious women and showing them how
political equality was consistent with piety. This moved men too. She was
critical in turning the once elite suffrage movement into a groundswell.
Today's feminists have anathematized Willard because she held two
conventional views they find intolerable: She regarded "womanliness" as a
virtue and a source of strength, power, and beauty, not as a socially
constructed domestic prison; and she advanced women's rights within, not in
opposition to, the framework of traditional religion. These two traits are
precisely the ones that gave Willard mass appeal in her own day and that
make her philosophy relevant to women struggling for their rights inside
highly traditional Islamic societies.
In Search of Islamic Feminism, a 1998 book by University of Texas Middle
Eastern studies professor Elizabeth Warnock Fernea, offers a rare glimpse
of Muslim women activists. In Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Turkey,
and Iraq, Fernea kept encountering what she calls "family feminism."
Several of the women she interviewed reject what they see as divisiveness
in today's American feminism. As one Iraqi women's advocate, Haifa Abdul
Rahman, told her, "We see feminism in America as dividing women from men,
separating women from the family. This is bad for everyone." Fernea was not
only struck by the family orientation of the women she encountered, she was
also awed by their feminine graciousness. The Italian novelist and essayist
Italo Calvino once made a list of requirements for a successful liberation
movement. Almost as an afterthought, he added, "There must also be beauty."
There is beauty in Islamic feminism.
Islamic feminism has some celebrated adherents, among them the Moroccan
sociologist Fatima Mernissi, the Iranian Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, and
the Canadian journalist and human rights activist Irshad Manji. In her 2004
feminist manifesto, The Trouble with Islam Today, Manji writes, "We Muslims
. . . are in crisis and we are dragging the rest of the world with us. If
ever there was a moment for an Islamic reformation, it's now."
Manji is right: In particular, a feminist reformation could be as dangerous
to the dreams of the jihadists as any military assault by the West. After
all, the oppression of women is not an incidental feature of the societies
that foster terrorism. It is a linchpin of the system of social control
that the jihadists are fighting to impose worldwide. Women's equality is as
incompatible with radical Islam's plan for domination and submission as it
is with polygamy. Women freely moving about, expressing their opinions, and
negotiating their relationships with men from a position of equal dignity
rather than servitude are a moderating, civilizing force in any society.
Female scholars voicing their opinions without inhibition would certainly
puncture some cherished jihadist fantasies.
Is an Islamic feminist reformation a realistic hope? In the last speech of
her life, in 1906, American feminist pioneer Susan B. Anthony famously told
her audience, "Failure is impossible." Anthony, however, was formed by and
worked within a liberal democracy founded on the proposition that all men
are created equal. Even when the American women's movement was at its most
controversial in the 19th and early 20th centuries, its exponents, with few
exceptions, risked only ridicule or shunning. Today's Muslim feminists face
imprisonment, lashing, disfigurement, and murder. The leader of the radical
wing of the 19th-century American women's movement, Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
was a religious skeptic and harshly critical of sexism in the Bible. Her
views were met by social antagonism and stern disapproval from more
conservative feminists--all of it civil and peaceable. Stanton's
present-day counterpart, Somali-born Dutch author Ayaan Hirsi Ali (now my
colleague at the American Enterprise Institute), is a religious skeptic who
is harshly critical of sexism in the Koran. Her views are met by violence
and death threats from Muslim fanatics. She has to be escorted by bodyguards.
Success, then, is not certain. Yet there are many hopeful signs. Experience
in Morocco, Tunisia, and Turkey is encouraging. Groups like WISE are
holding up a new image of female piety that does not require silence,
powerlessness, and second-class citizenship. And individual women such as
Pakistan's Mukhtar Mai, Morocco's Fatima Mernissi, Iran's Shirin Ebadi,
Canada's Irshad Manji, and Holland's Ayaan Hirsi Ali are offering the world
profiles in astonishing courage and grace. Their example may prove as
infectious as it is inspiring. Radical Islam does indeed pose an extreme
challenge to the cause of women's rights--but these wise and brave women
pose a devastating and unexpected challenge to radical Islam.
I asked Daisy Kahn, executive director of the American Society for Muslim
Advancement and organizer of the WISE conference, how Americans can help.
Her answer was simple: "Support us. Embrace our struggle." That is already
happening, though mostly outside feminist circles. There are scores of
independent organizations--groups like Freedom House, Global Giving, the
Independent Women's Forum, Project Ijtihad, Equality Now, and the
Initiative for Inclusive Security--that have begun to work in effective
ways to support Muslim women. Such groups, both liberal and conservative,
may not identify themselves as feminist, but they embody the ideals and
principles of the classical, humane feminism of Stanton, Anthony, and Willard.
Those "First Wave" reformers made history. Their classical "equity"
feminism was predominant in the United States long before the current band
of activists and theorists transformed and debased it beyond recognition.
Their understanding of equality was never at war with femininity, never at
war with men, or with family, or with logic or common sense. It is alive
again in Islamic feminism.
The women who constitute the American feminist establishment today are
destined to play little role in the battle for Muslim women's rights.
Preoccupied with their own imagined oppression, they can be of little help
to others--especially family-centered Islamic feminists. The Katha Pollitts
and Eve Enslers, the vagina warriors and university gender theorists--these
are women who cannot distinguish between free and unfree societies, between
the Taliban and the Promise Keepers, between being forced to wear a veil
and being socially pressured to be slender and fit. Their moral obtuseness
leads many of them to regard helping Muslim women as "colonialist" or as
part of a "hegemonic" "civilizing mission." It disqualifies them as
participants in this moral fight.
In reality, of course, it is the Islamic feminists themselves who are on a
civilizing mission--one that is vital to their own welfare and to the
welfare of an anxious world. A reviewer of Irshad Manji's manifesto
celebrating Islamic feminism aptly remarked, "This could be Osama bin
Laden's worst nightmare." Ipso facto, it should be our fondest dream. And
if, along the way, Islamic feminism were to have a wholesome influence on
American feminism, so much the better.
Christina Hoff Sommers, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise
Institute, is the author of The War Against Boys and coauthor of One Nation
Under Therapy.
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