http://www.altmuslimah.com/a/b/a/the_caged_and_the_saved_finding_feminism_in_the_islamic_world/
FEMINISM
The caged and the saved: finding feminism in the Islamic world
BY FAISAL AL YAFAI, JANUARY 11, 2010
Like most ideas, this one did not have a single genesis. I’ve been
thinking, and to some extent writing, about feminism for many years
and in many guises. The word itself is controversial, with some
damning it as the force that destroyed the family and others defending
it as the movement that freed a gender. It is one of those terms that
starts simply and rapidly gets tangled: if you look around the world
and think there are inequalities between the genders, and that those
inequalities are not biological and are unfair, you are probably a
feminist. And that’s where the arguments begin.
But definitions are only useful for what they illuminate, and the
language of feminism, like the languages of democracy or freedom, has
often been used to obscure.
So much of the discourse around the West’s relationship with the
Muslim world has been framed through the language of women.
It was around women that early Christian Europe framed its opposition
to the pleasure palaces of the “Mohammedans”, the barely disguised
yearning for the exoticism of the Orient. The role of women in
Egyptian society was cited by Napoleon as a wedge through which to
enter the country; was cited again as a justification for the
Anglo-American invasions of both Iraq and Afghanistan, and is
regularly cited as apparent evidence of a lack of commitment to equal
rights in Muslim communities.
Within the Muslim world, discourse around women’s roles and rights
remains highly charged. As much as some point to the treatment of
women in Europe as evidence of the vanishing of the West’s moral
compass, it is also the case that, across much of the Muslim world,
women’s dress has become a way to impose a religious vision upon the
society, even as Muslim women use the veil to reclaim their own
identities.
And, still, in too many countries, internal social and cultural wars
are fought on the battleground of women’s bodies.
So the question of what counts as feminism, as liberation, in the Arab
and Islamic worlds is complicated and intricate. To try and answer it,
I am leaving London next week for Beirut, the first stop on a journey
that will take me thousands of kilometres across Arab and Islamic
lands, through Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan and to the very edges of
Indonesia.
Through interviews, experiences and research, I hope to come close to
an answer, and I’ve been immensely privileged to be awarded a
Churchill Fellowship, the living memorial to Britain’s wartime leader,
to fund this exploration.
What do I hope to find? Not easy answers, for sure. Even the idea of
what counts as liberation is mixed.
I have called the introductory chapter of the book I am writing about
this journey “The caged and the saved”, reflecting the two ways people
think of what the Muslim veil does.
In it, I tell an anecdote of encountering these contrasting attitudes
in real life, when, walking around London with a friend, she asked me,
of a woman wearing a Saudi abaya, “How can she think she is liberated
when she dresses like that?” It occurred to me another woman might ask
the same question about the women around her displaying acres of
flesh.
Nor is there a clear dividing line between political and religious
perspectives. Earlier this year in Morocco I interviewed Nadia
Yassine, of the banned Islamist group Al Adl wal Ihsane. As much as
she spoke the language of women’s rights and of female liberation, she
was reluctant to be pigeonholed as a feminist in the western
understanding of the term. Her perspective, she said, stemmed from her
faith. The imam and the activist can sometimes reach the same
conclusions.
Within the Muslim world, as within the West, the idea of what feminism
is, where it comes from, how relevant it is, what form equality ought
to take are real, live debates. They come to us in snatches:
harassment of women on the streets of Cairo, the wearing of trousers
in Sudan, unsegregated university campuses in Saudi Arabia, the
burning of girls’ schools in Pakistan.
And threaded through these snatches are less-regular glimpses of clear
successes: the leadership of women such as Queen Rania, Benazir Bhutto
and Lubna Olayan. And there is the immense lived experience of
millions of women, who assert their own independence daily through
their work, relationships, devotion to their family and faith.
The Arab and Islamic worlds are going through a period of immense
change and the ideology that holds nations and regions together is
altering. The big –isms of the world – nationalism, capitalism,
Islamism – affect women in each country differently.
The outward symbols of faith are obvious illustrations of this, but
the framework of the society is equally important.
The professor in Tehran and the village-woman in Indonesia will not
only dress differently, they may also have different conceptions of
the relationship between men and women. I expect to meet those who
espouse feminism from a purely secular perspective, and those who say
that Islam has provided a clear manifesto for women’s rights.
So I am not setting out with preconceived notions. I don’t begin from
the assumption that one way of living is better than another, nor do I
go in with the assumption that what occurs to one person in one
country is indicative of a nation or a faith. But I do think it is
possible to delineate between ways of organising a society: that if
you look closely enough at a society’s history and people, it is
possible to make fine, sensitive judgements. Though I expect
differences, I also hope for some common ground.
The Arab world is a complex place; nations of Arabic speakers who
think they are one but act like they are many. It is a place that
defies easy categorisation.
I have lived, travelled and reported across many Arab countries over
many years, but there are still times when I come across something –
an event, a conversation – that makes me think I have barely scratched
the surface.
Such has been the case with my conversations about feminism: I’ve
often understood the word in terms of equality of laws, education and
employment. But it is astonishing how varied people’s perceptions are
around the Middle East.
If that is the case with the Arab world, with all its many
commonalities, imagine the complexity of the Islamic worlds that
stretch across Asia and Africa. That’s the reason I have broadened the
journey out to encompass the vast non-Arab Islamic world: the Shia
customs of Iran, the South Asian experience in Pakistan and the newer
Asian traditions in Indonesia.
The exploration of these places will be a key theme, because no idea
lives in isolation; all are shaped by the experience of their
societies. I want to go beyond a purely intellectual discussion to
understand the lived experiences of women in these societies.
I admit there have been times these last few weeks, as I prepare to
leave London and skim through old books on the subject, that I have
wondered if it is perhaps an overwhelming one. I have been incredibly
lucky so far to have friends and colleagues who have helped me get
started – I know I will meet many more over the next few months. What
I don’t know is if I will find any answers, or even if there are any:
that’s why I am going.
(Illustration: Pep Montserrat)
Follow Faisal al Yafai’s journey at faisalalyafai.com. His book will
be published by IB Tauris in 2011. This article originally appeared in
The National on Saturday, January 2, 2010.
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