Feminists and Fundamentalists

What is a 'reactionary' feminist anyway?

A few days ago Naomi Wolf wrote about what was, in her opinion, a weird possibility of Michelle Bachmann becoming the next President of the United States. In a piece on Al Jazeera she categorises both Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann as “America’s Reactionary Feminists”, and recognises that they represent a ‘perfectly legitimate approach to feminism‘.

The second reason that Bachmann and Palin appeal to so many Americans – and this should not be underestimated, either – has to do with a serious historical misreading of feminism. Because feminism in the 1960s and 1970s was articulated via the institutions of the left – in Britain, it was often allied with the labour movement, and in the US, it was reborn in conjunction with the emergence of the New Left – there is an assumption that feminism itself must be leftist. In fact, feminism is philosophically as much in harmony with conservative, and especially libertarian, values – and in some ways even more so.

Wolf realises such a claim may sound absurd to many feminists trained in Western / Euro-centric interpretations of gender theory and feminist movement(s). She warns:

Many of these women are socially conservative, strongly supportive of the armed forces, and religious – and yet they crave equality as strongly as any leftist vegetarian in Birkenstocks. It is blindness to this perfectly legitimate approach to feminism that keeps tripping up commentators who wish to dismiss women like Margaret Thatcher, or Muslim women, or now right-wing US women leaders, as somehow not being the “real thing”.

But these women are real feminists – even if they do not share policy preferences with the already recognised “sisterhood”, and even if they themselves would reject the feminist label. In the case of Palin – and especially that of Bachmann – we ignore the wide appeal of right-wing feminism at our peril.

This got me thinking about right-wing feminism(s) within the Muslim world and more specifically movements such as Al-Huda in Pakistan. What Wolf identifies as “right-wing feminism” in America is a far cry from, say, the politics of women within the right-wing Jamat-e-Islami. In the States this category would constitute

a powerful constituency of right-wing women in Britain and Western Europe, as well as in the US, who do not see their values reflected in collectivist social-policy prescriptions or gender quotas. They prefer what they see as the rugged individualism of free-market forces, a level capitalist playing field, and a weak state that does not impinge on their personal choices.

Contrast this with women’s issues raised in the last decade by Al-Huda or Jamat-e-Islami: more segregated schools for girls, regulating social and cultural life according to Islamic Shariah, negotiating piety in private and public spheres and opposing America’s war in Muslim lands.

What then is “right-wing feminism”?

Who gets to decide what kind of activism is acceptable as feminist?

Conservative feminism in the United States is perhaps as different from conservative feminism in South Asia as it is from third-wave leftist feminism in France. Perhaps leftist anti-war feminists in Europe have more in common with right-wing anti-war Jamat-e-Islami women. Or perhaps not at all.

The point is there is no singular feminism. It is not a thick text-book sitting somewhere that one can access to in any given time or space and make use of established tools and resources to advance women’s rights in one’s immediate sphere. If we can accept that feminism is local to the time, place and people it is borne out of, we should not have a problem accepting that no feminism is, ipso facto, less legitimate than another.

But secular, liberal feminists in Pakistan have repeatedly expressed their repugnance for these Other feminists in their midst. Amina Jamal’s paper “Feminist ‘Selves’ and Feminism’s ‘Others’: Feminist Representations of Jamaat-e-Islami Women in Pakistan” traces how activists from Women’s Action Forum, for example, have dealt with the Jamaati women.

While in the traditional version of Orientalism the veiled Muslim woman is constructed as the oppressed victim of the barbarity of Muslim men and Islamic religion, in the latest construction she is problematized as an enigmatic Other who defiantly negates Western liberal notions about social development and secular modernity. Hence she is seen to mark the emergence of a significant movement of women who espouse many of the goals of ‘women’s rights’ identified by self-defined feminist activists but reject feminist notions of gender equality as contradictory to the teachings of Islam. Their religiously motivated political activism is a problem for Pakistani feminists who insist on the separation of state and religion as a prerequisite for progressive politics.

Indeed some recent scholarship on Islamic women’s activism has attempted to dismantle the constructed opposition between ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ while drawing attention to successful moves by Islamic women’s groups in challenging male domination without renouncing their religious commitment. Najmabadi’s work on Islamic feminist activism in Iran since the 1979 Islamic revolution not only demonstrates a heterogeneity of positions within ‘Islamic feminism’ but also traces the historical roots of the secular/religious dichotomy that divides Iranian women activists. In doing so, Najmabadi contends, Zanan has opened a ‘new space for dialogue’ between Islamic women activists and reformers and secular feminists who had been separated by a 60-year-old rift.

Amina Jamal goes on to say:

The agonistic relationship of Islamization and globalization as well as the transnational human rights activism that emerged in response to contemporary cultural, historical and political conditions, enabled the construction of a feminist internationalist selfhood by organized women in Pakistan that cannot be understood through conventional ideas about universal oppression of women or global sisterhood.

Jamal discusses the engagement of secular, liberal feminists in Pakistan with the Jamaati women in a seminal paper tracing history of women’s movement in Pakistan written by Khawar Mumtaz and F. Shaheed who themselves belong to the former category.

Jamal states that “it was not until 1992 that feminists from the Women’s Action Forum engaged with Jamaati women whom they described at best as an ‘enigma’ for feminists and at worst as simply an ‘adjunct’ of fundamentalist men.”

According to Shaheed and Mumtaz, Jamaat women share some common interests with feminists in Pakistan since they call for increased rights for women in marriage and divorce, end to economic exploitation and elevation of women’s status in society. However, they diverge strongly on the causes of women’s problems since ‘the fundamentalist position’ considers unrestricted social interaction of men and women as the root of all social evils and demands segregation of the sexes in all spheres of social life. Shaheed and Mumtaz (1992: 63) point out that this contrasts with the position of those they described as ‘progressive women’ who believe that women’s social and economic position can be improved only through structural change and challenging the patriarchal structure of the family. Shaheed and Mumtaz try to account for the appeal of ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ among women by reference to the changes in the country’s socio-economic conditions.

In later essays both Shaheed and Mumtaz separately began to deepen their insights regarding the possibility of a gendered consciousness in which women’s relationship with religion could have an independent basis from their relationship with men or the imperatives of adjusting to socio-economic modernity. On the basis of a study conducted in 1994 among urban working and middle class women in Lahore, Shaheed contends that the majority of women’s experiences in Pakistan do not fit into the strain of feminist analysis that views religion as the primary factor in women’s oppression. She charges the Pakistani women’s movement with elitism and failure to engage with religion as a factor in women’s day to day lives.

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Last week, Newsweek Pakistan interviewed Samia Raheel Qazi, daughter of Qazi Hussain who was the former chief of the Jamaat-e-Islami. The interview is quite stellar as it set up to dismantle many assumptions about Jamaati women and their ‘feminism’.

[Note: I use quotes here because the Jamaati women, like Palin and Bachmann, have never self-identified as feminists but have in several forum expressed a concern for gender equality and a struggle for a better society for women to live in.]

Qazi while discussing how she envisions a better Pakistan says:

Pakistan is a little too male dominated. Men need to realize that they require female support in order to strike a balance in society. Men need to cooperate with women. In Pakistan, women need to understand and sacrifice a little more than men in order to attain their rights. Women need to be more educated and they need to understand their status in society. Some women have chained themselves to their homes, which is not right. They should step outside and educate themselves—not just for their own sakes but also for their families. At the same time, women should not ignore their families either. They might have to work a little hard for this balance, but they should not give up.

I understand that her stated opinion in an interview should be taken with a huge dollop of salt and measured against the Jamaat’s history of standing up for women’s place in the public sphere, right to education so on and so forth. I also accept that this may be complete hogwash and her actions could be diametrically opposite of her speech. The truth is I don’t know anything about her apart from this one interview.

My only problem is when scholars like Ayesha Siddiqua refuse to acknowledge even the faintest possibility of Jamaati women exercising their agency and in doing so deny their ability to negotiate their womanhood. Just today, in a convoluted, ignorant and bigoted piece, she writes:

[If we speak about agency of women in Jamat-ud-Dawa and Jamaat-e-Islami we] confuse the power of making a choice with the absence or presence of an environment that constraints free choice. Freedom of thought is seriously constrained when laws, even man-made, seem to have divine sanction. It is very difficult to challenge religious norms or even argue about the possibility of variation in interpreting holy text.

Why is it impossible for Siddiqua to recognise Jamaati women and their discourse as a product of  a rational mind?

Delving deeper into her biases would go beyond the scope of this post and quite frankly, I’m not trained enough in Anthropology to be able to aptly point out all her logical fallacies and ideological limitations. [She misreads and misrepresents Talal Asad!]

Before I entangle myself in further tangents, I’ll end with an excerpt from Saba Mahmood’s field work in her book “Politics of Piety” which is, till date, the most important text on this topic.

In the course of my fieldwork, I had come to spend time with a group of four working women, in their mid to late thirties, working in the public and private sectors of the Egyptian economy. In addition to attending the mosque lessons, the four also met as a group to read and discuss issues of Islamic ethical practice and Quranic exegesis. Given the stringent demands of their desire to abide by high standards of piety placed on them, these women often had to struggle against a secular ethos that permeated their lives and made their realisation of piety somewhat difficult. They often talked about the pressures they faced as working women, which included negotiating close interactions with unrelated male colleagues, riding public transportation in mixed-sex compartments, overhearing conversations (given close proximity of co-workers) that were impious in character or tone, and so on. Often this situation was further compounded by resistance these women encountered in their attempts to live a pious life from their family members – particularly from male members – who were opposed to stringent forms of religious devotion.

When these women met as a group, their discussions often focused on two challenges they constantly had to face in their attempts to maintain a pious lifestyle. One was learning to live amicably with people – both colleagues and immediate kin – who constantly placed them in situations that were far from optimal for the realisation of piety in day to day life. The second challenge was in the internal struggle they had to engage in within themselves in a world that constantly beckoned them to behave in unpious ways.

Like Wolf, I concede that we ignore these women and their struggle to define their womanhood in private and public life, at our own peril.