Tuesday, March 08, 2005
Feminists and Islamists
Kay Hymowitz:
Of course, if the white women would support the white men who save the brown women from the brown men, the whole business of saving people would take less time, cost fewer lives, and in general be a lot less tedious for everybody.
For many years before September 11, 2001 – and much to their credit – Western feminists tried to rouse a sleeping world to the plight of women in increasingly radical Islamic countries. In the US, it was the Feminist Majority that pressured president Bill Clinton to impose sanctions against the woman-hating Taliban regime; it was feminists who first publicised the horror of genital mutilation in Muslim Africa.
But in the months after the attacks on New York and Washington, as Westerners gradually woke to the strange vocabulary that went with jihadism – burkas, veils, honour killings, stonings, forced marriages – feminists went uncharacteristically mum...
Why the relative silence on a subject that would seem to epitomise feminist concerns? Because in the eyes of the sisterhood, worse than stoning women for adultery or forbidding girls to go to school are the policies of white men such as George W. Bush...
As the political origins of today's holiday suggest, feminism has long been entwined with anti-Western, anti-nationalist and especially anti-American feeling. Radical feminists, especially those who congregate in the universities, view everyone in the Islamic world as victims of Western imperialism, exempt from all judgment. Criticism – even of, say, forcing a 13-year-old girl into marriage with her 40-year-old cousin, as is acceptable under strict Islamic law – smacks of "orientalism"; that is, the imposition of a Western value system on Eastern behaviour.
In any event, if Muslim men could be said to oppress their women, it is the fault of Western imperialists or, more specifically, Western men. "When men are traumatised [by colonial rule], they tend to traumatise their own women," says Miriam Cooke, a professor at Duke University in North Carolina. From this vantage point, feminists must condemn not just war in Iraq and Afghanistan but any instances of what Columbia University professor Gayatri Spivak calls "white men saving brown women from brown men".
Of course, if the white women would support the white men who save the brown women from the brown men, the whole business of saving people would take less time, cost fewer lives, and in general be a lot less tedious for everybody.
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