Islam Vs. Feminism

Feminism as Cultural Imperialism

Feminism has long been a favorite weapon in the arsenal of the colonialist powers. The colonialists used feminism in order to berate the cultures of the lands they governed, to win local support for Europeanization, and to provide moral justification for imperialism.26

Islam was very poorly understood by Europeans prior to the twentieth century. The misunderstandings had been entrenched since the crusades when a disinformation campaign was employed to bolster the war effort. One of the aspects of this campaign concerned gender in Islam. Islam was condemned because of polygamy, sensuality, and what it was thought, the imprisonment of women behind the veil. Even in the eighteenth century many Europeans believed that Islam teaches that women have no souls.

During the nineteenth century, the European colonialist powers, particularly the English, built upon these common misunderstandings to justify a program for the eradication of Muslim culture. Victorian anthropology contributed to the idea that the culmination of human evolution was to be found in England, and that it was therefore natural and filling for the British to rule over other peoples. At the same time, a vocal feminist movement was emerging in England itself. The colonialists made use of the arguments of English feminists in their own rhetoric to claim that because Muslims oppressed their women, their mores had to be replaced by 'civilized' European mores. Colonial feminism was thus used against other cultures in the service of colonial rule, particularly against Muslim cultures, but in different variations it was also used against local cultures in India and Africa. The colonialists argued that the fundamental reason for the comprehensive backwardness of Muslim societies was the prevalence of Islamic customs pertaining to women. The veil became the symbol for the degradation of women and chief target of colonialist propaganda. In order for Muslim societies to progress toward civilization, the women in these societies would have to learn to dress and behave like European women.

Evelyn Baring, the 1st Earl of Cromer, was the British consul-general of Egypt from 1882 to 1907, and he made frequent use of feminist arguments in his attacks against Islam, claiming that Islam degraded women while Christianity elevated them, yet in England Cromer was a founding member and a president of the Men's League for Opposing Women's Suffrage! Prominent in his statements about Egypt was that only by abandoning the veil could Egypt reap the benefits of the introduction of Western civilization brought by the colonialists.27

Christian missionaries also focused on the role of women in Islamic societies to justify claims of the superiority of the Christian religion and the need for missionary activities in Muslim lands under the protection, of course, of colonialist military prowess.

In addition to colonialist rulers and missionaries. Western feminists also propagated the idea that Islamic precepts pertaining to women should be abandoned. Leila Ahmed states:

Others besides officials and missionaries similarly promoted these ideas, individuals resident in Egypt, for example. Well-meaning European feminists, such as Euggnie Le Brun (who took the young Huda Sha'rawi

under her wing), earnestly inducted young Muslim women into the European understanding of the meaning of the veil and the need to cast it off as the essential first step in the struggle for female liberation.28

The legacy of colonialist feminism persisted through the neo- colonialist period to the present. Western feminists continue to criticize Muslim societies with special attention given to the veil, which is still seen by feminists as the symbol of the suppression of women by Islamic patriarchy.

Colonialist feminism was also accepted by members of the upper classes in Muslim societies who adopted Western modes of dress, manners, home decor, and intellectual fashions. The first feminists from the indigenous populations of colonialized countries were those of the upper classes who were educated in Europe or European schools.

Nationalist leaders in Muslim countries, such as Ataturk (in Turkey) and Reza Shah (in Iran), were the next to adopt the rhetoric of colonialist feminism as part of their programs of modernization. They were in basic agreement with to sort of values and world view held by the colonialists. They also agreed with the colonialists that their own cultures had to be reformed to come up to the standards of European civilization. Their only difference with the colonialists was that they wanted to direct the program of modernization themselves. They would not allow Europeans to govern their countries, but they themselves would govern their countries as the Europeans would, or perhaps even more ruthlessly. The values and fashions learned from the colonialists by the upper classes were to be imposed on the society as a whole. The most striking symbol of this was the attempt to outlaw traditional Islamic modes of dress.

In 1936, Reza Shah declared what he called the emancipation of women and made women's Islamic covering illegal. In 1963, women were granted the right to vote, and in the so-called Family Protection Act, polygamy was made illegal and women were given custody of their children in case of divorce. The Family Protection Act was revoked after the victory of the Islamic Revolution of Iran, when this law and many of the other measures introduced by feminists were denounced along with the rest of the colonialist legacy as contrary to the aims of Islam.

The connection between feminism and cultural imperialism is clearly indicated by Sachiko Murata:

It seems to me that feminists who have criticized various aspects of Islam or Islamic society base their positions upon a worldview radically alien to the Islamic world-view. Their critique typically takes a moral stance. They ask for reform, whether explicitly or implicitly. The reform they have in view is of the standard modern Western type. Among other things, this means that there is an abstract ideal, thought up by us or by our leader, which has to be imposed by overthrowing the old order. This reform is of the same lineage as the Western imperialism that originally appeared in the East as Christian missionary activity. The white man's burden gradually expanded its horizons—or reduced them, depending on how you look at it. Salvation was no longer touted as present in Christianity, but in science and progress.29

Prof. Murata goes on to observe that the feminist critique takes a decidedly moral stance for granted, and on the assumption that any sort of subordination of women to men is wrong and oppressive, goes on to denounce Islam, as well as most other traditional systems that contain rules governing gender relationships. It is here that Muslims have to stop and ask whether the moral assumptions being used to condemn their religion are really acceptable. Islam has its own morals and jurisprudence grounded in a metaphysics that has been delineated through the course of centuries by Muslim philosophers, Gnostics and theologians.

The point is not that there can be no injustice in Islamic societies, but that Muslims will not be able to solve their social problems as Muslim by acquiescence to the social and cultural hegemony of the West.

[Both] feminine and masculine are double-edged swords. Each has a negative and a positive evaluation. If the  rigidly "patriarchal" stress of some contemporary Muslims is to be softened, this can happen only when they place renewed stress on femininity as a positive quality and masculinity as a negative quality. And Muslims will be able to do things as Muslims—not as imitation Westerners—only if they look once again at the spiritual and intellectual dimensions of their own tradition.30