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So I thought we could use this space to talk about Misogyny re: white males talking about Muslim women, and how it fits in with racism and white priviledge. I'll start by showing you a fairly common example, this Facebook topic, "Women in Islam", and picking apart the topic starter's, er, "points":
I don't really know how to start this topic because I don't know where to begin.
In other words, Islam is so terrible that it is literally unspeakable. The situation is apparently so dire it allegedly defeats even the poster's ability to start a discussion on the internet - despite this being obviously untrue as he clearly does "begin".
This is the most barbarous aspect of Islam. Women in Islamic communities are treated as slaves and are dehumanized by being made to wear burkas, and not show any of their skin in public, as to keep fresh for their "husbands" (read "Masters").
Note the use of "most barbarous aspect", not "a barbarous aspect". Already the clear point of this topic is not the real suffering of women but the construction of "Islam" as a homogenous barbarity - with the convenient mythic figure of the suffering brown slave woman, the oriental damsel in distress, who needs to be saved. Guess who by?
Women do buy into the lie that they are "special" and "holy," but it isn't true. Phyllis Schafly in the United States in the 80s told women that "the home is a sacred place" as well, in order to kick them out of the public sphere.
So allegedly the women have agency - economic agency, even - in their own suffering, they "buy into" it. Oh, and the idea that a woman is "special" or "holy", that she has religious importance, is brushed off with a wave of the hand; even though, if one really thinks about the ways in which a real respect for women could be brought into being in a strongly religious society, their religious importance is perhaps one way in which they could claim representative and political legitimacy (if that "religious importance" underwent a serious metamorphosis, of course). Of course, our poster doesn't care about this, because bettering the lot of women is not his real objective.
There is no "marriage" in Islam. It is bondage. Marriages are made almost completely without the "wife's" consent and she is often duped into it.
According to this poster's ideology, what Islam calls "marriages" and "wives" are not anything of the sort, they are barbaric forced unions and unwilling victims. Which suggests that there is, on the other hand, in other places, essentially among anyone non-Muslim, a real marriage - marriage, as opposed to "marriage" - which is enlightened, liberal, not bondage, etcetera - which of course anyone who has read feminism will disagree with. The American or European marriage is not something to be complacent about.
It is on this topic where I lose all respect for Islam.
In other words, the acheivements of 20+ different countries, over a third of the Earth's surface, since the 7th century AD - including philosophy, scholarship, architecture, literature, charities, early political reform and multi-faith adminisitration - are reduced to nothing, are devalued, by the treatment of women by certain Islamic governments, groups and ideologies (or in our poster's logic, "By Islam"). To some extent, I would be happy to accept this appraisal of the ill-treatment of women ongoing among all states and calling the "civilized" nature of those states into question, if the same was said about "Christianity", and in fact every state on every continent ever, with a few exceptions in isolated places and periods. It is not said of these, of course, even though it very well could be.
And then our delightful poster ends with the unrelated and unsourced quote:
"Behead those who say Islam is violent"
You can read the thread for a lot of other well-placed criticisms; it's not too face-stabbish. What I really want to point out is how the bait-and-switch works here: the poster perhaps really does care about the lot of women, but either
a) is, in anger at the ill-treatment, pulled into the orbit of Imperialist ideology which presents "Islam" as a state more worthy of criticism than anything in the West, so that the poster's feminism is bought out by the Empire, or
b) cares about the ill-treatment of women only in so far as it can be used to justify violence towards the Islamic "other"; the suffering woman is a tool, or a bargaining chip.
Whichever one of these priorities is in play, we can see how easy it is to fall into such a trap. The things the Taliban do to women are pointless and repulsive, but if we start throwing around the word Barbarian we locate this cruelty within the Afghan/Islamic male, when in fact it is rooted in the CIA which funded him and the economic hardship - the poverty and desert conditions - which prevail in Afghanistan and make life there hard and real education all but impossible. |
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