Who's Pushing For Muslim Women's Rights?

(The Nation)  This column was written by The Nation's Katha Pollitt

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I didn't review Phyllis Chesler's "The Death of Feminism" when it came out more than a year ago, and that was a mistake. The book, which accused American feminists of ignoring the oppression of Muslim women out of a combination of multicultural piety and anti-Americanism, was such a slapdash, narcissistic mess I thought it would sink of its own accord. How, for example, could anyone take seriously an analysis of Muslim gender relations, based on the author's account of her marriage to an Afghan almost fifty years ago? If I tried to describe, say, Catholic attitudes toward women on the basis of my 1974 romance with the bartender of the Bells of Hell, wouldn't that seem a little, I dunno, self-involved to you?

I know a lot of the feminists Chesler excoriates for imaginary crimes against sisterhood; in fact, I came in for several pages of rather unhinged abuse myself. I just couldn't believe anyone would give the book the time of day. How seriously can you take a writer who has turned herself into a tax-deductible "organization" for which she solicits donations on her Web site? Is that even legal?

In a way I was right. The book tanked. But its argument has taken on a life of its own. That selfish Western feminists have abandoned Muslim women has become a truism on the right. Well, with Iraq a shambles and Afghanistan on its way to becoming a Taliban-friendly narco-state, these can't be happy days for the proponents of gunpoint liberation. You can see how it would go in the offices of The Weekly Standard: Hmmm... maybe invading countries and killing a lot of innocent people isn't the way to get women out of those burqas? Oh, never mind, here's a piece by Christina Hoff Sommers blaming American feminists for turning their backs on female victims of "lashings, stonings, and honor killings" in the Muslim world. Whew!

According to Sommers's "The Subjection of Islamic Women and the Fecklessness of American Feminism" the major obstacles in the path of Muslim women's progress are Eve Ensler, Barbara Ehrenreich, the National Organization for Women and me. She attacks any feminist, basically, who either concentrates on domestic issues, as NOW does, or who makes theoretical connections between the situation of women in the West and elsewhere.

(I was bashed for my introduction to "Nothing Sacred: Women Respond to Religious Fundamentalism and Terror," an anthology edited by Nation executive editor Betsy Reed, in which I wrote of a "common thread of misogyny" in modern fundamentalist movements. Sommers accuses me of placing the Taliban and "Christian evangelicals" "on the same plane." Actually, I mentioned Focus on the Family, the Christian Coalition and the Promise Keepers, hardly synonyms for "evangelicals," but in any case, to note a common thread between phenomena is not to equate them. And in fact, in case you were wondering, I don't equate them.)

Is there any truth to the charges? I write a lot about Muslim women's human rights in this space — I guess The Weekly Standard doesn't subscribe to The Nation — and have found that just about the only Americans who do the heavy lifting on these issues are feminists, although (see the otherwise excellent columns of Nicholas Kristof) they often don't get credit. Sommers mentions the high-profile case of Mukhtar Mai, the Pakistani woman who was gang-raped by order of a tribal council. According to Pakistani journalist Rafia Zakaria, a volunteer with the Asian American Network Against Abuse of Human Rights (ANAA), which helped bring Mai to the United States, Western feminists, from Equality Now and Amnesty International all the way over to Cynthia Leive at Glamour, gave "enormous support" while State Department officials were "often openly callous."

Still, Western feminism is a pretty big tent: If you go looking for someone to say female genital mutilation or child marriage is "just their culture," you can find her (of course, you can find a lot more people who aren't feminists who will say the same). Academic feminists can split hairs with the best, and that can be frustrating. And face it, our big national organizations have some odd priorities. I winced when Sommers mocked NOW for promoting "Love Your Body Day." La-di-da!

As usual, though, Sommers hasn't done her homework. Women's eNews has a whole Arabic section. Ms. is chock-full of articles about Muslim women. Through "The Vagina Monologues," which drives the proper ladies of the Independent Women's Forum wild every year around Valentine's Day, Sommers's bête noire Eve Ensler raises a ton of money for women's groups in the Muslim world. Equality Now, one of the few groups Sommers likes, operates on the very principle Sommers mocks, that patriarchy exists all over the world. And guess who supported the Women's Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equity conference, which Sommers praises at length? The Ms. Foundation! The very organization she accuses in her opening of neglecting Muslim women!

It's all very well to accuse American feminists of hating the West. But actually, U.S. invasions have made the work of Muslim feminists much more difficult. The last thing they need is for women's rights to be branded as the tool of the invaders and occupiers and cultural imperialists. That is why feminists from Egypt to Iran are leery of seeming too close to the West; Zakaria wants me to make clear her group gets no U.S. government support. And that is why smart Western feminists support Muslim women's rights through carefully targeted international campaigns and by lending quiet support to groups on the ground, by funding schools and battered women's shelters and microenterprises rather than rushing in and telling everyone how to live.

Oh, and by pressuring the U.S. government, which is, after all, our own, to live up to its egalitarian rhetoric in its foreign aid. "In the 3.7 billion dollars that has been given" to General Musharraf, Zakaria writes, "nothing has been made contingent on improving conditions for Pakistani women."

How about it, Phyllis? Christina? See you in front of the White House about that?
By Katha Pollitt
Reprinted with permission from The Nation

[gwk2005]

Rule # 1 for dealing with Muslim mjority countries -- INSIST ON RECIPROCITY and fair treatment for non-Muslims. Rule #2 -- Favor better treatment for all women in those countries. Corrolary to Rule #2 -- All Western civilized countries MUST insist on issuing 50% more education and work related visas to Muslim Women than to Muslim men. The only way to de-radical Muslim men is to make them see women more as peers than as tehir subjects; and that takes a lot of effort on the part of Western civilization. It starts with boosting the opportunities for Muslim women and westernizing their world view.

[conservevoic]

sy2502

I agree that those who are steeped in not just a repressive religion, but an entire culture which teaches that it is right and just to cruelly subjugate women have little hope of being free. But I still disagree that the Christian religion and the culture it has establish can be compared to Islam. Women in Christian cultures have more freedom than in any other. Granted, it is still not perfect, but it is superior to any other in the world today. I appreciate your point of view.

[texmexborderswimmer]

I support every Muslim's right to die for the Great Mohammad and the sooner they do the better.

[sy2502]

ConserveVoic you are entirely missing my point, so let me try explain it again.
Western feminists cannot free Muslim women if these women don't feel they have something to be freed from. Many of them do what they do because their religion tells them what to do. Any religion that leads to the oppression of one part of society is a form of control.
I tried to make an example with our Western society, which you took entirely the wrong way. Our society has oppressed women for centuries, and that oppression has its roots in the christian tradition. You cannot dispute that, read history. Only when Western women started challenging that tradition did they achieve something. Does this mean that christian religion is a form of control? Draw your own conclusions.
But it is not easy to fight against century old traditions. Even today we have to butt heads with some conservative women who oppose women's rights. If a fundamentalist minority can do so much damage to women's rights here in America, can you imagine what it is like in the Muslim countries, where the women who dare question the belief system are a tiny minority?

[dan9111]

Not being murdered is also a human right. When you look at the body counts, the males have been brutalized more. It is undeniable. The U.S. gender feminists have systematically ignored this topic of Muslims precisely because it exposes the vastly larger slaughter of men in Muslim-controlled lands.

The politics of division are fierce, not just in Middle-Eastern circles, but in our political parties. We do not have men and women lifting each other up, aiding female and male self-esteem and hope. We have feminists in denial, tearing down their own families, relentless in the abuse of children they control. That is not women oppressed. It is not women being broken, it is an act of women breaking. Our American foreign policy is equally clueless, murdering our own fellow humans.

There is no objectivity left. Universities and the media, worst of all, panders to the most brutal factions. That is exactly why men's issues and feelings are null and void in the media, but anything cops or soldiers do is glorified.

[conservevoic]

sy2502

You want a reasoned argument? No problem. Let's focus on one aspect of your argument. If %u201Cmind-control%u201D is involved shouldn%u2019t those controlled have similar responses, either bad or good? And even if this is not true, shouldn%u2019t the %u201Ccontrolled%u201D have to suffer due to their %u201Ccontrol%u201D? Let%u2019s compare any society where the values espoused by Jesus of Nazareth are followed to where the precepts of Mohammad are followed. In the Christian culture women are more valued and have more freedom. Note the honor given to Mary Magdalene and other women mentioned in the Bible. Women in the Christian culture can talk with men not of their family without threat of being killed by their own family. They can drive, vote, own property, go to school, be free from the threat of genital mutilation and enter the workplace without fear of being raped by men who will never be held accountable. This is only one example of the differences between Islam and Christianity. If we are all victims of %u201Cmind-control%u201D why is one society so repressive and the other so supportive of the rights of not just women, but all people? Yes womenn have been repressed and still suffer under both types of society, but to say that those who espouse a religion which is benefical is just unfair and not in keeping with the facts.

[mgpm-2009]

We can no more change life for women there in Iraq than we can for the men! This war is ridiculous...it was not began to change life for anyone there but to change life for some few people interested in OIL.

People have their culture, and short of invading and taking over, beating it out of them and infiltrating with out people, inbreeding with them, and infusing the country with our culture, we are not going to change that. If Iraqi women want their rights they will have to stand up for them, and they will have to do so in numbers with much pain and bloodshed, in perhaps a Gandhi-like way. They will need an amazing leader or set of leaders.

I don't see it happening from here. Our making war on Iraq is not going to change their culture or want to make them more like us. Quite the opposite, I'm sure!

[sy2502]

sy2502

The millions of good, God respecting Christians are victims of "mind control"?!?
How dare you lump us in with those who are under the control and the influence of others, to the benefit of the others. You are so totally disrespectful and non-inclusive. You hipocrite.
Posted by ConserveVoic at 02:11 PM : May 29, 2007

Instead of calling names, why don't you give me arguments to contradict what I just said?

Judeo-christian tradition has always been skewed against women.
- Women are responsible for the original sin, they are weak, stupid.
Result: until last century, women could get no education, couldn't meddle in politics, couldn't owning anything. To this day, women in power get more talk about their hair and clothes than their intelligence. Most agree we'll have a black president before we have a woman.
- Jesus was born from a virgin because sexuality, specifically for women, is sinful and disgusting. So women are held to different standards from men, specifically where sexual freedom and reproductive rights are concerned.
Result: stigmas against single mothers and divorced women, and the never ending attacks to abortion rights, sexual education, and the availability of birth control.

These are only 2 examples among many.

If you have any intelligent counterargument I would love to hear it, otherwise cut the childish name-calling.

[ajaxrose1]

So, exactly what are women of America supposed to do about the things that go on in other countries? I can't even think about the way women are treated in some of those places (not just Muslim) without getting sick. Does that help?

[conservevoic]

sy2502

The millions of good, God respecting Christians are victims of "mind control"?!? We look at the evidence of history and the written testimony of thousands and make our conclusion on our world view based upon fact and faith. How dare you lump us in with those who are under the control and the influence of others, to the benefit of the others. You are so totally disrespectful and non-inclusive. You hipocrite.