The indisputable ‘Otherness’ of veiled women and their segregation was in marked contrast with the cultural ideal of Victorian womanhood and it is from this point onwards that women, the veil and segregation are to dominate feminist political discourse.
“The activities of Lord Cromer are particularly illuminating on the subject, perfectly exemplifying how, when it came to the cultures of other men, white supremacist views, androcentric and paternalistic convictions, and feminism came together in harmonious and actually entirely logical accord in the service of the imperial ideal” (Ahmed: 1992: 152)
Cromer had definite views on Islamic culture, believing Islam (and by implication Islamic men) to be less intelligent than Western culture. He believed also that Islam as a social system, a culture and as a civilisation had been an abject failure. It was not Egypt’s lack of military advancement, technological development or educational opportunities that rendered Islam inferior. Paramount to Islamic inferiority, claimed Cromer, was its treatment of women. Two important discursive areas which remain to the present day (from a Western perspective at least) concern the veiling of women and seclusion, a practise Cromer referred to as having a “baneful effect on Eastern society” (Ahmed: 1992: 153). Believing, as many Victorian Orientalists did, that these two Islamic cultural practises to be the source of misery and evil and a signifier of Islamic innate backwardness, they were to be removed as a starting point towards modernisation. If Egypt was ever going to modernise along the lines laid out by the British, Lord Cromer insisted that women must unveil and seclusion must cease.
“It was Islam’s degradation of women, its insistence on veiling and seclusion, which was [according to Cromer] the ‘fatal obstacle’ to Egyptians ‘attainment of that elevation of thought and character which should accompany the introduction of Western civilisation’ … [t]he Egyptians should be ‘ persuaded or forced’ to become ‘civilised’ by disposing of the veil” (Viner, 2002).
Thus the co-opted language of feminism served as a “handmaid to colonialism” (Ahmed: 1992: 155). It serves as an example of “white men saving brown women from brown men” crudely speaking, according to Gayatri Spivak (Hymowitz: 2003: 6). Of course Cromer and other white men trying to save brown women, had little or no interest in actually improving the lives of Muslim women. Cromer single-handedly raised school fees in Egypt (reducing further women’s chances of education) while founding and sometimes presiding over the Men’s League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage in Britain (Viner: 2002) and (Ahmed: 1992). It is plain to see that the colonialists intended no more than to swap Eastern misogyny with a more up-to-date form of Western misogyny while the ideas of Western feminist discourse “essentially functioned to morally justify the attack on native societies” (Ahmed: 1992: 154).
There are important ramifications for both Egyptian nationalism and feminist discourse within this equating of cultural worth and the treatment of women. Firstly, it was Orientalist-informed Western discourse that fused the connection between the issues of culture and the treatment of women (Ahmed: 1992). This idea remains present today in Western feminist discourse: the concept that improving the status of women entails abandoning native customs and the overhaul of Islamic culture. For example, media pictures of women in Afghanistan following the US invasion used images of women removing Burkas as a sign of the successful liberation and the grateful women of the country. The synthesis of women and culture through Western discourse would prove hard to separate at future dates. This synthesis is reproduced in the Islamic discourse as a means to opposing colonial presence and defiant resistance to cultural imperialism. In order to defend native culture, Egyptian Muslims assumed defensive position around the then status quo of women with native culture, thus acknowledging the falsehood that women and culture were inextricably linked. “The resistant narrative contested the colonial thesis by inverting itself- thereby also, ironically, grounding itself in the premise of the colonial thesis” (Ahmed: 1992: 166). Once locked into this discursive paradigm, native voices were stunted prematurely from engaging in original debate regarding the political rights of women within Egyptian society. Arguments for rights were swept away with the polarised attack on/defence of Islamic culture. The politicisation of the veil was to become a false battleground for competing political agendas; those of colonial imperialism and that of indigenous nationalism.
The use of feminism by the colonisers to promote their own culture (for political and economic reasons among others) and undermine that of the colonised, left many Muslims suspicious of feminism as a concept in its own right. It had after all, “the taint of having served as an instrument of colonial domination” and was “vulnerable to the charge of being an ally of colonial interest” (Ahmed: 1992: 167). For these reasons according to Sherin Saadallah “secular feminism and feminism which mimics that of the west is in trouble in the Arab world” (Viner: 2002: 2).
Qassim Amin’s The Liberation of Women published in 1899 called for a general social and cultural reform within Islamic culture and Egyptian society, particularly focusing on practises pertinent to the treatment of women. Amin, a French-educated upper-class Egyptian called for the education of women (which had been in place in Egypt for the last 30 years), the removal of the veil and an end to segregation. Amin’s book promoted the inherent superiority and desirability of western culture while savagely attacking his native culture (Ahmed: 1992). This is a perfect example of how the discourse on modernisation, culture and the treatment of women has become inextricably linked. Just as Amin (and the British administration) had used the issue of women and veiling to conduct an attack on Egyptian culture, refutation of the cultural assault were confined within the discursive paradigm of the veil and segregation. “The opposition appropriated, in order to negate them, the terms set in the first place by the colonial discourse (Ahmed: 1992: 162).
The veil had now gained a signification, a deeper meaning than had previously been intended for it. Colonialists (and neo-imperialists of today) saw the veil as the cultural indicator of oppressive, backward and inferior peoples: its removal was essential for modernisation and civilisation. Upper-class Egyptians (often western-educated) supported the calls for the removal of the veil and parroted the superior nature of western-style governing. Those who opposed Amin’s blistering attack on Egyptian society and the British doctrine of modernisation under colonial terms, had become locked into the discursive paradigm of the colonisers. Defence of Islam and native culture could not be considered without a point-counter point defence of veiling and segregation, by the political spectrum within Egypt. Those who rejected Amin’s book could not be considered in simply pro/anti feminist terms, this would imply that Amin was in fact a feminist, rather than a western-educated patriarch and misogynist, who favoured colonial-style repression of women. Some defending native customs were not nearly as misogynistic as Amin, others who opposed unveiling on nationalist and Islamic reasons espoused similarly patriarchal views as he did. Ahmed refers to Amin, not as the first Arab feminist but rather “the son of Cromer and colonialism”.
Increased British presence within society in the early half of the twentieth century and the growing class distinction as a result of the colonial economic and political problems lead to stronger nationalist feelings among Egyptians. Social change had begun to take place as well as political. More and more women were attending schools, women were to join the discourse on women in Islam and many upper or upper-middle class urban women had already began to remove their veils. Agitation and political protest based on nationalism began to become more vocal from 1910 onwards. This essay will not deal with chronicling the individual events or people, but will focus on the emerging discourse of women within Islam and Islamic countries as part of the nationalist and anti-western movements.
Nationalism
Said asserted that “the cultural horizons of nationalism are fatally limited by the common history of the coloniser and the colonised assumed by the nationalist movement itself” (Yegenoglu: 1998: 122). There exists to some extend a homology and structural similarity between Orientalism and nationalism. In the first thirty years of the twentieth century feminism moved from the realm of intellectualism , through organisationally and finally then politically. There were two main streams of thought dominating feminist thought, that of Huda Sha’rawi and Malak Hifni Nassef. It was the feminist style of Sha’rawi that was to dominate the political landscape for the best part of half a century, while Nassef was to remain a marginal force, sometimes not even given recognition as a feminist. It is Nassefs theories that can most easily be equated with modern day Islamic Feminism, while Sha’rawi represented a more discreetly westernising and secular political discourse.
The Wafd Party was the main politically nationalist party that was opposed to British presence in Egypt and in 1919, the Wafdist Women’s Central Committee elected Sha’rawi as their President (Ahmed: 1992). The Wafd party was concerned mostly with the expulsion of the British from Egypt, but their position on women was a lot less western or akin to the President of the Wafdist Women’s Committee. When Britain won ‘independence’ from Britain in 1923 they refused to extend suffrage to women and limited reforms to raising the minimum age of marriage to 16 for girls and 18 for men. Education was listed as a priority and women began to enrol in Egyptian universities by the late 1920’s (Ahmed: 1992). The Wafd Party adhered to certain principles of the west, thought they were not always implemented such as democratic government, separation of politics and freely elected parliament and the rights of the individual male (Hopwood: 1993: 85).
It is important to view these developments by returning to theory of nationalism in colonised countries and the practise of nation building to understand the discourse on women which emerged.
According to Chatterjee nationalist efforts trying to approximate the characteristics of modernity (adoptions of western mores and practises) nationalist thought reveals a base and fundamental contradiction: the attainment of those values implies its subjugation to western hegemony that it seeks as it goal to combat. These nationalist movements have a ‘split-personality’ in that they aspire to modernise along the lines of the enlightenment while simultaneously insisting on an autonomous identity of native uncontaminated origin (Yegenoglu: 1998). Yegenoglu draws heavily on the work of Chatterjee in explaining the ‘split-personality’ of nationalist movements. Thematic and Problematic conceptual tools can be employed explaining nationalism as complicit with the projects of imperialism and Orientalism. The problematic in nationalist thought is that it is just a reverse of the passive subject (the colonised) now imagining him/herself as active and with agency but retaining exactly the same Orientalist-attributed characteristics (Yegenoglu: 1998: 125) a type of ‘able savage’. The thematic of nationalism is that while rejecting colonisers truth/knowledge and moral claims (of Orientalist origin) nationalism remains hostage to the categories of imperialism and Orientalism (Yegenoglu: 1998: 123). Nationalist thought in Egypt does not simply duplicate Orientalist discourse, it is “selective” about what it takes from rational western knowledge. The nationalist project needs to achieve it prime political target which is objection to colonial rule. It must also distinguish itself, assert its difference from those who seek to dominate it. It is through an examination of what and why nationalism selects these ideas that explains and demonstrates how the signifier woman is employed in nationalist discourse (Yegenoglu: 1998: 124).
Nationalist thought makes a distinction between the material and spiritual. The material sphere, according to Chatterjee, is “constructed as the site which the nationalist projects need rationalise” (1998: 124) and must reform elements within the native culture in order to defeat the colonialists. By knowing and acquiring superior western knowledge on techniques and making them more, or suitable to, Islam is the key to defeating the occupiers. The incorporation of these ideals however must be limited to the material world and must never seep into the spiritual world. The spiritual world of the East is the only place unconquered by western imperialists, it is the essence of the eastern society. If the spiritual sphere were to become contaminated by western ideas the distinction between the two cultures of essences would become blurred (Yegenoglu: 1998). This answers what aspect many Islamic cultures ‘selected’ from Western culture, that of technology and knowledge, while rejecting cultural or moral aspects for the spiritual sphere, in order to preserve the unique and uncontaminated eastern culture and spirit. Nationalism also holds that the material sphere is less important than the spiritual sphere and must therefore be protected with greater vigour. Therefore it is possible for nationalist movements (certainly those that existed in Egypt) to rationalise what was to be incorporated (western technology) and what was to be rejected (western culture and values), a type of ‘doublethink’ of modernisation and cultural conservatism.
Yegenoglu uses the material/spiritual model and transfers it to the question of gender within national movements and again drawing on the work of Chatterjee, highlights the dichotomy of ghar and bhair (the home and the world). The external world (the material sphere) is an unfriendly landscape where economic concerns and practical matters are dealt with- it is male. The home on the other hand remains the pure and goodly antithesis of the external- it is female. Chatterjee asserts that by matching gender roles to the home/world dichotomy one can see gender roles as answered by nationalism which answer the women’s question (Yegenoglu: 1998: 124-125). The spiritual sphere so essential for differenitating between East and West and the home, where one seeks respite from the endless drudgery of the material sphere, where the true essence of the eastern culture is present, it is the world of women. The material sphere which is rationalised to allow some essential elements of Western (in order to defeat colonialists) is fraught with material interests and practical considerations and which has previously been dominated by westerners, is male. Women are made passive cultural guardians, they must remain unchanged and uncontaminated by western values. Chatterjee cites the example of his native India where the home (and therefore woman) discussed within the nationalist discourse became “the principle site for expressing the nation’s culture” (Yegenoglu: 1998: 125). When the home/ woman becomes the site for the advancement of a nation’s culture then “controversies about women’s dress, manners, food, education, her role outside the home become intensified” (Yegenoglu: 1998: 125). While he speaks in relation to India it is applicable to many Muslim countries and to countries trying to break-free of colonial domination. It is as true for Egypt as it is for Ireland. The Wafd Party while adopting a constitutional monarchy system (a replica of the coloniser) and embracing education including that of women. The Wafd Party did not extend the right to vote to women and left almost all of the demands of the Egyptian feminists unresolved. Polygamy and divorce reforms were left unchanged, the spiritual, cultural, domestic sphere (or woman) must be retained in cultural nationalism so that a national identity may be forged.
The 1956 Constitution of Egypt gave women the right to vote if they sought it following a hunger strike by leading feminist Shafik under the leadership of Nasser who had taken power via a coup in 1952. Nasser became a very popular leader because of his opposition to the British, finally removing their presence in 1954. While the Wafd Party had become corrupt, Nasser was to turn Egypt into a secular socialist state which became at the latter stages more or less a police state (Hopwood: 1993). The socialist policies and the international triumph following the Tripartite Aggression made Nasser initially popular with the populous.
Islamism
Islamism is the term generally used to refer to conservative efforts to return fully to Shari’a law as the only means of governing, rejecting fiercely any western ideals. Shari’a law has very strict ruling regarding the status of women which can be seen in countries such as “the laws and decrees of both Pakistan and Iran directly reflect[ing] or entirely compatible with Shari’a views as interpreted by establishment Islam” (Ahmed: 1992: 234).
Many reasons have been given for the rise of Islamism within Egyptian society that is commonly thought to have emerged following the 1967 defeat at the hands of Israel. Ahmed cites other reasons for the new-found popularity of an old tradition. Chiefly a lot of the reasons stem from the Infitah, which opened up the Egyptian market for foreign investment. This lead to an explosion of American fast-food chains, luxury goods and satellite television, bringing with them neo-imperialist cultural domination. These new goods and services displaced indigenous business and created hardship and unemployment within Egypt. The economic downturn was not solely caused by foreign MNC entering the state but by other factors such as a costly war with Yemen. Sadat was forced to back down from socialist policies in the face of tightened public coffers, which drew political criticism from both leftist parties and Nasserities also. In order to ease pressure on himself Sadat allowed the Muslim Brethren to resume their activities that had been banned under Nasser. Unfortunately for Sadat, the Muslim Brethren were also unhappy about Sadat’s apparent willingness to co-operate with the west economically and with the treaty signed with Israel: they began to criticise him too. While leftist newspapers had been banned, the Muslim Brethren were free to write and distribute their publication without competition from others, espousing their own particular Islamic idiom. With no other papers in competition, the Muslim Brethren became the only alternative political voice within Egyptian society.
Islamism demands a return to Shari’a law believing that the separation of Church and State to be fundamentally wrong, and that Islamic misfortune in recent decades is a sign that they have strayed from God. The move towards democracy within Egypt has also not pleased Islamic group greatly. As Fatima Mernissi explains “women’s claim to change, the disintegration of traditional society and the invasion of western, capitalist, consumerist individualism” (Mernissi: 1996:110) have greatly upset the Islamic groups in recent years. This current discourse in placed in perspective by Mernissi by a ‘double slave’ paradigm and via the concept of Nushuz.
Mernissi explains in Women’s Rebellion and Islamic Memory that what Islamic groups fear is individualism, which comes hand in hand along with consumerism, secularisation and other western concepts. Mernissi explains that this individualism threatens the core of Muslim beliefs, that of the group or umma that is the sole source of authority within the group. Women symbolically function within Islamic society as the embodiment of dangerous individualism. The whole order of the umma is based on a slave/master dynamic. One sex is the slave of both God and master of the other sex, those are males, women on the other hand are slaves to God and slaves to men. If women were to begin to take control or to rebel the whole order that Islamic society is based on unravels. A fear of dissent has been feared in Islam for many years, and not just from women. Anyone who were to challenge the umma could place the entire hierarchy in jeopardy (Mernissi: 1996: 109-112).
“In the 1990s the fear within the umma is stronger than ever before, because there are threats to consensus not only from without (the West as a deadly enemy with an invading culture), but from within as well. The increasing access of the poor to education, the incredibly high social mobility, the polarization of classes around economic issues, the emergence of women as salaried workers- all these pose a threat to the Muslim community as it traditionally viewed itself; a homogenous group” (Mernissi: 1996: 112)
Islam then sees itself as under threat. Ibrahim conducted research into members of Islamic movements in Egypt and concluded the following
“They have a deep-seated hostility towards the West, Communism and Israel. Any ruler who deals with or befriends any of them would be betraying Islam. Excessive wealth, extravagance, sever poverty, exploitation and usury have no place in a truly Muslim society. They disapprove of nearly all the regimes in the Arab and Muslim worlds. They attribute many of the decadent aspects of behaviour in Egypt wither to Western influence or to the squandering of oil money, and they firmly believe that should ‘true Islam’ be implemented Egypt and the Muslim world would be independent, free, prosperous, just and righteous societies” (Ahmed: 1992: 229).
Ahmed expresses her own personal doubts about the means by which women in these groups hope to attain their goals. Ahmed believes that first a "“period in which dictates and assumptions of established Islam are fundamentally questioned” (Ahmed: 1992: 230), otherwise these Islamic groups are open to the enforcement of established of Shari’a law with its unmitigated androcentric doctrines. In a survey of university students within Egypt conducted by Radwan, 67% of veiled students and 53% of unveiled students said they wished for Shari’a law to be introduced in Egypt (Ahmed: 1992: 233). Ahmed questions whether women who support these groups fully realise the implications of living under Shari’a law. Citing the modern Shari’a law regimes in Iran (where women’s testimony counts only if corroborated by men and discourages women from educating themselves outside the realms of nursing and teaching, tries removing them from office jobs etc.) Ahmed doubts that the 67% of veiled university students and 53% of unveiled university students who want Egypt to adopt shari’a law “has any idea of the extremes of control, exclusion, injustice and indeed brutality that can be, in the present order of things, legitimately meted out to women in the name of Islam” (Ahmed: 1992: 234).
In response to the growing demand for conservative Islamic law a new type of Muslim feminism has emerged, with Ahmed and Mernissi at its helm. Neither westernised and secular, nor Islamist and ultra-traditional it is instead focusing on trying to dismantle the things which enforce women’s subjugation within the Islamic framework. It aspires to find within the new drive to ‘purer Islam’, the founding principles of Islam which Islamic feminists believe was “long ago corrupted by pre-Islamic Arab, Persian, and North African customs [and] are if anything more egalitarian than those of western religions” (Hymowitz: 2003). This Islamic feminism has emerged because previous attempts at Western feminism proved unpopular and remain associated for the most part with colonialism.
Conclusion
Colonialism projected both the fears of the colonisers and the fears of the colonised onto women. Issues of cultural domination and resistance became attached permanently to the place of women within a culture. While trying to ‘civilise’ or dominate using the language of feminism irreparably tarnished western/ secular feminism within Egypt.
With the expulsion of the British, nationalism centred (as it has in so many other countries, including Ireland) its cultural battleground and construction of separate national identity on women, by making women the guardians of native cultural practices and the ‘spirit’ of Egyptian essence.
With current western leaders currently engaged in foreign security and economic security incursions into Muslim countries, Muslim resistance to neo-imperialism has centred on a return to conservative Islamic law. This Islamism is a means of maintaining a separate cultural identity, one that does not support rampant consumerism, secularism and individualism. Geo-politics has always demanded a reaction from Muslims, be it colonialism, Orientalism, war, the Palestine/Israel conflict or the current ‘war on terrorism’. The nationalist projects within Egypt borrowed certain ideas from the west (separation of church and state, constitutional democracy) but ideas imported wholesale from an enemy can never be supported by indigenous peoples because they essentially foreign and are forever associated with the colonisers. In response to this, feminists within Islam are trying to carve out an identity for themselves within Islam. It is not merely an attempt to ‘rationalise on their feet’ in response to western resistance within their societies, rather it is because they do not necessarily agree with western values either and they search for a way of equalling gender roles based on complimentary relations between the sexes. If this form of Islam, which Ahmed and Mernissi among others believe is within the Quaran already, it has all the more chance of succeeding because the rush toward to Islamic conservatism in not necessarily an opposition to female freedom, why would so many women support the return of shari’a law while hold the opinion of working outside the home? The wearing of Islamic dress does not necessarily mean crushing repression of women, it was colonialism which earmarked the veil as a symbol of backwardness, not Islamic women. Sometimes a veil is just a veil. The Islamic revival is a reaction to the unfair geo-political situation that Muslims in Egypt, and elsewhere, find themselves in. It has more chances of succeeding because it will have come from Islamic scholarly study, not imposed from elite’s (whether foreign or indigenous) from above.
Bibliography
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