MARKHA G. VALENTAInference 1.There is considerably greater public interest in and affective commitment
to deriding Islam’s oppression of women than there is to preventing actual violence against
women. So the violence continues... as does the derision of Islam.
Inference 2.While a veil on the heads of a handful of girls is perceived throughout much
of continental Western Europe as having the potential to undermine the West’s hard-fought
democratic values, the continued battering of women—much like the lucrative traffic in East-
ern European women, girls, and boys forced into prostitution—apparently poses little danger
to European societies. No one argues that it should be allowed to continue; they just assume
(I must assume) that it will stop some day, die a silent death, as we become ever more
democratic. At least it’s not un-Western.Significantly, those Western colonizers of a century ago most opposed to the veil in
Muslim societies (in the name of Muslim women) were often the ones most fiercely
resistant to feminism at home. The point, after all, was to transform non-Western women
into the ultimate civilized woman as she hadalreadybeen established within Western
bourgeois society (even as at home, bourgeois society had taken as its task the reform and
elevation of the working classes). The British consul general in Egypt at the turn of the
nineteenth century, Lord Cromer, offers a fine example: an uncompromising proponent
of unveiling Muslim women in the colonies, he was also a founding member and some-
time president of the Men’s League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage.^24 What we might
call ‘‘colonialist feminism’’ was activated, then, not only in the interests of the imperial
project but of a patriarchal territorialism that sought to strengthen established gender
relations and identities at the center, most particularly women’s exclusion from the politi-
cal realm and the restriction of motherhood to the world of biology. After all, as Edward
Said notes, by this point ‘‘imperialism was considered essential to the well-being of British
fertility generally and of motherhood particularly.’’^25 The doubled logic of territorialism
is again at work: striving to enclose and saturate Muslim space with its authority, in the
name of liberation, while fortifying the dividing walls between the sexes in the name of
nature. The veil is the frontier zone, the borderland, the zone of ephemerality between a
concrete here and there, male and female, the body politic and the politicized body.
At the same time, it is important to see here the mechanism, the logic, by which at
one and the same time colonized peoples were pressured to transform fundamentally—to
accept having Western understandings of the process of Modern History, which is to say,
Westernization, forced upon them—even as Western women were required to remain
true to their established gender position. While the colonized are then radically histori-
cized, the contemporary West, as the culmination of History, is itself removed from His-
tory. In this way, the threat posed then, as now, by the colonized (the feminists, the
immigrants, the peripheral) was the reintroduction of History into the West in the face
of all those who proclaimed the end of history—whether the Fukuyamas of today, or the
British imperialists of yore.^26
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