Pearson Edexcel Level 3 Advanced GCE in Religious Studies – Anthology
236There can be few people of Arab or Muslim background (including, and perhaps
even partic ularly, the feminists among them) who have not notic ed and been
disheartened by the way in whic h Arab and Muslim "oppression" of women is
invoked in Western media and sometimes in sc holarship in order to justify and even
insidiously promot e host ilit y t oward Arabs and Muslims. It is disheart ening, t oo,
t hat some feminist sc holarly work c ont inues t o unc rit ic ally reinsc ribe t he old st ory.
Whole books are unfortunately still being published in whic h the history of Arab
women is t old wit hin t he framework of t he paradigm t hat Cromer put forward-that
the measure of whether Muslim women were liberated or not lay in whether they
veiled and whether the particular society had become "progressive" and
west ernized or insist ed on c linging t o Arab and Islamic ways. In it s c ont emporary
version t his essent ially st ill-c olonial (or c olonial and c lassist ) feminis m is only
slight ly more subt le t han t he old version. It may be c ast , for example, in t he form
of praising heroic Arab feminist women for resist ing t he appalling oppressions of
Arab culture and Islam. Whereas this is its stated message, the unstated message
when the inherited c onstruc ts of Western disc ourse are reproduc ed unexamined is
often, just as in c olonial days, that Arab men, Arab c ulture, and Islam are inc urably
backward and that Arab and Islamic societies indeed deserve to be dominated,
undermined, or worse.
In the c ontext of the c ontemporary struc ture of global power, then, we need a
feminism t hat is vigilant ly self-c rit ic al and aware of it s hist oric al and polit ic al
sit uat edness if we are t o avoid bec oming unwit t ing c ollaborat ors in rac ist ideologies
whose c osts to humanity have been no less brutal than those of sexism. It may be,
moreover, that in the context of Western global domination, the posture of some
kinds of feminis m – poised to identify, deplore, and denounce oppression – mu s t
unavoidably lend support to Western domination when it looks steadfastly past the
injustic e to whic h women are subjec t in Western soc ieties and the exploitation of
women perpetrated abroad by Western capitalism only to fix upon the oppressions
of women perpetrated by Other men in Other societies...
Researc h on Arab women is a muc h younger field. Analysis of this c omplexity
is rare in work on Arab women, in whic h it is often assumed that modernity and
"progress" and westernization are inc ontestably good and that the values of
individualis m are always unambiguous ly benefic ial. T he sum of what is c urrent ly
known about women and gender in Arab soc ieties – the many and different Arab
soc ieties and c ultures that there are – is minusc ule. The areas of women's lives and
th e informal struc tures they inhabit that are still unexplored are vast. And perhaps
the posture of studying other c ultures in order to identify their worst prac tic es is
not after all likely to be the best way to further our understanding of human
soc iet ies. The noted Indian anthropologist T.N. Madan, reflec ting on the ambiguous
legac y of anthropology and the c ontribution the disc ipline might nevertheless make
to a c ommon human enterprise, rather than serving Western interests, suggests
that a productive starting point c ould be looking to other c ultures in an attitude of
respec t and in ac knowledgment of their affording opportunities for c ritiquing and
enhanc ing awareness of the investigator's c ulture. The study of anthropology
"should not merely tell us how others live t heir lives: it should rat her t ell us how we
may live our lives bet t er," and ideally it should be grounded in t he affirmat ion "t hat
every c ulture needs others as c ritic s so that the best in it may be highlighted and
held out as being c ross-c ulturally desirable." Perhaps feminism c ould formulat e