Last week, Fatemeh of Muslimah Media Watch wrote an open letter to white non-Muslim Western feminists on Muslimista. Some highlights:
There are those of us who suffer. But don’t speak of us as victims if we are not dead. Don’t deny the agency with which we become survivors and active shapers of our lives. Don’t ignore the fighting we do for ourselves.
We can—and do—speak for ourselves. So stop speaking for us.
I notice a lot of condescension and arrogance when you talk to us or about us. Let me be clear: you do not know more about us than we know about ourselves, our religion, our cultures, our families, or the forces that shape our lives. You do not know what’s best for us more than we do.
…
If we want help, and ask for it, then do only what you’re asked.
When I read this, I thought back to a post on Feministe about the headscarf ban in Turkey. The focus of the post was on Fatma Benli, a Muslim feminist fighting against the classism, sexism, and Islamophobia behind the ban. Many commenters, though, weren’t interested in solidarity – instead, all they could focus on were the poor backwards Muslim women who were so brainwashed by Islam that they couldn’t cast off their oppressive head coverings and be like us.
You can’t get much clearer than Fatemeh’s words – “You do not know what’s best for us more than we do” – and yet, in the comment thread at Muslimista, two Western men swoop in with the same old tropes. To be clear, they may not be feminists, but rather right-wing trolls. But their sentiments very closely echo things I’ve heard self-identified feminists say. You have the Sweeping Generalization of the World’s Second Largest Religion:
While I understand some of the sentiment in this letter, the position of women in Islam, and Islam itself, is a sorry state of affairs.
Islam as it is currently practiced is so far from its original intention, as to make it almost unrecognizable.
You got your That Thing I Heard About on Fox News is the Only Thing That Matters:
I hate to break it to you, but we’re going to be continuing to use our freedom of speech given to us by our constitution whether you like it or not. Personally, as someone who stands for basic human rights I have no choice but to speak out against the most extreme, vile, and offensive aspects of (radical?) Islam. I will continue to oppose public stonings as backward and barbaric which they are. I will continue to oppose honor murders, which happen every day and not only in muslim nations but in the USA as well. I will continue to raise awareness for the victims of jihad, both historically and today. And if you don’t like it thats just tough for you.
And in case we didn’t hear him the first time:
I will be offering help to cure the backwardness and evil of radical Islam whether you want to help or not. The most important step is to ban public stonings FOREVER.
(Later in the comments, Krista points out that stonings actually aren’t that common, and this commenter doesn’t have any response to that.)
Finally, throw in a little You’re Just in Denial:
While I understand that there is misplaced criticism and help, whether due to lack of knowledge or organizational agendas, to throw up the “your not Muslim,” and “there are colonial overtones” cards is a really poor excuse. It is just a veil for Islam not wanting to recognize it is no different from the other world religions, and get off its arse and reform itself.
See the pattern here? The actual needs and concerns of real Muslim women are beside the point. The REALLY pressing issue is that I totally heard somewhere that Islam is like bad and stuff, and there’s no way I could possibly be wrong about that! Because I’m white! And (often) male! Tremble before my superior culture! Watch, as I set your agenda for you without ever learning anything about you! Why would I degrade myself by taking orders from a brown woman – can you imagine? – when I could take a token action to save you from yourself? After all, white people are never the problem – brown people are! We’re the saviors, silly!
Another commenter points out that she does listen to the needs of Muslim women, and asks that Fatemeh not lump her in with “cultural imperialist feminists.” I’ll grant that this is a little more complicated. I still remember the sting the first time I heard harsh criticism directed at “white people” – as if we were a hive mind, and none of us were making any attempt to be good allies. So I get that it sucks (and Fatemeh responds very eloquently and effectively).
But there are bigger issues here than our feelings. We’re the ones with the power – locally and globally. If a POC lumps all white people together, a few white people get irritated. If a white person lumps all POC together, POC die. (Obviously there are exceptions to this, but I’m talking about the overall power structure.)
Also, it gets harder and harder to take it personally the more you see the shit they’re up against.
(Cross-posted at Modern Mitzvot.)
Nicely put. I was definitely a belligerent “but the veil OPPRESSES, always and without exception!” kind of feminist until I read some good theorists who set me straight, but this idea – that Western progressives do not know what’s best for all progressives – is a very difficult concept to teach us privileged folk.
To be fair, it’s also tricky to put into action. In the same course, I read some news articles about how religious fundamentalists who happened to be Muslim were more or less ghettoized in some European cities like Berlin, and within those communities there were some violations of human rights practiced (honor killings, for example) that were not investigated by police. That is something I find unacceptable. But it seems clear to me that it doesn’t work for the great white saviors to rush in and save brown women (and men). Or at least, it doesn’t work the way it’s intended. So perhaps what we should ask ourselves is not what we can do to “save brown women from brown men” (Hi, Spivak), but to ask how we can not be bigots and how we can make the right kind of space so that if anyone does want help, they feel safe to ask?
In the same course, I read some news articles about how religious fundamentalists who happened to be Muslim were more or less ghettoized in some European cities like Berlin, and within those communities there were some violations of human rights practiced (honor killings, for example) that were not investigated by police. That is something I find unacceptable. But it seems clear to me that it doesn’t work for the great white saviors to rush in and save brown women (and men). Or at least, it doesn’t work the way it’s intended. So perhaps what we should ask ourselves is not what we can do to “save brown women from brown men” (Hi, Spivak), but to ask how we can not be bigots and how we can make the right kind of space so that if anyone does want help, they feel safe to ask?
I don’t think that being of a minority religion/ race means that one can opt-out of the application of laws that everyone else has to follow. Whatever German Lutherans are prohibited from doing, German Muslims also are prohibited from doing, and enforcement should be undertaken as necessary in both communities to carry out the law. If some Muslims want the law to be different, they can try to change it democratically or explain why it violates their rights, but they do not get to ignore it and have the government go along with that.
With regard to headscarf bans, the existing norms of a society are relevant. For example, in the U.S. (so far as I know) dowry payments aren’t against the law. Hindus are such a tiny part of the population here that if it occurs, it’s such a small problem and one with so little support from the majority that we don’t consider it worthwhile to abrogate the freedom to contract in marriage that way. We also don’t ban headscarves, because the number of girls and, more important, adult women who are forced to wear them unwillingly is so small that it’s not worthwhile to abrogate the freedom of religion and expression in that way. In contrast, India (rather futilely) bans dowry payment because it is a significant problem in that society. They consider it worthwhile to restrict someone’s freedom in order to prevent the exploitation and abuse of women in marriage in this form. Similarly, while Turkey’s headscarf ban had the unfortunate origin of being overtly anti-Islam and an attempt to ape Western culture, if there isn’t a strong social bias in Turkey against making women wear the headscarf against their will, then it’s legitimate to worry that removing the ban will result in statistically significant levels of women being forced to wear the headscarf.
Then again, I personally find the headscarf a rather silly thing for secularists to worry about. I’m a lot more disturbed by the idea of a 13 year old girl getting pulled out of school by her parents because the school won’t let her wear a headscarf, than I am by the same girl’s showing up to school with only her eyes visible, so long as she still can get an education and get some ability to make her own choices — ones far more important than a piece of cloth — later on.
Thank you SO MUCH for this. THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU. I have a lot of respect for the posts you do on privilege, and I feel humbled (and privileged–WINK!) to be on the same space.
As a liberal gay white male, I’m torn on these issues.
In general, I agree with Fatemeh’s sentiments. I take a little exception to the final line of your quote: “If we want help, and ask for it, then do only what you’re asked.”
Assistance usually comes with conditions. If you are asking for my time and effort and money, then I am going to have some say in how those resources are used.
I wouldn’t keep giving cash to my drug addicted child, just because that is what they asked for. Life just doesn’t work that way.
Finally, to echo PG above, we have rules in our liberal western societies. If you want to reap the rewards that come from living here, you have to agree to the rules as well. I can certainly agree to the desire to live in a community that shares your values and background and experiences. As long as you are playing by the rules, by all means, live in Chinatown or Little Italy or the Gay Ghetto. Enjoy your cultural heritage. I know I will when I visit.
Just leave me alone to live my life in a way that works for me, and I’ll give you the same respect.
Fatemeh – humbled!? WHATEVS. Thank you!
Bucky – please don’t compare adult Muslimah activists to drug-addicted children. This is not a similar situation.
Sorry for the poor choice of comparisons, TGD. Nothing derisive meant. It was just the first comparison that came to mind because that is what my family is dealing with at the moment with my younger brother.
But the larger point is I think valid. Philanthropists don’t just pick random people on the street to give their money. They direct it to places and in ways that fit with their own particular world view. As is their right.
So I think that Fatemeh suffers from the same cultural myopia she is accusing other of having. We are required to only help her in ways that she finds culturally acceptable, requirning that we ignore what we may find culturally accepatable.
That just doesn’t work for me.
Bucky,
I think you might mistake the meaning of “If we want help, and ask for it, then do only what you’re asked.” Fatemah is not saying that anyone should be forced to do something to help her that they are unwilling to do. However, she is saying that going beyond what is asked may actually harm rather than help.
For example, one of my friends was sexually abused by her father as a child and only came to terms with that in the last few years. The help she asked from me was that I be available to listen and that I offer positive emotional support. She did NOT ask that I bring a civil suit against her father, publicize what he had done, or confront him to tell him what a horrible person I thought he was. Even if I thought any of those actions were the right way to act (and a civil suit that also would publicize his crime to the community does seem to me an appropriate action), I had been drawn into the situation only by her trusting me with the information, and that trust rested on my willingness to do only what I was asked. It was her pain, her family, her life. It would have been presumptuous and paternalistic for me to go beyond what she asked, and so I didn’t, out of respect for her and her agency.
Great response, PG.
Certainly in the situation that you describe with your friend, you did what you thought best. And I would have done the exact same thing myself. And have before in a similiar situation.
Hower, would you feel the same if the sexual were ongoing?
@ Bucky: PG explains it perfectly (THANK YOU!).
Oftentimes, groups who seek to help Muslim women want to “liberate us” from the veil or from Islam in an effort to help. These terms aren’t always going to work for us. It’s like a Christian home for gay youths: the help these homes offer isn’t going to accept that youth’s identity and sexuality and help him comes to terms with them, the homes are going to repudiate these and denigrate them in an effort to “help.”
It’s also a question of priorities: if a woman in Afghanistan has no clean water and no education for her children, then why raise a fuss about having to wear a burqa? There are bigger issues at stake for her, so she probably wants help on those issues rather than the one that most western feminists seem to focus on.
I’m uncomfortable with the idea present in your first comment that assumes that Muslim women are “foreigners” evidenced by your statement, “If you want to reap the rewards that come from living here, you have to agree to the rules as well.” This sounds dangerously close to “go back where you came from” rhetoric that doesn’t hold up in a pluralistic society, especially for Muslim women who were born and raised here.
This also implies that “the rules” are fixed, which we have certainly seen they are not (evidenced by Roe vs. Wade and the number of states who realize gay marriage is constitutionally sound).
I’m not talking about cultural relativism, I’m talking about respect. When the police don’t get involved in an honor killing because they want to respect the family’s culture, this is blatantly disregarding another human’s life and is not acceptable. But there’s a difference between intervening in a situation where a woman’s life is in danger and trying to convert her or take away her right to dress in whatever she wants, including clothing that indicates her religious beliefs.
It’s disrespectful (not to mention arrogant) to believe that we don’t know what’s best for ourselves and aren’t working to change the inequities we see with how our religion is practiced or how some of our cultures distort religion. That’s what I’m getting at.
If she is an adult in a sexual relationship with her father, both of them would be guilty of violating incest laws, even if on her side the sexual relationship was part of a pattern of abuse beginning in childhood. So no, I still would not force legal intervention into her problem, although obviously I would counsel her against continuing the relationship and offer any financial support I could, including having her move in with me to get her out of the bad situation.
If I had known of an ongoing sexual abuse of her at the time she was a minor, I would have notified law enforcement because children are different from adults and generally lack the agency to leave an abusive situation unless there is outside intervention. This is recognized in laws that require teachers, pastors and a host of other adults who interact with children to report any suspected abuse. There is no similar law to protect adults.
With regard to living by the rules, I agree such rules are not fixed and that if there is a rule that violates Muslims’ ability to live within their religious faith, it should be challenged constitutionally and changed democratically. However, in an orderly society the rule cannot be flouted without consequences. Even in the civil rights movement, where the laws were manifestly unjust and unconstitutional, protestors nonetheless submitted themselves to being taken to jail until such time as the laws were recognized as unjust and unconstitutional. MLK didn’t fight being taken to Birmingham jail; instead, he sat down and wrote a letter to the white moderates who told him he was demanding too much too fast.
Doesn’t feminism as a movement (like many other movements) always straddle the line between agreeing with people and trying to do the “right thing?” How do we, generally speaking, determine whether a person is acting out of a full understanding of their position and is making an ‘informed choice’, or whether that same person only believes they have an understanding, and is making what is (in the view of others) an ‘uninformed choice’?
After all, the vast majority of people think they’re right to do what they do. That’s why they do it! But even if they think the preceding is correctthe vast majority of people, when told that their own immediate perceptions or beliefs are wrong, tend to disagree. Everyone (and I am certainly including myself here) might agree with the rule and simultaneously think of themselves as an ‘exception to the rule,’ in that their particular situation is (to them) not understandable by someone who isn’t a certain color/gender/age/sex/orientation/height/weight/what have you.
But of course… that’s not the case. Everyone isn’t an exception, not at all. We all suffer from subjectivity in our own lives, like it or not.
I know little about the particular issues affecting Muslim women, which is why I have kept this general. But it does not seem that being Muslim, or veiled, or in a certain country, makes one’s own personal perceptions any more guaranteed to be correct. So the concept that nobody else can understand is simultaneously somewhat true and, probably, not much more true than in many other situations where outside opinion is considered appropriate.
Oh, and PG: Do you care to bring the paragraph quoted below (with which I agree heartily, BTW) into the context of the teen abortion/abuse discussion in the other thread?
But where else are outside opinions considered “appropriate,” in the sense that someone who is in what she acknowledges to be a bad situation is pushed to reject not only what she knows is bad but also what others consider bad?
For example, if I know a 16-year-old American white girl who is being abused by her latest 22-year-old boyfriend and wants help, my “outside opinion” that this abuse is wrong is considered valid and useful. However, if my “outside opinion” also includes pushing her to dress in a way I consider seemly instead of looking like porno jailbait, most Americans would say that I was being too pushy and forcing my idea of correct dress (I don’t wear clothing that bares my stomach, my back, or my legs above mid-thigh) onto someone who should be able to dress in what I consider a trashy fashion. The fact that I might see some correlation between her getting into inequitable and abusive relationships, and the way she dresses, is irrelevant. Midriff-baring halters and Daisy Dukes are normative in U.S. culture, and I’m being oppressive and possibly a bad feminist if I decry them.
In contrast, because women who choose to cover their hair or faces are not normative in U.S. culture, people here will assume that the women cannot have made an informed decision to dress that way, and that furthermore the choice of dressing that way is tied to things Muslim women *don’t* like, such as honor killings or lack of access to education.
I’m not quite clear on the relationship between mandatory reporting of suspected abuse to law enforcement, and mandatory reporting to parents that their daughter has sought an abortion.
Fatemeh:
Thanks for the response. I’m afraid that I haven’t been particularly clear in my comments. I hope that offers some clarification.
First, let me say that I didn’t read the original article/thread and so was not specifically addressing the issue of head scarves or dress. Sorry. I was responding to the very general comments posted at the beginning of the thread with some very general comments of my own.
Your comment specifically mentioned Muslim women, but my thoughts were more broadly based. I will admit to largely complete ignorance regarding the issues facing Muslim women beyond those that face all people, particularly those in a minority.
I’m sorry that you took exception to my line about agreeing to the rules to live in our society and felt I was referring to Muslim women (and men) with that comment. I was not. In fact, I had in mind my own family of fundamentalist Pentecostal Christians who have very different ideas about the role and value of women in society, and I do have more than a passing knowledge of women who choose to dress and behave in ways that are far from society’s norm. And more imporantly, they have very different beliefs about how women should be treated before the law. My family believes that America should become a Christian theocracy, for instance, and women should be the property of men and have no standing before the law.
Although I grant them the right to their beliefs, I think they couldn’t be more wrong. But more importantly, they don’t get to have a seperate set of laws and rules just for them, although they want one. They live in a greater society of people and are required to adhere to the same laws as everyone else.
The “rules” I was thinking of when I made that statement were the fundamental and founding rules that established our country. The right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. The freedoms enumerated in the Bill of Rights. The very basic beliefs that have helped to create a secular western civilazation. Sadly, we have always fallen short of our ideals, and continue to do so today. I certainly understand that the intrepretation of the rules aren’t fixed, but our country has been on a slow but steady march forward to bring more and more people under the protection of our Constitution and to give greater freedom to everyone.
I more than understand your point about the disrespect that comes from those wanting to “help” because my life differs from what they see as the right way to live. I am a gay man with an adopted bi-racial child. I am very well acquainted with people that think they know what is best for me and my family. They are working very hard right now to enshrine their disrespect and bigotry into the constitutions of our country and states.
I firmly believe that we should all be left alone to live our lives as we see fit as long as we aren’t actually harming others. (And let me point out that offended sensibilities by being around those who are different or make different choices don’t constitute actual harm.)
One final thought — I appreciate your understanding about Christian “homes” for gay youth. It is a sad thing. The major difference between that situation and one where people are seeking help is that those gay kids aren’t in those reeducatin camps because they want to be there. They are forced into those places by very misguided parents and churches. The help these kids seek is usually in getting away from such situations.
Bucky
I couldn’t agree more. :) Thanks for your clarification.