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Arzu Merali
Director of Research, Islamic Human Rights Commission, London, UK.
'Mad Woman in the Burqa: Muslim Women as Exemplar Feminists'
In defence of a positivist and empiricist epistemology of Feminism and Feminist standpoint theory, against the charges of post-modern race feminism, thinkers such as Sandra Harding state that women of different races, classes and cultures cannot be feminists. In so doing they posit an alarming inversion: that feminists belong to a single race, class and culture. The words Dead white European (fe)male spring to mind.
This paper seeks to look at the representation of Muslim women not simply in the popular psyche but as part of feminist discourses, both academic and popular, focusing in particular on the representation of Muslim women wearing the veil, burqa, hijab, scarf etc. It will look in particular at the representation of Muslim women in relation to pictures of the Afghan woman as absolute symbol of oppression in the wake of 9/11. In so doing it briefly critiques empiricist feminism as an exclusionary epistemology. It will also briefly challenge Nancy Hartsock's standpoint theory. The duality of knowledge and the validity of the knowledge of the subjugated other inhere, this writer argues, discourse of liberation that many Muslim women adopt when the adorn themselves in Islamic garb. Harding constructs Muslim women - who are generally alter-racial, lower-class and obviously other-cultured - as unEnlightened others flailing in their attempts to know as a result of their racial, class and cultural disadvantage. A veiled woman is in this academic psyche, as so clearly in popular culture, de facto oppressed. Born into this culture, they must be educated out of it. Whilst they may chose to reject this benevolent ministry, their so doing marks them out as obdurately or stupidly replicating patriarchal discourses. Whilst writers from Lady Wortley Montagu to Germaine Greer, having travelled through other cultures, have exploded this argument, the idea of the Muslim woman as an agent in female liberation still beggars belief.
This paper will look in particular at Muslim women in so-called Western societies and posits the idea that Muslim women who adopt this form of dress are, as they often overtly state, seeking and in their minds finding, liberation. Their challenge to accepted norms of female liberation is not, as Bell Hooks argues and Sandra Harding decries, a particularised cultural response but another universal model. Herein lies the conflict between Islamic and Western feminist ideologies. The author will argue that the tensions between Muslim and secular feminists are the result of the Harding like prejudices that inhere in Western culture, positing Western knowledge and science as a teleology - something that standpoint theory should decry rather than uphold. The latter concept is a key to opening avenues of communication between women from Muslim, secular and other perspectives on the still distant road to female emancipation.
<A.Merali.89@cantab.net>