by Zeinab Nobowati, PhD Candidate, Department of Philosophy

Do Muslim women need freedom? Perhaps at the first glance, most feminists would be inclined to respond with a “yes,” given that most of us believe that all women, and all human beings, need freedom in some sense. In the history of philosophy, especially during modernity, freedom has been defined as one of the most valuable ideals that humans pursue in the hope of overcoming alienating and oppressive social norms and structures and in order to flourish. But when it comes to the question of freedom and emancipation of Muslim women, the issue becomes more complicated because it is a question that has become increasingly politicized in our time. My training in both feminist philosophy and women and gender studies as well as my life journey of having experienced the growing (yet oppressed) feminist movement in Iran firsthand has driven my curiosity, motivation, and passion for undertaking an inquiry into this politicized discourse.  

The discourse of Orientalism in the 19th century already portrayed Muslim women as weak and oppressed in order to justify its own “civilizing” agenda. After 9/11, a growing body of literature has emerged about Muslim women, some reproducing Orientalist ideas (for example about the need to “save” Afghan women) and some critiquing such Orientalism (Abu-Lughod 2013; Mahmood 2011). Following Gandhi’s (1988) thesis that postcolonial feminism has always been busy navigating the tensions between its two commitments, anti-imperialism and feminism, my research studies the status of this tension in contemporary scholarship about Muslim women and problematizes the ways that the anti-imperialist commitments of postcolonial scholars have come at the expense of feminist values. It seems to me that this approach overcorrects western missionary feminism (Khader 2018) by erasing the problem of gender inequality in the Muslim world.  

My research critically engages with the work of two influential anthropologists, Saba Mahmoud and Leila Abu-Lughod, whose scholarship has studied the lives of Muslim women from an anthropological perspective (Mahmood 2011; Abu-Lughod 2013). Their work problematizes the ideological function of Western media and scholarship in the post-9/11 political landscape and suggests that Muslim women are not as oppressed as the Western media show and as Western feminists argue. While I agree with their critique of “imperialist feminism,” I engage with these anti-imperialist anthropological studies of Muslim women in order to problematize what I call the one-directionality of critique in this scholarship, a mode of critique that scrutinizes cultural imperialism as the site of colonial domination but falls short of extending the lens of critique to patriarchal domination, i.e., the political and social struggles of women. I trace such one-directionality back to Franz Fanon’s (2004) vindicative analysis of the Muslim veil and his decolonial politics that bracketed the problem of women’s oppression. I argue that this erasure can be avoided if we replace the one-dimensional anti-imperialist inquiry with what Nikita Dhawan (2013) calls a multi-directional politics of critique, i.e., a politics of critique that remains committed to problematizing different relations of power at the same time.  

To enable such a shift, my research unpacks intellectual and analytical re-sources that serve the development of such a multi-directional feminist critique. One productive resource will be sought in Serene Khader’s (2018) recent recourse to non-ideal theory and her account of feminist analysis as an analysis that does not start with supposedly universal (and implicitly Eurocentric) ideals. Instead, a feminist lens inspired by non-ideal theory starts from the heterogeneity of the social reality, acknowledges the differences in various forms of gender oppression and in various forms of feminist commitment, and thereby avoids falling into “missionary feminism.” This methodological insight is crucial for developing tools of analysis that can serve global studies of gender oppression. Another productive resource will be sought in Michel Foucault’s theory of power. I turn to Foucault (1990) to underscore the multiplicity of power relations that influence people in every society, and to argue that critique needs to expose that heterogeneous multiplicity as well. In other words, a multi-directional feminist critique needs to acknowledge the limitations of totalizing theories and analyze power without reducing it to one ultimate source such as imperialism. In that sense, postcolonial scholarship has a lot to learn from intersectional feminists and their emphasis on the plurality of the axis of oppression. 

As a student of philosophy, my engagement with feminism happens mostly from a methodological and theoretical perspective, but I remain also committed to learning from actors in local communities. A closer look at the local struggles of Muslim postcolonial societies shows that women themselves are aware of the need to critique the politics of gender inequality promoted by nationalist and Islamist states and presented as a nativist discourse, the recent #NoToCompulsoryHijab movement in Iran that happens under the shadow of an authoritarian anti-Western government constitutes a perfect example. I seek to take such local resistances seriously as a catalysator for feminist philosophical analysis that bases the need for feminist critique of religious cultures and forms of lives not in the abstract skepticism about religion, non-western cultures, or Islam as such (as it has often been assumed in the so-called western “missionary feminism”), but in the actuality of the critical practices and local forms of resistance. To come back to the question posed in the beginning: If we take the voices of local activists and advocates for social justice and their demand for freedom seriously, it becomes evident that freedom does not lose its relevance only because it is instrumentalized by orientalist and imperialist discourses. Perhaps the better way of being an anti-imperialist feminist is by acknowledging that imperialism is not all-encompassing, that its discourse is not the only speech in the world, and that we have other voices to listen to. 

—Zeinab Nobowati received a 2021–22 Graduate Student Research Grant from CSWS. 

Works Cited 

Abu-Lughod, Lila. Do Muslim Women Need Saving? Harvard University Press, 2013. 

Fanon, Frantz. “Algeria Unveiled.” In: Decolonization: Perspectives From Now and Then (2004): 42–55. 

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Vintage, 1990. 

Dhawan, Nikita. “The Empire Prays Back: Religion, Secularity, and Queer Critique.” Boundary 2 40.1 (2013): 191–222. 

Gandhi, Leela. Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction. Columbia University Press, 1988. 

Khader, Serene J. Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic. Oxford University Press, 2018. 

Mahmood, Saba. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton University Press, 2011.