Afghan Women Betrayed

Another subgenre is paintings about the harem; since most European males did not have access to that space, these paintings were more a projection of their sexual fantasies than the reality of life in the gender segregated spaces in which women spent their time. As various scholars have shown, European men who wrote about the plight of Muslim women had little access to these women to verify their assumptions. Coterminous accounts by western women of the Muslim women they encountered reveal a more complex reality. Nevertheless, this narrative of the oppressed Muslim woman serviced the colonial enterprise. The Afghan war in 2001 elevated imperialist feminism. Furthermore, it has various other political and commercial uses. For instance, in 2019 the far right-wing Alternative for Germany Party urged Europeans to vote for them using posters of the The Slave Market with the title “so that Europe doesn’t become Eurabia.”

But what of Muslim women themselves? Are they oppressed? Some point to the fact that women’s rights have been severely curtailed by right-wing Islamist regimes such as the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Conservative Alliance in Iran. We might respond to this point in two ways. First, the parties of political Islam adapt religion to serve their political goals in much the same way as American Christian fundamentalists have used Christianity to attack women’s rights. However, these Islamist parties and organizations are not a monolith. Second, all of the world’s major religions are to a greater or lesser extent sexist. Singling out Islam for its sexist practices in the mainstream media and public discourse is not a historical oversight but a systematic attempt to construct “our” values and religion as being enlightened in contrast with “theirs.”

One could, for instance, point to sexism in the history of Christianity and in Christian-majority societies quite easily. The Christian creation myth tells us that Eve was created out of Adam’s rib and that women’s pain in childbirth is a punishment for Eve’s disobedience to God. Women who were thought to be witches were burned at the stake not only in Europe but in colonial America, barely three centuries ago. Nicaragua, Chile, El Salvador, and Malta, all predominantly Catholic countries, ban abortion without exception, even if the woman’s life is in danger. The United States has yet to elect a female head of state, as Aslan pointed out, and it was only in 2020 that a woman of color was elected to the vice presidency.

Even if we examine Islam on its own terms, there is much debate about the role of women. The Quran, like any religious text, lends itself to multiple interpretations. Scholars like sociologist Fatima Mernissi and political scientist Asma Barlas have argued that Islam is not inherently misogynistic. Mernissi notes that while traditional interpretations of Islam seek to regulate women’s sexuality and social space, she also argues that if “women’s rights are a problem for some modern Muslim men, it is neither because of the Quran nor the Prophet, nor the Islamic tradition, but simply because those rights conflict with the interests of a male elite.” Barlas further points to the egalitarian passages in the Quran that suggest equality between men and women. She argues that sexist interpretations of the Quran are products of particular societies that need religious authority to justify sexual inequality. Ahmed states that prior to the institutionalization of Islam, women in Arab society participated in warfare and religion and had sexual autonomy. Historian Montgomery Watt even goes so far as to argue that Arab society at the time was predominantly matrilineal. However, Rodinson rejects this analysis, describing Arabia in this period instead as a patrilineal society where polyandrous practices, combined with substantial social roles for women, prevailed in certain regions. Prophet Mohammad’s first wife Khadija was a wealthy woman who was forty when she proposed to the twenty-five-year-old Mohammad. Khadija had been married twice before and was widowed; it was Mohammad’s first marriage.

As Islam spread, it adopted the cultural practices of various empires, including those of the neighboring Persian and Byzantine empires. The Christians who populated the Middle East and the Mediterranean had more rigid customs associated with women. In the Christian Byzantine empire, the sexes were segregated. Women were not to be seen in public, they were veiled, and they were given only rudimentary education. As the expanding Islamic empire incorporated these regions, it also assimilated these cultural and social practices. In other words, the particular misogynistic practices that Islam came to adopt were inherited from the Christian and Jewish religious customs of the neighboring societies that Muslims conquered. At the same time, however, as Samir Amin argues, the “model proposed by Islam” remained “entirely part of the tradition of patriarchal authority and the submission of women.” The significant point here is that sexist attitudes toward women, far from being unique to Islam, were prevalent among Christians and Jews as well.

Finally, a word on nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). In the neoliberal era, the withdrawal of state and public resources from the processes of social reproduction created a gap that NGOs have been able to fill. This has given birth to a privatized means by which to address and appropriate gender oppression. A network of well-funded NGOs, in collaboration with the UN and its various agencies, has produced what has been referred to as a neoliberal aid regime. Inderpal Grewal and Victoria Bernal noted that in 2000, NGOs disbursed between twelve and fifteen billion dollars and that by 2012, the NGO sector had become more powerful than the state in some parts of the world. Sociologist Zakia Salime’s analysis of the Moroccan context sheds light on the alliances between the state, feminist organizations, and the UN, highlighting how these alliances and NGO involvement are another means through which imperial feminism is reproduced. NGOs, particularly those that receive large grants from corporate sources, have thus become the new missionaries of empire bolstering neoliberal capitalism. General Colin Powell observed that NGOs were a “force multiplier” and “an important part of our combat team” in the Afghan war.