Al-Ahram Weekly | Special | Righteous ideology

The mark of power is often presented in the form of the helping hand. Amid invasions and occupation, focus has fallen, too, on more subtle means of advancing the agendas of foreign powers. One such means is targeting the generative essence of societies, wherein women stand at the centre. What role do women in Islamist movements play in defending the cultural particularity and sovereignty of the Arab and Muslim world?

Righteous ideology

Western conceptions of gender and feminism are skewed towards imposing Western values on the non-Western world, writes Amany Abulfadl*

The recently published Carnegie Endowment for International Peace report on the status of women in Islamic movements dives into the "mysterious" world of Muslim women activists, one that has become an object of curiosity for media and research centres of late.

The report, thankfully, introduces the reader to the fact that Islamic movements are not one but many, and succeeds in revealing dominant Western views and prejudices against women in Islamic movements.

Unfortunately, in many places, the report echoes these views and prejudices and renders an imperfect image of women in Islamic movements in favour of the feminist model. Such a discriminatory attitude is a serious breach of scientific methodology that is supposed to relay facts without leading readers towards desired conclusions.

For example, the paper frankly states that Western feminism is the model against which all women's movements should be measured to gain recognition. It says, "the [Islamic] organisations are also interesting because they are trying to develop a concept of women's rights independent of the Western legacy. It is not clear whether they will be able to do so." Here the paper is casting doubt on any attempt to approach women's rights outside the fetters of Western paradigms. It also considers Islamist groups' concerns about women's rights as dubious so long as they don't comply with Western definitions.

This way of denying Islamist women's competence to formulate theories and practices of women's rights derived from their own value system is questionable and I wonder if this denying attitude aims at downgrading their self- confidence in order to pave the way for them to accept the alternative alien agendas that will, assumingly, save them from their intellectual vacuum.

Imposing a Western paradigm in this fashion proves the research to be not only biased but also irrational as it tries to stereotype diverse experience under one specific paradigm of "gender feminism", which is not even a matter of consensus in the West and that is largely irrelevant to Arab women who are dying in wars or of malnutrition. The report charges Islamist women with ignorance in rejecting the Western paradigm; of "knowing little about the differences that exist among women activists in the West", while the truth is that they reject it because nothing could be further from our Arab women's priorities beside its value system which is unacceptable in this region.

The paper goes further to accuse Islamists of being, unlike Western and some favoured Arab NGOs, outdated and unaware of changing women's issues, despite the fact that there are two special committees run by women from within the Islamic movement concerned exclusively with monitoring the changing situation of women's issues at home and abroad. The database they maintain is an important reference for NGOs to benefit from. They regularly attend relevant UN sessions and play a part in the drafting of relevant UN documents. I remember onboard a plane to New York to attend the "Beijing+10" session, and while our Islamist delegation was feverishly preparing its amendment to the document, members of official Arab delegations came to ask us what it was all about. Their governments had sent them only to have their photographs taken in the meeting room, simply to convey to the world community the impression that they care.

The authors of the Carnegie report believe that Islamic parties use women instrumentally. They unfairly suspect Islamist movements' positive attitudes towards women's rights to be "lip service" motivated by the pragmatic imperative of gaining "international legitimacy" rather than the reformist vision it strives to realise in all aspects of life. Moreover, the report's authors understand the act of nominating women candidates for parliamentary elections to be equally self- serving ("female candidates may help Islamist parties win votes") whereas the nomination of candidates in Islamist groups is a complex process of filtering according to qualifications and history of political work, not gender considerations.

What the authors need to understand is that if those parties were ready from the outset to adopt an instrumental approach to reach power -- either through the self- serving use of women or otherwise -- they would have reached it long ago. Besides, the Islamic movement is not in favour of applying the quota system but they choose according to individual talent and proficiency.

The same unawareness of the inner workings of Islamic groups leads the authors to lay blame on group leaders for not putting women in leadership positions. But if they knew how these leaders are often kidnapped from their homes at midnight and taken to unknown places where they are subject to all kinds of rights violations committed against them, including sexual crimes and humiliations, would the report's authors still insist on sacrificing women simply to satisfy their feminist agenda?

Sometimes the favouring of feminist ideology goes beyond all reason; the following statement that criticises the Islamic concept of equality is an example: "the concept of simultaneous equality among the genders and separation of their roles comes uncomfortably close to the idea of 'separate but equal' that has underpinned race segregation and discrimination in the United States."

Apart from the inaccuracy of the comparison between Islamist discourse and American race apartheid, the statement reveals a shallow level of understanding of the feminist concept of equality that calls for the merging of roles of both the sexes. Feminists here don't mean, as we believe, benign appeals for not confining women to domestic roles, or for men to help at home, but rather to extend more malignant demands. I personally heard feminist leaders defining "equality" as "exchanging roles" between men and women with a specific example of men sharing in pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding roles -- through potential medical interferences -- and of women's rights to drive lorries and cut wood in the jungle!

For those who are always ready to get spellbound with whatever comes from the West, this definition of equality can not work in our Arab world because neither will our women find jungles to cut wood in, nor our men ever have breasts to feed babies.

* The writer is a member of the Egyptian Centre for Monitoring Women's Priorities.