How not to talk about Muslim women: Patriarchy, Islam and the Sexual Regulation of Pakistani Women Saadia Toor College of Staten Island, City University of New York In recent years, the status of the Muslim woman - often coded in the image of a veiled female figure - has become a major preoccupation of the mainstream media in the West, where it is framed as an issue of 'Islam and gender'. Regardless of whether the tone of the commentary is critical or sympathetic, the organizing logic is the same - that something called 'Islam' exists and that it can explain all aspects of Muslim society. Note that the terms - 'Islam', 'Muslim society', 'Muslim culture', etc. - circulating in this discourse are all in the singular, implying that there is one essential, monolithic thing called 'Islam' which remains consistent across time and space, and that all Muslims are somehow essentially identical regardless of where they may come from geographically and culturally. The overwhelming conclusion of this discourse is that there is something uniquely sexist - even misogynist - about Islam, 'the Muslim world', and thereby all Muslims, which in turn explains the low status of Muslim women. The main thrust of this chapter is to show that this mainstream Western discourse on Islam is misleading insofar as it is premised on an essentialized and monolithic 'Islam' emptied of history, diversity, complexity and dissent. I will show that, far from 'unveiling' the insidious workings of an actually-existing 'thing' called 'Islam', this discourse actually actively constructs it. Not only that, it does so in order to legitimize certain political projects. In other words, this discourse is deeply ideological. 1
In order to understand what I mean, let's turn first to the discourse and its history. In Orientalism, Edward Said argued that Western discourse on 'the Orient' provided the ideological justification for European colonialism in Asia and in the 'Islamic world' from the 18th century onwards. This justification included the idea that colonialism was, first and foremost, a 'civilizing mission' rather than an exercise in the occupation of non-European lands and the exploitation of non-European peoples and their resources. It is also important to note that the concept of the 'civilizing mission' came out of the ideology of Liberalism which was on the ascendance in Europe at this time. Postcolonial scholars - particularly postcolonial feminists - extended this initial work on the ideological roots of European colonialism to emphasize the centrality of gender and sexuality to the colonial enterprise. Their scholarship has highlighted how non-Western women became cast in colonial discourse as victims of their oppressive culture(s) and tradition(s), in a way that allowed colonialism to emerge as their savior. The postcolonial feminist scholar Gayatri Spivak has captured this logic in her pithy reformulation of the colonial civilizing mission as 'white men saving brown women from brown men'. Of course, white women also played an important role in the colonial enterprise. For example, many of the early British suffragettes were fervent supporters of