2023-09-07 16:22:08
Middle East – Artigo from Le Monde DiplomatiqueToward liberation from religious, colonial, governmental and Western tutelageIn May, biologist Rayyanah Barnawi became the first Saudi to carry out a space mission. As remarkable as it is, this event is not representative of the female condition in the Maghreb, Maxerreq and the Gulf.
To achieve equality between the sexes, women in these regions have nothing to expect from a State feminism that legitimizes the installed powers, because only the fight for democracy and secularism is emancipatory.
The wave of demonstrations in Iran triggered by the death of student Mahsa Amini in September 2022 shows how central the issue of women’s emancipation has become in the Middle East today.
To examine the issue with all rigor, it is better not to rely on the positions of the West, which often has a tendency to explore or caricature the issue of inequalities between the sexes in the region, and which arrogates to itself the power to liberate or reject this other «Other» which is the oriental woman.
It is also important not to limit ourselves to the choice between two identically biased options: that of attacking the allegedly deep roots of women’s oppression in the Middle East or that of presenting the latter as victims of colonialism, in the first place, and of the reactionary aspiration to cultural authenticity. , for another.
Understanding the struggle of women in this part of the world requires a more solid base. It is about questioning the ideological and political terms in which the social object of gender was constructed, both for the West and for the people of the Middle East themselves.
Only in this way can we clarify the embarrassing legacies of the past, as well as the possibilities of challenging patriarchy and making voices heard that have been marginalized until now.
Of the many harms caused by European colonialism in the region, few have had as lasting an impact as the system of misogynistic norms enacted against women.
In the context of the time, no society, whether colonizing or colonized, was exemplary in terms of equality between the sexes.
The power of patriarchy comes from its almost universal nature. However, concepts of gender and male privilege in the Middle East differed very clearly from the hierarchies and institutions in force in Europe, which reshaped the region from the 19th century onwards.
A fundamental difference concerns informal norms, as opposed to law codes. Social life in the Middle East was certainly framed by the texts and opinions of Islamic jurists, but it also provided women with latitude in several areas, including managing finances, legal deliberations and signing contracts.
In various ways, the gender system inscribed in sharia, for example, regarding the role of women in the family and in the couple, it denoted this flexibility. It had the mark of religious conceptions and also of the pragmatic needs of society.
European colonialism transformed this system in two ways. On the one hand, it established the prescriptions of sharia, until then subject to interpretations, quite different depending on the communities, in a uniform code of intangible laws. The rigid boundary established between women and men does not mahram, that is, without family ties with them, illustrates this evolution well: what was once a more or less malleable line of conduct with religious connotations, now constituted a legal obligation imposed under constraint.
On the other hand, colonialism then recorded these rules in a set of civil and criminal codes imposed on local societies by force of courts, military orders and decisions by public authorities.
The impasses of enlightened despotism
Under the effect of European domination, the old pluralistic mix of informal religious norms was therefore transformed into an arsenal of imperatives that did not admit any exceptions. This reflected the colonial powers’ perspectives on Islam and Muslims, considered backward and recalcitrant to civilization, which meant that women necessarily lived in oppression and had to be saved.
The imperialist desire to “civilize” Muslims led, however, to the opposite effect, subjecting local societies to authoritarian power, uniform violence and economic exploitation. Women were also victims of this will. They were less liberated than absorbed into a new legal apparatus that expressed the European vision of gender hierarchy.
Nothing better illustrates the remodeling of local traditions under the effect of colonial nationalization than the issue of the rights and identities of homosexual people. In many Muslim societies, conceptions of gender and sexuality tacitly admitted a certain ambiguity in sexual relationships and practices prohibited in sacred texts.
Now, the classification criteria established by Western legislators drew a strict line of demarcation between “hetero” and “homo”. Sexuality was codified in such a way as to criminalize any and all practices equated to deviance. The consequence of this was to extirpate homosexual relationships from their traditional terrain, forcibly inscribing them into categories foreign to Middle Eastern culture.
A series of paradoxes followed in the way feminism and women’s rights were conceived in the Western world. Colonial administrators punished Muslim populations for their oppression of women, while in their own countries they had no right to vote or access to political careers.
Furthermore, in the field of economic transactions, European women had much less autonomy than their sisters in the Middle East, who could participate in the conclusion of contracts and contribute to charitable or academic works through the institution of waqf, Islamic asset endowment.
Likewise, the female emancipation movement developed in the West in the mid-20th century, in a context in which homosexuality continued to be criminalized and in which heterosexuality constituted the unsurpassable norm.
When the Western world committed itself to the recognition of LGBTQIA+ people, at the beginning of the decade beginning in 2000, it did not annul the rule of “double standards”: blaming Muslim societies for their condemnation of non-heterosexual practices, at the same time who forgot his own past conduct in this domain.
From the West’s point of view, the objective of gender equality in Muslim societies could only be achieved by implementing their ideas there.
This way of seeing resulted from the hegemony he had exercised for so long over norms in the four corners of the planet. But the injunction to a European-style feminism has never met with convincing results. It is true that she encouraged the education and mobilization of urban bourgeois women, but she did so by feeding and promoting cultural stereotypes that ignore local identities. Implemented through state-building following a war, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, or by national governments using technocratic means, such efforts have fueled an indigenous reaction that associates female emancipation with Western imperialism.
This mechanism has been reproduced throughout modern history. Firstly, in its most brutal form, it consisted, for colonial governments, of enacting repressive laws in the name of gender equality. In Central Asia, for example, the Soviet Union forcibly removed the Islamic veil from the 1930s onwards. France did the same in Algeria in 1958. This policy targeted traditional elites and religious authorities, but was mainly as an effect of fueling the confusion between progress and colonialism.
Secondly, the same logic was at work within the authoritarian regimes themselves, either by inspiration or under the direct dependence of their allies in the North. This local version of “enlightened despotism” aimed to free “the” Muslim woman without freeing the citizens. It inserts the issue of women’s rights into the armor of an autocratic power that seeks to use secular conservatism as a weapon against religious opposition, in order to broaden the regime’s social base.
The Shah of Iran, the former King of Afghanistan Zaher Chah (1933-1973), the former Tunisian President Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali (1987-2011) and the current Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Ben Salman all resorted to this strategy. Each time, what is at stake is accepting limited rights for women to better impede any demand for democratization. The fact that they were given some ministerial posts, that they recognized their rights to education (…)
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