Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 2, No. 3 | Islam & Feminism: ARE THE BARRIERS COMING DOWN?

If there is common ground to be found between Western feminists and women in the Muslim world, it is being discovered slowly—but thoughtfully—by women from both secular and religious backgrounds.

In 1979, feminist author Kate Millett went to Iran in the midst of its tumultuous Islamic revolution. She demonstrated with Iranian women in the streets of Tehran. She declared that “religion and clothing are something private” and insisted that “nobody can force” women to wear Islamic-style dress. Millett also trumpeted her vision of global sisterhood at a chaotic press conference. “We are an international movement, the women’s movement,” she said. “I had understood there to be a few struggling feminists in Tehran...[N]ow there are thousands and thousands in the street...who hope to build a movement here...What is happening in Iran may herald the rise of women throughout Islam and the Near and Middle East.”

As Millett related in her 1982 book, Going to Iran (Coward McCann, 1982), her message was not well received. She and her Iranian friends were heckled for presuming to speak for Iranian women. One woman challenged Millett’s presence in her country, saying, “As women in Iran we are very happy to have you here. It’s very nice of you to want to help us in this situation. But help us in our way, not in an American way.”

One day twenty years later, the telephone rang in the offices of the Los Angeles-based Muslim Women’s League, an organization of American Muslim women. A staff person from the Feminist Majority Foundation was on the line with a request. The Foundation was staging a rally to deplore the Taliban’s repression of Afghan women, she said, and wanted to borrow some burqas for the event. “They assumed we all had burqas!” says Laila Al-Marayati, a U.S.-born founder of the League. “To make the assumption that we all have that, that we all dress the same, I was so offended. It was a total lack of cultural sensitivity.” The League was doubly insulted because it had twice written the Foundation suggesting some joint projects but never received a response. “They weren’t interested in our participation at all,” adds Al-Marayati. “Even though we’d be natural bridges to women in other countries.”

Much has changed in the worlds of both Islam and feminism since Millett’s trip to Iran. But American feminists and Muslim women seem as estranged as ever. On an institutional level, their relations remain plagued by stereotypes and mutual suspicion. Their dominant worldviews—one secular, the other faith-based—seem irreconcilable. “When the Taliban were overthrown, the attitude was ‘Now you’ve been liberated by us, we expect you to take off the veil and become like us. Throw off Islam,’” says Pakistan-born Riffat Hassan, a professor of religious studies at the University of Louisville in Kentucky and a women’s rights activist. “There is an imperialist vein in American feminism. I see that clearly at times.”

Muslims complain that many American feminists remain ignorant about Islam and unaware of groundbreaking theological work on women’s rights being done by female Muslim scholars. They also criticize feminists for dismissing faith-based women’s movements, “matronizing” Muslim women, and being fixated on the Islamic head cover.

At the same time, Muslim women are often overly sensitive and defensive when feminists make mistakes. (A Feminist Majority Foundation spokeswoman says that when they called the Muslim Women’s League looking for a burqa, “we didn’t assume they wore burqas or anything like that.”) Some also reject feminism as inimical to Islam without bothering to ask the person using the word what she means by it. Others demonize anything Western, and resort to formulaic apologias for Islam rather than acknowledge the problems that women face in Islamic societies. “Some Muslim men and women are extremely defensive when they perceive criticism and they don’t spend the energy to check where that belief is coming from and talk about it,” says Uzma Mazhar, a Muslim psychotherapist in St. Louis. “They don’t go beyond their initial reaction to have a dialogue.”

Astonishingly, women interviewed for this article could not recall a single gathering designed solely to promote dialogue between American feminists and Muslim women. Instead, dialogue has come only as an unintentional byproduct of meetings convened for other purposes. “We come together to talk about issues but we never get to talk about stereotyping each other,” says Azizah al-Hibri, president of KARAMAH, a Washington, D.C. organization of female Muslim lawyers.

Despite this formal estrangement, however, a more nuanced portrait emerges on other levels of interaction. In the academic arena, and in grass-roots encounters that have proliferated since the September 11th terrorist attacks, women on both sides are beginning to view each other with greater understanding and trying to build working relationships, according to recent interviews and a survey of the newest literature. “As someone who works in that field,” says Mohja Kahf, “I do think the situation is actually improving among Western feminists.” A poet and professor of comparative literature at the University of Arkansas, Kahf, who came to this country from Syria when she was three, says she has seen “more sophistication” in academic writings about Islam and Muslim women.

Manal Omar also has noticed changes. “Muslim women are learning to take the good and leave the bad from the West and from feminism. There is more of a critical process,” says Omar, a former World Bank employee of Palestinian descent with extensive experience in international development projects. “And on the side of Western feminists, they are becoming more sensitive in their approach to understanding other cultures and religions. It’s an overall tone I’ve been seeing.”

Next page: Feminism is the principle that women have an equal right to the same opportunities as men... But feminism’s content depends on the circumstances of individual women.

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