Last week, a statement from the Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group (MACG) was blasted out into the internet ether entitled "No to racism and the veil." It was noted this article was published in the first edition of "The Anvil," MACG's newsletter.
I know little about the MACG aside from the brief announcement of their formation and their stated aims and principles. I found their article very troubling, and in the interest of constructive dialogue, offer my response to it here.
In "No to racism and the veil," the MACG argues that the "veil" is a symbol of the oppression of women in Islam and therefore should not be worn. Paradoxically, however, they state that women should wear whatever they like - but the MACG really doesn't think women should wear the veil.
To begin with, there are a few blatant problems with the piece. First off, it condemns "anti-Islamic racism." "Anti-Islamic racism" is an impossibility because Islam is not a race but a religion with adherents from a wide range of races and ethnicities. Secondly, the premise that a handful of (I'm assuming) white, male anarchists feel entitled to give direction to at least 500 million women is extremely troubling. Compound this by the fact that the authors apparently presume the experiences of all women under Islam to be the same, and this piece jumps off into the deep end of Orientalism and what Chandra Talpade Mohanty labels "methodological universalism."
In "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourse" - an essay every Westerner who is going to attempt to save global Southerners from themselves needs to read - Mohanty writes:
The argument goes like this: the greater the number of women who wear the veil, the more universal is the sexual segregation and control of women....For instance, Muslim women in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, India and Egypt all wear some sort of a veil. Hence, this indicates that the sexual control of women is a universal fact in those countries in which the women are veiled....
[T]he problem is not in asserting that the practice of wearing a veil is widespread....it is the analytic leap from the practice of veiling to an assertion of its general significance in controlling women that must be questioned. While there may be a physical similarity in the veils worn by women in Saudi Arabia and Iran, the specific meaning attached to this practice varies according to the cultural and ideological context....
[T]he application of the notion of women as a homogeneous category to women in the third world colonizes and appropriates the pluralities of the simultaneous location of different groups of women in social class and ethnic frameworks; in doing so it ultimately robs them of their historical and political agency.... [emphasis in original]
The crux of the problem lies in that initial assumption of women as a homogeneous group or category ('the oppressed'), a familiar assumption in Western radical and liberal feminisms.
By arguing that all Muslim women should wholesale disavow the veil, the MACG is doing just as Mohanty describes above, creating a homogeneous category of "Muslim women" where none exists and robbing women of their agency.
Thirdly, the authors write that the veil "is a physical limitation on a woman's
freedom and ability to act in society." While a niqab or burqa may limit physical mobility in a sense, how a headscarf does so, I'm not quite clear. As well, the authors reference an article in The Guardian written by a British woman who wore the niqab for one day as proof that the veil is physically oppressive. Instead, they may have wished to talk to a Muslim woman (or several) who wears niqab every day before making such statements and conclusively evaluating the limitations (or not) of the veil.
Fourthly, and this is where things get really ugly, the authors write:
Here, we find women in
the situation where they are burdened with the responsibility to limit their
personal freedom because of the poor behaviour of men. In societies where the
veil is customary, the assumption is that women are sex objects and a man in
the presence of an unveiled woman to whom he is not related cannot reasonably
be expected to control himself and keep within the bounds of morality.
The image of Muslim men as rapacious sex fiends who are inherently physically incapable of restraining themselves from sexual attacking a woman who is not veiled qualifies as nothing short of "anti-Islamic racism," the very thing this statement was supposed to be against. The stereotype of the male Other as sexually predatory and insatiable has long been a weapon in the white supremacist arsenal and it is gravely disturbing to see such rhetoric employed here by anarchists.
Fifthly, the authors lament that "many Muslim women in Western countries have adopted the veil as a
symbol of defiance and cultural identity. Despite its physical oppressiveness,
they experience it as a liberatory symbol." The authors promise that "[b]y defeating racism, we will remove the illusory 'liberation'
of the veil and make its real physical oppressiveness more obvious."
Not only do the authors find wearing the veil as an expression of solidarity and defiance in the face of rampant Islamophobia troubling, but they (white, male anarchists) have generously taken it upon themselves to do their utmost to demonstrate to these deluded Muslim women just how oppressed and misguided they are in their veil-wearing.
By painting a homogeneous picture of women in Islam and essentializing Muslim men, women and Islam in general, this piece veers beyond mere inaccuracies into Islamophobia and Orientalism. It also, as Mohanty writes, "perpetrate[s] and sustain[s] the hegemony of the idea of the superiority of the West." All of these are things anarchists should be fighting - not propagating.
Though undoubtedly the comrades in Melbourne meant well in taking a stand against Islamophobia and the oppression of women, their analysis itself appears to be based on knowledge produced by the West about Islam and women instead of knowledge produced by Muslims and women about Muslims and women. And in doing so, instead of sticking a wrench in the works of such problematic beliefs, it just ends up feeding and recycling them, even if it does come with a radical bent.
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