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Muslim Women Must Write Themselves: women and the multiculturalism debate
There’s an irony in the above title: I’m not a Muslim woman. I’m white, Western, and the lucky inheritor of an (ongoing) women’s movement. I’m also fully aware of the implications of claiming to speak ‘for’ this group, or any group of under-privileged individuals, from a such removed standpoint.
But that’s the point: no one in the press seems to be aware of the imperialist, colonizing implications of this ‘speaking-for’ discourse. While the ‘multiculturalism’ debate rages around us, fueled today by David Cameron’s speech, women’s rights are cited as a foremost reason as to why we should abandon multiculturalism. The plight of Muslim women has been both absent and present throughout multiculturalist arguments. Despite the fact that it doesn’t seem to have occured to the government to take steps to protect Muslim women from the worst behaviours of Muslim men, it continually occurs to them to take steps to protect us indigenous Brits from the worst excesses of Islam. According to Cameron, it’s us, the white Westerners, that need protection much more than anyone else in the UK. Women don’t come into this though, since his cuts have resulted in the removal of funding to women’s charities and his party’s MPs have scrapped schemes to protect women from domestic abuse. And now he has the cheek to use Muslim women’s rights to backup his argument for the regulation and censorship of Muslim organisations in the UK: “Do they believe in universal human rights – including for women and people of other faiths? Do they believe in equality of all before the law?”
Where is the Muslim woman in this sort of discourse? She peers out from behind a veil of white, Western representation, where no space is granted her to determine her own role in the multiculturalist debate. She is merely a tool which Cameron is using to futher his own agenda, which is the perpetuation of the dominance of allegedly ‘British’ values. If David Cameron really wanted to regulate Muslim organisations in the UK in order that they might treat women better, he might have asked some Muslim women for their opinions (his token consultation with Baroness Warsi notwithstanding, since her status as a peer and Tory co-chairman means she’s not exactly impartial, nor is her situation in any way typical or representative of Muslim women in the UK). He might even have considered making a speech that was actually about them, rather than once-again tarring all Muslims with the Potential Extremist brush, aiming to limit the roles and identities available to Muslim men and women alike, further silencing an already-silenced group.
In this article from 2007, Johan Hari has actually bothered to do some reasearch that isn’t just from the point-of-view of card-carrying right-wingers, therefore anticipating some teasing-out some of the power-relations at work in multiculturalism. In this article he cites the case of Nishal, living in Germany, and her appeal to the courts for protection from her abusive husband. Informed by a judge that she has no right to such protection because, as a Muslim, she should of course expect such treatment, Nishal was sent back to her husband. And this German case isn’t as far from home as we’d like: German Chancellor Angela Merkel is not only a close ally of Cameron’s, but she anticipated his speech with her own public fascism last year.
What this means is that the German courts took it upon themselves to define Nishal’s religion on her behalf: based on a narrow reading of an out-of-context section of the Qur’an, they told this Muslim woman what her role as a Muslim woman should be. Nishal’s attempts to define herself and her own identity as a Muslim woman were thwarted. In a double-whammy, they granted Nishal’s husband the right to continue to determine her life for her. The only person who gets no say in Nishal’s life is Nishal herself. In order to achieve any degree of personal autonomy, Nishal must speak out from under her husband, from under the veil of ignorance through which Western state representatives view Islam, and from under a justice system which – as the verdict made patently obvious – was not made to protect such as her, but to contribute to her oppression. She must speak out from under piled-up layers of Western patriarchy, Eastern patriarchy, Western privilege, white privilege, and the discourse Cameron and Merkel subscribe to, which privileges what they perceive to be ‘native values’ over the rights of immigrants to determine their own lives. All these layers of power conspire to silence her; no one woman can have a voice loud enough to be heard over all that.
Which is why it’s time there was a prominent Muslim Women’s Movement in Western countries . The feminist movement in the West is far from over: it’s an ongoing struggle against the kind of discourse which uses women’s rights as a means to an end, but never sees them as an end in itself. Of course, white western feminism cannot purport to speak on behalf of immigrant women, any more than David Cameron – or indeed, Johan Hari – can. As Helene Cixous writes: ‘Woman must write her self [...] must put herself into the text – as into the world and into history – by her own movement.’ When Cameron uses what he sees as the rights of Muslim women to strengthen his position within the multiculturalist debate, he denies them this opportunity. Cixous advocates a fightback against this kind of marginalisation and the act of ‘speaking-for’ (which is really silencing): ‘Women should break out of the snare of silence. They shouldn’t be conned into accepting a domain which is the margin or the harem’ (All Cixous quotes are from her seminal essay ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’).
Arguably it is suspect even for this kind of feminism – written by a female immigrant in 1975 – to determine the path that should be taken by immigrant women in Britain today. Nonetheless, what the work of established feminists does show is that, whenever immigrant women seek to determine their own lives, and subsequently to remake their religions, their communities, their culture, they should find millions of willing allies in their Western sisters. Whenever Nishal or someone like her goes to court, she should have available to her the support of millions of women’s rights activists willing to fight for her rights, because women’s rights don’t cease to be relevant when the woman in question chooses to wear a veil and/or go to mosque. However, these activists ought to be willing to listen, rather than to talk over Muslim women or to use their sufferings as a means to an end that wont benefit them. David Cameron would deny these women the chance to speak for themselves. Allah forbid we should do the same.
This is a really good article!
Thanks, much appreciated. It was my first one for the blog so I was a bit anxious about it.
yep great blog. look forward to many more!
Thank you, funny how women are always used in these debates. The government refuses to give funding to women fleeeing domestic abuse who have no right to public funds, it deports women who are trafficked into prostitution and makes cuts to services to all women afffected by domestic abuse and other gender based violences. It makes legal aid difficult to get…..so when Cameron bumps his gums about women and multiculturalism what is he talking about. He refuses to take about unequal pay for women, violences and abuses against women., cuts in the public sector, lack of child care, lack of care for people with disabilities and older people – these are the things that affect all women. He doesn’t care about immigrant women or muslim women, he is just using racist assumptions about these women to have a go at “multi-culturalism” – if you don’t have multiculturalism you have monoculturalism and that would be horrible because whose culture are we talking about?
Once again great blog and great piece – thank you
Great article!
Obviously supporting the self-organisation of oppressed groups (not just women but black people, LGBT people, disabled people etc.) is (or should be) ABC for any socialist, but I think it’s wrong to say that you can’t or shouldn’t have any opinions on the best way to fight for liberation unless you yourself are part of the oppressed group in question. Within the framework of your own argument, you don’t really have any right to say whether or not Baroness Warsi is or isn’t a legitimate representative of Muslim women (as she is one and you aren’t).
I also think it’d be wrong to react to state racism against Muslims and right-wing critiques of multi-culturalism by uncritically “defending” Islam and multi-culturalism. I think we should be “against” Islam in the same sense that we should be “against” all religions (not just on feminist grounds but on basic materialist, secularist grounds) and I also think the long-standing tradition of left-wing critique of bourgeois multi-culturalism (which counterposes working-class anti-racism and integration to the idea of neatly boxed-off “communities” and “cultures”, each with their own – usually self-appointed, usually right-wing, usually very rich – leadership) needs to be revived.
There are some really good examples of women’s struggles within ethnic minority communities (Southall Black Sisters is one name that comes immediately to mind) which in many ways provide a good model. Ultimately isn’t what we (and by “we” I mean “the working class”) need a working-class women’s movement that can fight for women’s liberation (immediately, not as something for “after the revolution”) on the basis of consistently anti-racist, working-class politics?
I’m a white man (and an atheist secular Jew, if it matters) so I guess if you do think that identity/personal experience are the ultimate bottom-line in politics then I have no right to say any of this stuff. But to reiterate, I think there’s an important difference between believing in the self-organisation of the oppressed (and autonomous leadership) and believing that only members of oppressed groups have any right to say anything about that oppression and how to fight it.
Obviously by writing the article I’m sort of bypassing the idea that only members of opressed groups get a say in the matter. Basically what I’m trying to point out in this article is that your average muslim women (discounting Baroness Warsi because her circumstances are exceptional in any circumstances, but also on the grounds that she’s come under attack from her own community on several occasions) doesn’t get to be part of the debate on multiculturalism, instead she is ‘spoken for’. Everyone else does. There is no question really that people who are not members of opressed groups shouldn’t get a say – we all do, in fact, we are the primary voices in the Muslim debate. Voices critical of Islam are very strongly heard in this debate also. But there is a major, gaping silence in this debate, which is the voice of the opressed Muslim woman, that same opressed Muslim woman who is being used as a pawn in multiculturalist arguments that she is denied a part in. This isn’t right. In the same way that gay people should get a major voice in gay rights, working-class people should get a voice in worker’s rights, and women should get a voice in women’s rights, Muslim women should get a voice when it comes to defining their religion and their role as women within it.
At the moment voices other than theirs are getting the last say – the only say, perhaps – in the multiculturalist arguments which affect Muslim women. This is what I’m objecting to. This is not a case claiming that Muslims should get to do whatever they like, or anything of the sort. It’s a call for the amplification of an unheard voice, and for a willingness on the part of others to hear it.
To add something else – bypassing my thoughts on Baroness Warsi and her exceptional circumstances, if we accept her unquestionably as a fair and just representative of the female Muslim population of the UK, is the inclusion ONE female Muslim voice enough in a debate that seems to both centre around, and obscure, Muslim women’s rights? In this circumstance, can one speak for all? And this too leaving aside the fact that Baroness Warsi has not spoken directly on the matter, instead the press points out at every opportunity that Cameron has drawn up his anti-multiculturalism plans ‘in consultation with’ Baroness Warsi, almost as if the Tories are attempting to legitimise their policy by name-dropping her in a manner that posits her as unquestionably representative, assuming that because one Muslim woman concurs with the policy, all do so implicitly (or should do). Again this indicates a ‘speaking-for’ dynamic, which is what I’m objecting to in the article.
If all you’re saying is that in any debate/discussion about Muslim women then the voice of Muslim women (rather than, say, the voice of David Cameron) should be foregrounded, then fine; I think that’s pretty uncontroversial.
But there’s another important question within that – *which* Muslim women are we talking about? Muslim women do not exist as a homogeneous bloc – they are divided on the basis of political opinion, social experience and (most fundamentally from a socialist point of view) class. Do we (i.e. the revolutionary left) want to foreground the voices of bourgeois Muslim women like Baroness Warsi? Or of political-Islamist women? Or of working-class feminist Muslims arguing for a politics of liberation?
I think the best contribution that non-Muslim socialist-feminists can make to this debate is to identify and promote working-class, leftist and feminist voices (hopefully all three in the same voice) within Muslim communities. If we don’t do this, what’s the point in our politics?
“If all you’re saying is that in any debate/discussion about Muslim women then the voice of Muslim women (rather than, say, the voice of David Cameron) should be foregrounded, then fine; I think that’s pretty uncontroversial. ”
I am saying that, but it’s not all I’m saying. What I wanted to highlight was the difference between speaking about, and speaking-for. Cameron is establishing a version of Muslim women’s identity which he is then using to promote an anti-multiculturalist agenda that wont necessarily benefit them. He constructs a certain image of the opressed Muslim women which he then uses as a means to an end which isn’t necessarily their end. This isn’t the same as me writing an article, and it’s not the same as the discussion we’re having now: because he is ‘speaking-for’ them in a way we are not, and because he is using his own particular conception of the place of Muslim women in society to further his own agenda.
“*which* Muslim women are we talking about? Muslim women do not exist as a homogeneous bloc – they are divided on the basis of political opinion, social experience and (most fundamentally from a socialist point of view) class. ”
This is my point re. Baroness Warsi. By citing his consultation with her left, right, and centre, he is implying that Muslim women are a homogenous unit – that one can speak for all, because they’re all ostensibly the same. I’m saying there needs to be a more representative female Muslim voice in society, something which is more pluralistic and acknowledges the divisions within the social group also. I think who we (as the revolutionary left) want to foreground is irrelevant – this is something that we cannot decide without consultation with female Muslims, who first must consult among themselves in order to reach some form of workable consensus about the place(s) in society they see themselves as occupying, and also the place(s) in society that they desire to occupy. Because feminism does have a revolutionary agenda, and in the west has been associated with Marxism for a long time (particularly in the case of french feminism), I think that western feminism has something to offer muslim women, should they choose to adopt it. But to impose it on them – to impose any agenda on them – risks ‘speaking-for’ them, and thus replicating the kind of discourse Cameron is guilty of. Muslim women need to elect their own representatives – and Baroness Warsi isn’t necessarily the choice of that community, but of a wider community which includes people who are not necessarily wishing to act in their interests. I have been promoting eftist and feminist voices with the example of Helene Cixous, who is also an immigrant. But it’s not for me to say whether she is relevant to what they wnat to achieve or not. This is the point – NOT to impose, not to promote, unless it is in solidarity with the self-determined desires of Muslim women (pluralistic as these desires will no-doubt be).
But I don’t want “consensus”. I want the division between working-class feminist voices and bourgeois-liberal voices (or Islamist or other politico-religious voices) across society (not just within Muslim communities) to sharpen and intensify.
Promoting and solidarising with the voices you agree with isn’t “imposition” – it’s just acting on your politics. And as I say – if we don’t do this, then why do we exist in politics at all?
When you’re on a picket line and you’re trying to persuade a workmate not to scab, are you “imposing [your] agenda” on him/her? No – you’re just acting on your politics.
Just wanted to add that this is about as much development and clarification as I’m willing to give. I think I’ve defended my article to the point that it still stands, and I don’t want to exhaust my thoughts or to transcend the span of my concerns – which is mainly a call for more female Muslim voices, in a more prominent position in society, and for people to be more willing to listen rather than to ‘speak-for’. Also I have to channel my efforts into future articles and my own academic work (which is incidentally in this area – I’m deeply concerned with authority in discourse and in literature).
If any significantly different points come up I will of course provide a response, but I can see this escalating into me repeating myself needlessly or the whole discussion spiralling off-topic.
“But I don’t want “consensus”. I want the division between working-class feminist voices and bourgeois-liberal voices (or Islamist or other politico-religious voices) across society (not just within Muslim communities) to sharpen and intensify. ”
Ok, this is def the last one, promise. Bsically here you’re viewing the muslim thing as part of a wider agenda. That’s fine, but my article isn’t concerned with that, this is your own agenda, this is about what you want. My article isn’t about how Muslim women and leftist politics can help each other or where they coincide. My article is about discourse politics and why we should’t ‘speak-for’ opressed peoples in the way Cameron does in the case of Muslim women.
we could spend a long time arguing about whether encouraging a person to picket is ‘imposing’ or not. Personally I don’t have strong feelings either way. It’s not what I’m concerned with in this article. I’m concerned about Cameron using Muslim women to impose an agenda of his own. this is pretty far removed from your concern with widening the division between working-class and bourgeois voices. Whether or not these divisions should be widened isn’t a question I’m particularly interested in answering.
Umm… okay. Yes – I am definitely viewing “the Muslim thing” as part of “a wider agenda” – that is, the “wider agenda” of society and class (in abstraction from which pretty much nothing makes sense anyway).
I just assumed that as you’re writing on the website of a revolutionary socialist youth group we had some basic class-struggle and anti-capitalist starting points in common. Obviously a mistaken assumption; my bad.
(Not saying you’re not a socialist – I don’t know – but if so we clearly have pretty different conceptions of what that means and what the role of socialists in political discourse of this kind is. If you don’t have “strong feelings either way” on the issue of encouraging someone not to scab then I think our differences go way beyond the substance of this particular debate so it’s possibly best to agree to disagree on this one for now.)
Yeah, best to agree to disagree is probably right. I am definitely a socialist, and of course I think it’s a good idea to encourage people not to scab. I don’t want to debate the implications of scabbing here though (not that I don’t want to debate them at all, and at the moment there’s a lot of good stuff about scabbing being said surrounding Aaron Porter) because the power dynamics at work regarding this sort of rhetoric are very very different from the ones in the opressed-Muslim-women-multiculturalism thing.
And OF COURSE I think that anti-capitalist and class-struggle stuff is important, OF COURSE this is part of my concern regardless of what I’m writing, and of course it informs everything I do – otherwise I wouldn’t be referencing someone like Helene Cixous. And a lot of the power dynamics I am concerned about are facilitated and indeed caused by capitalism. But this isn’t my only concern, and it certainly isn’t a concern in this article. As a socialist I seek to challenge existing power dynamics, and while class is a fundamental concern (my academic work is very much concerned with class), I’m very aware that the class dynamic isn’t the only hierarchical power structure at work (although the class dynamic has a major effect on other power hierarchies).
Class is important. But other power structures need challenged too, and as feminists I think we’ve acknowledged this already. This doesn’t mean that I don’t think that class is of a primary importance – if I didn’t I probably wouldn’t be a socialist. But I reserve the right to write about other things too, and to challenge other power structures independently of my class-based concerns (whilst of course acknowledging capitalism’s role in facilitating these hierarchies in the first place).
Danny. I think your accusing us of throwing out the baby with the bath water here but thats not true. This is a good thoughtful piece and Meghan you have no need to “defend” it. Its not about whether we are AGAINST Islam in the abstract (which obviously, as you say, as materialists we are). This is a post about the need for strong self-organisation and a critique of the attempt to silence the people who this government claims to be “defending.” Same old shit as “Yeh, we’re invading Iraq to help the women and the gays” defence which was wheeled out 2 years after the fact. We might believe this bollocks if it wasn’t part of a clear and orchestrated attack.
I have heard some of Cameron’s speech and in reality disagree with very little of the few soundbites picked up by the TV news. I abhor “state multiculturalism” which (again…you rightly say) has destroyed and usurped anti-racism. It’s a ridiculous idea held by Liberal racists. Its greatest hope is mere tolerance of each other’s strange and unchanging “culture.” We beleive that actually we can do more than feign interest in traditional dancing and bite our tongues. We know that we can build a different culture and better culture. But…that isn’t what this article is about though is it?
Our materialist opposition to Islam, or my hatred of “multiculturalism” has little consequence to the fact that none of us want to see women being used as battering rams by racists and right-wingers to push their agenda. And the argument for radical self-organisation is not and cannot be put up as some sort of oppositional distraction from class struggle but as its most fundemental component.
Actually, while I’m still commenting on this, I want to point out that I feel like I’ve been accused in this discussion of not being a ‘real’ socialist (albeit in a passive sort of a way). At least one of these comments borders on being quite uncomradely. It’s not that I don’t expect to encounter opposition, or to be engaged in debate, by people whose priorities are perhaps different from mine, or who see their roles within socialism differently, or who want me to clarify my own position. But I did see one particular comment on this as a personal attack – not least because different parameters were introduced and I was then opposed on the basis of these parameters, rather than on the basis of my article. I published it anyway because I see no need to censor people who obviously are interested in socialism – it’s not comradely to censor your comrades. But in that spirit, can we keep comments comradely? When I write for a socialist blog, on issues that people who post here seem to find relevant (for the most part), I don’t think that I should have to defend my choice of subject-matter, or my choice to write about identity politics rather than class struggle. Yes, one might be a founding tenent of socialism where the other is perhaps more peripheral, but I don’t think that makes my article antithetical to socialism, and I’m hurt by the suggestion that I’m somehow betraying socialist interests (and also by the suggestion that I support scabs – this is very unfair).
Meghan, I genuinely don’t understand how anything I’ve said could be construed as a “personal attack” but I’m sorry if anything has come across like that. I’m pretty certain I never accused you of “betraying socialist interests”; all I’ve been going on is the substantive content of the article you wrote, which runs contrary to my understanding of a socialist perspective on this issue. Obviously you disagree; fine. It’s a debate. Maybe you’ll convince me I’ve been wrong. Maybe vice versa. Maybe neither. That’s what the comment facilities on blogs are for. I thought the exchange had indeed been conducted in a pretty comradely fashion so far and I’m a bit taken aback by the sudden claim that I’ve been launching “personal attacks”. No-one’s asking you to “defend” anything; my whole point is that, for socialists, there is no issue that can be viewed in abstraction from the class struggle, so it’s not about me saying you shouldn’t write about “identity politics”, but rather that when socialists write about “identity politics” we should do so from a working-class, class-struggle perspective. Maybe you disagree about that; maybe you think there are some issues which can be understood and responded to in abstraction from class struggle.
Lovebug – yes, Meghan’s piece was “thoughtful” but “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” would be a pretty good summary of what I thought was wrong with it. As I’ve said I think it goes way beyond “self-organisation is important” and into faintly post-modernist “you-can-only-comment-on-something-if-you’ve-experienced-it”-type argument. Cameron’s speech wasn’t really on that “we’re invading Iraq to help the women and the gays” tip and as you say yourself, as a series of soundbyte-critques of state multiculturalism was actually pretty unobjectionable so in terms of a direct critique of his speech I think the article misses the mark. The point is less about the content and more about the context; Cameron’s policies – including e.g. his promotion of faith schools – are hardly conducive to a situation in which a democratic alternative to state multiculturalism can flourish.
Anyway – I’m clearly pissing people off here and while my natural instinct in political debate when I start annoying people is to shout louder, I have no desire to needlessly irritate anyone involved in this site and besides, I think I’ve made my points clear and now feel like I’m repeating myself anyway. And without wanting to sound tokenistic, people like me already have plenty of places on the far left to sound-off without turning the comments thread on this article into another one so I think I’ll leave it there.
That works for me. I think it’s fair to say we’re not understanding each other here – how anyone can say that an article which draws on the work of Helene Cixous isn’t from a socialist perspective is pretty beyond me, especially when said article is deconstructing the rhetoric of a right-wing government. There are a lot of articles on this site dealing with feminism and anti-racism which don’t mention class struggle: the point is that these different fields are part of the wonderful tradition of leftist writers and part of the agenda of left-wingers today. But this doesn’t mean we’ve stopped caring about class struggle. I didn’t write about class struggle in this article, but like many of the major leftist thinkers of the twentieth century (Chomsky, Spivak, Derrida, Cixous, de Beauvoir) I reserve the right to write about other things in a context that is ‘abstracted’ from class struggle, and since this article is still very relevant to leftist thinkers and the agendas of the SSY and the broader left, I think it belongs here regardless. I have no intention to write ‘another article’ – I’m perfectly satisfied with this one.