The issue of secularity/religion

Next to the already reiterated genetic and cultural-national discriminations, in the European context religion emerges as a site of ethnoracial dispute. Though the end of

the Second World War brought an end to the popularity of eugenics, if not on the practice²⁰, the divisions between them-and-us persist in altered and in less outspoken forms. Ideas of ethnic differentiation are still prevalent and recently the importance of religion has re-entered the stage. This is the issue I shall turn to next.

As argued in the beginning of this chapter, in the first wave of western feminism, in the late nineteenth century, the issue of religion – predominantly in the form of Christianity – was debated frequently. Feminists have not always had a comfortable relation to Christianity, mainly due to the patriarchal structure of the church as well as the gendered God (Armstrong 1999). In the late nineteenth century, white, American feminist²¹ Mathilda Joslyn Gage (1881) thus argued that the Christian Church has circumvented and destroyed the original matriarchy of the ancient world (Waters 2000). Distinguishing between ‘true religion’ and ‘theology’, Gage reiterates the many instances in world history in which women’s religious functions and high esteem have been replaced by Christian dogmas of women’s original sin and slight worth. This contempt for women, Gage argues, is mirrored in the position allocated to women in society at large. But Christianity has also been invoked to support women’s rights, such as in the writings of the white, British philosopher and political theorist Mary Wollstonecraft. Wollstonecraft (1792) contends, in the liberal tradition, that though ‘men seem to be designed to attain a greater degree of virtue [than women]’

(Waters 2000: 99), men and women share the same kind of virtue stemming from God and from exercising their own reason. Wollstonecraft is arguing that women belong to the sphere of human beings rather than to that of animals or the immature and thus women should receive education of the same standard and on the same issues as men.

God has an even greater role in the work of Maria W. Stewart (1830-3), who – like Wollstonecraft, their differences notwithstanding – makes a connection between Christianity and the education of women. Stewart was an African American and her work deals with women’s rights as well as the rights of African Americans, and she calls on African Americans and women in general to make use of the liberal ideas of equality and liberty for all through furthering their knowledge by educating themselves. As a professed Christian, Stewart connects slavery to ignorance and

20 The practice of sterilising ‘unfit’ people persisted into the 1970s in Sweden and is still practised among Roma women in Slovakia today. More on this issue in the first case study.

21 I am underscoring the gendered and racial categorisation, ethnic and national belonging in my presentation of these theorists so as to keep the multilayered intersectionalities in mind.

Christianity to knowledge. Ignorance can be defeated primarily through ‘cultivat[ing]

among ourselves [African American, women] the pure principle of piety, morality and virtue’ (Waters 2000: 215). Thus, for Stewart, freedom of the individual goes through a submission to a certain theology.²²

The three first-wave feminists presented here all left traces in the contemporary feminist debates, and they point towards the difficult tradition and intertwining of liberal feminism, religion and inequalities and oppressions such as slavery. Thus, Raka Shome (1999) argues that major indicators of whiteness in the Indian colonial setting were Christianity and language as well as skin colour, which was connected also to ancient Indian myths and traditions. Of late the feminist discussion about religious heritage and belonging has taken up the issue of (post)secularism (Mahmood 2005, Braidotti 2006, Bracke 2008). This is also an issue taken up in this dissertation, in case study 3.

In relation to contemporary feminism and women’s studies, issues of liberation, emancipation, democracy and female agency are still in question. But current debates focus on Islam rather than Christianity²³ in relation to women’s situations, and so in this section I will present three prominent and different writers on Islam and feminism. Their diversities stem not only from their scholarly theoretical approaches but also from the differences in their geographical and cultural backgrounds, to which they all in one way or another allude in their work. They are; Meyda Yegenoglu (1998), Saba Mahmood (2005) and, lastly, an important political figure in the European debate, though not an academic in the strict sense, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. After several years in the Dutch parliament for the liberal VVD party, Hirsi Ali recently moved to Washington to continue her political work in a Republican think-tank, American Enterprise Institute.

Hirsi Ali has in a few years become a controversial figure in continental migrant politics. Using her personal experiences as a Somali woman brought up in Arabian

22 This route to freedom is interesting in relation to what I will present later as Saba Mahmood’s

‘theory’ of agency.

23 I would suggest that this is partly due to the binary public discourse of ‘clashes of civilisations’

(Huntington) and ‘either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists’ (Bush), which positions Christianity in a favourable light conflated with a secularist, enlightened world-view. I will discuss these conflations in relation to journalism in the following case studies.

Moslem communities, who migrated to Europe, received an academic education and excelled in Dutch politics, Hirsi Ali today denounces Islam as a religion demeaning to women primarily due to sexual morality, which is implemented on women’s bodies and which saturates Islamic societies, Hirsi Ali asserts (Ali 2006). Hirsi Ali calls time and again for an Islamic Enlightenment, which she believes would secularise Moslems and end the tyranny of Islamic patriarchy. Along with eleven other intellectuals and writers²⁴, Hirsi Ali signed a manifesto responding to the controversy which arose out of the publication of twelve cartoons in a Danish newspaper in 2005 depicting the Moslem prophet, Mohammed.²⁵ The response was entitled ‘Manifesto:

together facing the new totalitarianism’ and can be found on various websites.²⁶ The writers found that the controversy had revealed a necessity of struggling against Islamism and for ‘the universal values’ of ‘freedom, equal opportunity and secular values for all’. The manifesto continues:

Like all totalitarianisms, Islamism is nurtured by fears and frustrations.

The hate preachers bet on these feelings in order to form battalions destined to impose a liberticidal and unegalitarian world. But we clearly and firmly state: nothing, not even despair, justifies the choice of obscurantism, totalitarianism and hatred. Islamism is a reactionary ideology which kills equality, freedom and secularism wherever it is present. Its success can only lead to a world of domination: man's domination of woman, the Islamists' domination of all the others. To counter this, we must assure universal rights to oppressed or discriminated people. (emphasis added)

Clearly the manifesto draws on a strong enlightenment rhetoric invoking the concepts of freedom, equality and secularism. It also draws on the liberal feminist tradition paralleling men’s subjugation of women to a theological subjugation of both men and women. This correlation between men-Islam and women-the west is at first sight perhaps oddly chosen. Firstly, because of the traditional conception and

24 Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Chahla Chafiq, Caroline Fourest, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Irshad Manji, Mehdi Mozaffari, Maryam Namazie, Taslima Nasreen, Salman Rushdie, Antoine Sfeir, Philippe Val, Ibn Warraq.

25 I will be dealing in depth with the controversy in case study 3

26 Quoted here from http://www.petitionspot.com/petitions/manifesto.

orientalisation of Islam, which renders Moslems feminised, as the other (Gilman 1985, Yegenoglu 1998, Stoler 2002). In the manifesto’s constellation it is the west which is put in the position as the feminine, in danger of oppression. Secondly, because surely there are other political analogies to be drawn than women’s oppression by men, and women’s rights are often seen as a ‘women’s issue’ rather than a societal issue. When it comes to histories and traditions of oppressions and dominations it may actually be difficult to find examples that do not posit the west as the dominating factor – though this would obviously go against the argument in the manifesto. But there are – at least – two reasons for this juxtaposition: Firstly, the feminisation of the ‘west’ is underscored by the ‘fear’ of Islamic dominance and hegemony, which the authors to the manifesto identify. Fear of overpowering patriarchal dominance (Islam) places the ‘despairing’ west in the position of the under-dog that has to fight for its freedom from domination. Secondly, it aligns the

‘west’ with values of gender equality and freedom. Moreover, placing women’s liberation at the forefront of this alleged ‘clash of civilisations’ is symptomatic for the way in which women’s bodies are the site on which these cultural battles are fought (Yegenoglu 1998, Griffin and Braidotti 2002, Ware 2006).

Also worth noticing is the use of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ as generic forms opposed to

‘men’ and ‘women’. The categories are universal and do not distinguish between different cultural, religious and political stances within the groups of men and women.

This is what Saba Mahmood (forthcoming) finds to be sustaining the neo-conservative politics supporting the war on terror extended by the US and its allies in Europe.

Mahmood analyses a number of popular biographies by female Moslem writers – among them Hirsi Ali and Irshad Manji – who base their knowledge of the oppression of Moslem women on their own experiences. These experiences feed into the binary position of ‘the Western secular values’ against ‘the obscurantism and oppression of Islam’, which the aforementioned manifesto also invokes, and are littered with provocative expressions about Moslems and Islam, Mahmood contends. Mahmood calls for a feminist reassessment of some of the traditional values of feminist thought if indeed feminists want to distance themselves from what Mahmood sees as the

‘imperial politics of our times’ (Mahmood forthcoming: 118). Mahmood (2005, and forthcoming) radicalises the debate about female and feminist agency by arguing that piety and submission to Islam for some women poses a possibility of agency. Thus

Mahmood calls for a cautious approach from feminists when dealing with religion versus democracy and secularity. The latter may not necessarily equate equality of women’s rights in all cultures, Mahmood argues.

Basing her theory of female agency on Judith Butler’s notion of ‘performativity’

Mahmood wants to go beyond the binary of resistance-hegemony so prevalent in feminist theory. Thereby she insists on keeping ‘the meaning of the concept of agency open’ so as to make room for theorising about ‘ethical agency’. Presenting her fieldwork conducted among Egyptian women of the Moslem Piety Movement, Mahmood provokes the feminist standpoint and line of theorising that focuses on resistance to the patriarchal order. The women Mahmood investigates understand their agency to mean that they have freedom to subjugate themselves in order to realise their Moslem faith more fully. Mahmood uses the example of a virtuoso pianist who may submit herself to many painful hours of practising playing the piano, ‘as well as to the hierarchy of apprenticeship’ in order to fulfil her calling (Mahmood 2005: 29).

But this freedom to choose submission is not an ethical decision alone, Mahmood argues: the effects in the society surrounding the Piety Movement, which Mahmood’s research evolved around, is profound – not in a direct political sense (the movement is not interested in an Islamic state nor work for political parties and politicians, for instance) but in an ethico-political sense (Mahmood 2005: 35). Mahmood insists on the differences between the western tradition and definition of ‘piety’ to mean a more introverted and individually based spirituality, whereas the Islamic version is connected to ethical and practical actions and so directly affects the surrounding society (Mahmood 2005: 4 (footnote)). But the tradition of constructing agency through a religious practice is – as Stewart showed us above – not unknown to the western tradition either.

Following Edward Said and the critique of Orientalism, Meyda Yegenoglu (1998) problematises the issue of the veil and its many meanings in a new Europe. Like Mahmood, Yegenoglu recognises the situation of ‘western’ feminists as double and problematic. Western, white feminists are both a part of the orientalising west and part of a subjugated position in relation to ‘western’ men. Yegenoglu, following Jacques Derrida and Luce Irigaray among others, proposes a poststructuralist approach to the problem and calls for a ‘deconstruction’ followed by a ‘displacement’ of the subject.

The notion of displacement is important, because ‘[i]t implies a subjectivity where embodiment and relationality are not denied but become the constitutive moment of subjectivity, challenging and subverting the western form of sovereign subject’

(Yegenoglu 1998: 9). Yegenoglu continues to construe two different kinds of subjectivity. The first is of the western, dominating and possessive kind; and the second ‘is active in the sense of receptivity and openness to others and otherness’

(Yegenoglu 1998: 9). It is the latter Yegenoglu calls for in a deconstruction and displacement of the western idea of autonomy and sovereignty. However, Yegenuglo’s account seems to place oppression entirely outside the ‘Oriental’ subject.

Shome (1999) in contrast recognises the complex structures of interpellation when she argues that through Indian myths, customs, as well as British colonial educational systems made a discourse of the superiority of ‘whiteness’ possible in colonised India.

Thus, the roots of oppressive hegemony have many threads and strands of origin – some reaching through the ‘coloniser’, some through the ‘colonised’ and some coming from a dynamic relationship between the two.

Though feminism has a long history of theorising and practising its relation to religion, it would seem that the interconnections between Islam and politics in the contemporary western world have implications for the way we think about feminism and religion – that is, when the religion is Islam in contrast to Christianity. Cultural and social power structures play into the analyses of Islam and feminism and so it is not ‘merely’ an analysis of women’s relations to a patriarchal theology in an otherwise western-defined realm, but the colonial, imperial and enslavement histories play a part in the analyses as well. These differences and similarities have not been theorised sufficiently yet – and it is not my task to do so in this dissertation. Rather this section points to the contemporary categorisations of Moslem women and the feminist efforts made to dissolve the complications encountered in white feminists’

work on the othered Moslem woman. These efforts point to another way of looking at agency or subjectivity in relation not only to the dichotomised concepts of power and resistance and not only seen as an individual quality.

Though I am sympathetic to Yegenoglu’s support for a more receptive and open subjectivity, I fear the tendency of yet again universalising common humanity – in the sense of encompassing all differences in one universal lump of humanity. It seems

futile to wish for unison of subjectivities. Rather I will argue for realising the variations and ever-shifting diversities within humanity – and beyond – and without slipping into the relativism of identity politics. In order to recognise the other in the self while not conflating the two or letting one take over the other, ideas of connectivity and relationality need to be thought of in web-like constellations of political agency and power relations, and thus issues of responsibility and accountability are crucial (Braidotti 2006: 12). This is where the phenomenological legacy is the strongest.