virus: The Universality of Womens' Rights and Post Modern Theories

From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Sun Jul 21 2002 - 15:08:38 MDT


    
    The Universality of Women's Rights
    and Post modern Theories
    Until the mid-70s, women's rights concepts were not
    considered as culturally specific and were not divided into
    eastern or western, rather they were seen as something
    universal, and secularism and the separation of religion
    from the state were seen as pre-conditions for women's
    liberation.
    In the mid-70s, the idea of cultural Imperialism became a
    dominant discourse amongst nationalist/ anti-imperialist
    intellectuals and political and cultural circles in the west
    and the so -called Third World countries alike.
    The idea of cultural Imperialism supposedly had a
    progressive and militant guise: as part of the populist
    struggle in the so-called Third World countries against
    imperialism. In the Middle Eastern countries, opposition
    to 'imperialist culture' has been considered as an element
    of the fight against imperialism. Women have been the
    victims of the struggle against 'imperialist culture' and
    "Westernism". This is because women's liberation and
    women's rights were seen as imperialist and western
    concepts. Traditionalist, religious and reactionary forces
    opposed women's liberation in the name of fighting
    Imperialism and the West.
    The idea of cultural Imperialism was the beginning of
    revising the idea of universality of women's rights. The
    rise of political Islam and the anti-secularist backlash in
    the 1980s and 1990s imposed serious setbacks on civil
    rights especially on women's rights in the so-called Islamic
    countries. These setbacks laid the framework for the idea
    that women's rights in the Middle Eastern countries are
    culturally bound and should be defined according to
    religious and traditionalist values. This reactionary trend
    stamped on the concepts of women's rights and equality in
    those societies in Ideology, thoughts and discourse.
    During the 1990s, post-modern theories particularly the
    theories of identity politics and cultural relativism, became
    the dominant discourse in academia and various Middle
    Eastern study centres in the West. Under the guise of
    avoiding orientalism, racism and Euro-centerism, these
    theories have justified and continue to justify the attacks
    on women's rights, and have been haunting studies of the
    Middle East and particularly the study of women's
    experiences in various Middle Eastern countries.
    Post-modern theories emerged in the 1980s; at the time of
    the rise of conservatism, the attacks of capitalist market
    economy, the international ideological shifts and
    imbalances, the anti-secularist backlash and the rise of
    political Islam. These theories were the by-products of a
    time of uncertainty, darkness, setbacks and backlash.
    Post-modern theories have increasingly questioned the
    project of Enlightenment. These theories criticize the
    ideals of truth, rationality, system, foundation, certainty
    and coherence. They refute a universal view on history, the
    world, and society as a whole and believe in fragmentation
    and differences, since according to these views, the history
    of humanity does not evolve in a universal direction
    toward modern and secularist norms and values. These
    theories doubt system and a universal truth, and base their
    essence on differences and fragmentation. From this
    standpoint the history has reached to its end, modernism
    failed to achieve its commitments, and secularism and
    universalism, all became empty words and terms.
    According to post-modern views, the dichotomy of
    oppressed and oppressor, oppressive regimes and people
    under their rule, backward cultural and religious values
    and women's liberation, are invalid and do not exist
    anymore.
    These theories tell us that the universality of women's
    rights, modernity and secularism are all products of the
    evolution of western societies and therefore inapplicable
    and incompatible to non-western societies where
    indigenous cultural and religious values and norms are
    different than the West. Therefore, dominant secularist
    ideologies must be questioned and resisted where the
    viable traditions of social organization such as Islam can
    lay the framework for a more humane and egalitarian
    society.
    John Esposito formulates this view as follows: "At a time
    when the ideology of capitalism has desacralised all of
    human life for the sake of a destructive acquisitiveness,
    the need to open up non-capitalist spaces is more urgent
    than ever. The insistence on establishing alternative social
    imagery sakes Islam appears as the perennial threats it has
    always been. Especially because Islam may well be the
    most authentic voice of the South in its struggle against the
    western inspired and racially informed hegemonic aims of
    trans-national capital. Whatever the case, it has become
    quite clear that the nationalist secularist model of the post-
    independence period has utterly failed to emancipate the
    people and is now seen as a dismal failure."
    And he continues: "Secularism is not a separation between
    religion and the state, as propagated in both western and
    Arab writing. Rather, it is the removal of absolute values-
    epistemological and ethical- from the world such that the
    entire world-humanity and nature alike- becomes merely a
    utilitarian object to be utilised and subjugated. From this
    standpoint, we can see the structural similarity between
    the secular epistemological vision and the imperialist
    epistemological vision. We can also realize that
    imperialism is no more than the exporting of a secular and
    epistemological paradigm from the western world, where
    it first emerged to the rest of the world."
    According to identity politics and cultural relativism,
    women's quest for legal, political and economic equality is
    considered as culturally specific. It permits the
    justification of practices that oppress and dehumanise
    women in non- western cultures, when similar practices
    would be condemned as outrageous, unacceptable and
    barbaric in western culture.
    What is disturbing in reflecting women's demands and
    struggle in the study of and by women in the Middle East
    is the attempt to refute women's rights concepts and
    theories altogether as western ideas and incompatible to
    women's situation in non- western countries. The
    suggestion is that the ideas of women's rights and equality
    essentially functioned to provide moral justification for the
    attack on native societies or their indigenous culture and
    traditions.
    The pressure on women living in the Middle Eastern
    countries to denounce concepts of women's rights as
    western, as ethnic specific and irrelevant to non- western
    contexts is one of the destructive and damaging
    consequences of these views. Sometimes even the
    previously accepted minimal elements of women's rights
    in a non- western context are called into question. For
    example Patricia Higgins suggested that the plight of
    women in Iran concern only middle - and upper - class
    women, implying that the horrendous consequences of
    Islam in power were not significant for most Iranian
    women.
    Others have questioned maturity of Middle Eastern
    societies, and their women to enjoy such rights as sexual
    equality. Juliette Minces has argued that they are not ready
    "to undergo an emancipation which throws into question a
    non - secular equilibrium which has the full backing of
    religion"
    One dramatic example is the silence of feminists in the
    West in face of systematic suppression of women's basic
    human rights in Iran and countries under the rule of
    Islamic regimes and under the pressure of Islamic
    movements. Another example is the denial of asylum
    rights to people especially women fleeing oppression and
    gender-based persecution such as honour killing, forced
    marriage, stoning to death, veil and other Islamic practices
    and oppressive customs, under the name of respecting
    indigenous culture and religion. The third example is the
    way Western governments and their judicial systems treat
    the basic human rights of women and girls in the Islamic
    families and Islamic communities in the West, in face of
    forced marriage, honour killing, imposing the veil on girls
    under 16 which deprives them from social activities and
    enjoying their basic rights.
    Presumably what is happening to women in those
    countries and communities is what they deserve and is
    more than enough for them. Why should geographic
    borders and the oppressive ruling reactionary culture and
    religion make what is conceived as oppressive in one
    culture an acceptable cultural norm in another? In fact
    none of women's rights would have existed in the West if
    the concept of women's equality were defined as and
    limited to Christian values and backward Victorian norms
    in Europe. Cultural relativism suggests that it is not
    acceptable to criticise the misogynist, sexist and
    derogatory religious and nationalistic culture and
    traditions that have been preserved, celebrated and
    reproduced as part of an untouchable national or cultural
    heritage generation after generation. If Islamic beliefs and
    the indigenous national culture in the Middle Eastern
    countries are not oppressive and therefore important
    barriers against development in women's rights and
    liberation, why are women's individual rights and social
    position worse in those countries than anywhere else?
    The conceptual frameworks laid by identity politics and
    cultural relativism prevent many western intellectuals
    including women's rights activists from seeing and
    appreciating the diversified women's movements in the
    Middle East. The hegemonic influence of the western
    image of Middle Eastern women as veiled, obedient,
    subservient and backward, overshadows the mounting
    evidence of their intellectual, cultural and political
    changes in the region. This distorted understanding of
    women's life experiences, concerns and expectations is
    reproduced and repeated in this stereotype. The idea is
    that, because socio - economic problems are more
    pronounced in the region and because traditionalist gender
    roles and male dominance are more rigidly maintained and
    reproduced, issues of concern to western women such as
    freedom from sexual oppression and women's complete
    equality with men are irrelevant to Middle Eastern women.
    *****************
    Identity politics and cultural relativism are covers to create
    a comprehensive social, legal, intellectual, emotional,
    geographical and civil apartheid based on distinctions of
    race, ethnicity, religion and gender. This complete system
    of apartheid attacks women's basic rights and freedom and
    justifies savagery and barbarism inflicted on women by
    Islamic movements and Islamic governments in the region.
    The idea of women's liberation and equality for women is
    a universal one. There should not be any cultural or
    religious restriction on it. Any attempt to restrict these
    rights in the name of culture and identity and religion, or
    defining freedom and equality according to different
    cultures and religions, puts a major obstacle in the way of
    women's liberation.
    Egalitarianism, secularism and modernism are important
    elements of people's values and experiences in the Middle
    Eastern countries. The efforts made by women in those
    countries to struggle for a secularist family law in Egypt,
    Lebanon and Morocco, in Sudan to secure women's
    employment in a mixed public sphere, women's struggle in
    Jordan to abolish the law of honour-killing, Kuwaiti
    women's fight for getting the right to vote and the most
    significant of all, women's movement in Iran are all the
    signs of a powerful egalitarian and secularist women's
    movement in the region. The development of this powerful
    movement would definitively shake the basis of these
    societies and revolutionaries men and women's lives alike.
    Total failure of post- modern theories is one of the
    significant consequences of this movement's advancement.
    While women are fighting against traditionalist, religious
    and reactionary laws, rules and customs, there would be no
    legitimacy and space for these theories to justify the
    reactionary and misogynist religion and culture under the
    name of closure, expansion, linguistic turn, discourse, and
    dichotomy, identity politics, and cultural relativism.
    Women's rights are universal and women's liberation can
    only be achieved under an egalitarian, progressive and
    secularist form of government. These are the basic
    prerequisites of women's liberation in the Middle Eastern
    countries. These are what women and progressive
    movements in those societies struggling and fighting for.
    References:
    S. Best & D. Kellner, Post-modern Theory. MacMillan,
    London, 1991
    Esposito, J. The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? Oxford
    & New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
    P. Higgins, Women in the Islamic Republic of Iran: Legal,
    Social and Ideological Changes, in Signs: Journal of
    Women in Culture and Society. 10,31 (1998)
    J. Minces, The House of Obedience. London & New
    Jersey. Zed Books, 1982.
    Azam Kamguian's speech in the First Annual Conference
    of the Middle Eastern Centre for Women's Studies - 10th
    December 2000 - London, England



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