With Friends Like Feminists, Who Needs Enemies?
Why Islamic patriarchy goes unchallenged by western feminists
Unsurprisingly, I’ve thought a lot about why western feminists make such bad allies to Muslim and Middle Eastern women. The treatment of women in Islamic communities often goes unchallenged even when those communities are located in the west. The Islamic patriarchy gets condemnation but not nearly enough as it deserves, and often not by those who you’d most expect to see condemning the patriarchy in all its forms.
Here’s why I think that is:
1. They’re statists first; feminists second.
Despite calling themselves feminists; they’re statists or socialists before they’re feminists. They ensconce other issues in the language of women’s rights activism. For left-wing feminists, the solution to all women’s rights issues is always more government intervention.
It’s only easy to ask for more government help if you have an Enlightened, wealthy, benevolent government. If you have a racist, sexist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, theocratic, and despotic government — as many women in Muslim majority countries or communities do — the last thing you want is more government.
2. The fear of being called racists/politically correctness.
Left-wing feminists are likely to subscribe to identity politics and political correctness often humourless policing acts of ‘microaggression’ intensely. Because of this feminists are reluctant to criticise Muslim communities — no matter how valid the criticism of those communities may be — for fear of being subject to accusations of racism or Islamophobia themselves.
3. The fear of drawing attention to the fact that western women aren’t institutionally discriminated against anymore.
Western feminists still have work to do. Not all the battles have been won — but a lot of the big ones have been won. Western feminists have been an effective force for change over the last two hundred years and because of this, women in liberal democracies aren’t institutionally discriminated against anymore. A woman’s life is not perceived as being worth less than a man’s life in the eyes of the western states.
The frontiers in the fight for the rights of western women are very different from the frontiers in the fight for the rights of Muslims women. The issues that face western women still matter, but they’re not as fundamental as fighting for the right to be considered the same value as a man. Western feminists haven’t had to fight those types of fights for years.
I suspect the reluctance of western feminists to advocate for the rights of Muslim and Middle Eastern women boils down to not wanting to draw attention to the fact they are unable to fight those types of fights anymore — or that western women don’t have it that bad these days.
4. A preoccupation with erasing gender.
The feminist cours de jour in western academia is gender identity. Feminist narratives on erasing gender rather than focusing on improving relations between men and women despite their difference aren’t helpful to Muslim women who are fighting a different battle.
Feminist academics are preoccupied with different issues and are ill-equipped to deal with, or unable to empathise with, the issues facing Muslim women.
5. An inability or an unwillingness to have conservative/traditional cis women as allies or build those types of alliances.
Left-wing feminists are often most antagonistic towards women who don’t think and live like them. The left’s continuing ill-treatment of Margaret Thatcher comes to mind. Women who aren’t feminists are bombarded with more contempt than patriarchal males — as though the crime of being a gender-traitor is worse than the real enemy — men who mistreat women.
This fundamentally puts feminists at odds with Muslim women, many of whom who are more small ‘c’ conservative. Feminists struggle or don’t attempt to build bridges with right-wing women even when they’re fighting for the same rights. Conservative women need institutional equality too, even if they prefer traditional gender roles.
6. Their alignment in the Israel/Palestine conflict.
The British left, including left-wing feminists, tend to align themselves with the plight of the Palestinians in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Many take it a step further and boil the conflict down to Jews versus Arabs. This unhelpful racial Manichean split causes the left to align themselves with Arabs and Muslims rather than Israelis and Jews. Because they see the Palestinians and Arabs as their allies in a general sense, they are less likely to criticise Arab and Muslim communities not wanting to weaken their own allies.
The plight of Muslim women gets buried in this Manichean struggle.
The points I’ve made above are my opinions based on my perceptions and observations. I would love to explore this topic further in an academic context, however, I don’t have any plans to do further study. My brand of libertarian feminism will probably not be welcome on a Gender Studies postgraduate degree anytime soon (in many ways, that proves the points listed above…). But until then, all I have to offer as a contribution to the discussion is this article.
Thank you for reading — I hope you found my thoughts interesting. You can find links to my other work here: https://linktr.ee/sayde.scarlett
