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The Convenient Dissident: The uses of the Muslim woman’s pain
A politics that cares about Muslim women’s oppression as an image begins and ends with arguments about the veil, for it only needs her as a symbol of suffering.
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Taslima NasrinBangladeshi-Swedish WriterA physician and author known for her feminist views and criticism of religion, leading to her exile from Bangladesh due to death threats from Islamic fundamentalists. fled her country under a death threat from Islamic clerics who had declared her blasphemous. She was a dissident whose offence was to write with unusual bluntness about religion, desire and the treatment of women. Her subsequent career is the most instructive in South Asian public life, and it is instructive for what it reveals about the machinery that takes a persecuted woman and converts her into a weapon. Nasrin deserves sympathy, and that is exactly why her case is so useful to those who could use her suffering.
What is it about the political economy of attention that lets a woman’s authentic critique of patriarchy within her community be amplified only when it can be repurposed against that community as a whole? A movement that has no interest in her feminism will gladly take her anecdotes, her anger, and her biography, strip away the universalism that animated them, and deploy what remains as evidence in a case it was going to make anyway.
When she settled in Kolkata in 2004, West Bengal’s Left Front government banned a volume of her memoirs in 2003, and in 2007 she was physically assaulted by legislators of a Muslim political party at a book launch in Hyderabad. That same year, after street protests in Kolkata, the state government—apparently preferring the quiet of its electoral arithmetic to the principle of free expression—expelled her from the city, passing her to Rajasthan and then to Delhi, where she has lived for years on a series of short-term residence permits, her stay perpetually dependent on the goodwill of a state.
A Muslim woman abandoned by the secular left, threatened by Islamic conservatives, and dependent on a government’s indulgence will find that the warm hands extended to her belong to those who have an interest in her testimony. Hindu nationalist politicians were quick to offer sympathy and, more importantly, a platform; in time, her public pronouncements began to echo the preoccupations of her hosts: on the veil, on the supposed failings of Indian secularism, and on the dangers of a Muslim demographic presence.
Cases from history
In colonial Egypt, Lord Cromer denounced the veil as the emblem of Islam’s degradation of women while helping to found the Men’s League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage at home—a deployment of a language of emancipation in the service of empire, by men with no interest in emancipating anyone in their own society. In 1958, French authorities in Algeria staged public unveiling ceremonies in which women were encouraged, and frequently pressured, to remove their veils before assembled crowds as a token of loyalty to France, a spectacle in which Frantz Fanon, writing in Algeria Unveiled called the colonial state’s desire to possess a society by possessing its women. Gayatri Spivak called the colonial project as ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’ an argument that was most recently reflected in the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, when the burqa was marshalled as a justification for war. It is not that Muslim women don’t face hardship, but that collapsing an immensely varied set of lives into the single image of the veiled victim erases the economic, political and historical forces that actually shape those lives, as well as the women’s own judgments about them.
The mirror
The first function of the oppressed Muslim woman is to serve as a mirror. If a community’s culture can be defined by its patriarchy, then the observer’s own culture may be defined by its opposite, as modern, secular and liberated; whether the vocabulary on offer is the ‘western values’ of Europe or Hindutva in India – which casts a tolerant and ancient Hindu society against a stagnant minority. Edward Said described this structure as Orientalism, in which the Other is constructed as irrational and despotic precisely so that the Self may appear rational and free, and in which the woman’s clothing, her marriage and her divorce become the exhibits in a trial whose verdict is already written.
Movements that most loudly defend women across a communal line are frequently those most invested in traditional gender hierarchy within their own. Nationalist parties borrow feminist themes for anti-Muslim ends while opposing the measures, from childcare provision to reproductive rights and protection from domestic violence, that would extend equality to all women. All nationalisms assign women a symbolic burden as the biological reproducers of the collective, the transmitters of its culture and the living markers of its boundaries, so that a woman’s body is never wholly her own. The love jihad conspiracy theory, which casts Muslim men as predators who seduce Hindu women into marriage and conversion, and the state laws enacted in its name, treat adult Hindu women as property whose choices must be guarded by the community, while the same politics claims to protect Muslim women from their men. Both claims rest on the identical assumption that women are objects of protection rather than subjects of agency.
Questions involving Muslim women are efficient because they allow a majority to feel generous while directing hostility at a minority. An issue is selected, whether dress, personal law or the safety of women in the community, and re-narrated as the expression of a community’s nature. A rescue mission is framed to save the minority’s women from its men, and thus the majority consolidates its sense of itself as a benevolent and progressive force.
In 2017 the Supreme Court struck down instant triple talaq in a case brought by Shayara Bano, a result that Muslim women’s organisations had pursued for years before any government took notice, and in 2019 Parliament went further by criminalising the practice, with a prison term of up to three years for the husband. Many observed that a practice already void in law had been made a crime for one community alone, that a husband in prison cannot pay maintenance to the wife the statute purported to protect, and that a government so eager to cast itself as the Muslim woman’s champion continues to resist criminalising marital rape for women of every community.
The hypocrisy further revealed itself in 2021 and 2022 when the ‘Sulli Deals’ and ‘Bulli Bai’ applications placed photographs of prominent Muslim women, among them journalists, activists and students, up for mock ‘auction’ on a public platform, a campaign of harassment whose targets were the same women who had been the subject of so much solicitous rhetoric, and whose perpetrators belonged to the same ideological milieu.
In 2022, when Muslim schoolgirls in Karnataka were barred from classrooms for wearing the hijab, voices that had previously spoken of liberating Muslim women from the veil defended keeping those girls out of school. If liberation was indeed the aim, what could be more liberating than education? But liberation had never been the aim, the real unspoken aim had been to erase all signs of Muslimness from public life, keeping in with the greater aims of the Hindutva project.
The woman who is never asked
The women of Shaheen Bagh, who in the winter of 2019 to 2020 sustained a months-long sit-in against the citizenship law, were the very women supposedly awaiting rescue, and they proved articulate, organised and unwilling to be grateful on anyone else’s terms. A Muslim woman in India confronts patriarchy within her community, patriarchy in the wider society, and a state that treats her as a symbol before it treats her as a citizen, whereas rescue narratives acknowledge only the first of these and only when it is convenient. Nasrin’s stands as a reminder that even the woman who does speak, bravely and at great personal cost, can find her voice enlisted by those who value its volume more than its meaning.
Muslim women and men have challenged unjust practices from within for generations, and continue to do so in Iran and Afghanistan, often at great risk. But the solicitous rescue missions must deal with some simple questions: Do they equally demand the same rights for women in their own community? Are Muslim women consulted, funded and heard, or merely invoked? Does it expand on the woman’s voice, or replace one authority over her body with another? And, does the concern survive even after she says something that doesn’t align with their narrative?
A politics that cared about Muslim women’s freedom would begin with their schooling, their safety, their access to the law, and their voice in the decisions that govern them, whereas a politics that cares about Muslim women’s oppression as an image begins and ends with arguments about the veil, for it decided long ago that it only needs her as a symbol of suffering.
Disclaimer:The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of The Rift.
