Double-standards in Western conceptualisations of women in Arab society

Polly Wilson on the West’s long-standing problematic conceptualisation of gender in Arab Societies

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

The catastrophic impact of Israel’s military incursion on the civilian population in Gaza has exposed the hypocrisy of Western feminist thought. In January, Julia Hartley-Brewer’s remarks towards her guest Mustafa Barghouti sparked outrage online. Debating on Talk TV, she exclaimed ‘For the love of God, let me finish a sentence, man. Maybe you are not used to women talking, I do not know.’ She concluded the segment ‘sorry to have been a woman speaking to you’.

‘This rhetoric, which asserts that all women in the Middle East live in a state of perpetual oppression and are therefore in need of western salvation, has been used to justify multiple military incursions in the name of female emancipation.’

While her words were rightly criticised for endorsing racist stereotypes, this instance has simply revealed the West’s long-standing problematic conceptualisation of gender in Arab societies. This rhetoric, which asserts that all women in the Middle East live in a state of perpetual oppression and are therefore in need of western salvation, has been used to justify multiple military incursions in the name of female emancipation.

Take the United State’s ‘War on Terror’, a military campaign concentrated in Iraq and Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks. The invasion of Afghanistan was immediately cast in gendered terms, with Laura Bush declaring ‘the fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women’ on November 11th 2001. A report by the White House concerning the status of women in Afghanistan titled ‘The Taliban’s War Against Women’ was published shortly after. The image of the Muslim women as a universally oppressed group dominated Western thought, and the East vs West divide was recast in gendered terms. In this paradigm, the ‘East’ force their women to don burqas, while the ‘West’ offers a perfectly egalitarian society, free from of patriarchal structures.

There is no value in defending the Taliban’s, or any other Islamist regime’s oppressive policies towards women. But, in the same breath, using female oppression to legitimise military intervention feeds into problematic rhetoric which frames the West as the pinnacle of civilisation which must be instilled on the less ‘advanced’ East. Moreover, few would argue that the devastation the ‘War on Terror’ entailed improved the socio-economic status of any group in Afghanistan, let alone of all those who were already vulnerable. This convergence of pseudo-feminism and colonialism is rooted even deeper, with the orientalist image of the submissive, mysterious and veiled Muslim women exploited by state policy in the 21st century.

“Using female oppression to legitimise military intervention feeds into problematic rhetoric which frames the West as the pinnacle of civilisation which must be instilled on the less ‘advanced’ East.”

It does not take an expert to conclude that the gendered rhetoric employed to justify Western incursions into the Middle East is not genuinely invested in the emancipation of women. While this may on occasion come as a by-product of increased NGOS involvement in post-conflict states, it remains that it is impossible to bomb the sexism out a society. Indeed, the trauma inflicted on the community can often lead to a crystallisation of patriarchal practises, as, in the face of what is perceived as a cultural affront, social change is rejected. Moreover, in times of conflict and social disruption, women consistently face increased levels of hardship in comparison to their male counterparts. This is particularly true in cases where the boundaries between the domestic and the battleground are blurred, such as in Gaza, where due to the wide-scale aerial bombardment, women have found themselves at the centre of the conflict.

A report by the World Health Organisation on 3rd November cited how ‘women are disproportionately bearing the burden of the escalation of hostilities in the occupied Palestinian territory’ and a host of gender-specific hardships have been documented by the UN. These range from the absence of pre- and post-natal healthcare to a lack of sanitary products exponentially increasing the risk of infection and toxic shock syndrome.

This pseudo-feminism can have an even more detrimental impact on the West’s attitudes towards Middle Eastern women. Their apparent goal to ‘free’ Muslim, (and rhetoric does tend to centre around specifically Muslim, rather than Arab) women from their oppressors works to dehumanise the populations they intervene in. In the case of the the current Israel-Gaza conflict, this rhetoric works to render the entire organisation of Palestinian civilisation ‘other’. The old mission civiliatrice is reframed; Arabs abuse their women and so they are not like us. Spivak encapsulates this sentiment arguing that Western military incursions into the Middle East represent ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’. Indeed, little attention was given to the high rates of malnutrition in pregnant women in Gaza before the war, nor the socio-economic status of women in the West Bank. But now this lack of female emancipation is vilified in a twisted attempt to justify the violence which will impact women the most. This rationale has recently been coined ‘pink-washing’, an ideology which refers to the justification of military incursion due to the lack of progressive values of a society. This is additionally problematic, as the basic premise assumes that in order to for a society’s human rights to be protected, they must subscribe to Western ideals, with little acknowledgement that the extreme hardship incurred by the impacts of the war on the civilian population will only solidify patriarchal power structures.

“The case of the hijab illustrates the West’s superficial and one-dimensional view of female emancipation in the Middle East”

There is no debating that, in parts of the Middle East, under certain regimes including Hamas, women face inordinate barriers of discrimination, and the West should be invested in furthering gender equality internationally. What is problematic is the lazy assumptions used to justify military incursions, which ultimately worsens, not improves, the status of women in the Middle East. For example, the hijab, an Islamic but also culturally significant garment the West seems to have developed an obsession with. Popular culture draws on orientalist stereotypes of the submissive ‘Eastern’ women abandoning her hijab in a revolutionary act. This view ignores the nuances of hijab in several Middle Eastern societies, and Fatima Gailani, an advisor at the Bonn truth conference reflected an uncomfortable truth when she was caught saying ‘If I go to Afghanistan today [..]and promise to bring them secularism, they are going to tell me to go to hell.’ It is further poignant that when this hijab-shaking trope did manifest, in the courageous protestors of the ‘Women, Life, Freedom’ movement in Iran, it was met with little tangible support from the West. The case of the hijab illustrates the West’s superficial and one-dimensional view of female emancipation in the Middle East, which is used to categorise Middle Eastern women as lacking in agency and waiting for an external savour.

In Gaza today, women sleep in their hijab with the hope that, if they succumb to the arial bombardment, they will be respectfully covered. This show of steadfastness and resilience sits at odds with the neo-orientalist conceptualisations of Muslim women which the West use to sanctify state violence. The employment of women’s rights to legitimise the brutalisation of non-white populations is nothing new. frames Perhaps Julia Hartley Brewer’s comments were directed at the wrong audience, as the West, as much as the East, are not used to women talking.