Veiled nonsense

Why are some feminists labeling oppression as liberation?


Seth J. Frantzman
Terra Incognita/JPost
25 August '10


Anat Berko, a research fellow at the International Policy Institute for Counterterrorism and former IDF colonel, wrote a book about female Palestinian suicide bombers. She hasn’t been met with wrath from the Right for sitting for hours with would-be murderers, but she has received vitriol from the feminist Left. Why, pray tell?

In a review of the book, Dr. Sarah Ozacky-Lazar, a research fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, wrote that “a problem is that Berko appears to be chained to the theory that all Arab women are oppressed, restricted and under the absolute control of their male relatives, to the point where ‘they experience more freedom in prison than at home.’ That is an Orientalist, condescending and clearly unscientific viewpoint. Since this idea seems to be one of the author’s basic premises, it also dictates her conclusions. She makes no attempt to use critical or feminist theories to understand the complexity of the situation in which these women live.”

Leaving aside the petty academic insult of calling Berko’s work “unscientific,” it is worth trying to understand how the Islamic woman has been turned into a liberated figure by some feminists. Katherine Bullock’s 2002 Rethinking Muslim Women and the Veil is a good primer. Bullock was a conscientious convert to Islam – something she did while completing her doctorate. A self-described “strong and committed feminist,” for her the veil “can be experienced as liberation from the tyranny of the beauty myth. The popular Western notion that the veil is a symbol of Muslim women’s oppression is a constructed image [which] served Western political ends, and it continued to do so even in the late 20th century.”

In fact our notion that the veil is oppressive is based on our own “liberal understandings of ‘equality’ and ‘liberty’ that preclude other ways of thinking about ‘equality’ and ‘liberty.’” Thus basing one’s notion of equality on things being equal leads one to label Muslim women as oppressed. Thinking outside the box, i.e equal meaning unequal or “differing equalities,” the Muslim women is more liberated than the Western one.

The redefinition of Islamic women as empowered, radical, bra-burning (well not bra-burning probably) feminists all hinges on the notion that since the West viewed Islamic women one way and since the West is always wrong (i.e. it’s racist and colonialist), then the opposite must be true. If the West had come to the Islamic East and ordered the women into burkas, or just clothed them like Catholic nuns, and stoned them for adultery and closeted them in harems or sold them into sex slavery, one can imagine that today we would hear the opposite: Islamic women must be freed from the West’s oppressive embrace.

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