The Muslim Woman As Either 'Victim' or 'To Be Saved' A Trope of Domination in Global Politics and Scholarship (original) (raw)

Libraries around the world are filled with books and encyclopedias on Muslim Women. Notably, Western and Westernized scholarship tends to be marked by a trope characterized as having a posture of domination and superiority, often subtle, over Muslim women, who are Orientalized , inferiorized, and stigmatized – portrayed as victims of Islam and patriarchal culture. Caged in veils and stigmatized by ‘awra, they are subjected to honor killing, circumcision, polygyny, segregation, and seclusion in the harem. All in all, they are second class citizens. During the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s scholarship on the subject of Muslim women contained a disproportionate number of references to the veil in connection with Muslim women to such an extent that some scholars of Islam lamented the trend suggesting perhaps that the Crescent, which is commonly considered the legitimate symbol of Islam, was being substituted by the Veil as Islam’s primary symbol. A gradual construction of the essential ‘Veiled Muslim Woman’ was being erected. Terms like ’Visibly Muslim’ (Tarlo 2010, as an example of a popular advocacy work in defense of Hijab) were beginning to appear in print, implying, unintentionally perhaps, that the veil is primary indication of being Muslim or that Muslim women are necessarily veiled. The prevalent perception about the Muslim Woman emerging out of some trends in feminist scholarship and generally in the Western media was that of a victim. She was a subordinate woman oppressed by Islam (‘awrah [translated as blemish of her body], unequal inheritance, polygyny, veiling, arbitrary divorce, subjugation to male guardianship), her culture (honor, seclusion, circumcision), and men (who control her movement and enslave her sexually). This trope of Muslim women’s victimhood, whether blamed on Islam, cultural tradition, or patriarchy extends to issues such as voting in political elections in which women are again portrayed as victims of exclusion, in that they are deprived of the he right to vote, as was more prominently the case until recently in Arabian and Arabian Gulf countries. However, with regard to having the right to vote, until recently in Arabian monarchies no one voted. Neither men nor women voted. There was no representational election. Is it a matter of gender inequality when neither sex voted? Gender inequality in voting rights means that while men had the right to vote, women were excluded from that right as was the case in the United States before the suffragette movement and until the 1960s in Switzerland. Therefore, in systems which were not based on election to achieve political office and positions of governance and in which neither sex voted the issue of gender inequality of access to elections does not apply. So when women are singled out as being deprived from the right to vote, we are looking at selective bias and inaccuracy in such observations regarding issues of rights and gender in Arabian and Arabian Gulf countries.