***** Valentine M. Moghadam, "Feminism and Islamic Fundamentalism: A Secularist Interpretation," _Journal of Women's History_ 13.1 (Spring 2001): 42-45, at <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_womens_history/v013/13.1moghadam.html>.
Bronwyn Winter's thought-provoking and timely article offers a measured feminist critique of the study of women and fundamentalisms. It compels those of us who have previously written on Islamic fundamentalism to reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of our analyses. And it comes at a time when Iranian expatriates are debating the reality or illusion of an Islamic feminism. For these reasons, I welcome the opportunity to respond to Winter's article, "Fundamental Misunderstandings."
Winter identifies three discursive frameworks -- orientalist, multiculturalist, and pluralist -- within which key issues related to the study of Islamism have developed. I suspect that there are at least two additional frameworks that may be identified: feminist atheist and secular feminist. The feminist atheist stance informs Winter's approach, and the secular feminist approach I will describe here.
There is much about Winter's critical analysis and overall politics with which I agree -- such as her cogent comments on cultural relativism, Islamism as a patriarchal and right-wing political movement, and the silence on Algeria and pre-Taliban Afghanistan. The absence of articles on Algeria in well-known feminist journals raises questions about how editors decide on submissions dealing with non-Western women's issues. As for Afghanistan, I am as frustrated today by the American feminist preoccupation with the Taliban's gender apartheid as I was by the total silence of feminists in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the Mujahideen, the precursors of the Taliban, revolted against the left-wing government. Some feminists even wrote sympathetically about the freedom fighters; I may have been the only one emphasizing the reactionary and patriarchal character of the Mujahideen. Not only mindless cultural relativism but also willful anticommunism lay behind the silence and sympathy. Today's self-righteous breast-beating allows U.S. complicity in Afghanistan's tragedy to remain unexamined.
My major disagreement with Winter's article concerns her conflation of Islam and Islamism. Ironically, the equation of Islam with Islamism is precisely the claim of Islamic fundamentalists. This claim dehistoricizes Islam and confuses the issues. I also believe that Winter is too dismissive of the sociological approach that correctly explains Islamism in terms of contemporary crises of modernization and modernity. Because of space limitations, I will focus the rest of my comment on the question of Islam versus Islamic fundamentalism, while also examining the debate on Islamic feminism....
Valentine M. Moghadam is director of the women's studies program and associate professor of sociology at Illinois State University. She is author of Modernizing Women: Gender and Social Change in the Middle East (1993); Women, Work, and Economic Reform in the Middle East and North Africa (1998); "Revolution, Religion, and Gender Politics: Iran and Afghanistan Compared," Journal of Women's History, 10, no. 4 (1999): 172-95; and other articles and edited books. <vmmogha at ilstu.edu> *****
***** Bronwyn Winter, "Fundamental Misunderstandings: Issues in Feminist Approaches to Islamism," _Journal of Women's History_ 13.1 (Spring 2001): 9-41, at <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_womens_history/v013/13.1winter01.html>.
Abstract: Within feminist debates on Islamism, many issues remain both contentious and insufficiently explored, including the relationship of fundamentalism to religion, the situation of Islamism in relation to a supposed crisis of modernity and search for authenticity, its legitimation through "democratization" and "multiculturalism," the connection between fundamentalisms and extreme right politics, and the qualitative value attributed to women's widely acknowledged centrality to Islamism and cultural identity. This article explores these issues and, in doing so, discusses three problematic discursive frameworks within which the subject is generally approached: an "orientalist" discourse, which demonizes and essentializes Islam and the Muslim world; a "multiculturalist" discourse, which legitimates even the most fundamentalist Islamic voices in the name of "cultural difference" and "women's agency"; and a "pluralist" discourse, which distances itself from overtly right-wing political uses of Islam while maintaining an apologist stance in relation to Islam....
Bronwyn Winter is a lecturer (professor) in the Department of French Studies at the University of Sydney. She identifies as a radical feminist political scientist and likes to stir up debate in the pursuit of what Somer Bodribb has called "the feminist potential to make sense." Her publications focus on such themes as culture and consent in human rights discourse on women, the politics of race and culture, issues in women's political representation, what counts as feminist theory, and why what is generally known in the United States as "French feminism" has little if anything to do with what French feminism actually is. <bronwyn.winter at french.usyd.edu.au> ***** -- Yoshie
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