The conception of the oppressed, veiled, and silenced prey has been the centre of the mission to save Muslim women. Women everywhere have been victims of patriarchy and repression. However, the Muslim woman is a particular case.
She is hostage to her culture, religion, and society, which serves a unique framework that sets a ‘rescuing mission’ in the name of feminism. This paints the battle of women in the Muslim world as a struggle against Islam; their discrimination, oppression, and endeavour are reduced to a single monolithic religious experience.
This ideology is presumed by the West, especially by Western feminists who adopt the moral saviour’s role to achieve equality across the globe.
It is essential to consider the effects this has on the plight of women, specifically in the Muslim world, who may not maintain the same grounds to their struggle. How can this rescuing mission be understood as an extension of the colonial ‘civilising mission’? How does this further subjugate and exclude Muslim women from their own fight for liberation?
Modern day colonialism
The conception of the West as the rescuer from oriental and Islamic backwardness can be seen as an extension of the civilising mission, which again attempts to 'save' the inferior population from their backwardness.
Orientalist and colonialist constructions characterise the Western feminist fight for the liberation of women in the Muslim world. The orientalist depiction of the East, characterised by backwardness, is painted as dichotomous to the West, the height of civilisation and modernity.
The orientalist ideology of the Muslim woman as exotic, veiled sexual objects created gendered colonial tropes with women at the centre of this ‘backwardness’.
Western observers rendered this treatment of women as a result of Muslim culture and Islam; thus was the racialisation of Islam. Religion becomes responsible for the backwardness and premodern nature of Islamic society. It ties the experiences of all Muslim women, or those in the region, as facing the same difficulties and barriers due to this common denominator.
The issue here becomes the generalisation of Muslim women’s experiences into a single monolithic ideology that omits broader intersectionality notions. It renders this single, homogenous oppressed experience as a direct result of Islam. Muslim women are presumed to be trapped in this orientalist culture secluded by Islam, who are waiting to be saved by the modern progressive West.
Moreover, the conception of the West as the rescuer from oriental and Islamic backwardness can be seen as an extension of the civilising mission, which again attempts to ‘save’ the inferior population from their backwardness.
Western feminism is painted in this colonialist trope in its failure to acknowledge the relativity in understanding Muslim women’s experiences. The continuous calls for ‘liberating women from Islam’ convey the same imperialist and orientalist ideology that racialises Islam placing it at the core of experiences and progression.
Furthermore, Roland Coloma adds how the ‘transnational moral superiority’ taken up as practice for White women as imperial feminism. For example, the images used of the veiled Muslim woman waiting to be saved by the ‘White progressives’ further reinforce this orientalist assumption of Islam’s oppressive nature and the West’s civilisation.
Whereas, many scholars have demonstrated how although this can be an experience shared by some women, many others do not characterise their fight for liberation as constituting the need to be ‘un-veiled’.
A whitewashed narrative?
Women liberation movements require extensive knowledge of the many variables and notions that constitute society and individual experiences in which they are rooted.
The homogenous ideological terrain internalised by Western feminism fails to consider cultural relativism. It acts as a modern-day colonialist civilising mission through the orientalist harmful presumptions of women feminist ideology within the region.
Returning to the example of the veil/burqa, Whitcher argues how this imposition of Western feminist ideology, which forces the idea of Islam as the cause of repression, is more harmful to Muslim women.
Recent trends reveal how more women willingly choose to veil due to the political and social significance imbued to it, making it an effective tool that helps them advance within society.
Therefore, it is crucial to consider the effects that the assertion of a Western feminist idea of what liberation entails can further restrict and suppress women when such ideology does not accurately and appropriately respond to the particular demands of such given society.
Moreover, when Muslim women embraced secular/Western models of feminism, this caused increased pressure within society from religious elites and other social divisions, resulting in counter-productive ramifications due to the presumed ‘imperialist Western rebellion’.
Therefore, Muslim women are returning to the familiarised domestic framework to reclaim their rights and fight for equality within the realm of Islamic thought and ideology, which directly and effectively tackles local discourses and convictions, facing less resistance.
Decolonising feminism
In conclusion, the attempt to save Muslim women whilst enforcing a Western ideologue of women’s liberation has colonial and oriental underpinnings that maintain the moral crusader complex in a modern-day colonial control.
To understand gender relations in the Muslim world, it is crucial to investigate the historical colonial encounters of the dynamics of gender, race and sexuality.
Considering the plight of Muslim women, acknowledging Western moral superiority is integral to achieving true equality and ensuring the success of feminist movements within the Muslim world.
The aim is not to fight for them and speak on their behalf, but rather to fight with them.
What is needed is to ensure intersectional domestic liberation movements can function within the social, cultural, and political context instead of enforcing imported ideologies that maintain colonial control, which is more harmful and destructive than liberating, to gender relations in the Muslim world.
The idea communicated is not that women should not help or empower each other, but that it is important for paradigm shifts not to get lost when speaking for other cultures. The aim is not to fight for them and speak on their behalf, but rather to fight with them.
