Geopolitics, culture clash, and gender after September 11.

• Author: Razack, Sherene

Culture clashes were essential to the success of racial myths, for throughout history the foreigner outside the tribe has never been truly welcome.--George L. Mosse (1985: xxvii)

... the imperialist feminist desire to emancipate the Muslim woman is part of a system based on the disciplining and normalizing gaze of modern colonial disciplinary power.--Meyda Yegenoglu (1998:111)

The modern woman is first and foremost an imperialist.--Rosemary M. George (1993-1994: 97)

THE ATTACKS ON THE WORLD TRADE CENTER AND PENTAGON ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, have resulted in 'antiterrorism" measures that have included surveillance, stigmatization, and the actual incarceration of men considered "Muslim looking or Arab looking." In this climate, to write about violent Muslim men guarantees royalties and the prestige of being on bestseller lists. When the writing is done by Western feminists, both Muslim and non-Muslim, it provides ideological justifications for the "War on Terror" and the U.S. bid for empire. The post-September 11 climate has also enabled Western feminists to use the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as evidence of the violence of Muslim and Arab men. In recent years, there has been a steady stream of books and articles announcing that the current Israeli administration is entirely justified in its treatment of Palestinians and that those who criticize Israel are simply being anti-Semitic. (1) In many of these texts, the violence Muslim women endure at the hands of Muslim men becomes a marker of Muslim men's barbarism and a reason why the claims of Palestinians, who are mainly Muslims, are unacceptable. This logic is available at a glance in subway posters in San Francisco in which a blond woman announces that she has just been to Israel, a land where women have equal rights.

In this article, I argue that the convergence of the U.S. "War on Terror" and its inextricable links to U.S. support of Israel has produced a particular geopolitical terrain in the post-September 11 period that has enabled blatant racism to be articulated in the name of feminism. As I will show, the seemingly disparate strands of this political position are bound together and given coherency by the notion of "culture clash" in that the West, Jews included, are caught up in a violent clash with the Islamic world. The clash is cultural in origin: Islam is everything the West is not. Furthermore, as fatally pre-modern, tribal, non-democratic, and religious, the barbarism of Islam is principally evident in the treatment of women in Muslim communities.

Of course, this approach is not new. As Edward Said (1992: 25) pointed out long ago in The Question of Palestine, the argument that turns colonial dispossession of a people into a story of an empty land awaiting European improvement draws on "the picture of a handful of European Jews hewing a civilization of sweetness and light out of the Black Islamic sea." Yet if the notion of a Black Islamic sea has long been marshaled in support of the state of Israel's oppressive policies toward Palestinians, today it has gained greater currency and the bodies of Muslim woman have been useful to the argument.

What are the implications for feminists of these two geopolitical conditions, in which the Muslim woman's body is constituted as simply a marker of a community's place in modernity? First, the pervasiveness of violence against women in the West is eclipsed. Additionally, saving Muslim women from the excesses of their society marks Western men and women as more civilized. Observing that "the declaration of an emancipated status for the Western woman is contingent upon the representation of the Oriental woman as her devalued other," Yegenoglu (1998: 105) reminds us that women can only enter the privileged space of the universal through "a masculine gesture." Just as men claim the universal for themselves by confining women outside of it as non-rational subjects, so the Western woman requires the culturally different body to make her own claim of universality. Unveiling the Muslim woman, making her body visible, and hence knowable and available for possession, renders the Western woman as the colonial, observing, possessing subject. Thus, old colonial technologies enjoy renewed vigor at a time when the hegemonic framing of the New World Order centers on Islam versus the West.

This examination was prompted in part by my own experiences as a secular feminist with a Muslim name. Whereas the "marking" that identifies me as Muslim seldom drew attention before, my body, my feminist commitments, and my scholarship became suspect in the post-September 11 environment. In 2002, for instance, I became the target of an e-mail campaign that vilified me for distributing a petition that denounced the military activities of the Israeli state in Jenin. Predictably, this campaign featured threatening, violent, and misogynist language of the kind familiar to any woman who takes strong anti-sexist and antiracist positions. This time, however, I was also reminded of the barbarities of the treatment of women in Muslim-Arab cultures. Often in these messages, "the oppression of women, religious intolerance, lack of freedoms, lack of democracy, absence of free press, and honor killings of family members in the Arab countries" were put against Israel as a "free country with tolerance of all religions and equality for women." (2) To criticize Israel, my correspondents insisted, was not only to be anti-Semitic and anti-American, but also to be on the side of patriarchy. Since these messages specifically targeted me, I knew that my body had become something of a global sign and that a strange nexus had emerged in contemporary geopolitics between Western feminism and racism.

A similar confluence between Western feminism and racism was taking place in popular culture. Between 2002 and 2003, three books appeared that did very well in sales and were almost without exception positively reviewed in the press: Orianna Fallaci's The Rage and the Pride (2002), Phyllis Chesler's The New Anti-Semitism (2003), and Irshad Manji's The Trouble with Islam (2003). Each book advances the idea of a culture clash of epic proportions between the West and Islam. They outline the need to defend the West generally, and Israel in particular, against an Islamic threat, a threat reinforced by the idea of misogynist Muslim men. Implicitly or explicitly, each book suggests that to take a political position critical of the then-current U.S. and Israeli administrations (George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon) is at best being callous toward Muslim women and at worst supportive of profoundly misogynist political regimes.

In this article, I wish to examine the post-September 11 geopolitical terrain for feminists. I do so principally by examining Fallaci, Chesler, and Manji and by reflecting on how widely and popularly these texts were acclaimed in the media. These books are my focus due to their popularity and to the ways in which the racism-feminism nexus is evident in each. Insofar as their previous publications offered them a public place within feminism, Fallaci and Chesler had a feminist past, but all three authors marshal feminist ideas in support of their political positions. All three also have a somewhat right-wing reputation and advance neoliberal arguments. However, they are taken up across the political spectrum on the basis of their feminist claims. That these books do well further attests to the fact that, their provocative and polemical nature notwithstanding, they resonate with large numbers of people in the West. My interest, then, is in the popularity of racist arguments that claim the ground of gender equality.

Although I am addressing myself to feminists, my task is not to explore what I consider to be an imperialist feminism (which is the topic of another essay). Instead, I wish to closely examine the racial logic that structures so much of this geopolitical terrain, gesturing to gender as one of its principal technologies, but remaining focused on the overall thrust of these books: a message of European superiority in which both the U.S. bid for empire and the contemporary politics of Israeli occupation are defended and legitimized. My aim is to take stock of a geopolitics that has begun to profoundly alter the conditions under which feminists can address issues of violence in communities of color. The article is divided into three primary parts. In part one, I explore the notion of "culture clash" to show the modern/pre-modern racial logic upon which it depends and the role gender has played in its construction. In part two, I focus on Fallaci's book to show that the culture clash argument is integral to characterizing the Muslim man as a threat to all women. In part three, I connect culture clash and the idea of Muslim male violence to the representations of the Israel-Palestine conflict in Chesler and Manji's books. The article ends by reflecting on how Western feminist responses might transcend the culture clash logic when analyzing violence against women.

Culture Clash

Mosse's observation that racial myths depend upon the language of culture (our culture is more developed than theirs) is an important reminder of why it is dangerous to consider culture apart from racism. The close connection between assertions of cultural difference and racism has meant that in white societies the smallest reference to cultural differences between the European majority and Third World peoples (Muslims in particular) triggers an instant chain of associations (the veil, female genital mutilation, arranged marriages, etc.). This chain ends with the declared superiority of European culture, imagined as a homogeneous composite of values, including a unique commitment to democracy and human rights, and to the human rights of women in particular. Culture clash, in which the West has values and modernity and the non-West has culture, consolidates membership in the...