Saadia Toor, "Gender, Sexuality, and Islam under the Shadow of Empire"
(page 7 of 7)

In Conclusion

In this paper I have tried to show the ideological underpinnings and political implications of the contemporary obsession with Islam and sexuality in the West. This means we must always entertain a healthy dose of skepticism towards projects that present the 'Muslim world' as some sort of organic entity. In a quintessentially Foucauldian sense, their ideological purpose is to create this very 'Muslim world' of which they propose to speak. In doing so, they perpetuate the idea that Muslim societies and communities are self-contained and never-changing entities bound together by a monolithic and totalitarian 'Islam,' which share nothing historically, culturally, socially, or politically with other societies and communities.

This myth of Muslim exceptionalism does not stand up to any historical or comparative study that looks at 'Muslim countries' alongside others. In fact, even the study of a single 'Muslim' country—even one which calls itself the Islamic Republic of Pakistan—explodes the myth of a monolithic and totalitarian 'Islam' that defines every aspect of its followers' lives.

What the examples from Pakistan also illustrate is that understanding the role of Islam even in a single country requires, among other things, parsing the complex and contradictory role it plays at various levels, from national ideology, to social norms and state structure. And at each of these levels there are a further set of questions that need to be asked: how is 'Islam' being deployed, by whom, and for what purpose? Is it being used as an ideological tool, does it serve as a spiritual haven, or is it invoked as an identitarian response to the ravages of a globalized world?

It is impossible to come away with anything but a superficial—and often simply incorrect—understanding of the role Islam plays with regard to women and gays without historical and sociological context. Such a framework immediately disrupts (or should) the idea that something stable and immutable called 'Islam' exists anywhere. For example, the fact that Muslims in Pakistan, as elsewhere, invoke Islam in everyday discourse doesn't tell us anything about what they mean when they invoke it—surely the 'Islam' invoked by the women imprisoned under the zina law and interviewed by Khan is not the same Islam that features in the discourse of the Jama'at-i Islami. Thus, 'Islam,' when deployed by state and private actors, be they organizations or individuals, needs to be one of the things the researcher must unpack; it certainly cannot be unproblematically deployed as the explanatory variable. Among other things, the 'Islam connection,' when it is there, is varied, complex, and sometimes contradictory, and certainly not what we are led to expect from mainstream discourse on Islam.

All this means that there is no shortcut and no way around historically and socially contextual analysis that is simultaneously also implicitly or explicitly comparative—and that too not simply across 'Muslim societies.' There is need for analysis that begins with the empirical reality and then moves out towards generalization, but a generalization that is not predetermined by a priori categories such as 'Muslim nations' and 'Muslims societies.' It also means acknowledging that, far from 'unveiling' the insidious workings of an actually-existing 'thing' called 'Islam,' the current Western discourse actually actively constructs it, and does so in order to legitimize certain political projects. In other words, this discourse is deeply ideological.

Endnotes

1. In her superb book The Politics of the Veil, Joan Scott points to the way in which the imperative of the heterosexual male gaze underlies the French anxiety over the veil. Scott quotes a French psychoanalyst's (a woman) explanation that, "the real problem posed by the veil is that is covers over ... a sexual dimension". As Scott points out, "It was precisely the covering over of women's sexuality that so troubled her: the veil was a denial, she said, of women as 'objects of desire' ... the veil interfered with what she took to be a natural psychological process: the visual appreciation of women's bodies by men brought women's femininity into being ... feminine identity depended on male desire; male desire depended on visual stimulation." See Joan Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007): 157-8. [Return to text]

2. Salman Rushdie, "Fighting the Forces of Invisibility," The Washington Post, 2 October 2001. [Return to text]

3. Irshad Manji, The Trouble with Islam (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2004). [Return to text]

4. Leila Lalami, "The Missionary Position," The Nation, 1 June 2006. [Return to text]

5. Clifford Krauss, "An Unlikely Promoter of an Islamic Reformation," The New York Times, 4 October 2003. [Return to text]

6. "She's Got Chutzpah," O, The Oprah Magazine, May 2004. [Return to text]

7. Due to constraints of space, it is not possible to do justice to the place of Zionist intellectuals and the state of Israel and the role of queer activism in the West within this latest imperialist project and its accompanying ideological discourse of Islamophobia. Briefly, queer Zionist intellectuals/activists (such as Andrew Sullivan), and the state of Israel, pitch the latter as an island of queer-positivity (read: liberalism) in a sea of Arab/Muslim/Palestinian homophobia. This position is not going unchallenged, however—anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist queer groups and individuals in Israel/Palestine and the West have launched a concerted counter-attack. For a quick introduction to the issues, see: Jasbir Puar, "Israel's Gay Propaganda War," The Guardian, 1 July 2010. [Return to text]

8. Krauss. [Return to text]

9. See Irshad Manji's blog. [Return to text]

10. The role of the Western—and, in particular, U.S.—academy in the current imperialist project deserves separate in-depth attention. [Return to text]

11. They are regularly mentioned in the same breath within the mainstream media. See, for example: Marianne Williamson, "Women in Islam," Oprah Radio, 24 April 2007. [Return to text]

12. Emphasis mine. Ayan Hirsi Ali, Infidel (New York: Free Press, 2007): 303. [Return to text]

13. Lalami. [Return to text]

14. By an ironic twist of fate she was stripped of her Dutch citizenship after it emerged that she had lied on her asylum application. [Return to text]

15. Lalami. [Return to text]

16. The project was cut short by van Gogh's murder at the hands of a radical Islamist. By all accounts, van Gogh reveled in baiting Muslims, and saw them as antithetical to Dutch values; in Hirsi Ali he found the perfect partner. [Return to text]

17. Anthony Brooks and Parvez Sharma, "Interview," National Public Radio, 2 October 2007. [Return to text]

18. Trenton Straube, "Struggles of Gay Muslims," New York Blade, 17 May 2008. [Return to text]

19. The portion on Pakistan is even more bizarre, focusing on a sufi shrine but featuring no queers. [Return to text]

20. In fact, when I made the connection in an informal discussion with Dubowski at the screening of the film in Boston, his response was to reject this comparison because whereas the Hasidic Jews (the ones featured in Trembling Before G-d) are members of a conservative Jewish sect, in the case of Islam, the problem was the mainstream. [Return to text]

21. Edward Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (New York: Pantheon, 1981): x. [Return to text]

22. Said, xv. [Return to text]

23. In fact, Islamist parties have never managed to turn their rhetoric into electoral victory in Pakistan, except through the rigged election of 2002, held by another American-supported dictator, General Pervez Musharraf. [Return to text]

24. This part of my essay is immeasurably indebted to Neelam Hussain's wonderful and complex analysis of the Saima case. See: Neelam Hussain, "The Narrative Appropriation of Saima: Coercion and Consent in Muslim Pakistan," in Engendering the Nation-State, Volume I, Neelam Hussain, Samiya Mumtaz, and Rubina Saigol, eds. (Lahore: Simorgh Publications, 1997). [Return to text]

25. Such "runaway marriages" are also common in India, for example. [Return to text]

26. Hussain, 202. [Return to text]

27. This strategy of dismissing or attacking feminists on the basis of the claim of 'Westernization' is not unique to Pakistan or even Muslim countries. Uma Narayan, for example, describes the deployment of the same strategy in India. See: Uma Narayan, Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions and Third World Feminisms (New York: Routledge, 1997). [Return to text]

28. For a detailed exposition of these judgments, see Hussain (1997) and Saadia Toor, "Moral Regulation in a Postcolonial Nation-State: Gender and the Politics of Islamization in Pakistan," Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 9:2 (2007): 255-275. [Return to text]

29. Hussain, 221. [Return to text]

30. Inderpal Grewal, "On the New Global Feminism and the Family of Nations: Dilemmas of Transnational Feminist Practice," in Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age, Ella Shohat, ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). [Return to text]

31. Mitra Rastegar, "Reading Nafisi in the West: Authenticity, Orientalism and 'Liberating' Iranian Women," Women Studies Quarterly 34: 1-2 (2006): 116. [Return to text]

32. Shahnaz Khan, Zina, Transnational Feminism, and the Moral Regulation of Pakistani Women (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006). [Return to text]

33. Nafisa Shah, "Role of the Community in Honour Killings in Sindh," in Engendering the Nation-State, Volume 1, Neelam Hussain, Samiya Mumtaz and Rubina Saigol, eds. (Lahore: Simorgh Publications, 1997). [Return to text]

34. 'Islamization' and the attempt to institute Islamic law included half-hearted attempts in other spheres such as 'interest-free banking', but these were never institutionalized or implemented with the same enthusiasm and consensus as the laws pertaining to women. [Return to text]

35. See, for example: Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid. eds. Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History (Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989); George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: Howard Fertig, 1997); Andrew Parker, et al, eds., Nationalisms and Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1992); Angana P. Chatterji and Lubna Nazir Chaudhry, guest editors, "Gendered Violence in South Asia: Nation and Community in the Postcolonial Present," Cultural Dynamics 16: 2-3 (2004): 122-373. [Return to text]

36. This section draws on several conversations with Nighat Said Khan during and after the period in which the case was unfolding. I served as an informal liaison between Khan and the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. [Return to text]

37. In 2005, a hijra had made national headlines by winning his local union council seat, and members of the hijra community are increasingly visible on serious talk shows. [Return to text]

38. In pointing this out I am not claiming that members of gender and sexual minorities now have full and complete rights and that they do not continue to face severe problems in Pakistan. [Return to text]

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