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Dominic Wetzel,
"Introduction"
(page 3 of 4)
Islam, Bodies, Politics
The next section, Islam, Bodies, Politics, focuses more
directly on different issues of bodily regulation within specific
Islamic national contexts. In "Passing, Politics and Religion," Minoo
Moallem analyzes the widely popular—but quickly banned—Iranian
comedy, Marmoulak (The Lizard), about a criminal, Reza, who escapes
from prison by "passing" as a respectable clergyman. Along the way,
she argues, in a comic twist of mistaken identity, the film "brilliantly
exposes and unsettles notions of respectability, masculinity, and class
capital by interrogating the boundaries of normativity and criminality
in what the Islamic State considers a pious, ethical, and religious
citizen-subject."
Here, through the lens of a popular film, ironic insight is drawn
that challenges quite strongly any equation of religion with
conservatism, in this case the equation in the West of "Islam" and
"fundamentalist" Islam, in particular, as "backward" and anti-modern.
For, as the film shows quite clearly, "respectability" falls along class
lines, and particularly, those of the educated, elite. It is the latter
which has suppressed the kooche va bazar space of Iranian popular
culture, replacing it with Islamic values since the Cultural Revolution.
It is on Reza's body, the criminal-turned-clergyman, that we can "read"
this distinction between the symbolic capital and respectable
masculinity of the educated clergyman, or ahklund, and the
lower-class, pleasure-seeking, hyper-masculinity of the playful and
light kooche va bazar language of the thug.
Moallem concludes her analysis of respectable vs. non-respectable
"passing" in Iranian society with the argument that the presumed
opposition between religion and secularism actually undercuts
possibilities for secular practices within the framework of Iranian
society:
The implication of passing for Iranian political discourse
is significant because the current discourses both in Iran and in
the diaspora have produced citizen-subjects that are seen, or
self-perceived, as belonging to one side or the other of certain
impenetrable binaries. This problem has significantly impacted the
cultural and political spheres of representation. For example,
while the modernist and secularist bias in the sphere of cultural
representation keeps referring to the Iranian clergy as the other of
the secular and the modern, in reality and on the ground, what
distinguishes various groups of people, both men and women, is not
their religious or secular appearances, especially when it comes to
the dress code, but rather their conservative or reformist political
agenda. Indeed, I argue that the dichotomies of modern/traditional,
secular/religious, and respectable/outlaw based on modern regimes of
visibility and corporeality have been crucial in influencing the Iranian
political sphere. Constructing religion as equivalent to
conservatism and the opposite of secularism has been detrimental to the
formation of secular practices within the framework of Islamic
political and cultural discourses and practices.
Similarly, Saadia Toor, in "Gender, Sexuality, and Islam Under the
Shadow of Empire," explores how inadequate this configuration is to
understand the complexity of issues around the regulation of women's,
queer, and transgender bodies in Pakistan. Analyzing two high profile
controversies of women and sexual minorities, as well as recent
documentaries and the writings of self-declared neocon "spokespersons"
for the Islamic world in the West, Toor shows how misleading the
contemporary mainstream Western discourse on 'Islam' and
gender/sexuality is, and the degree to which it is "premised on an
essentialized and monolithic 'Islam' emptied of history, diversity,
complexity, and dissent." This, in turn, fuels the dominant Western
"civilizational" discourse that justifies racist, imperial aggression,
and xenophobia under the ideological cover of "rescuing" Muslim queers
and women. Under her analysis, it quickly becomes clear how misleading
any simplistic equation of Islam with conservatism or fundamentalism and
secularism or Western values with sexual freedom is. Rather than
invoking "Islam" to "explain" the regulation of gender and sexuality in
"the Muslim World," Toor argues instead that it is essential to examine
the underlying (and typically ignored) historical and contemporary
context of social conditions, relations, and conflicts that have helped
produce Pakistan's religious culture:
The (changing) role of religion in Pakistan, for example,
cannot be understood outside the region's colonial and post-colonial
history. The British politicized religion during the course of their
rule in the subcontinent, and religious discourse and identity
became a crucial part of the anti-colonial struggle. During the Cold
War, the United States found it expedient to use religious ideology
to counter "god-less" communism across the globe and followed a
conscious strategy of funding and otherwise supporting the most virulent
forms of political Islam across the Muslim world.
In Pakistan, this went further back than the more well-known American
funding of the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1970s and 80s proxy war
against the Soviet Union, to the funding of the "neo-fascist"
Jama'at-i-Islami party of the 1950s to fight 'godless' communism. But
it was not until the 1980s and the arrival of the American-backed
dictator, General Zia ul Haq, that Jama'at-i Islami truly came to power,
wherein the "main focus of Zia's program of Islamization and the moral
renewal of Pakistani society was the control of women, specifically the
need to return them to the 'chardivari' or the home." Interestingly,
Toor argues, "this was a class project—Zia's base was the urban
petty-bourgeoisie which had been feeling culturally and economically
threatened by the recent entry of large numbers of women into the public
sphere." Yet, "despite all this 'Islamization,' something called
'Islam' cannot explain the actual ways and means by which women's bodies
and sexuality are managed and/or controlled in contemporary Pakistan."
In the two controversies Toor looks at—one involving an
upper-middle class woman who went against her religiously orthodox and
well-connected parents' wishes in marrying a man from a lower class; and
another of a marriage of a female-to-male transgendered person to a
woman—she shows how "Islam is invoked very selectively even in
so-called 'Islamic societies,' ... even when the issue is the control of
women's sexuality." If the rights granted to women under Islamic law
become inconvenient for the purposes of patriarchal control, often
'Islam' is all-too-easily tossed aside in favor of 'custom' and
'tradition'"—a dynamic Toor names "patriarchal opportunism." In her
analysis of both cases, she shows that it is the patriarchal, economic
interest of the fathers in question that motivates their cases against
their daughters—for the upper-class father of an influential religious
family, to marry his daughter to the son of a friend to consolidate
power; for the father of the lower-class, transgendered "daughter," to
marry "her" off to pay a debt. Further, the laws they were charged with
violating were those leftover from the imperial British penal code, not
shariah law—a distinction often lost or unrecognized by Western
audiences. Conversely, Zia's draconian Zina Ordinances, in which a
woman had to prove a claim of rape by producing "four Muslim male
witnesses of good moral character" (impossible conditions often
resulting in the woman being subjected to charges of adultery) were
opposed at the time by many Islamic clerics as unfair to women. Lastly,
all cases pursued under the Zina ordinances passed by shariah appellate
courts have ultimately been overturned by the Supreme Court, challenging
the Western perception of Pakistan as solely an Islamist, rather than a
secular, or mixed Islamist-secular, society.
In this context, Toor argues, even the World Bank's push for
"devolution" to local power, which sounds great in the abstract,
reinforces patriarchal power and custom:
When grafted onto a society such as Pakistan's which is
characterized by deep inequalities at the local level, where powerful
landed interests still hold sway, and women are still treated as
communal property, it effectively removes any possibility that the most
vulnerable might occasionally be able to turn to the State for
protection. Even more so than before, when they had to at least answer
to a senior bureaucrat, the local police have effectively become the
thugs for the powerful interests in their area.
Toor concludes:
What the examples from Pakistan ... 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?
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