Between Feminism and Islam: Human Rights and Sharia Law in Morocco

5. Subversive Veiling: Beyond the Binary of the Secular and the Religious

5 Subversive Veiling: Beyond the Binary of the Secular and the Religious 134 The terms “feminism” and “Islamism” have genealogies rooted in colonial representations about Islam and postcolonial identifications with modernity. Gender lies at the center of these representations. The question of women’s oppression in Islam was crucial to legitimizing not only the colonial enterprise (Ahmed 1992; Haddad and Smith 1996; Zayzafoon 2005), but also the nationalist resistance couching the project of postcolonial modernity in women’s emancipation, their participation in public life, and, more importantly , their unveiling (al-Fassi 1953; Chraibi 1954). Since the 1980s, the veiling of a young generation of educated and professional women has complicated the binary of modernity versus tradition , which was articulated by intellectuals and political elites in Morocco (Chraibi 1954; Laroui 1976; see also Pandolfo 2000). Epitomized by the resurgence of the veil and intensified by the 9/11 attacks, these binaries have formed a lens through which mainstream feminist literature (see Sabbagh 1996; Lazreg 1994; Mernissi 2001), represented Islam as incommensurate with modernity (see Hippler and Lueg 1995; Huntington 1996; Lewis 2002; Said 1978). The past decade, however, brought about important scholarship on the Middle East that questioned these orientalist representations of a monolithic, ahistorical Islam, as opposed to a normative Western modernity (Abu-Lughod 1998; Asad 2003; Mitchell 2000; Moallem 2005). This literature has shifted the lens to the encounters of Islam and modernity in the colonial and postcolonial (dis)junctures. As the growing field of sociology of religion began to consider modernity as the framework for understanding the resurgence of religion “as a public force” (Hefner 1998, 98) in modern times, the entanglement of the Islamist movements with secular modernity came to be understood in a new light (Emerson and Hartman 2006; Hefner 1998). In the Middle East, these movements are viewed as a reaction to processes of secularization (Tibi 1998, 2000), “failed” development projects (G. Amin 1997; Tibi 1995; Ibrahim 1998), and related aspects of individualization and privatization of religion in postcolonial state formations. But the most important contribution to this debate came from the feminist scholarship on the Middle East, notably from postcolonial and postmodern critics of the secularist , developmentalist, and liberal underpinnings of Western feminism (AbuLughod 1998; Bodman and Tohidi 1998; Cooke 2001; Lazreg 1986, 2002; Mahmood 2005; Mir-Hosseini 1999; Moalem 2005; Tohidi 1991; Treacher and Shukrallah 2001).These studies have shown how women’s political identities are located at the encounters of modernity and Islam, and how articulations of “feminisms” (Karam 1998), “modernness” (Deeb 2006) agency (Mahmood 2005), and rights (Afkhami and Friedl 1997) are shaped by global discourses and regulatory regimes, as well as women’s identifications within Islam and feminism, in these junctures. In what follows, I pursue this debate by showing how feminist and Islamist politics have overlapped in Morocco through the narratives of activists in both movements. I depict five areas in which these encounters have been most visible. The Veil In the past two decades, young women’s veiling practices have generated enormous passions in public opinion and rich academic debates (El Guindi 2007; Macleod 1991; Slymovics 1996). The veil has surely been the most potent signifier of women’s identity politics, demarcating the boundaries of secularism and Islamism in its original stages of emergence. However, in the past decade, the hijab became the means for blurring these boundaries and bridging gaps between women from various economic backgrounds and political sensibilities. While a politics of identity is still a principal definer of educated women’s mode of veiling, the veil itself no longer demarcates women’s political affiliation and sensibilities, neither does it demarcate the geographical boundaries of secular and religious territories. The widespread adoption of the veil at the end of the 1990s challenges any understanding of the veil within these fixed terms. For instance, it is no longer surprising to see members of leftist parties attending their party meetings wearing the hijab. During the 2007 legislative elections, very few unveiled women ran for the Islamist party’s municipal seats, while many veiled women ran on behalf of the socialist party. Hence, the ethics of Islamic modesty are no longer synonymous subversive veiling 135 with militant Islam. In fact, there has been a blurring of the differences between women’s identities as Muslims, which is stressed by the observance of the hijab as coupled with women’s political convictions...