Between Muslim Women and the Muslimwoman

When she fuses the words Muslim and woman to create the Muslimwoman, miriam cooke abruptly brings to attention the practice of collapsing two components of identity—religion and gender— into a “singular identity.” The Muslim-woman is a composite identity constructed, not by Muslim women but by others, mainly neo-Orientalist Westerners and Islamists or proponents of political Islam. The Muslimwoman of their construction is veiled (typically wearing the hijab, a head cover, or infrequently, the niqab, which hides the face), compliant (with authorities in family and society), and protected (by men). If others created the Muslimwoman, it is Muslim women who must be The Muslimwoman. They must play the part. Herein lies the trouble— and the potential.

Speaking of the Muslimwoman encapsulated in an image, cooke summons the word cage. Nineteenth-century Egyptian poet Aisha al-Taimuriyya used this very word in speaking of how Muslim women of the middle and upper strata of society were incarcerated in their houses. By the mid-twentieth century, women throughout Muslim societies in Africa and Asia had freed themselves from imposed domestic confinement. Muslim women are now ubiquitous in the public arena, where they put their skills and knowledge in virtually all known fields to good use. Neither the physical cage nor the metaphoric cage has suited women. Muslim women, as cooke notes, are using, refusing, and refiguring the descriptive/prescriptive model of the Muslimwoman that has been handed them.

Like many others, cooke looks to 9/11 as a pivotal—she calls it an “axial”—moment for the Muslimwoman. It was mainly and most dramatically so in the West. The post–9/11 world looked different beyond the West, where most Muslims continued as before, operating with and being recognized by their multiple identities or a flow between identities—the way most of us do anywhere as we get on with our lives.

If largely unnoticed in the West, the Muslimwoman had a life prior to 9/11. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Islamists had launched their version of the Muslimwoman in Muslim Africa and Asia. By the 1990s, Muslim women were seriously challenging Islamists’ fabrication of the Muslimwoman. Now, ironically, the (neo-Orientalist) West is doing the work of the Islamists in relaunching the Muslimwoman at precisely the moment when the West is intent upon containing Islamists. Could such Western embrace of the Muslimwoman be the gendered equivalent of a penchant for backing repressive (patriarchal) regimes?

Display of Muslim identity, in a born-again, politicized version, occurred in some places as early as the 1970s, such as Egypt, and more widely following the 1979 Islamist revolution in Iran. Emboldened by the Iranian success, Islamists in many Muslim countries pitted themselves against the “seculars,” whom they smeared, unleashing intra-Muslim strife. Islamists reconstituted a conservative model of the Muslim woman, now marked by the hijab (not the niqab, which prevailed among the middle and upper strata in Muslim countries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries¹), at a time when women throughout the Muslim world had gained many rights—or as they noted, had recovered many of their Islamicly granted rights—thereby seriously eroding the traditional patriarchal order and the version of Islam that held it up.

Islamists sought to rally women around them and to make such women mark themselves publicly as political allies by hoisting the flag of hijab. Women who declined to take up the veil and who refused to bend to the patriarchal agenda (at a certain moment, Islamists were even calling for women to retreat to the home—an economic impossibility for the majority of women and their families) were upbraided and sometimes even branded non-Muslims. “Secular women” (those who did not publicly proclaim their Islamic affiliation) rejected the Islamist model of the Muslimwoman. By then, a second feminist wave was ascendant in much of the Muslim world. Its proponents refused to respond to the Islamists but simply forged ahead with their own gender work.

In the late 1980s and especially the 1990s, religiously committed Muslim women, often called “religious women” (those who publicly displayed their Islamic identity...