Feminism and Islamic Fundamentalism: A Secularist Approach

Bronwyn Winter's thought-provoking and timely article offers a measured feminist critique of the study of women and fundamentalisms. It compels those of us who have previously written on Islamic fundamentalism to reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of our analyses. And it comes at a time when Iranian expatriates are debating the reality or illusion of an Islamic feminism. For these reasons, I welcome the opportunity to respond to Winter's article, "Fundamental Misunderstandings."

Winter identifies three discursive frameworks--orientalist, multiculturalist, and pluralist--within which key issues related to the study of Islamism have developed. I suspect that there are at least two additional frameworks that may be identified: feminist atheist and secular feminist. The feminist atheist stance informs Winter's approach, and the secular feminist approach I will describe here.

There is much about Winter's critical analysis and overall politics with which I agree--such as her cogent comments on cultural relativism, Islamism as a patriarchal and right-wing political movement, and the silence on Algeria and pre-Taliban Afghanistan. The absence of articles on Algeria in well-known feminist journals raises questions about how editors decide on submissions dealing with non-Western women's issues. As for Afghanistan, I am as frustrated today by the American feminist preoccupation with the Taliban's gender apartheid as I was by the total silence of feminists in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the Mujahideen, the precursors of the Taliban, revolted against the left-wing government. Some feminists even wrote sympathetically about the freedom fighters; I may have been the only one emphasizing the reactionary and patriarchal character of the Mujahideen. Not only mindless cultural relativism but also willful anticommunism lay behind the silence and sympathy. Today's self-righteous breast-beating allows U.S. complicity in Afghanistan's tragedy to remain unexamined.

My major disagreement with Winter's article concerns her conflation of Islam and Islamism. Ironically, the equation of Islam with Islamism is precisely the claim of Islamic fundamentalists. This claim dehistoricizes Islam and confuses the issues. I also believe that Winter is too dismissive of the sociological approach that correctly explains Islamism in terms of contemporary crises of modernization and modernity. Because of space limitations, I will focus the rest of my comment on the question of Islam versus Islamic fundamentalism, while also examining the debate on Islamic feminism.

To say that Islamism (the political movement) is not the same as Islam (the religion) is not necessarily to fall into what Winter calls the "multiculturalist/cultural relativist" and "pluralist" frameworks (or traps). It is, rather, to recognize that sociology and theology are separate enterprises, and that religious practice and political mobilization are distinct social phenomena (although sometimes interrelated). I am not a theologian, so I cannot comment on the merits or deficiencies of Islamic doctrine. However, I know enough about the Abrahamic religions to assert that Islam is neither more nor less patriarchal than Judaism or Christianity. As a sociologist, I primarily have been concerned with the Islamist political-cultural movement--its causes, characteristics, contradictions, and evolution. I have focused as well on differences among Islamist movements. Iranian Islamism, for example, has been reactive and proactive, reactionary and innovative, repressive and reforming. It differs from Afghan Islamism, which lacks modernizing features. Social structure, including the size of the middle class, helps to explain the differences.

Many Muslims are appalled by Islamic fundamentalism, be it of the Iranian, Afghan, or Algerian variety. In this sense, too, it is important to separate analytically the belief system from the political movement. Nor does it help matters to bring Christianity and Judaism into the argument and suggest that they, too, "carry the seeds of their own fundamentalisms." ¹ I am not sure what Winter means by this assertion. As she indicates, there can be progressive articulations of religion (e.g., the black church and civil rights movement in the United States). Moreover...