August 19 2005: Open letter to a friend

Women, feminism and the veil

Dear S-

Thank you so much for the piece, you sent me. I found it intelligent, persuasive. You have a talent for writing, and I hope you persist. You lambast 'Western feminism' for the role it has played in supporting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. You portray the support some feminists have given to the French ban on the hijab as the sign of a tradition hopelessly mired in the structures of colonial rule. Western feminism you say has had no positive ideal except to turn women into men; 'Islamic feminism' will set itself different goals.

The piece is so angry, so compelling, it is almost impossible not to agree with you. When you write, you seem to speak for an entire generation. And yet ... I have my doubts.

You seem to know Laura Bush and Cherie Blair, but not Sheila Rowbotham or Lynn Segal. You do not know Mrs Desai nor Sojourner Truth. You avoid the central texts of European and American feminisms, settling for reading instead that 'feminism' you could find in feminist critiques of Islam or, almost as often, in Islamic critiques of 'feminism'. You can't defeat an intellectual tradition, even one you dislike, by misrepresenting it.

It seems to me that in fact 'Western feminism' is not one tradition but a series of complex, hostile and variegated traditions, as different between each other as the atheist/secular/Muslim and Islamic feminisms you identify.

In the most important writers, there is no sense (at all) that women should achieve equality by aspiring to become like men. Quite the reverse, a common theme of contemporary feminism is that a crisis of gender relations distorts and dehumanises both women and men. Susan Faludi's book Stiffed is particularly good on this.

The external point against which the most interesting European feminists have tended to judge women's equality is not 'have women become men?' but 'to what extend do the options open to men and women match up to our ideal notion of what society should be like: i.e. a condition of substantive equality?'

The purpose of Western feminism in the last 30 years has not been to refute Islam; its priority rather has been to interrogate gender relations in Britain and Europe. Women's liberation originated as a doctrine of revolt: it may not show that face to you, but that is its true face, and one I think that could offer you and your generation more than you think.

Why then the controversy about the veil? For many European women the right to take off clothes was part of their personal struggle against a generation of older, sexist men (notice, I do not use the word patriarchy - many writers argue that it doesn't think it explains anything at all). This leads to an ambivalent or contradictory response to women who wear the veil: some feminists see women in the hijab as selling out the struggle which they themselves fought in previous years for liberation.

Other feminists (many of my friends) see the exact opposite. They would argue that the majority of younger women in Muslim countries choose to wear the veil, that they do so in struggle against relations of national, religious and gender inequality. Such socialist feminists are pained them that many Western feminists can't see a common corridor of experience between their struggle and yours. They are equally troubled that you see no common experience between your struggles and the struggles of women against power in the West.

Western feminism is a broad tradition which includes both people who argue that women are held together by a common experience of struggle against religion (this is the tradition that you rightly want to expose) and also different people who argue that women are held together by a common experience of struggle against all inequality (this is a position much closer to your own).

If you don't mind me asking, I wonder why you call your ideal an Islamic feminism? When women in the West have called themselves feminists they have had in mind not just a common theory but a common programme - the abolition of rape and domestic violence, the ending of unequal pay and occupational structures. You do not object to these demands, you do not even consider them. What is that you want from your feminism: the involvement of women only in national and religious struggles; or the diminution also of the power that men hold over women?