Femperialism No More: Why This Muslim Woman has
Liberated Herself from Feminism

UmmAli Hijazi - December 26th, 2006
http://hotcoals.org/?p=115#more-115

"A nation is not conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground. Then it is done, no matter how brave its warriors nor how strong their weapons" - Mary Crow Dog, "Lakota Woman"

In February of 2006, riding a wave of conservative political and cultural victories across the nation, the South Dakota legislature decided to pave the way for an assault on Roe v. Wade by enacting the most stringent abortion law in the country. The performance of an abortion for any reason other than saving the life of a pregnant woman became a felony. One month later, Cecelia Fire Thunder, President of the Oglala Sioux Nation on the Pine Ridge reservation, evoked tribal sovereignty. According to an Indianz.com report by author Tim Giago, Ms. Fire Thunder stated, "I will personally establish a Planned Parenthood clinic on my own land which is within the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation where the state of South Dakota has absolutely no jurisdiction."

Across the blogosphere pro-choice feminists and their allies cheered and mobilized financial support for the proposed clinic. Though Fire Thunder became a hero to the numbers of privileged white commenters that frequent the newsmagazines, blogs and message boards championing her cause, her move created controversy amongst her own. In May, the tribal counsel voted to ban all abortions on Pine Ridge reservation land and suspended President Fire Thunder. In June she was impeached. The jubilation and praise for Fire Thunder quickly turned to venom toward her tribe. A poster on one popular Democratic message board accused the Oglala Sioux of "colonialist thinking." That this group of America's indigenous people should be accused of "colonialist thinking" is ironic; for the Oglala Sioux, like billions of people of color across the globe, colonialism is the heart of the issue.

The Oglala Sioux are members of one of seven divisions making up the Great Sioux Nation. It was these people who defeated General Custer when the U.S. government attempted to remove them from their land, under threat of death, after gold was discovered in their sacred Black Hills. The victory, however, was pyrrhic as over the next several years the United States government carried out policies that included massacres of the Sioux people and the Buffalo that sustained them until, starving and freezing, they were forced to flee to designated reservations. It was at Pine Ridge reservation in 1890 that 300 unarmed people were massacred. It was at Pine Ridge in 1973 that the famous stand off with American Indian Movement activists took place.

Today Shannon County, South Dakota, the location of the Pine Ridge reservation is consistently ranked as one of the poorest counties in America. The reservation has an 80% unemployment rate and according to the American Indian Relief council the majority of residents have an annual income of under $3000. This situation is by no means unique to Pine Ridge. Despite the socio-economic problems reported about other communities of color, namely African Americans and Latinos, Native Americans are amongst the poorest, most underserved populations in America.

For white feminists, the daughters and beneficiaries of Western imperialism, the decision to carry through or terminate a pregnancy is simply about her personhood. It's an issue of a woman's right to autonomy over her own body. For a community that has, for over a century, been the target of state sponsored violence, forced sterilization, assimilation and conversion, for a community that is barely holding on to its language, culture, and traditions, abortion becomes a much more complicated issue than the simple way that white feminists frame them. It extends even beyond religious belief, for in this situation the life of each child is one small step toward the survival of a nation. Beyond choice rhetoric, true reproductive freedom is not just about the individual woman, but about the conditions in a community that make gestating, nurturing and providing for a child unbearable.

I discovered the term feminist in my mother's old college books, which lined the seven-foot bookshelf in the living room of our tiny apartment. I was about 13 and just beginning to question why men and boys were so much more interested in what was on my chest than in my head. I'll never forget my mother's response when I asked her if she was a feminist, "feminism is for white women, they don't care about us, we have our own problems." Her best friend, a black nationalist with an activist resume taller than her African head wrap, agreed.

These were women who would have easily been included as feminists under the wide reaching rhetoric of inclusiveness that has come to characterize definitions of feminism. They were pro-choice, hard-working single mothers, women of conviction and strength. They instilled in their daughters love for and pride in womanhood and blackness.

At 14, while browsing the shelves of a used bookstore I came across Susan Brownmiller's Femininity. Her deconstruction of how women's bodies from hair to toenails are restricted by imposed ideals resonated with me deeply. It was soon thereafter that I put on hijab. As counterintuitive as it may seem to those whose knowledge of Islamic values is informed solely by the rhetoric of Western press and Taliban crimes, Femininity had as much to do with my decision to don the hijab as the Qur'an.

Well over ten years later, feeling nostalgia for those heady days of newfound empowerment, I googled Susan Brownmiller only to come upon an essay of hers that boils Muslim resistance to American imperialism down to simplistic "they hate us for our freedoms" rhetoric. She even quotes Jerry Falwell! I was stunned. Not only was this founding mother of the second wave mouthing right-wing rhetoric, she advises her readers to support the struggle against the Taliban's "gender apartheid," not by advising support for RAWA, an Afghan women's rights association that has been on the ground fighting for thirty years, but rather, one American organization, the Feminist Majority led by Eleanor Smeal, who she states "has worked tirelessly for six years to alert national and international policymakers to the Taliban's gender war."

Beyond the obvious racism of ignoring an organization of Afghan women in Afghanistan in order to promote the work of white American feminists, there is the fact that RAWA activists have explicitly denounced the condescending actions of The Feminist Majority's "Gender Apartheid" campaign and other "white feminists." Sonali Kolhatkar, Co-director of Afghan Women's Mission, which works closely with RAWA, stated on an article posted on RAWA's website:

"It is easy to condemn the 'barbaric' men of Afghanistan and pity the helpless women of Afghanistan. It is this very logic that drives the Feminist Majority's 'Gender Apartheid' campaign for Afghan women. Far more interested in portraying Afghan women as mute creatures covered from head to toe, the Feminist Majority aggressively promotes itself and it's campaign by selling small squares of mesh cloth, similar to the mesh through which Afghan women can look outside when wearing the traditional Afghan burqa. The post card on which the swatch of mesh is sold says, 'Wear a symbol of remembrance for Afghan women', as if they are already extinct. An alternative could have been 'Celebrate the Resistance of Afghan Women' with a pin of a hand folded into a fist, to acknowledge the very real struggle that Afghan women wage every day, particularly the women of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), who are at the forefront of that struggle. Interestingly enough, 50% of all proceeds go toward helping Feminist Majority in promoting their campaign on 'Gender Apartheid' in Afghanistan."

On almost every image of Afghan women in the Western mainstream and even alternative media, images of shapeless blue clad forms of Afghan women covered with the burqa, dominate (Amnesty International's poster of Afghan women, the cover of Cheryl Bernard's new book on RAWA, etc.).

No, I am not alone. Women of color have been offering the same criticism of mainstream feminism for over thirty years. In the U.S. these critiques were heard most often from American women of color, but as the Internet expands our ability to hear the voices of people excluded from Western media outlets, women of color across the globe have joined the chorus. Still, they do not hear us. From mainstream message boards to Ms. Magazine the reality of white American feminists using feminism to maintain their position as imperial mistresses at the expense of women of color stands clear.

Many of these critics now use the term womanist or feminist of color to distinguish themselves from the feminism that frames discussions of female liberation around the concerns of upwardly mobile Western white women. I respect their tenacity, their determination to desegregate feminism and make room for themselves at the table. From what I can see, however, integration has often proven to be a mixed blessing, what happens more often in these situations is co-optation.

I don't need allies who refuse to unpack and discard the contents of their knapsack of racism. As a woman of color, more specifically a Shi'a Muslim woman, descendant of kidnapped Africans enslaved in the Americas, this WASP centered myopia has driven me away from the feminist movement. I will fight until my last breath, both in the Muslim community and outside of it, to ensure a just world for all regardless of gender or the many other identity labels that divide us. I don't need to do that under the banner of feminism. In fact, my own religious tradition provides me ample theory, inspiration and framework for that struggle. I don't wear a burqa, but I maintain the hijab proudly, feminism is the only shroud that I plan to remove as a part of my liberation.

UmmAli Hijazi is the host of the new Muslim radio show, "The Muslim Street": http://muslimstreet.wordpress.com/