Reading Muslim women’s plight as cultural corruption has colonial roots

Evidence

Leila Ahmed has identified the colonial basis of this trope, pointing out that the tendency to read the plight of the Muslim woman as indicative of the corruption of the entirety of Muslim culture has its roots in the discourse of colonial feminism employed by imperialists such as Lord Cromer, the consul general of Egypt and no friend of feminist campaigners at home in Britain, to castigate Arab Muslim society for its backwardness on the basis of its treatment of its womenfolk. Ahmed comments on how the same set of assumptions pervades even academic feminist scholarship: “To this day, the struggle against the veil and towards westernization and the abandoning of backward and oppressive Arab Muslim ways … is [sic] still commonly the framestory [sic] within which Western-based studies of Arab women, including feminist studies, are presented.” Lila Abu-Lughod takes up and extends this point, indicating how such “culturalist” explanations for women’s oppression—which lay the blame squarely at the door of Islam—conveniently ignore the longer, entangled histories of the evolution of certain social systems, a story that, given the legacies of colonialism, the Cold War, and globalization, ought really to include Western support for the repressive regimes that have allowed such ideologies to thrive. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 209

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Said’s Orientalism and the decontextualization argument that parallels how Hamid and Naqvi’s novels get read — the analytical hinge the reader needs. — connects to: Colonial reform discourse re-encoded Indian women’s practices as criminal categories. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 2029; A narrative about Muslim women’s oppression only emerged with European colonialism; Colonial administrators framed Islam as inherently degrading women. (+1 more)
• DEFINE: Defines ‘culturalist’ explanations for women’s oppression and the ‘framestory’ concept — useful critical vocabulary.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: whether Hamid and Naqvi actually resist or reproduce this decontextualized ‘brute named Islam’ framing.