Reading Muslim women’s plight as proof of Islamic depravity traces to colonial feminism

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. … 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. … In works such as those I analyze here, which totally omit any consideration of previous U.S. interference in each nation’s affairs, selective decontextualization allows the author to attribute all the abuses we see to a brute named “Islam” that works everywhere to curtail human rights. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 209

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘culturalist’ explanations and ‘selective decontextualization’ as moves that blame Islam while erasing Western interference.
• XREF: Directly useful for framing Hamid and Naqvi — both set post-9/11 novels against U.S. foreign entanglement, so they contest this very decontextualization. — connects to: Colonial-native feminist rhetoric aimed to train women as caregivers, not liberate them — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 148; A narrative about Muslim women’s oppression only emerged with European colonialism; Colonial administrators framed Islam as inherently degrading women. (+2 more)