State protection of Muslim women can backfire by fueling anti-Muslim racism

Evidence

As things stand, Canadian Muslim communities will continue to use Islamic principles informally and women remain unprotected in this arena. However, should a woman be able to turn to common law, something that requires resources and a willingness to live without community, the possibility exists that she may be able to secure her rights under Western law. But here too, we must note that Muslim women’s experiences of Canadian law have not been entirely positive and that our secular state is a racist state, complete with patriarchal and racist judges. At the end of the day, something positive may have been achieved in that the plans of a small conservative religious faction may have been upset, but it has been achieved through reinforcing some rather terrible dualisms (women’s rights versus multi-culturalism; West versus Muslims; enlightened Western feminists versus imperilled Muslim women) that, in a post-9/11 era, has tremendous utility for states seeking to regulate Muslim populations. Was it worth it? Only time will tell, but my guess is that the way is paved, if it was not before, for the kinds of laws we are seeing in Europe, which are enacted in the name of protecting Muslim women but are thinly disguised methods of putting Muslim populations under heavy surveillance while relieving the state of scrutiny about its practices towards both Muslims and all women. As in the narratives of rescue with which I began, it seems likely that Muslim women won some protection, but only at the cost of increasing anti-Muslim/anti-immigrant racism and consolidating the idea of civilized Europeans. When the ‘war on terror’ in the West requires imperilled Muslim women and dangerous Muslim men as a central part of its conceptual apparatus, we become obligated as anti-imperial feminists to pursue anti-patriarchal strategies within, rather than outside, our communities, the difficulties of doing so notwithstanding. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 393

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to her earlier chapters on rescue narratives of imperilled Muslim women and the war-on-terror apparatus.
• DEEPTHINKING: Caps off the chapter’s central paradox: Western feminist wins for Muslim women reinforce the surveillance/racism machinery — a dense, genuinely hard conclusion.