Women’s bodies serve as the terrain where anti-Muslim and anti-multicultural politics are fought

Evidence

That Jews and other Europeans face a common enemy in the Muslim pre-modern Other is established through an appeal to a more widespread resentment of the foreigner. A shared Europeanness is made possible principally through gender. Endorsing Pipes’s views, for example, Brenda Walker illustrates these connections, arguing that when European generosity towards immigrants and asylum seekers is returned with ‘rape, physical attacks, theft, general disrespect and refusal to learn the language, then the public realises that multiculturalism is a philosophy based on falsehood.’ The belief that all cultures are equal and should be respected as such, she concludes, has resulted in widespread violence against women and the death of Muslim women themselves at the hands of Muslim men. Women’s bodies are marked here as the terrain of struggle, and culture serves to define the conflict as one between Europeans and non-European Others as well as one between those who support multiculturalism and those who do not. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 219

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly parallels the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ article pattern: women’s bodies as the symbolic battlefield for class/identity/political struggles, here in the post-9/11 geopolitics context.
• XREF: Connects to Mohanty’s ‘Under Western Eyes’ and the figure of the ‘Third World Woman’ — the trope of saving brown women from brown men.