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- To: Multiple recipients of list <femecon-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Subject: Comment on Barbara Bergmann's and Katha Pollitt's attack on Leila Ahmed (post 1)
- From: "S. Charusheela" <charu@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 22 Aug 1999 16:57:51 -0400 (EDT)
Two posts on Islamic Feminism and Ahmed's Work -- apologies in advance
for the length.
laal-haraa salaams, Charu.
________________________
Comment on Barbara Bergmann's and Katha Pollitt's attack on Leila Ahmed
The trouble with the posts by Barbara Bergmann and Katha Pollitt is that
they undertake an incredible slide in argumentation. Effectively the
rather absurd attack on Leila Ahmed is undertaken via critiques of the
usage of ideology by powerful clergy -- this presumes (wrongly) that
Ahmed minimizes or excuses anti-feminist Islamic fundamentalists.
There is little doubt that serious discussion on the relationship
between religious ideology and feminism is needed. Ahmed's work does
provide precisely such serious discussion. Unfortunately, the posts on
femecon-l critiquing her did not. The peculiar (non)analysis through
which Ahmed's ethnic origin and religious orientation were put forward
as substitutes for discussion of her actual views does little to advance
feminist solidarity, analysis, or even comprehension, about the politics
of feminism and Islam.
So, if the issue is Ahmed's work, let us discuss Ahmed's work
seriously. Barbara Bergmann is a scholar and should take Ahmed
seriously enough to engage her work directly. If she has a problem with
Ahmed, let her quote and critique, not resort to sweeping claims based
on news clippings. Bergmann might also take the trouble to spell
Ahmed's name properly.
Katha Pollitt too should squarely address Ahmed's work, and not depend
on random and arbitrary manufactured absurd associations between Ahmed
and 'ayatollahs' to make her points. A concrete discussion of the
limits of Ahmed's work would have been quite interesting and useful, and
indeed actively welcomed by 'third worldists' like me who think there is
a world of difference between serious engaged disagreement and ad
hominum attack where one feels one need not even read or know what
someone has actually written in order to attack them.
I was especially troubled by the bizarre assertion on the part of
Pollitt that she somehow had a 'right' to make untrue and
unsubstantiated statements about Ahmed's perspective, or about the
actual perspective of Middle Eastern feminists who critique
orientalism. Let us recollect what the issue is -- it is not whether
fundamentalism has harmed women -- it has, and frankly, it is a pain to
have to remind folks that it has been these 'third world feminists' like
Ahmed who raised the difficult analytical questions about the
relationship between nationalism, decolonization, and feminism, in the
first place, and who made us comprehend that orientalism was harmful to
feminism precisely because feminist orientalism strenghtends the hand of
the right wing patriarchal fundamentalist elite and causes tensions at
precisely the moment when Third world feminists can least afford the
luxury of doing the 'damage control' needed when we have to answer for
the racist and orientalist mouthings about the Third World on the part
of our Western 'sisters.' The issue is whether one can make the absurd
attack on the politics and ethical integrity of a specific person purely
on grounds of their religious background. It will not do, I think, to
simply make bald assertions about the inadequacy of a specific person's
politics, and worse, proceed as if this person has taken positions that
they explicitly critique in their actual work, and then absolve oneself
of actually having to back up this claim by looking at that person's
work.
Having posted her complete agreement with Barbara Bergmann's 'analysis'
of Prof. Ahmed's position at Harvard and how this implied that we can
safely assume that said work of this explicitly named person is not
really feminist, Katha Pollitt is providing a string of glib arguments
for ignorance in her reply to Jennifer. This may not be a graduate
seminar, but we should not assume that anti-Islamic baiting which
depends primarily on a person's religious background is therefore
'sanctioned' on femecon-l. I also fail to see how asking someone to
back up their critiques of another's work is deference to authority.'
The fact that a bad person knows a lot about something does not make
knowledge as such a bad thing. Katha Pollitt also deliberately confuses
argument based on scholarship and argument from authority. Argument
from authority takes the form of "x is true because y says so and y is
an authority." Jennifer takes the issues seriously enough to learn
about them and is prepared to share what she knows. Same, clearly, with
Leila Ahmed. Katha Pollitt, however, seems to feel that it is
unreasonable to expect her to actually know anything about the work of
the person she so blithely attacks here. In fact, it is she who
presumes that we should simply accept her arguments based on some
'authority' on her part, rather than via examining her arguments and
scholarship.
What's disturbing is the insistence on the right to make sweeping,
anti-analytical claims about "Islam" as a whole, an approach one does
not see taken with any other concrete approach to feminist activism.
There is of course a distinguished tradition of making sweeping claims
about Islam. The West has long defined itself in opposition to a
caricature of the Muslim world. Katha Pollitt, incredibly, cites
Montesquieu on Islam without getting the point that this writing is
about the West's self-definition against an uncivilized other and not
about Islam as it exists today or during the colonial period. Hard to
believe it's almost two decades since the publication of Said's
_Orientalism_!
Given the above, I'd like to note that what Katha Pollitt calls Third
Worldism, I would call simple common sense -- One may be atheist, and
critique Zionism, but that does not mean one cannot get upset or protest
when the critiques of Judaism that are put forward sound more like plain
old anti-semetic fantasy than like serious and engaged critique. To end
-- to randomly assert that someone must be anti-feminist or an apologist
for patriarchy simply because of her religion, to then pretend that this
is about the right to critique a religion (there is a vast difference
between saying that Barry Goldwater is bad BECAUSE he is Jewish, and
critiquing his concrete arguments and positions, after all), to refuse
to discuss or engage with the actual writings of someone, to refuse to
present a clear discussion in terms of analysis of the relationships
between religion and state power and between religious ideology and
social injustice; to insist on the right to present imagined rather than
researched histories and philosophies of said religion in critique; and
to then wriggle out of having to actually back up arguments by simply
resorting to terms like 'third worldism,' all this does a huge
disservice to the many 'third worldists' -- including us secular
feminist third-worldists -- struggling against injustice the world
over. Such solidarity as is being offered by Barbara Bergmann and Katha
Pollitt, frankly, I can do without -- yours from an intransigently
atheist Marxist-feminist who has deep commitments to secularism and who
fervently hopes that this type of 'analysis' and 'political commitment
to women's rights in the non-West' isn't being seriously offered to me
as 'internationalism and solidarity' by my Western sisters!
________________________
PS. For those who periodically wonder why there aren't enough non-US or
Third World voices on femecon-l: would YOU partake in a forum where it
is okay to say ridiculous unsubstantiated things about a scholar, where
the key 'proof' proffered is that scholars' racial and ethnic and
religious origin, and where the bulk of the e-list participants do not
find it odd or strange that this is done (or at least do not voice the
type of strong unambiguous and clear protest, discussion, and subsequent
clarifications of perspective when disagreement ensued that the Bergmann
posting on the decrease of male wages to so quickly elicited), and where
when you point this out, you are accused of being a 'relativist' or
'apologist for patriarchy'? Making sure you get heard seriously involves
having to educate folks who REFUSE to read what someone said or wrote
before they tar them, and it is often too emotionally draining and time
consuming a task to take on -- especially when one wishes to devote that
energy and time to concrete analysis and activism which is relevant to
the women being discussed. It is to Jennifer's credit (and my own
shame) that unlike folks like me who throw up our hands and vote with
our feet via silence and non-participation, she has taken the commitment
to continued conversation and exchange seriously enough to stay in here
and keep at.
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