Culture War is not Liberation

I recently intended an informal gathering that featured a long lecture on Islamic politics. One of the points made during this talk really struck me as typical of the problems of Muslim political thought in the current era. The speaker said that Islam was currently the only force capable of resisting the onslaught of Western imperialism and that this was because, to paraphrase, Muslims don't drink liquor and their women don't follow western modes of dress. This, of course, was in a room with many women, at least half of whom were dressed in western clothes. 

I talked to the him later and asked him to clarify his remarks. He then gave me a more nuanced, if flawed, explanation of his words: Western Capitalism is constantly seeking out new markets for its products and the social restrictions peculiar to Islam hamper this expansion significantly. The glaring flaw of this statement is that the one country that, more than any other, imposes all of these social restrictions "with extreme prejudice" is also the most integrated into the global capitalist system. I am writing, of course, of Saudi Arabia. While subjecting women to the most restrictive controls of any country on the planet and imposing strict forms of censorship various cultural practices, they not only function as a leading petroleum exporter but as a major investor as well. They've been more than willing to invest massive amounts of money in the American economy to keep it going, fueling the very culture it is intent on resisting.

I take his point that alcohol and other drugs have been used by those in a position of power to keep their charges in state of thralldom. The use of alcohol to subjugate American Indians is well known. The FLN targeted bars and brothels during the Algerian independence struggle because these institutions were used by the French to demoralize and degrade the Algerian people, weakening their capacity to resist. The penetration of American urban ghettos by liquor stores is widely noted as contributing to the downward spiral of the disenfranchised. These attacks on what can be called the political economy of liquor are not sufficient to justify a total cultural prohibition of the practice. Alcohol consumption, for example, has often been used by progressive and leftist groups to build up comradery and group solidarity. The numerous drinking songs of the Wobblies and other left groups are an example of this (the International makes an excellent drinking song!). The absolute prohibition on consumption therefore can not be justified on political grounds alone. In the hands of an absolute monarchy like Saudi Arabia, the prohibition becomes another means to cultivate subservience to royal fiat. Abstaining from drink does not make you a chic revolutionary and indulging in it does not make you a dupe of imperialism.

The political economy of women's dress is a long and complex topic. It is easy to find justification for a number of views simply by observing the endless conga line of fashion trends that surge into prominence and then fade into oblivion. Coach bags? Those are totallyVeblenian objects of conspicuous consumption, meant to inspire an invidious comparison between those who possess them and those who do not. In previous times, a well-accessorized woman was a reflection of worth of the man who kept her, a form of vicarious consumption. Now these items have become direct status-symbols for the woman, reflecting the increasing integration of women into the mainstream of economic life. 

The endless round of seasonal variations that characterizes fashion in Pakistan serves many purposes: conspicuous consumption, assertion of identity in the midst of enforced religious anonymity, a creative outlet to compensate for narrowing prospects of professional empowerment. While on the subject of fashion, the speaker stated that it was odd that gay men worked as fashion designers for women. Acting on the theory that gay men are rejectors of women, he cited this as an example of the producers of mass culture having contempt for its consumers. This struck me as odd. It would seem to me that if one wanted a form of dress that did not attempt to objectify women as mere sexual objects, gay men (and heterosexual women, of course) would be just the ones to turn to. But I guess its hard to resist taking pot-shots against the gays.

The reasons which prompt individual women to take up the abaya and niqab are too numerous to mention. When this mode of dress becomes a uniform enforced by the power of the state, such as in Saudi, the effect is to reduce women to the status of what Agamben named Homo Sacer: sacred humans. Their rights are guaranteed in the abstract so that they may be violated in the concrete particulars. They are protected by way of abuse. In the words of the No Doubt song Just a Girl, 

"'Cause I'm just a girl, little 'ol me 
Don't let me out of your sight 
I'm just a girl, all pretty and petite 
So don't let me have any rights

'Cause I'm just a girl I'd rather not be 
'Cause they won't let me drive 
Late at night I'm just a girl, 
Guess I'm some kind of freak 
'Cause they all sit and stare
With their eyes"

This perfectly encapsulates the paternal voyeurism that plagues gender relations in most Muslim societies. The restrictions are really protections and any woman who in the least way foregos them is fair game for the male gaze and the male hand. I am reminded of Marx's passage in the Communist Manifesto: 
"Free trade: for the benefit of the working class. Protective duties: for the benefit of the working class. Prison Reform: for the benefit of the working class... the bourgeois is a bourgeois — for the benefit of the working class." 

One could easily rephrase this as:
"Burqas: for the protection of women. Driving restrictions: for the protection of women. Chaperones: for the protection of women. A patriarch is a patriarch, for the protection of women."


What the fight over women's dress in the context of Islam most thoroughly unveils (don't kill me!) is the extent to which women are excluded from this struggle. A political football can't be allowed to dictate its own trajectory. Militant secularists in Tunisia rip the veils from women and then rape them with soda bottles, Islamists (or old-fashioned misogynists) splash acid in the faces of unveiled women, representatives of Saudi state force girls back into their burning school because they don't have their scarfs, veiled women are denied a place in civil society in Turkey, Tunisia, and, increasingly, Western Europe. What is lacking, or, to be precise, actively silenced or ignored, is the voice of Muslim women themselves. The debate over appropriate dress needs to be one internal to the community of Muslim women, without the bearded men or the humanitarian warmongers intervening. Of the Muslim women who have been most active in shaping the debate over hijab, the four most influential have been Fatima Mernissi, Amina Wadud, Maryam Jameelah, Yvonne Ridley, and Asra Nomani. The first three wrote influential books touching on the issue and the last two have been prominent in activism and journalism. Of these four, only the latter has been prominent during the latest phase of the debate: the recent increase in islamophobia in the US and the attempts to criminalize the veil in Western Europe. Whatever side they take on this issue, Muslim women need to play a more prominent role in how it is decided. They should not remain mere objects of debate, but the principal participants.

Both the issue of alcohol and women's dress demonstrate the limits of a culture war as a response to empire. A culture war can easily provide the pretext for a community's incorporation into the global capitalist economy via the ideology of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is a ploy to support capitalism: it buys off the Muslim leadership, sells out the women, and paves the way for the more thorough capitalization of the Muslim world. We must think dialectically here. It is not a matter of islamophobes getting the government to start concentration camps. The professional islamophobes serve certain very specific goals: invoking the feared Other during a heated election, supporting US foreign policy vis-a-vis Israel. They will come and go as required. It is the ideology of multiculturalism that is the key to the long-term sustainability of capitalism. The dialectic of the closed, mono-cultural, (usually) mono-racial society proposed by the Islamophobes and their secular anti-immigrant allies pitted against the institutional advocates of liberal multi-culturalism will soon give way to a new synthesis: an ‘enlightened’ yet ‘principled’ tolerance that tames the Other, defangs it, and displays it for purposes of ideological reinforcement and entertainment. 

This dialectical process will repeated on a larger, global scale vis-a-vis the West and the Islamic world. The ultimate result will be ‘quaint’ survivals useful for justifying the existence of Western civilization as a way of life and, on the more liberal end, to meet the ideological requirement of tolerance of diversity. These survivals will be economically integrated, their resources, both physical and cultural, will be tapped, but they will be self-policing. Identity politics will give way to identity police. Saudi Arabia and Occupied Palestine are both illustrative examples. 

In the latter case, the West Bank plays the part of the respectable, secular Arab state. It clamps down on the Islamists, negotiates with Israel, and accepts money from the US in order to more effectively control its own people (an example of the latter being the funding of the Dahlan gangs’ attempted take over of Gaza). The Gaza Strip, under the rule of the Islamist Hamas party, acts as a crucible of Islamist political identity. When the pressure increases, the women feel it. Women, for example, can no longer smoke sheesha (hookah) in public. Lingerie ads are now banned, although perhaps this affects the men more than the women. Women are no longer free to have fabulous male hair-dressers. There is a dialectic at work here: the harder that one side asserts its secular/islamic identity, the greater the identity policing performed by the other side. In Gaza, women are slowly being squeezed back into the home while in the West Bank the space of political participation is being restricted to Fatah apparatchiks. The only solution for the vicious dialectic of multiculturalism is a new global project committed to universal emancipation. Partial solutions and parochial battles are no longer sufficient.