Women and Power in the Middle East, and: Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East: The Egyptian Women's Movement, and: Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World (review)

Abstract

The images of veiled Muslim women are everywhere. On the New York Times website one could peruse "Beyond the Veil," photographer Ruth Fremson's visual and verbal account of Afghan and Pakistani women (2001). Back in the United States, Lieutenant Colonel Martha McSally, highest-ranking female combat pilot in the U.S. Air Force, was challenging the legality of Central Command regulations that force service women (but not service men) to "adopt Islamic dress and adhere to Islamic customs" when they leave their base in Saudi Arabia (Philpott 2001). According to Thomas Neuberger, her co-counsel, "What's happening in Afghanistan, with women and burqas, helps point out the contradiction, of our freeing Afghan women from wearing these but, at the same time, making our own service women wear them" (Philpott 2001). In this current rush to see Muslim veiled women as women who are oppressed and passive victims who must be rescued by the white Western knight riding in on his tank, it was a welcome relief to read each of these books which so ably challenge this Orientalist construction of Middle Eastern women. Further, these books remind readers that constructs such as secularism, democracy, citizenship, and individual rights—all of which supposedly make Western women's lives better than those of their Middle Eastern counterparts—are in fact the cultural products of a particular Western historical experience. In the process, one is forced to question why these particular cultural concepts merit elevation to the status of universal standards to which all other peoples should aspire.