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American Occidentalism and the agential Muslim woman

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2012

KATHERINE ALLISON
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Abstract

Through the War on Terror the United States developed a seemingly enlightened understanding of Muslim women. In contrast to Orientalised representations of Muslim women's passivity and victimisation within brutal Islamic cultures these emerging representations posit Muslim women in terms of their modernity and liberation. The emergence of this new Muslim woman illuminates an attempt to secure an Occidental self through the negotiation of conflicting impulses towards Islam. Islam is recognised as the repository from which the US enemy other emerges yet the WoT also reflects a particular desire for a cosmopolitan inclusivity. The presence of the Muslim woman acts to assuage these tensions. Her oppression confirms the barbarity of the enemy yet the combination of her intrinsic agency and religiosity posits her as an acceptable Islamic other whose presence confirms the pluralistic tolerance of the US and the universal validity of its project.

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Review of International Studies , Volume 39 , Issue 3 , July 2013, pp. 665 - 684
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2012 

After America was attacked, it was as if our entire country looked into the mirror and saw our better selves.Footnote 1

Introduction

The US-led War on Terror (WoT) has served to shape the unfolding debates concerning the representation of Muslim women. What has evolved through US government discourse is a representation of Muslim women as being invested in the values of modernity, diversity, and liberation yet who also remain religiously observant and culturally located. The emergence of what we might term an ‘agential Muslim woman’ appears to run counter to much existing feminist scholarship exploring how Muslim women are made present within the WoT. From the earliest 9/11 moment, as the international gaze fixed upon Afghanistan, critical feminist scholars have argued that the condition of Afghan women under the oppressive rule of the Taliban regime came to serve as a ready moral justification for military action.Footnote 2 Edward Said's Orientalism Footnote 3 is central to the recognition of an Afghan woman, brought into subjectivity through repetitious Orientalised tropes, as the passive victims of an inherently misogynist and static Islamic culture. The political effect of such understandings are to legitimate calls to ‘save’ Afghan women in ways that reinforce the imperial powers of the US and deny voice and agency to those made subject to a supposed rescue.Footnote 4 Yet attention to the discursive shaping of the WoT reveals a further positioning of an Afghan womanhood made explicable in terms of religiosity. Rather than being cast solely as a victim she is imbued with a very apparent form of agency. Her history is cast as one of longstanding participation in Afghan society that was only diverted from its path of modernisation by the incursion of the Taliban. Her suffering was marked by bravery, independence, and resilient defiance.

The continuing development of a Muslim woman imbued with agency and modernity seems indicative of not only a disruption to essentialised representations of gender and Islam but also the ways that these representations are intrinsic to the construction of relations between the US and Islam in the WoT and beyond. In appointing itself as the rescuer of Afghan women, the US has been understood by feminist critics as reflecting an Orientalised dichotomy of America/Islam self/other in a true ‘clash of civilisations’ manner.Footnote 5 Tropes of Afghan women become implicated in ‘a range of binaries situating the “West” in opposition to the “East” – for example, good vs. evil, civilised vs. barbaric, rational vs. irrational, progressive vs. backward’.Footnote 6 The agential Muslim woman, however, appears to subvert this polarisation of Occident and Orient by embodying both a recognisably Islamic practice and Western standards of emancipated modernity.

Conflicting impulses are not only evident in the representation of Muslim women. They correspond with wider US ambivalences to the Middle East and to Islam and its constitutive role in the WoT. Howell and Shryock have examined how ‘the first months after the 9/11 attacks were a time of hate crimes and intimidation, but a simultaneous desire to “understand” and “protect” Arabs and Muslims [also] flourished in America’.Footnote 7 Simon Tate has explored an ongoing and problematic tendency to essentialise the West in ways that prevent critical attention to the internal differentiations and developing nature in the WoT.Footnote 8 In particular he notes a qualitative shift in the effort of Western leaders to denounce and distance themselves from clash of civilisations rhetoric.Footnote 9 Sayres Rudy expands this even further maintaining that the WoT actually depends upon the denunciation of racism and the adoption of a ‘progressive view of Islamism’.Footnote 10 As such he even argues that, ‘the WoT has embraced the anti-essentialist heart of Orientalism, rendering Saidian anti-imperial ideology-criticism otiose. Said won.’Footnote 11

How may this seemingly ‘progressive’ representation of Muslim women be accounted for? How do apparently conflictual discourses positing Islam in terms of Oriental barbarity and an enlightened progressivism coexist? If seemingly co-opted can an anti-Orientalist critique continue to offer methodological and empirical insight? What is the significance of this new trope for those made subject to it and how may its recognition contribute to a critical feminist response? The existence of apparently conflicting orientations towards Islam directs us towards the complexities in the evolving representation of Muslim women and the relation of the US to Islam and to its WoT enemies. Such concerns foreground tensions as to how we might expose the exercise of power through an entrenched discourse of self and other but also allow for variation and multiplicity and avoid erasing the participation of the oriental subject in the shaping of the discourse.

In this article I propose to negotiate these contested dynamics made visible in the emergence of an agential Muslim woman by tilting the analytical focus towards an account of US Occidentalism. That is, how, through representational practices of othering, the US hopes to realise and secure a sovereign self.

My specific focus begins with the WoT and its status an issue of foreign policy. I therefore concentrate upon the Bush administration as the primary locus of the WoT and the manner in which Muslim women came to be represented by its members. The speeches of the key administration figures and the varied information output of the State Department and its associated bodies are utilised as primary sources of empirical data. My understanding of foreign policy is one that reflects the tenets of Orientalism/Occidentalism and recognises that elite foreign policy practices are explicable in relation to the creation of state identity.Footnote 12 In drawing this out, the latter part of the my empirical analysis focuses particularly upon the public diplomacy wing of the State Department, the Bureau of International Information Programs, and its America.gov project that contains many resources centred upon on Muslim women.Footnote 13 America.gov provides a direct means to consider how the domestic is implicated in the international. America.gov was directed overseas, disseminating information about foreign policy and American life and culture. Thus it attempts to shape the PR image of the US in terms of foreign policy by constructing a positive image of the US domestically. The WoT represents a specific historical moment associated primarily with the Bush administration, yet, despite the change in administration and the fading of WoT parlance, the fundamental tensions concerning the nature of the West remain current. Moreover, in terms of Muslim women there is continuity in thought between the two administrations with both concerned with positive representations. Therefore I also use America.gov materials produced under the Obama administration.

What I want to draw out is an understanding of how this quest functions via the inclusion of an other in the form of the agential Muslim woman. Including her as other serves as a mirroring and a completion of a US self. The WoT is a site where confirmation of the ideals of pluralistic tolerance and cosmopolitan universalism is sought, with these being made the markers of difference between the US self and the enemy other. The quest for self through the inclusion of an other thus enables us to engage with the paradoxical invocation of Islam. Islam represents an American enemy other, being the crucible from which the enemy emerges; yet the subversion of the Islam/US binary offers the possibilities of realising a cosmopolitan self. Thus the enemy is also understood to represent a perversion of Islam and a more authentic and progressive practice may be found. The agential Muslim woman thus becomes invested in the desire to posit this authentic practice of Islam recognised as compatible with the US and in opposition to the debased, extremist religiosity of the enemy. Thus, in creating an idealised understanding of an agential Muslim woman, the US ‘represents itself as a place of tolerance where “true” Islam can thrive’.Footnote 14 This becomes the centre of a foreign policy whose logic centres on the assumption that if Muslim women are free and accepted within the US then Muslims can have no reason to hate or feel threatened by the US. The America.gov PR project aimed at the Muslim world is realised.

This is not, however, the acceptance of unmitigated alterity. Through the inclusion of the Islamic other the US claims a universal cosmopolitan validity for its cause but, as a decidedly American account of universality, it ultimately caters to the promotion of US interests. The inclusion of the agential Muslim woman other illuminates and assuages these conflicts. Her religiosity and her femininity locate her as an ultimate point of difference, her persecution confirms the barbarity of the Islamic enemy. Yet the particular confluence of gender and religion enables an enlightened Islamic practice and holds the possibilities for an Islam amenable to US ideals. The other and her otherness are thus deployed in ways conducive to the self. Her successful absorption serves to confirm the cosmopolitan nature of the US and obscures the specificity of its claims to universality.

In developing this argument I first return to Orientalism to consider the tensions that accrue when we try to negotiate Orientalism as a discourse embodying unity, stability, and dominance but also one of multiplicity and flow and a responsiveness or even need for the other. I maintain that an orientation towards Occidentalism can allow specific analytical attention to these underlying concerns in recognising the positing of the agential Muslim woman as an active process of shaping subjectivity involving aspects of variation and ambiguity and degrees of reciprocity between the US and Muslim women.

A feminist perspective furthers this and facilitates the development of a critical purchase as to how Muslim women are understood within, and made enabling of, US policies. I then provide a genealogical sketch of the emergence of the agential Muslim woman examining how discourses of victimhood and agency are mutually constituted via two key logics. The first posits the normality of Muslim women's agency. The speeches of members of the Bush administration are analysed to show how they try to convey that the abuse of Afghan women gains meaning because it is understood as aberrant to the Afghan norm; it is an outside imposition by the Taliban/Al-Qaeda. This is closely intertwined with the second logic that develops through a deliberate language of diversity and anti-essentialism to posit ‘stereotyping’ and ‘misinformation’ as the barriers preventing us from seeing the true reality of liberated Muslim women. The creation of an agential woman thus melds the assertion of the enemy's brutality with its denouncement through the claiming of a ‘true’ Islamic practice embodied by Muslim women. I then consider these logics through a case study of the veil. A United States Agency for International Development (USAID) exhibition on Afghan women and America.gov interviews with American Muslim women enables us to explore an evolving and multifaceted account of the veil as symbolic of oppression, resistance, and contemporary cultural plurality. I then explore how agential Muslim women are sought in order to confirm the certainty of the US self. They are present as the embodiment of both difference and similarity that, through a reassuring fusion of gender and religiosity, seeks to solidify a US that domestically confirms liberal pluralism and internationally projects an American/universal cosmopolitanism. The article concludes with a critical evaluation of the political effects of the development of an agential Muslim woman. I outline its disciplinary impetus but also how the Occidentalist approach may facilitate opportunities for rethinking the operation of agency and the encounter between the US and Muslim women as one involving aspects of mutual identity formation.

Ambivalent Orientalism

Questions and contestations as to how ambiguity and instability may be encompassed within Orientalist discourses are a lingering legacy of Orientalism.Footnote 15 Said sought to account for multiplicity within Orientalism by distinguishing it as operative within two forms. Latent Orientalism remains unchanging and unified but in its manifest form it is able to reflect variation and historical change.Footnote 16 Homi Bhabha, however, is critical of this typology, maintaining that although it articulates the possibility of an alterity and ambivalence that may ‘threaten to split the very object of Orientalist discourse as a knowledge’, Said is ultimately reluctant to follow this through. Instead, the two forms are ultimately unified through the deliberate intentionality of the West to project its power over the Middle East.Footnote 17 Thus anomalies are marginalised and Orientalist discourse remains recognisable for its ‘sheer knitted together strength’Footnote 18 as ‘a monolithic, undifferentiated and uncontested Western imposition’.Footnote 19 Such a position is problematic for two clear reasons. First, for the possibility that such an Orientalist critique may transpose the frameworks of essentialisationFootnote 20 to understandings of the US. Second, that this replication may not only lead to impoverished understanding of the US, but that it may also have the contradictory effect of erasing the resistance of those under its purview by presenting a limited account of the operation of power as the undisputed dominance over the other.

There are no simple means to negotiate the dilemmas of recognising both the cohesive power of discourse and its fractures and ambivalences. In order to illuminate the agential Muslim woman, I propose to place the very idea of US intentionality under scrutiny. I want to engage with the US project to reveal strategies of domination but also the need for investment in the agential Muslim woman as a resolution to underlying tensions and fragilities within it. I want to keep the US subject to a sharp-eyed critique that seeks to ask where we might find the most productive openings to register dissent but also to keep these politics at the fore in ways that engage with their ambiguities and avoid easy summations.

An Occidental approach

Occidentalism refers to the creation of an essentialised West. Within the literature this has taken two specific forms. In the first, Occidentalism broadly functions as Orientalism in reverse. It explores the ways that Eastern societies have created and utilised stereotypical representations of the West.Footnote 21 The second addresses how the West creates and reifies its own essential identity. It is this latter form that that is of interest to me in this article. Here practices of Orientalism and the construction of the West are fused. Occidentalism relates to Orientalism as a ‘condition of its possibility’; through constructing the other, construction of the self is enabled.Footnote 22

Overt attention to Occidentalism is necessary, as Alastair Bonnett maintains, due to an ongoing lacuna in the social sciences and humanities concerning the study of the West. For ‘although critical social theory in Europe and North America has challenged the West in many ways it has been largely uninterested in how the West is imagined, either in the West or around the world’.Footnote 23 In the place of developed analysis we tend to encounter ‘general and generalising mediations that take its form and nature as pre-given and beyond dispute’.Footnote 24 This failure to attend to the construction of the West with precision may reflect a problem of where in the unfolding of Orientalist practices we locate our critical scrutiny. To James Carrier we have ‘focused most closely on Orientalism in the textual description of alien societies, which is to say, on the product of Orientalism, rather than on the way that these descriptions are generated, the process of Orientalism, the social, political, and intellectual factors that lead to Orientalist constructions of alien societies’.Footnote 25 In the context of the US, and its prosecution of the WoT, this absence of specific engagement with the varying ways that an American self-identity is shaped as a process is apparent. US subjectivity is largely either preformed or reconfirmed in relation to the other. To paraphrase Fernando Coronil, the problem of the encounter with the other is one for the US, not of the US or for the other.Footnote 26 A postcolonial sensibility alerts us to consider how the ‘cultures and psyches of the colonizer [are] not already defined, and only waiting, as it were, to be imposed, fully formed, on the hapless victims of the colonial project’.Footnote 27 It directs us towards an awareness of how US identity is shaped through the investment in the other, a process that also involves a recognition of the mutually constituted roles enacted by the dominant power and the subjects of its interventions.Footnote 28

Consideration of the role of the other in the mutual production of knowledge, and of US Occidentalism as a process that reflects not only dominance but uncertainty, not only provides for an expanded insight; it also extends the scope for political engagement. We can understand the US as a production of particular institutions and historical moments. Pathways to ‘provincialising’Footnote 29 the US, to questioning the narratives it instantiates as only one contested thread of history are opened up.

Feminism and questioning representation

Such strategies may be furthered and given greater specificity by connecting the analysis with feminism. Feminist scholars have, as we have already noted, provided an initial purchase into how the US sustains a self image through the Orientalising of a Muslim woman other. Such insights reflect the wider scholarship of feminists concerned with how gender and race are entwined with projects of nationalism and how certain understandings of women subsequently come to shape the boundaries of national identity and desired citizenship.Footnote 30 Drawing in these perspectives and further expanding their focus may help us negotiate both the process and the product of US Occidentalism. The possibility of feminisms concerned with the questioning of gendered subjectivities enables both sensitivity to wider issues of identity and the means of its production, and the critical means to scrutinise them. They may enrich a study of Occidentalism by making evident the conditioning factors of gender, religion, and race and the confluences that bind them.Footnote 31 Furthermore, as these variants of feminism also occupy an overtly normative stance, they sensitise us towards the necessity of drawing US Occidentalism and its invocation of Muslim women into a realm of critique.Footnote 32

In particular, a normative feminist stance encourages engagement with the central, political, and ethical issues that flow from the practices of representation implicit to Orientalism/Occidentalism. Feminist scholarship has offered a depth of scrutiny to Western depictions of non-Western women, recognising that the act of representatation reflects the operation of power in the production of knowledge, with the ultimate effect typically being the silencing of those made subject to it.Footnote 33 An awareness of the problematic nature of attributing subjectivity has methodological implications that directly impact upon the conduct of research and the shaping of this article.

Acceptance that representation is explicable only in relation to power poses difficulties for how we might challenge US discourse and the policies that it enables. Any attempts to create a ‘true’ account of Muslim women, as a counter to US depictions, cannot negate the power/knowledge nexus and may act to inscribe a further discursive violence. My response is therefore to provoke critical attention to the political contexts of how Muslim women are construed and the ways that this may prove enabling of the continuation of the WoT. The act of making representational claims may be always inescapable but scrutiny of the plays of power and interests may expose a means by which those made subject to them can begin to contest them. In the final section of the article I address this further by discussing the possibilities for a critical response to US policies.

The agential Muslim woman

The status of Muslim women remains politically polarising within Western societies. Many continue to regard Islam itself as intrinsically hostile to women, a stance encapsulated and perhaps most infamously espoused by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who conceptualises Muslim women as continuously victimised by harmful religious norms. Hirsi Ali's response requires the complete rejection of Islam.Footnote 34 Other voices such as Irshad Manji remain committed to Islam but argue that Muslims must undertake a radical reform of their beliefs in order to advance a more pluralistic, less dogmatic religiosity more amenable to women's rights.Footnote 35 Moreover, depictions of Muslim women as victims increasingly jostle alongside more problematic media interest in Muslim women's involvement in violent acts of terrorism, most particularly as suicide bombers.Footnote 36

US governmental discourses cohere with Manji and Hirsi Ali in that they similarly position Muslim women primarily through their religiosity. ‘Islam’ is therefore recognisable as a reality unproblematised by interpretation and political context. However, the specific drive of US governmental discourse differs through its coalescence around overtly positive accounts of Muslim women's agency. Rosa Vasilaki enables us to locate this within a wider change in the representation of Muslim women that moves ‘from the discursive framework of submission, or victimisation, to one of resistance, or empowerment’.Footnote 37 Vasilaki locates this shift within a complex refashioning of agency as its traditionally secular origins, within grand narratives of emancipation, and reliance upon a universalised subject come under a postmodern and postcolonial critique. The freeing of agency from its traditional locations and possibilities permits a renewed political engagement by Muslim women and feminists in challenging the assumed confluence between religious adherence and the denial of agency.Footnote 38

In the following sections I contribute to the analysis of this broader representational shift by relating it to the specific context of the US and the WoT. In doing so I explore how a discourse initially concerned with Afghan women extends to encompass Iraqi women and crosses the domestic/international to give meaning to a US self. Here familiar tropes of Orientalised victimhood, and emergent ones of empowerment, are both present within the agential Muslim women. One does not replace the other in a linear fashion. Rather, they are mutually sustaining in a multi-faceted engagement that confirms the barbarity of the enemy other but also establishes an inherent compatibility between Islam and women's emancipation.

Victims and heroes

That the military intervention in Afghanistan on behalf of Afghan women required the uncontested acceptance of their suffering under the barbarity of the Taliban regime has been firmly established by critical feminist scholarship.Footnote 39 And so, with predictable regularity, the speeches made by members of the administration are foregrounded by descriptions of the deplorable abuses of Afghan women. Laura Bush's radio address in 2001 was the first time a First Lady had delivered the President's weekly address. She used it to inform us of a regime where ‘children aren't allowed to fly kites; their mothers face beatings for laughing out loud’, and where ‘women cannot work outside the home, or even leave their homes by themselves’.Footnote 40 Furthermore the conceptual prism through which we are to understand this shocking abuse is made clear as Bush outlines how ‘the severe repression and brutality against women in Afghanistan is not a matter of legitimate religious practice. Muslims around the world have condemned the brutal degradation of women and children by the Taliban regime.’Footnote 41 Thus, despite attempts to isolate and condemn the illegitimate religiosity of the Taliban/terrorist, Islam ultimately remains as the pre-eminent explanatory variable to understand Afghan women and the oppression they are subjected to and an unproblematised discursive slide between ‘Afghan’ (women) and ‘Muslim’ is enabled.

Yet, a classic Orientalist scope of Afghan/Muslim women as powerless victims does not entirely capture the Bush administration's project. Although a victim status is assumed, it is also transformed through the evocation of heroic endurance and resistance under the years of tyranny. The words of the then Secretary of State Colin Powell made at the beginning of the invasion of Afghanistan encapsulate this dual impulse when he states that, ‘during these years of great suffering, the women of Afghanistan have been the backbone of the Afghan society. It is in large measure a thanks to their endurance, their ingenuity, their courage that their country has survived.’Footnote 42 Applying a marker of ‘agency’ to ‘victim’ can begin to encompass both elements of what Powell is looking to express here, as the administration seeks to assure us that Afghan women are undoubtedly the victims of a cruel regime whom we must defeat, but Afghan women's response is not one of passivity. Rather, it is one premised upon an active struggle against the Taliban and an unceasing commitment to maintaining the true fabric of Afghan life and values.

This allusion to Afghan women as the custodians of Afghanistan throughout the era of tyrannical rule also requires an understanding of the agential victim that goes beyond courageous resistance. In order to further sustain this account of women's struggle against the Taliban, a very particular construction of Afghan history, its cultural and religious contexts and most especially the role of women within it is duly constructed. Afghan women may have suffered the ruthless denial of their rights under the Taliban, but this is not to be understood as the intrinsic condition of Afghan society. In the place of this misconception we are instead to understand the Taliban moment as essentially aberrant within Afghan history. Prior to their unwanted and apparently unforeseen incursion, Afghanistan was a society where women were fully active within all aspects of the public sphere. Laura Bush outlined a society where women had the vote as early as the 1920sFootnote 43 and President Bush was quick to tell us that, ‘You know, life in Afghanistan wasn't always this way’, as he presents an image of the pre-Taliban Afghan woman conveyed through the statistical ‘proof’ that ‘seventy percent of the nation's teachers were women. Half of the government workers in Afghanistan were women, and 40 percent of the doctors in the capital of Kabul were women’, but then ‘the Taliban destroyed that progress’.Footnote 44 Whatever the veracity of these statisticsFootnote 45 the effect is to inscribe Afghan women within a linear history of unfolding progress towards liberation. Afghan women may be made intelligible via religion but they are positioned in a way in which the period of Taliban rule becomes recognisable as one where women were unnaturally excised from history, while the operations of the WoT form a corrective in the reclamation of normality. Thus Powell goes on to tell us that, ‘the recovery of Afghanistan must entail the restoration of the rights of Afghan women’. This is assured because they are ‘eager and ready to resume their active participation in the life of the country’.Footnote 46

Stereotypes and misconceptions

This desire to locate and sustain a truth about Afghan women has subsequently evolved through a wider discourse concerning Muslim women. It appears to reject the tired tropes of Orientalist representation and instead pursues a progressive stance of anti-essentialism. Exploring its tenets makes apparent the relationships between Islam as a presence within American visions of the international and the domestic realms. America.gov has created a large output of web-based materials, including a youtube channel, web chats, a flickr site, magazine articles, and workshops. In doing so it has introduced us to the diverse nature of contemporary Muslim women, be they members of the State Department, homemakers, artists, students, scientists, fashion designers, entrepreneurs, or even the first Muslim woman in space. They are women of achievement who inspire and the mood is relentlessly upbeat. The framing of Islam as a driving force of women's agency is increasingly central; we encounter Muslim womanhood as diverse, modern and liberated but remaining focused upon traditional values of family, community, and a deep sense of religious commitment.

This diversity is deployed in a way that directly seeks to challenge what are perceived as erroneous stereotypes. Tayyibah Taylor is the founder and editor of AZIZAH, a glossy magazine ‘by and for Muslim women’ (Department of State, 2007).Footnote 47 Within the magazine positive affirmations abound confirming the presence of contemporary Muslim woman: ‘Informed, Inspired, Illustrious: The AZIZAH Woman: Catch the Spirit’, and ‘Discerning and Assertive, the AZIZAH woman knows her potential and strives to fulfil it’.Footnote 48 During a web chat hosted by the State Department Taylor voices her concern with the misperceptions of Muslim womanhood and the mission of AZIZAH to correct them:

Concerning many problems of Muslim women in the US, I think that really the biggest challenge is dealing with the misconception. People's misconception of who she is. Muslims and Muslim women and Islam, it is usually reported on in the US through the lens of Middle East politics and so, usually the Muslim women seen in the media is an only Arab woman, (sic) often times a vicim of either war or a victim of Muslim men or a victim of religion. And so having a magazine that depicts her positively, and really gives her story from her perspective, I think it helps to undo those negative the stereotypes and those misconceptions so this is something that she's dealing with constantly, trying to educate people who she is (sic) and what she stands for’ (Department of State, 2007).Footnote 49

A subjectivity is shaped once again around the Muslim woman as a victim, but this time she is only a victim of our failures to recognise her true nature through the faulty prism of a skewed view of Islam. Taylor illuminates the difficulties in the search for identity and, perhaps indirectly, the ultimate impossibility of its realisation, but the processes of searching constructs a new account of Muslim women's agency shaped in overt opposition to what is understood as negative stereotypes and misconceptions.

Unveiling the essential Muslim woman

These concerns and strategies regarding how we are to understand Muslim women, both within the United States and beyond its borders, can be brought together most clearly within the developing discourse concerning Muslim women and the wearing of the veil. Escaping a discussion of veiling seems to be impossible as debates around Muslim women's dress seem omnipresent and channel us quickly to wider questions of the status of Muslim women and contentious political issues of integration and secularism within multicultural societies.Footnote 50 Veiling has become the subject of a growing academic literatureFootnote 51 and may best be approached as the ultimate empty signifier for the ‘Muslim woman’, its meaning being subject to variation, contest, and context.

Focusing upon representations of Afghan women, critical scholars have explored the near fetishised politics of the infamous blue burqa that renders Afghan women as oppressed victims. Here the veil functions as a convenient catch-all for the brutalities of the Taliban regime and enables the consolidation of a strict Occident/Orient binary. Yet this does not exhaust the political possibilities as to how the veil functions as a means of representing Muslim women.Footnote 52 Understanding the complex practices of othering that constitute US Occidentalism brings to view the double effect of the veil concerning how it signifies both the suppression of Afghan women but also a certainty as to their inherent, resistant agency.

US discourses gain meaning by construing veiling as brutal acts of imposition but, crucially, they are also to be understood as alien acts of imposition that are not intrinsic to Afghan society or its cultural norms. Rather, the default condition of Afghan women is one of progress along a familiar pathway of emancipation. Thus veiling is construed within a narrative of what lies ‘under’, ‘beneath’, or ‘behind’ the burqa, as recounted within countless media stories. The burqa becomes manifest as a physical obscuring of the truth about Afghan women. The act of unveiling is to reveal this essence of active resistance affirming that despite the horrors of persecution Afghan women remain committed to a project of rights. Motifs of oppression and victimisation are realised only in conjunction with a reinstated movement towards progress. This is to facilitate a restoration to normality, not a conversion. A USAID exhibition on the women of Afghanistan following the downfall of the Taliban is illustrative. The introductory commentary states:

To many in the West, the fall of the Taliban meant that the people of Afghanistan could once again enjoy their freedom … The most popular image was that of women cautiously lifting the veils of the once mandatory burqa to see for themselves the promise of a new Afghanistan. Although seen by the Western world as an icon of Taliban oppression, the burqa remains a common sight in Afghanistan, especially in rural areas. Yet it is now a personal choice, not a mandate. And although some women continue to wear the burqa, all women across the country are being given the opportunity to step out of the shadows to play vibrant and significant roles in the rebuilding of their beloved country … When USAID returned to Afghanistan in January 2002, its mission was clear: to rebuild what had been lost, restore what had been damaged, and put the country on the path to a peaceful and prosperous future.Footnote 53

The exhibition thus begins by predictably deploying the burqa in order to establish the mood of the Taliban interlude, but this is something that is briskly set aside in favour of business-as-back-to-usual. Following the overthrow of the Taliban, the exhibition is able to move on to show us what it is far more interested in, that is, the depiction of women re-establishing themselves in Afghan national life within the spheres of education, the home, work, and roles of leadership. The potential horror of the burqa is then neutralised into a personal choice or a benign relic of a traditional rural life.

Subsequently, US governmental responses to veiling have continued to develop within the State Department and are particularly evident within the America.gov project. Here the veil is enmeshed within discourses of anti-essentialism, personal choice, and religious freedom that meld into an account of Muslim womanhood that encompasses both devout religious observance and modern emancipation. Thus one article covers the production of the Hijabi Monologues, a play that borrows the format of Eve Ensler's famous Vagina Monologues, to engage with the diverse nature of Muslim women in order to ‘challenge stereotypes’Footnote 54 while another article discusses an art exhibition, The Seen and the Hidden: [Dis]covering the Veil, where various understandings of the veil and its role in faith and culture and the politics that accrue around it are explored.Footnote 55 Developing a reconciliation of veiling and agency is made most overtly in an interview with a Muslim woman and a member of the State Department, Seema Matin. Matin explains the meaning in her decision to wear the veil and the experiences that have flowed from it.Footnote 56 A subtitle within the interview – ‘Contemporary Muslims choosing to wear the hijab’ – may be rather blunt in statement of its objectives, but in the attempt to secure its premise the article is able to engage with current debates surrounding the veil and subsequently offer a developed account of the veil and its relationship to agency. Here, wearing the veil is made a signifier both of personal identity and sociological change. The article depicts how veiling is to be read as a practice that is now at ease with the politics of American modernity; there is no friction between women wearing a veil and working in a high profile position for the US government. Matin herself describes for us her own ‘journey’ towards adopting the veil in the mid-1990s despite the initial objections of her parents, elite first generation Pakistani immigrants, for whom the wearing the veil was an alien symbol of backwardness. Outlining her concerns that the veil is widely understood as a symbol of oppression she directly counters this by assuring us that her decision ‘was probably one of the best, most liberating decisions of my life’. Wearing the veil is recounted as a deeply held religious commitment and as a constant reminder of Islamic principles that enable Matin to be ‘a better person’ and as a stipulation for modest dress. But Matin also makes it clear that there is no dogmatic position on the issue within Muslim society; rather ‘there's a full spectrum of opinion’, with some women choosing to cover their heads, whilst others choose not to.

Including the other and the sovereign self

The title of the interview with Matin does not seek subtlety in its declaration that ‘Acceptance of Religious Garb in US Shows, Diversity, Tolerance’. Such a clear statement quickly alerts us to how Muslim women are brought into the complicated politics that attempt to fuse and sustain US national identity. What this pivots upon is the wish to absorb the other, to encompass its difference in order to attain, as Cynthia Weber outlines, a completed self ‘freed from the trap of self-referential morality’.Footnote 57 Thus, in addition to letting Matin relate her personal story of the veil, the article seeks to demonstrate how this is also realised as a particularly American story. Here Muslim women wearing the veil is to be recognised as a completely normal practice, as ‘diversity’ and ‘tolerance’ are already central to what it means to be an American. A distinction is even posited between the easy-going acceptance in the US, as the nation of immigrants and religious freedoms safeguarded by the Constitution where ‘wearing the hijab is unlikely to elicit comments’, and the seemingly unenlightened European response of national anxiety and recourse to legislation and varying degrees of prohibition.Footnote 58

Matin's story is therefore a familiar one as a reinscription of the well-known American story of nation-building as a quest to realise the ‘E Pluribus Unum’ ideal.Footnote 59 This fusion of identity further distinguishes this stance from that of Hirsi Ali. While Hirsi Ali locates and maintains a strict US/Islam binary, Sayres Rudy draws out a distinction between the possibility of a European identity forged through an Orientalism, centred upon ‘externalizing a radical other across a hard border’, and the American mission that seeks a ‘plural ethos by internalizing familiar others across a soft boundary’.Footnote 60 An idealised citizenship of bounded, recognisable communities successfully hyphenated with ‘American’ is once again sought and apparently realised through the presence of Muslim women typified in a State Department statement that ‘many young Muslim women in America take pride in their choice to cover their hair and their freedom to express such a choice in this country’.Footnote 61

The search for an Occidental certainty through the absorption of the other is furthered via its externalisation into the WoT where domestic American ideals of liberal pluralism are transposed from the domestic to the international. Specifically, what we see in the prosecution of the WoT is the attempt to evoke a particular stance of cosmopolitanism.Footnote 62 Thus an ethos of tolerance and diversity is posited to mark the US from its enemy threat.Footnote 63 As President Bush outlines, ‘We face enemies that hate not our policies, but our existence; the tolerance of openness and creative culture that defines us.’Footnote 64 In contrast, the failure to embrace cosmopolitan values positions the enemy as ‘a movement defined by their hatreds’ of ‘progress, and freedom, and choice, and culture, and music, and laughter, and women, and Christians, and Jews, and all Muslims who reject their distorted doctrines’.Footnote 65 Moreover, innumerable declarations claim these values, and the actions that flow from them, to hold a universal validity and enable a universal good:

When it comes to the common rights and needs of men and women, there is no clash of civilizations. The requirements of freedom apply fully to Africa and Latin America and the entire Islamic world. The peoples of the Islamic nations want and deserve the same freedoms and opportunities as people in every nation.Footnote 66

The tenability of these claims depends upon the obscuring of their investment in the promotion of American interests through an American account of what universality is to encompass. There is an obvious paradoxical conflict hereFootnote 67 but the included other serves as a means by which American universality may be extrapolated to global applicability. Consider an excerpt from an op. ed. written by Paul Wolfowitz, a deputy secretary for defense in the Bush administration, about a visit to a US-funded women's centre in Iraq:

One young woman wearing a conservative Muslim head covering pressed me forcefully about what the United States was doing to support women's rights. In return, I asked if she saw any contradiction between her conservative dress and her advocacy of women's rights. With evident conviction, she said, ‘There is no inconsistency between my practice of my religion and human rights and rights for women.’Footnote 68

Reference to the young woman's ‘conservative Muslim head covering’ swiftly evokes the ultimate possibility of difference. Wolfowitz draws in our expectations of the extreme cultural otherness represented by the veiled Muslim woman. Given the widespread connotations of the veil as symbolic of oppression we might expect her to adhere to the passive trope of Islamic womanhood. Yet Wolfowitz seeks to challenge and subvert our expectations by demonstrating how forcefully she frames her demands. If this presumably religious woman, as the embodiment of religious/cultural Iraq, can be so enthusiastic and adamant about the possibilities of democracy and human rights, then we can be certain as to the innate correctness and universal validity of the US project. The veiled Muslim woman provides a complete motif for the idealised fusion of Islamic and (American) democratic values and women's rights.

However, tensions are inherent in the seeking of confirmation of the self in the difference of the other. What is subsequently sought is a Muslim woman carefully delineated to reaffirm the pluralistic, tolerant fabric of American life, yet also assimilated enough to keep it all quietly stitched together. Here I am reminded of how Slavoj Žižek captures this paradox when he states how ‘tolerant liberal multiculturalism wishes to experience the other deprived of its otherness’.Footnote 69 This dynamic becomes present in the agential Muslim woman through her subjectivity being created within two potentially radical points of otherness, that of Islam and that of the (feminist) woman. When fused together, however, these markers of alterity are effectively neutralised into an acceptable other/non-other. The discursive power of a formation of emancipated, enlightened and (possibly) feminist Occidental womanhood has been central to the establishment of an enemy marked by the barbarity and backwardness in its treatment of women. But through the agential Muslim woman this repository containing gendered ideals of civilisation and modernity may be extracted from the sole possession of the Occidental self and sutured to Islam. Thus a potential threat is transformed into a familiar ideal. In a specific form, the invocation of a certain form of feminist emancipation filters religious practices through a liberal understanding of self-expression and political citizenship. Thus to return to Seema Matin, her decision to wear the veil becomes explicable as one of individual choice, religion is personalised and privatised.

Yet it would be a mistake to understand the agential Muslim woman as solely a celebration of a quasi-feminist liberal individualism. Liberalism's status within US political discourse is ambivalent. Neoconservatives in particular fear the contemporary possibilities of liberalism becoming divorced from the robust values of civic participation and decaying into an unrestrained libertarianism. Within this schema feminism becomes associated with a corrosive identity politics of self-interest leading to relativism and the emptying of American bourgeois values. However, the religiosity of the agential Muslim woman serves as a marker of both a traditional femininity and a commitment to community that counters the dangers of the nihilistic feminist other. Muslim women are typically presented as being fully engaged in service to the Muslim and the wider American community. A session of Islamic Society of North America's annual convention, ‘Standing Strong: Women Creating Legacy Communities’ is highlighted and its participants understood as ‘Muslim-American women who combine faith with talent to improve their society’.Footnote 70 Other Muslim women are associated with an idealised heterosexual family embodying both traditional commitments and modern values. A State Department webchat introduces us to Kari Ansari, the editor in chief for America's Muslim Family magazine, who discusses her life ‘as a businessperson, mother and Muslim in America’.Footnote 71 Another publication entitled Muslim life in America focuses upon the Tagouri family. The Tagouris represent ‘a typical American family’. This typical family is an affluent one; the father is a pathologist and they are photographed within their large home in a ‘quiet upscale neighbourhood’. This family is also a young, modern American one, a modernity embodied by the mother Salwa Omeish, who ‘like many young, married American women … has kept her own last name’. Salwa is a devout Muslim who wears the hijab; yet she is educated and independent and currently is studying for a Masters degree in counselling. She is also a dedicated mother; ‘like countless women, she carefully balances her own desire to further her education with caring for her family’.Footnote 72

The agential Muslim woman appears to represent a familiarisation of the self, a reflection both idealised and domesticated. She reconciles the conflicts of a fractured US society being devout in her religious beliefs and practices but equally at home in the modern, liberal, and pluralist society that is the US. Stories that seek to unite opposing cultures abound on America.gov; we meet a successful Saudi scientist on a visit to the US to both learn how to market her inventions and to dispel false perceptions about Saudi women;Footnote 73 businesswomen from the United Arab Emirates travel to Kentucky and give talks on the ‘Facts Behind the Veil’;Footnote 74 two American girls of mixed Western and Pakistani heritage are designing fashionable Western clothes that also meet the modesty requirements of Muslim women.Footnote 75

Contesting the agential Muslim woman

Undoubtedly the set pieces of Orientalism have been refashioned. As Prakash observes, it is problematic to assume that Orientalism can remain as a ‘self-contained system of representations’. When put into use it has to ‘open itself to conflicts, change, and displacements generated by its operation in actual historical conditions’.Footnote 76 Here then, Orientalist tropes are invoked in order to be denied as a product of illegitimate and false stereotyping standing in the way of our ability to engage with Islam and to construe Muslim women as an embodiment of ‘authentic’ Islam through a framework of agency, modernity, and emancipation appears to embody progressive change and possibility. Yet how should we comprehend the political implications of this ‘progress’ for both Muslim women and the wider contexts of the WoT and US engagements with Islam? How can we develop existing feminist critiques? How does a framework that is attuned to the ‘process’ of Occidentalism and attentive to domination, variation, and ambivalence shape the possibilities for resistance?

The conclusions to be drawn do not provide any tidy responses to these questions. These representational shifts appear to deepen a stasis in the structures of power that maintain US control. Said's identification within Orientalism of a ‘flexible positional authority which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand’Footnote 77 seems confirmed. The issues surrounding the veil demonstrate how it can be invoked to signify the oppression of Muslim women or a benign expression of religious choice within a tolerant society. In both cases the legitimacy of the US in relation to an undesired other is apparently strengthened. However, a focus upon the processes of Occidentalism also assists us to connect with those tensions within Orientalism concerning the place and possibility for contest, resistance, and ‘the mutually constitutive role played by colonizer and colonized … in forming, in part, the identities of both the dominant power and the subalterns involved in the imperial and colonial projects of the “West”’.Footnote 78 Thus we may also consider how the alternative meanings of the veil have been actively fought for by women such as Seema Matin and Tayyibah Taylor. In concluding, therefore, I wish to consider the political effect of these discursive processes that signal a continuing assertion of US power but also the ways that they are enmeshed with ideals of the US self and the openings this may provide to further explore resistance to US projects and dialogical aspects of identity.

Through the agential Muslim Woman the WoT seeks to deny race, culture, and religion as its enabling factors. Thus the ‘progressive’ dimensions of the WoT gain support and legitimacy through an appeal to universalism. The veiled but agential Muslim woman, recognised by Wolfowitz, becomes the ultimate diffusion of the specific and local (other) into a common (American) humanity. However, this supposed denial has a paradoxical effect. It makes race culture and religion central to the meaning and conduct of the WoT through their evacuation from the sphere of political engagement. By representing Islam in wholly positive terms, a distancing from the sites of political contestation occurs. US discourses of Muslim women and veiling reflect important issues concerning the right to personal religious expression but they bypass wider questions of the problems of integration. In the absence of critical reflection, the demonisation and the celebration of Islam occurs along the same ideological axis. Understandings of Muslim women continue to flow from their interpellation as subjects of a particular religion, a process that Mahmood Mamdani captures as ‘culture talk’.Footnote 79 In operation culture talk ‘tends to think of individuals (from “traditional” cultures) in authentic and original terms, as if their identities are shaped entirely by the supposedly unchanging culture into which they are born’.Footnote 80 As subjects of culture Muslim women are homogenised into a manageable grouping. Access to issues historical context, varying interpretations of religious tradition, political struggle, and differences in socioeconomic situation that are the true requisites to any meaningful engagement with an understanding of Muslim women's lives are pushed further from the field of contestation.

The evocation of the agential Muslim woman has a further, disciplinary impetus. A single, acceptable form of religious observance and liberal citizenship is sought. Moreover, the collective evocation of Muslim women is problematic for its tendency to facilitate collective punishment.Footnote 81 If the embrace of Muslim women occurs without extensive critical dialogue then it may easily be reversed to facilitate collective sanction. The attempt to police the parameters of acceptable religious identity has far reaching and diverse repercussions for the political participation of Muslim women and their own attempts to negotiate complex subjectivities and political pressures. Under such circumstances, where do the possibilities to contest the agential Muslim woman and the political power plays that shape her lie? Some feminist critiques have argued that the legitimation of the WoT claimed through depictions of passive victims may be subverted via the counter positing of women's agency, and of ‘images of Afghan women marching militantly with fists in the air, carrying banners about freedom, democracy, and secular government. Those women wouldn't need saving as much as the burqa clad women seem to’.Footnote 82 Recognition of the appropriation of agency problematises this strategy such women would seem highly amenable to a US ideal. Moreover, reflecting upon the dynamics in the creation of the agential Muslim woman asks fundamental questions as to how we might theorise agency and the spaces in which its potential for resistance may be practiced. In particular it asks whether such a perspective further replicates depoliticised practices that, in lacking attention to how they may be embedded in the contested processes of the search for subjectivity, regard agency/passivity as a simple binary.Footnote 83 The shaping of the agential Muslim woman as a process intrinsic to the US search for an Occidental certainty, rather than as a purely instrumental cooption, questions whether agency and resistance can be external to this dynamic.

However, if we begin our critique from a perspective internal to the encounter between the US and Muslim women then we are brought to the centrality of understanding some of its complexities. Moreover, a sensitivity to the dialogical moments that shape this discourse may have further possibilities for developing the political opportunities to contest it. Michaela Ferguson outlines how the US intervention in Afghanistan must be recognised in part as a success for feminism's ability to shape the rhetoric of US security to the extent that women's rights may become a legitimate concern of foreign policy.Footnote 84 Using the same logic, I would argue that the adoption of the agential Muslim woman reflects the efforts of Muslim women, feminists, and activists to recast the discursive terrain in which they are construed. An interface between Muslim women and the US is apparent and it becomes important to ask about the ways that Muslim women may be utilising and shaping the possibilities that are created. As an example, Zakia Salime has explored how various women's organisations in Morocco have utilised the openings of the WoT to advance their own calls for greater political rights. In doing so they ‘shift the gaze from the binary of oppression/resistance to look at the various ways in which women have created new spaces through a selective appropriation of the war's narrative’.Footnote 85 Furthering such work may help move towards the complexities of agency, to imbue it with greater political substance and push it beyond a framework of presence or absence, victimhood, or agency. This is not to deny the effect of crucial asymmetries of power. But recognising that the investment in Muslim women is something that reveals not only an exercise of imperial power but also the precarity of the US self and its constant need to be reinvented and restated is crucial.

Connecting with the instabilities and ambivalences of US Occidentalism and questioning intentionality enables possibilities to negotiate universalising claims and confirms that the Muslim woman cannot simply be understood as the passive recipient of a one directional flow of power. As such it helps to prevent us from yet again (albeit inadvertently) erasing the presence of Muslim women by focusing solely upon the imposition of a disciplinary agenda from a fixed, fully coherent subject.

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38 Ibid., pp. 3–4.

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46 Powell, Remarks, emphasis added.

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49 Department of State, Azizah Founder.

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77 Said, Orientalism, p. 7.

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