It's a bit sad, really... one woman goes partly naked on her
own Facebook page and the world goes nuts. Mainstream culture - both “east” and
“west” - seems not to know how to react when girl reveals she's naked under her
clothes. Newspapers have a field day - "look, it's news but with boobs!”
Facebook groups against FEMEN spring up, with photos of women holding up signs
that read "My hijab is my dignity" and "Nudity doesn't liberate
me". There have been accusations of cultural imperialism and racism.
But no one can shout 'imperialist' at the fact that it's
been a Tunisian woman - Amina Tyler - who has founded FEMEN's branch in Tunisia,
and that the timing of FEMEN's growth into North Africa and the Middle East is
pretty unsurprising. The Arab Spring has been deeply inspiring but the
movements that have come to the fore are now largely Islamist. What we see in
in some countries is similar to the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution: secular
forces are being repressed and women - as in Amina's case - are being watched
by violently right wing 'morality police'. Her family have been acting in accordance
with these principles and few institutions have greater power than the internal
morality policing of family structures in these situations.
In a video released today (http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/04/15/amina-tyler-topless-tunisian-protester-femen-beaten-kidnapped-drugged-family_n_3083803.html)
Amina reveals that she was kidnapped,
beaten, forced to see a doctor, sedated, and given a kind of exorcism by an
imam. When asked if the police did this, she says, chillingly: 'No, not the
police... my brothers, my cousins'.
This isn't 'culturally specific' oppression. The misuse of
psychiatric drugs to sedate women was rampant in the UK and the US and in the
50s and 60s. Death by exorcism has been the horrible ending of various women's
lives at the hands of Christian ministers, including the Pentecostal ministers
in San Francisco who beat a woman to death in 1995 (they were trying to drive
out her demons, apparently). FEMEN, who claim they will not stop fighting Islam
as long as the stoning of women forms part of its teachings, have not singled out
Islam as its main enemy and came to notoriety through its protests against the
Orthodox Church in Eastern Europe.
So let's look at these accusations of 'imperialism'. Many of
those on Facebook (mis)using the word 'imperialism' are, it seems,
Western-based Muslims who have grown up under liberal laws. They have no idea
what it's like to actually live in a country where you might be forcibly
silenced for your politics. In my opinion, you do have to be pretty privileged
to cry out the word 'imperialism' so often and with such wild abandon. What is
really and truly awful is not that some Muslim women feel upset, but how
playing the victim can so effectively erase the original victim herself, in
this case Amina. There where whole days of outrage and little concern for where
Amina was. It turns out she was being tortured by her family, her aunts
stripped her naked to force a 'virginity' test on her and she was made to
recite passages from the Koran against her will.
We need to be very wary of giving political credence to
those who cry wolf, screaming ‘imperialism’ to create a smoke screen every time
they don't want to be challenged. You really have to ask the question 'what are
you trying to hide?’ Accusations of racism are becoming a way of demolishing
the confidence to show or even feel solidarity with those across national and
cultural boundaries (boundaries I don't happen to believe in). It's becoming a
way of making people feel guilty about caring, of making women feel like they
can't say anything about human rights in another country. It's a strategy to
force silence on those who have something to fight for, like Amina.
I grew up in a Muslim family in London and I believe that
Islam is a religion a lot like its close relatives, Christianity and Judaism. A
lot of the culture I grew up with wasn't that Islamic, it was more rural Indian
than anything else. 'What the Koran says' was about as important as 'what will
other people say?' in my mother's eyes, and often it seemed that what the Koran
actually had to say was a bit less repressive than what Mrs Khan from Sevenoaks
thought ("My daughter wears high heels and goes to office but she can't
even make aloo ghobi" *tutting/ pursed lips all round*).
In the end, I got into other ideas, the way teenagers often
do, and decided I was a socialist more than anything - a description of myself
that still holds true. But I think there are times when some liberals and
lefties (not all of course!) bend over
backwards so hard to not be racist that they end up listening to the same sort
of people who'd send their daughters back to the village and confiscate their
passports if they declared themselves radical. It's at best a naive misjudgement,
and at worst cowardly and unprincipled. Are non-white women to be considered
“separate but equal”? I know how that tale ended.
Women in Muslim countries deserve at least the same rights
as their western counterparts, and no one in Amina's case - not even FEMEN -
thinks Islam is 'bad' without also criticising other belief systems across
Europe that repress women.
I think it's important that we don't not lose sight of Amina
and her safety. Whether I'd do what she did has nothing to do with it. She's
been let down by her country and her family and I'm not about to do the same by
turning this into a 'racism' issue. I personally don't find the hijab or nudity
all that liberating, but I think Amina's protest pictures were amazingly brave.
For me it was the slogans that she wrote across her body, as well as the
cigarette and the book and that look of sultry defiance, that elevated ‘that
image’ to the level of protest-art. Bloody well good on her!!!
Solidarity.