Miriam Cooke: Crusade! I Mean Democracy! You Know: Women!
President Bush's claims to be liberating Middle Eastern women provide a moral pretext for the U.S. imperialistic project in the region
Thursday, April 3, 2003
Miriam Cooke is a professor of modern Arabic literature and culture at Duke University.
The tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001, hurled the U.S. into a retaliatory war. The 19 terrorists had to be made to stand in for something much bigger than themselves so that they might be confronted. The Taliban, Afghanistan, Islam, Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda, Iraq, hardliner Muslim rulers have all at one time or another served as worthy opponent in what has become a transcendental, universal struggle between the forces of Good and the forces of Evil.
In less than a week, the U.S. president and his aides called for a âcrusadeâ (briefly called campaign âInfinite Justiceâ) against the "evil doers" to avenge the crime against humanity. Muslims around the world bristled at the implications of a renewal of the 11th and 12th century Christian wars fought against their ancestors. Although he retracted the use of the word crusade when it did not sit so well with some, the U.S. president continued to invoke its spirit while wrapping it in the secular garb of "democratization" and the not-so-secular "civilizing mission." Conveniently for U.S. military ambitions in the region, the attack on the symbols of U.S. economic and political power rekindled the U.S. imperial project in the oil-rich Middle East and Central Asia.
On November 17, 2001, the First Lady, Laura Bush, furthered the imperial project in her highly gendered appeal to a world conscience. How could civilized people stand by when Afghan women were so oppressed by their men?! In her radio address to the American people, she split Afghan women from their men in order to place them on the side of civilization and their men on the side of barbarity. Civilized people could not fail to be horrified by the behavior of these men and the world they "would like to impose on the rest of us." (www.whitehouse.gov) The war against the Taliban/ the terrorists/ the Afghans/ Iraq is justified by this American womanâs appeal to a common humanity represented by Central Asian women whose oppression reveals the barbarity of their men.
It was not merely military mobilization, however, that paved the path to war but a highly gendered war talk.
The campaign to democratize the Middle East deployed women as victims to save or to empower. Official U.S. policymakers asserted that women who had suffered so much at the hands of their barbaric men were ready to rise up against them, if necessary, to institute reform at all levels. They were the ones that the U.S. government identified as the âprimary agents for changeâ from autocratic to democratic rule.
So central were they to the process of "strengthening civil society" (euphemism for "democratization" that had justly acquired a bad name) that they became a major focus of the "Middle East Partnership Initiative," a program designed to develop the post-bellum region. If only these politically savvy and unfairly marginalized women could be saved from their men they could save their societies for civilization.
People who thought otherwise were condemned for selling out to the women-oppressing enemy and they themselves thus risked falling outside the fold of civilization. An op-ed piece in the March 7, 2003 Wall Street Journal indicted U.S. feminists for "averting their eyes from the truth that only Western-style democracies have made the feminist principle of the full rights and dignity of women a reality, more perversely, they are lending support to the oppression and tyranny they profess to hate."
Mourning will follow this war as it did the Gulf War and the uprising that was so cruelly crushed by the combined neglect of the U.S. military and the fury of Saddam Hussein. More and more people will be scattered around the globe to eke out miserable lives without resources or hope.
They will be like the Shiite women who were driven out of their homes in southern Iraq in March 1991 to enter refugee camps in Saudi Arabia and then proceed to exilic futures outside the Middle East. These latest survivors, too, may have nothing more to rely on than spiritual resources from their past, like sacred mourning sessions.
These regularly held ritual lamentations link todayâs Shiite women across time with their foremother Zaynab, the granddaughter of the Prophet Muhammad, who mourned the murder of her brother Husayn in Karbala in 680. It was she who said to Yazid, the archetypal tyrant: âBy God, you will never take from us our memory,â thereby garnering the honor of having kept the memory of ahl al-bayt (or, the family the Prophet) alive for fourteen centuries. These therapeutic mourning sessions also network these Shiite women across space with others who are struggling to deal with the aftermath of war, deception and suffering.
It is so hard to think beyond mourning, beyond these lamentation sessions, but we must all learn from these women who have continued to resist and to hope despite unimaginable suffering. Taking their cue from Zaynab who in the 7th century stood up to Yazid, they remain strong and defiant, teaching us all how to say No to those who would deprive us of freedom, justice, hope and, ultimately, life.
This is an excerpt from a talk at a forum on the future of Iraq at the John Hope Franklin Center March 26. For the full text, please e-mail sally.hicks@duke.edu