New Imperialists : Ideologies of Empire

74 The New Imperialists
fighting over the control of the natural and human resources of the
oil-rich region. They have targeted women, workers, youth, peasants, and
secular, democratic, and socialist individuals and institutions. Much of
the post-structuralist and post-colonialist literature fails to see the
seriousness of these contradictions, while it ignores the close ties between
capitalist powers and Islamists. In order to illustrate this point, I return to
the politics of granting the Nobel peace prize to a Muslim Iranian woman.
Shirin Ebadi is the typical “moderate” or “reformist” Muslim, also a
woman and a lawyer, who has tried to reform the Islamic theocracy of
Iran into a modern or moderate state. The Nobel award immediately
created, or rather re-created, a web of contradictions. Conservative
Islamists treated the award as an American-Zionist plot against genuine
Islam; liberal Muslims hailed it as a recognition of Islam; and for some
Iranian nationalists it was no less than a matter of national pride. 24
However, radical secular Iranians overcame the lure of national pride,
and one of them, an Iranian poet in exile, wrote a poem in which he
treated the Nobel Committee’s decision as a “blind blow against
secularism throughout the world.” The poet, Yadollah Royai, resents the
Committee’s policy of treating theocracy as the fate of Iranians, and at
the same time considers this policy not only against secularism in Iran
but also “throughout the world.” 25
The conflict over Shirin Ebadi’s Nobel peace prize highlights the
mainstream and Orientalist perceptions of peoples who practice Islam.
The dominant view is that all Muslims are eternally tied to a religion,
which is incompatible with secularism, secular politics, and secular ways
of life. This rather old Orientalist view is shared even by some who are
opposed to Orientalism, for instance, advocates of politics of “difference.”
Since the late 1980s, “difference feminists” have insisted that Islam is the
framework for the moderation of gender relations in the Islamic
theocracy of Iran. They essentialize Iranian women as Muslims, and do
not see any secular alternative to an Islamic model of womanhood. Much
like the Islamists, they believe that Iranian women should be defined by
their religion alone, and that they should engage in “woman-friendly”
interpretations of the Qur’an and sharia in order to improve their lot.
The claim that patriarchal gender relations can be subverted through
“woman-friendly” interpretations of Islam underestimates the seriousness
of contradictions between patriarchy and women, which are reproduced
with utmost male violence, including honor killing. It also denies