New Imperialists : Ideologies of Empire

78 The New Imperialists
useful, however. Let us accept that Islam and feminism, or Judaism and
feminism, are compatible. Our task is to unravel the limitations of any
feminist project based on any group identity such as religion, ethnicity,
or nationality. This is the main question: why should the struggle against
women’s oppression be based on Islam, its sharia or its culture (if such a
unified culture exists at all)? Whose interests does it serve if the demand
for women’s rights is shaped by sharia? An alternative position is
the compatibility position, which, like its opposite, comes from both
religious and secular quarters. Certain liberal Islamic groups argue that
their religion, much like Christianity and Judaism, is flexible, and is able
to advance women’s rights, and develop Islamic gender relations based
on equality and justice. Secular thinkers reject the incompatibility claim
by arguing that Islam and feminism should not be constructed into a
dichotomous pair, one essentialized as a project of subordination and the
other as a project of emancipation. This secular claim is often rooted in
post-structuralist critiques of essentialism and binarism. 34
The post-structuralist critique of dichotomization does not, however,
break new ground. This problematization of the conflict in terms of
comparability is rooted in binary thinking in which Islam and feminism
constitute two mutually exclusive poles, and Islam is independent of class
and other social cleavages. Dialectics finds in Islam a religion practiced
by human beings who are divided along different lines such as class,
nation, race, and gender. While it is easy to highlight patriarchal relations
in Islamic scriptures, it would be wrong to deduce from any text a unified
behaviour for all Muslims or even for one person. Thus, instead of
treating the abstract “Islam” as the agency of all Muslims, one should
focus on the interconnections between this religion and other interests.
Thus, one may argue that liberal practitioners of Islam are more likely to
ally with liberal feminism, and adopt its legalistic approach to gender
equality.
At the same time, dialectics does not reduce Islam, its scriptures, and
its clerical hierarchy to a position of irrelevance or nothingness. For
instance, it is not difficult to see how belief in Islam, personal attachments
to the religion, and even single texts inform the politics of
individuals and groups. This is not a problem of different readings or the
polysemic nature of texts, because readings themselves depend on
ideological attachments to class, gender, race, or sexuality. For instance,
belief in divinity cannot but play a role in claiming that the Qur’an is a