Washington Week: Student Voices (O)

Speaker advises Stanford audience
By Allison Dedrick
The Stanford Daily (Stanford)
05/26/2006

(U-WIRE) STANFORD, Calif. — University of Wisconsin-Madison Law Professor Asifa Quraishi spoke in the Stanford psychology building Thursday night about Western women's advocacy for Islamic women. She said that well-intentioned feminists in the West can only make matters worse for Muslim women.

Stressing open-mindedness, education and humility as requirements for Western feminists hoping to aid Muslim women, Asifa Quraishi gave a talk Thursday, "Thought That Counts." An assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School and a specialist in Islamic law and legal theory, Quraishi discussed the potentially harmful effects misguided efforts from Western feminists can have on the Muslim women they are trying to help.

The event was planned by the Islamic Society of Stanford University (ISSU) and the Muslim Students Awareness Network (MSAN) in response to increasing attention on the status of Muslim women as seen in headlines last year about a woman sentenced to be raped to preserve the honor of her family.

Student organizers said they hoped the event would increase awareness about women's rights.

In an email to The Daily, ISSU organizer and electrical engineering graduate student Salman Latif said, "We wanted to have an event where we could start a discussion on how Muslims in the West and Western human rights organizations can work together, realizing that we share the same goals."

Quraishi began her speech by observing that Western feminists often use "conflicts of strategies that are ultimately detrimental in the long run to the very women they are trying to aid."

She cited basic misconceptions about Islam and Islamic law as main causes of these unintended negative consequences, arguing that Western feminists sometimes have an "innate, often subconscious sense of superiority" and approach issues facing Muslim women with a "rescue mentality."

"It is a situation of friends, but they are not having a conversation as equals," Quraishi said. "Western women generally don't even realize there is this disconnect."

She argued that sometimes well-intentioned Western feminists undermine the efforts of Muslim women, giving abortion rights as an example. By pushing reproductive rights so strongly at an international conference, Western activists generated a negative response, making abortions more difficult to obtain than they had been previously.

By not understanding the Islamic perspective, Quraishi argued, activists can turn the issue into an "Islam versus the West" conversation, which is not productive with and often does not leave the women any options. It is better to provide women arguments that come from within the Islamic tradition, she said.

She mentioned Zina, which is the crime of adultery. Pregnant, unmarried women might be punished under the law, even if they have been raped, she said.

"Western feminists usually don't have a filter of what is Islam, so things get lumped all together," Quraishi said. "It is fundamentally assumed Islam is part of the problem so there is the attitude of why should we even bother looking into what they think about this issue."

"Does it actually hurt to have an approach that doesn't take nuances of Islamic law into account?" she asked. "I think it does."

Quraishi also addressed how the image of a woman in a veil has become a symbol for oppression in the United States. Rhetoric about "saving the women of the East" is sometimes used to justify colonialism. Today this image is again employed by Western feminists, causing the Muslim world to perceive some activism as colonialist.

"I fundamentally disagree with the veil being a public issue at all," Quraishi said. "But I'm talking about it because it has become an obsession."

She stressed that in the West there is an assumption that Muslim women are forced to dress a certain way, dismissing reasons for a woman to wear a veil.

"Western women often don't want to admit that there may be liberating, empowering reasons for wearing a veil," she said.

Westerners don't always realize that the veil is a loaded issue in the Muslim world too.

"Women are categorized and put into boxes based on what they wear," Quraishi said. "There is no way to opt out of this conversation."

She explained that if a Muslim woman wears a veil, she is taken less seriously by Western women; but that if she does not wear a veil, she isn't respected in some Muslim communities, especially if she is speaking about women's issues.

"Where she gains credibility in one circle, she loses it in another," Quraishi said.

She said she doesn't believe that Western feminists should neglect the issues confronting Muslim women, but that they have to approach the issue with more respect and humility.

"I think we would all be better off working together, but the fundamental attitude that Islam is the problem has to go away," she said. "It would be best if we could work together but people need a broader appreciation of who they're working for and what they're working with."

Student organizers said they were pleased to see a well-known Islamic legal figure to campus.

"[Quraishi] is essentially an American-Muslim celebrity so it's an honor to have her here," said ISSU's Financial Advisor Sanah Parmez, a sophomore, about the event.

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