Obama’s Cairo speech has obviously been the most talked about thing this past week. While I have been surveying the many varied praises and critiques out there, I was drawn to a set of responses on one particular aspect of the speech: the section on women’s rights. Fatemeh Fakhraie has shared her thoughtful observations here, mainly in response to other feminists who have found more to diss than to like in the speech.
A complaint by a certain Anne Applebaum caught my attention. She writes, in an otherwise positive take on the speech: “he could have spared us the comment about the ‘struggle for womens’ equality in America,’ as if we were all in this together, us and the regimes who stone women for adultery.” This is a very interesting remark, because it objects to precisely one of the reasons why many of us might actually appreciate Obama’s speech, for his intelligent acknowledgment of nuance and complexity when it comes to such an issue. As Fatemeh notes, “Obama took care not to merely point fingers.” By recognizing problems within America while discussing those of “the Muslim world,” he made a very basic ethical gesture, one that I think is often crucial to resolving problems.
Applebaum’s perspective, however, is quite different. For her, the logic of differences between us and them reigns supreme. Incidentally, sometime after I read this yesterday, I was skimming through Paul Farmer‘s Pathologies of Power and came across the following notable remarks:
The abuse of the concept of cultural specificity is particularly insidious in discussions of suffering in general and of human rights abuses specifically: cultural difference, verging on a cultural determinism, is one of several forms of essentialism used to explain away assaults on dignity and suffering. Practices including torture are said to be “part of their culture” or “in their nature” — “their” designating either the victims, or the perpetrators, or both, as may be expedient. (p. 48, Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power. Berkeley: UC Press, 2005)
Farmer is assailing those who focus myopically on cultural differences but ignore “the national and international mechanisms that create and deepen inequalities.” And this is why I think Farmer’s points are relevant to the above discussion on Abblebaum. For her, we and they are so different, that we can’t possibly have anything to do with those “regimes who stone women.” As if these regimes exist in a vacuum, totally independent of us! Not only does she seem to insist that there is nothing comparable between the circumstance of women here and that over there, she also implies that we–mighty America–basically have (had) no role to play in affecting those circumstances. But is that really so? I don’t think we can ever get to the bottom of things without also asking questions about the (geo)politics of power, the nation state, globalization and culture, and the insidious international market.
I think Paul Farmer’s insights are important because he helps show how both the “cultural relativist” and the liberal “universalist” may be at fault: while the two disagree on whether or not we should impose our values on them, they both seem to be relying on the premise of difference between us and them. But neither seriously considers the possibility that us and them may have always already shaped each other.
With regard to stoning women for adultery, a question that I have been wondering about for some time is why there appears to have been a recent spike in this practice in some places of the world, at least over the past decade or so. Naturally, given how I think, I became curious about historical precedents and patterns. Over the last few months, I have been thinking about doing a series of blog posts on the topic, particularly since I learned some very interesting things in a class this past semester. I still hope to be able to do so, alongside some more reading and research on my part. Stay tuned.
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Interesting!
I was thinking about this a couple of weeks ago when I was teaching Indian history. During the time of the Sepoy Mutiny, Muslims began to unite against everything British to show solidarity with the ummah and hatred towards those who were soiling the “land of Islam”" (ironic that they thought ‘Hindustan’ was the “land of Islam”). Anyway, so they began to be *more Muslim* and rejected Western education. In the end Hindus and British educated Bengali intelligentsia benefited from their loss because they found favours and better jobs with the British.
Unfortunately, Muslims have not formed part of the intelligentsia in centuries and I fear they are repeating their folly. By punishing their own in the most extreme manner, they are trying to exert their solidarity and *rule.* Sadly both charity and cruelty begins at home.
Just a thought…
Comment by Achelois June 8, 2009 @ 12:55 pmAchelois, I think you may be right about punishments as a means to achieve consolidation of rule and identity.
My Indian history is deficient, but I believe there were two streams of Muslim responses to British colonization. The institutions at Aligarh and Deoband symbolize these, i.e. the former a self-conscious attempt to imitate Western knowledge, the latter a self-conscious attempt to revitalize Islamic knowledge and reject all that is Western. Of course, both were novel projects borne of the colonial encounter. The rise of a Hindu intelligentsia and the Bengali babus is a very interesting phenomenon, but probably not entirely anomalous with respect to the way British colonialism worked out in most areas (i.e. privileging of some groups as opposed to others). On this point, the Nizari Isma’ilis (i.e. the Aga Khan folks) are another interesting case: I have been meaning to read up more on them.
Comment by rawi June 9, 2009 @ 12:34 amInteresting that people are picking up on stoning as a woman’s right thing. I think more women should be concerned about right to marry, property, voting, domestic abuse, etc.
Comment by Mezba June 8, 2009 @ 2:41 pmWell, stoning is horrific, no doubt, and I totally think it should be a top human rights priority to put an end to the practice. Also I think in this case, Anne Applebaum was using this extreme example as sort of a symbolic point. The problem, of course, is when we focus on hot-button issues and loose sight of the deeper structural problems that underlie these very issues. That is precisely what Paul Farmer is trying to get at. He asks, for e.g., why is it that human rights violations almost always affect the poor more than the privileged? In other words, we are unlikely to be able to fully solve the problem of stoning by merely playing the women’s rights card, without also fighting for the social and economic rights of people.
Comment by rawi June 9, 2009 @ 12:46 am“In other words, we are unlikely to be able to fully solve the problem of stoning by merely playing the women’s rights card, without also fighting for the social and economic rights of people.”
That may be so true.
Comment by Achelois June 9, 2009 @ 2:16 pm[...] reacts to Obama’s speech and my thoughts on it. So does alternarrative and Marieme Helie [...]
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