Hirsi Ali and van Gogh's Submission: Reinforcing the Islam vs. women binary

Women's Studies International Forum 31 (2008) 148–155

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Women's Studies International Forum j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w. e l s ev i e r. c o m / l o c a t e / w s i f

Hirsi Ali and van Gogh's Submission: Reinforcing the Islam vs. women binary Iveta Jusová Comparative Women's Studies in Europe & Assistant Professor of WS, Antioch College, Yellow Springs, OH 45387, USA

a r t i c l e

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Available online 16 April 2008

s y n o p s i s This article presents a textual and visual analysis of Hirsi Ali and van Gogh's controversial short film, Submission: Part 1 [Submission: Part 1. (2004). Dir. Theo van Gogh. Script Ayaan Hirsi Ali.]. It argues that while Hirsi Ali's stated objective in Submission, as well as in her public statements and more recent writings, has been to combat domestic violence in Muslim communities, the rhetorical strategies she embraces frequently reinforce unproductive orientalist stereotypes of Islam and Muslim women and men. The article problematizes Hirsi Ali's strategies by drawing on Uma Narayan's analysis of the roles played by non-Western academics in debates concerning Third-World women's issues. And it compares Hirsi Ali's condemnation of Islam's abuse of women with feminist critiques of the same articulated by other Muslim academics, such as Leila Ahmed, whose feminist assessment of Islam is historically grounded and is strategically combined with a critique of derogatory Western stereotypes of Muslims. © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Ever since Submission: Part 1 was aired on Dutch public TV in August 2004, this short film has been at the center of heated debate on Islam and immigration in as well as beyond the Netherlands. The responses to Submission have been sharply polarized. Some describe it as a film fiercely critical of the disadvantageous position of women in Islam, and they praise the script-writer, the Somali–Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and the director, Theo van Gogh, for (presumably) telling the truth in a world obsessed with political correctness. Others, however, view Submission as a movie that unfairly conflates the occurrence of domestic violence in Muslim families with Islam as a supposed source, and they criticize the authors' approach as recklessly confrontational and divisive. Already prior to producing the film, Hirsi Ali was stirring much controversy. She was working at the time as a researcher for the left-of-center Dutch Labor Party (PvdA), and was openly critical of what in her view was PvdA's lack of competence in dealing with domestic violence in immigrant communities. She is herself a (now former) Muslim, a refugee from Somalia, who had escaped an arranged marriage by seeking asylum in the Netherlands, and she spent years working part-time as a translator from Arabic in domestic shelters, abortion clinics, and refugee centers throughout the 0277-5395/$ – see front matter © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.wsif.2008.03.007

Netherlands. For these reasons, hers was perceived as an insider voice, and the Labor Party found it difficult to dismiss her criticism. If Hirsi Ali's views were attracting attention before August 2004 — among other things for her unfortunate public characterizations of Islam as a “backward religion” and Muhammad as “ a perverse man and a tyrant” (Hirsi Ali, 2007, pp. 289, 303) — they were catapulted to international prominence after her film was aired publicly, and particularly after the slaying of the film's director, Theo van Gogh. He was murdered by Mohammed Bouyeri, a 26-year old Moroccan–Dutch man, a radical Islamist, in November 2004. The letter pinned onto van Gogh's body that identified Hirsi Ali1 as Bouyeri's real target thrust her into the spotlight, bestowing upon her the status as a martyr for free speech. By then, it should be mentioned, Hirsi Ali had left PvdA for the right-of-center Liberal Party (VVD), believing VVD would provide more support for her “mission to help Muslim women” (Hirsi Ali, 2006, p. 2), and had been elected to the Dutch Parliament. In summer 2006, Hirsi Ali was once again drawing much international attention: the center-right Dutch government collapsed as a result of the Integration Minister Rita Verdonk's (VVD) earlier decision to strip Hirsi Ali of her Dutch citizenship because of misleading information she had used on her

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asylum and (later) her citizenship applications. Although Verdonk's decision was in the end overturned by the Dutch Prime Minister, Hirsi Ali ended up resigning from the Dutch Parliament. Since then, she has accepted a fellowship at the American Enterprise Institute, has moved to the US and published an autobiography, Infidel (2007). I first learned about Ayaan Hirsi Ali in 2004 as I directed Antioch College's (USA) Comparative Women's Studies in Europe (WMSE), a study-abroad program partially located in the Netherlands. The 2004 WMSE group experienced the odd coincidence of being in Amsterdam on the day of Theo Van Gogh's murder, and we found ourselves departing Holland the following day in the midst of shocked faces and headlines. When I returned to the Netherlands with the WMSE 2005 group, it was a different country. Journalists now write obsessively about the end of multiculturalism in Europe, the “Huntingtonian clash of civilizations” (Caldwell, 2004; Esman, 2006, p. 12; Linklater, 2005; Scroggins, 2005, p. 21). And in his essay entitled “Coming After Us” (published in 2005), Salman Rushdie has written: “now, sixteen years later [after the attacks on The Satanic Verses], religion is coming after us all, and even though most of us probably feel, as I once felt, that we have other, more important concerns, we are all going to have to confront the challenge. If we fail, this particular fish may end up frying us” (Rushdie, 2005, pp. 21–22). I eventually saw Submission in November 2005 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, UK. This was the first public viewing of the film since the murder of van Gogh. Hirsi Ali, who had come back from months of hiding, was present at the event — surrounded by bodyguards who at the time never left her side. She was sitting in the ICA's compact auditorium packed with what seemed to be mostly supporters, and after the screening she came up on the stage to participate in a discussion moderated by Timothy Garton Ash, Director of the European Studies Center at St. Anthony's College, Oxford. Hosted by PEN — an organization that “champions freedom of expression everywhere and the right of writers, artists and indeed anyone to say whatever they feel without fear of persecution and penalty” (Publisher's Note, 2005, p. v), the event was inspired by the British Labour government's attempts to pass an Incitement of Religious Hatred amendment to the Public Order 1986 act, an act that already makes racial hatred a criminal offence. If it had been enacted in its initial version, the amendment would have made criminal not only any behavior that purposefully stirs up religious hatred but also any behavior that is “likely to stir up” religious hatred and unrest (Pannick quoted in Appignanesi, 2005a, p. 5). The bill (by now enacted but in a watered down version) was vigorously opposed by many British writers, journalists, comedians, professors, as well as immigrant and minority women's organizations, who all feared that their freedom of expression and their work would be hampered under the new law. They argued that while similar to race religion is an important part of many people's identity (which needs to be respected), unlike race it is also a set of opinions and writings, and opinions and dogmas need to be open to criticism (Ali, 2005, p. 49). As part of this debate, English PEN, whose most prominent member is Salman Rushdie, published a book of essays Free Expression Is No Offence (Appignanesi, 2005b). The book addresses several examples of what is here represented as a

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clampdown on freedom of speech on the part of fundamentalist religious groups in Britain. The authors discuss the closing down (in December 2004) of the production of Behzti (Dishonour), a play by the British Sikh woman playwright Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, whose plot centers on the rape of a devout Sikh woman by the head of a Sikh temple. After several successful performances at Birmingham Repertory Theatre, which were, according to the actors, quite vocally supported by many Sikh women in the audience, the theatre was stormed by hundreds of Sikh protestors, claiming the play was sacrilegious (Sharma, 2005, pp. 32–38). The other similar incidents discussed in the book include Evangelical Christian protests against the BBC production of the satirical opera Jerry Springer (Appignanesi, 2005a, p. 7), and the protests against Bells, a play by a woman playwright “about the secret world of Britain's Muslim courtesans” (Sharma, 2005, p. 32). The screening of Submission at ICA was embedded within this ongoing debate about free speech and about the proposed Incitement of Religious Hatred bill, and certainly in this context Hirsi Ali came across as a hero. One must agree with the organizers of the event that while free speech needs to be exercised responsibly, it is a fundamental human right that must be championed. The examples of censorship imposed on women's criticism of androcentrism and misogyny within their religious or cultural communities are particularly worrisome, and they are telling in suggesting what groups of people are most affected when religious fundamentalism is on the rise. And as exemplified by the PEN publications and lectures, there is a definite sense among many European intellectuals that politicized religious conservatism is indeed currently on the increase throughout Europe. Another example often cited to support this argument is the hold of the Vatican on political decision-making in Poland, which has resulted in placing severe restrictions on Polish women's abortion rights, starting in 1993. But as intellectuals champion the right of all women, including cultural/religious minority women, to express dissent, it is equally important to remember the long history of use and abuse of feminist arguments for Western colonialist purposes. Many scholars have written on this topic (Ahmed, 1992, p. 167; Macdonald, 2006, p. 8; Narayan, 1997, pp. 83–117; Shaikh, 2003, p. 149; Winter, 2006, pp. 386–387), analyzing the numerous occasions in the history of Western colonialism when the idea of “native” women's oppression (always measured against the presumably more enlightened Western culture's view of women) was deployed to argue the presumed inferiority or backwardness of the “native” culture and to rationalize the colonialist project overseas, often by men who vigorously opposed women's emancipatory agenda in their own country. Most recently, of course, the certainly deplorable and unacceptable oppression of women under the Taliban was used by the U.S. administration (suddenly turned feminist) to help justify the American invasion of Afghanistan. The situation of women in Afghanistan has not been improved by the invasion (Winter, 2006, pp. 386–388), although the U.S. oil interests in the region have been (arguably) secured. Thus as intellectuals champion the right of immigrant and all women to speak out their dissent, it is equally important to categorically oppose as dangerous and counterproductive any attempt on behalf of those participating in the broader public

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debate at appropriating feminist critiques into arguments about presumed backwardness or inferiority of the group in question. The problem is, as I will argue, that in the case of Submission, this is a position very difficult, if not impossible, to uphold.2 In the following critique of Hirsi Ali's strategies, I will attempt to avoid some of the pitfalls of the “anthropological perspective,” which, as Uma Narayan has argued convincingly, sometimes leads to Western academics' pressures on ThirdWorld feminists to act as “emissaries” of “their culture.” In this role as cultural ambassadors or emissaries, Third-World feminists are expected to represent only “positive pictures of their cultures as a corrective for negative Western stereotypes about the Third-World” (Narayan, 1997, p. 134). “To put ThirdWorld feminists in the ‘Emissary position’,” Narayan comments, “is often to impede their feminist analyses and politics, and to fail to recognize the fact that women have good reasons to be disloyal to a multiplicity of civilizations” (Narayan, 1997, p. 135). At the same time, however, as I listen to Hirsi Ali's voice, I will also try to avoid another problematic situation that Narayan identifies in her analysis of Western academic discussions concerning Third-World women and involving Third-World feminists. Hirsi Ali frequently uses her position as an “Authentic Insider” to legitimate her arguments. In spite of asserting in Infidel that “it doesn't matter who I am. What matters is abuse” (Hirsi Ali, 2007, p. 309), the entire autobiography seems in fact driven by the author's desire to vindicate her politics, arguments, and strategies by representing them as rooted in her experiences as a Muslim immigrant woman. And in The Caged Virgin (2006), Hirsi Ali has explained her determination to have her voice heard as follows: “Muslim women are scarcely listened to, and they need a woman to speak out on their behalf” (Hirsi Ali, 2006, p. 5). There is no question that with her life experiences, Hirsi Ali is an insider to the subject at hand and has some epistemic advantage when it comes to discussing experiences of Muslim women. At the same time, as Narayan has commented, the “‘Authentic Insider’ position become[s] problematic when prescribed or occupied without reflection … [such as] when a particular Third-World individual is the only person in a particular discursive situation ‘positioned’ to address ‘ThirdWorld perspectives.’” In situations like these, Narayan continues, “the ‘singularity’ of that voice and its perspective tend to be effaced, and it comes to stand for things like ‘the ThirdWorld position on human rights’” (Narayan, 1997, p. 143). In the words of Haideh Moghissi, the fact that “voice is always contingent and always situated” is too easily disregarded (quoted in Macdonald, 2006, p. 14). While there is a plethora of Muslim feminists' points of view concerning representations of women in the Qur'an and treatment of women in Muslim communities, these have been virtually ignored by Hirsi Ali. Furthermore, in the Western debates on Muslim immigration, Hirsi Ali's voice is too often represented in the media as the only “honest” one, while the more complex positions that have been developed and articulated by other Muslim feminists and NGOs, who might be more critical than Hirsi Ali of Western anti-Islam stereotypes, are denied the attention they deserve. As Myra Macdonald has concluded in her analysis of recent media representations of Muslim women's issues, “[Muslim

women's] voices are most readily muffled when they try to speak against the grain of already hegemonic modes of representation” (Macdonald, 2006, p. 18). In the following section of my essay, I will argue that rather than challenging and undermining the “hegemonic modes of representation” of Muslim women, Submission deploys, and manipulates for dramatic effect, a repertoire of visual stereotypes that have long been associated in Western cultural imagination with perceptions of Muslim women as sexual objects and as victims of their culture. The setting for Submission is an enclosed private space, sparsely furnished with ornamental carpets and peopled with highly stylized bodies of five actresses. To a Western spectator, who would inevitably view the film through the prism of Orientalism, as “an accepted grid for filtering through the Orient into Western consciousness” (Said, 1978, 1979, p. 6), the scene would evoke oriental fantasies of mosques and/or harems. No contextualizing details are provided, and Hirsi Ali herself (2006, p. 142) has described the film's location in a decontextualized way as “Islamistan, an imaginary country where the majority of the population is Muslim, and where the legal system is the Shari'a”. The script consists of four short monologues spoken by a single woman as part of her prayer to Allah. While the actress–narrator is fully veiled, the front of her hijab is translucent and her (almost entirely) naked body, although not her face, is clearly visible. She gives voice to four Muslim women (the bodies of the actresses representing the women are displayed in the background but they do not speak) and tells in American English their stories of physical and sexual abuse at the hands of their husbands, fathers, uncles. The decision to clad the central female figure in a diaphanous dress has stirred much anger among practicing Muslims, both men and women, many of whom find offensive this disregard of the prescription in the Qur'an to “lower your gaze and guard your modesty” in religious settings (Surah 24, verse 31). It has been much criticized as counterproductive, although during her ICA talk, Hirsi Ali defended her decision as inspired by her wish to confront the audience with what Muslim women have been forced to hide — that they are women, not just blobs of black cloth (as she articulated it) (Hirsi Ali, 2005). If Islam implies that women need to cover themselves because otherwise they would incite men's sexual passion, Hirsi Ali rejects this line of argument and insists that men accept responsibility for their own sexuality rather than blaming women. However, the way in which Hirsi Ali articulated her position leaves little room for those Muslim women who would don the hijab, burka, jilbab, and other forms of covering voluntarily (Ruby, 2006) and bolsters the view — even today still popular in the West — that all Muslim women who wear face- or head-covering do so because they have been forced to. What is more significant about the choice of a translucent dress for Submission's main character/narrator is that it harks back (and uncritically) to the long history of oriental fantasies of the veil and is part of the film's overall construction of the displayed women as exoticized and sexualized objects and as defenseless victims. As Hirsi Ali has herself commented with displeasure, the diaphanous fabric of the central actress' attire, combined with the partial nudity of some of the other actresses, has had the effect of concentrating much of the

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debate that has happened around the film on itself, distracting from what Hirsi Ali had initially set up to focus on with the film — the question of domestic violence in Muslim families. Male violence against women is certainly an issue worthy of attention and discussion, as it remains a major problem not only in Muslim communities but cross-culturally around the world. That the focus on the actresses' nudity in Submission has hijacked the discussion here is therefore unfortunate, but it needs to be pointed out that such an outcome has been encouraged, not discouraged, by the camera work deployed in the film. From the very beginning of Submission, the camera repeatedly zooms in on the main actress' body contours clearly visible behind the translucent fabric of her robe, as well as slowly moving up and down her naked torso and breasts. The gauzy, soft fabric turns the actress' robe into a decontextualized, sexually enticing “veil,” well recognizable from Western orientalist discourse. Rather than representing any actual, culturally and historically specific style of Muslim women's clothing, Submission draws here directly on Western fantasies of the oriental veil as a de-contextualized Western invention that has inscribed into it both the lopsided East–West power-relations and the West's obsession with Arab women's sexuality. Both the film's use of the oriental veil theme and the camera's focus on the partially nude bodies of the actresses have a sensationalizing and titillating effect, and fall back onto, rather than undermining, the traditional Western fixation on the East as veiled and in need of unveiling. The theme of unveiling is reinforced by the camera's construction of a voyeuristic spectator. In the first (and again in the last) scene, the central female figure is framed in a way evocative of an image viewed clandestinely through a keyhole. As the camera bids the viewer to enter this private chamber, focusing in on the woman at the center, a sense of spatial penetration is produced. The voyeuristic expectation is fully satisfied as the female figure unfolds itself before the viewer, until she stands erect, nude (except for the soft, filmy veil), and inviting of the spectator's gaze. By now we are inside the secluded, harem-like space, and again, rather than being challenged/undermined, the viewer's orientalist expectations are fulfilled, as the scene matches well the Western fantasy of the oriental harem as a place “connected with orgiastic feast where men received sexual pleasure without resistance” (Mernissi, 2001, p.14). The flesh of the semi-naked women displayed here is marked with physical and verbal violence (whip markings and fist wounds, as well as Arabic calligraphy quoting selected verses from the Qur'an which, according to the film authors, justify violence against women), conveying the filmmakers' important point of Muslim women's domestic abuse. But again the actresses are stylized, and the scenes are filmed, in ways that foreground the sexual (partial nudity, quivering and perspiring flesh) and the exotic (Arabic calligraphy, exotic music, juxtaposition of brown flesh and a white ornamental bridal dress/white silky undergarment), and the final impression is sensational and pornographic. Typical of pornography, violence and sex are joined together in Submission and presented in an erotically charged way. Perhaps even more significant is the film's reinforcement of yet another orientalist stereotype — the perception of

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Muslim women as passive victims. This is achieved through the narrative itself and visually as well. While their stories constitute the film's fabric (without them the film would not exist), the four women featured here are denied both direct voice and agency. They remain silent, with the central female figure/narrator speaking for them. Furthermore, their bodies stay frozen in space, each locked in its own circle of light, and they remain separated from each other by darkness and space. The actuality of complex relationships that develop between and among women in real-life harem spaces, as a natural result of several women sharing the same household (Mernissi, 1994, 2001), is disregarded here, as are the possibilities these relationships create for developing strategies of resistance to abuse. The only way of contesting violence left to the women in Submission is a mediated prayer (through the figure of the narrator) to Allah, which double-functions here as a testimony/confession before the Western viewer (most of the film is in English, with Dutch subtitles). It should not be surprising that most Muslim viewers have found it difficult to move beyond the question of representation in Submission, as some of the most entrenched and damaging Western stereotypes of Muslim women (and men) are embraced here. Muslim women are portrayed in the film as nothing more than oriental odalisques, available to male abuse, with little agency to resist it, and in need of protection by the West. While at least some of this final visual message should be attributed to the director, Theo van Gogh's, fondness for provocative camera work, Hirsi Ali has been open about her own contributions to the visual aspects of the film, such as the use of the transparent veil for the central female figure, the main character's role in narrating the other women's stories, the actresses' bodies' spatial separation from each other, the use of Arabic calligraphy to mark the women's bodies, as well as the de-contextualized nature of the setting (The Caged Virgin, 2006, pp.141–142; Infidel, 2007, pp. 312–315). Moving on to the text of the film's narrative,3 it consists, as I have already mentioned, of four stories of sexual and physical violence against Muslim women. The first part of the narrative concerns a couple who fell in love and developed an intimate relationship, only to be punished for their sin of fornication by public flogging. Woven into the narrative and also written onto the body of the actress representing the woman are the verses from the Qur'an (Surah 24, verse 2) which, as Hirsi Ali maintains, condone this punishment. The same strategy is repeated throughout the film, helping to drive home Hirsi Ali's overall argument that physical and sexual violence enacted upon Muslim women is accepted by and prescribed in Islam's key text. The second story portrayed in the film concerns a woman who was married at sixteen to a man who physically repulses her. Despite the repulsion, she submits to his sexual advances as he quotes verses from the Qur'an concerning his conjugal rights (Surah 2, verse 222). The next is an account of a woman fiercely beaten by her husband despite her “faithfulness and devout obedience” (Surah 4, verse 34). And the last story concerns another young woman, who follows all of the prescriptions on women in Islam — she guards her modesty, she never displays her beauty or ornaments (Surah 24, verse 31), she covers her body from head to toe not only outside but even inside the house.

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Despite her devout behavior, she is repeatedly raped by her uncle, receiving no support or help from her family. When faced with the criticism of representing the Qur'an by a few, selectively chosen verses quoted in the narrative out of context, Hirsi Ali replied at ICA that that is how the verses are often invoked by Muslim men and how they affect many Muslim women in their everyday lives (also see Hirsi Ali, 2006, p. 154). Underscoring how the Qur'an has been abused by conservative clerics and lay Muslim men is an important point indeed. However, Hirsi Ali's strategy does not acknowledge, in fact it entirely ignores, the long-term project of decentering and reinterpretation of the Qur'an that numerous Islamic feminists have been involved in (Ahmed, 1992, pp. 63– 67; Ali Engineer, 2004; Anwar, 2005, pp. 233–247; Brown, 2006, p. 418; Marcotte, 2003, p. 157; Othman, 2006, p. 348; Winter, 2006, p. 387). Watching the film, one is left with the impression that the text of the Qur'an leaves no space for women's emancipation and that there is only one version of Islam, a version irreparably misogynistic. But any English speaker who has ever decided to read the Qur'an is immediately faced with the dilemma of which version she should choose. There are numerous English translations of the Qur'an available, often vastly different from each other, reflecting the fact that the Arabic of the original text is highly concise and many of the key words used in the text can be interpreted in various ways. Thus for instance, as Riffat Hassan, Asghar Ali Engineer, and others have pointed out, the Arabic word “qawwamun” in the often discussed verse 4:34 used in Submission in scene three, “Men are the protectors and maintainers of women, because Allah has given the one more (strength) than the other, and because they support them from their means” (The Qur'an: Translation), has been translated as “rulers,” “protectors,” “supporters,” as well as with the phrase “the husbands should take care of their wives" (Ali Engineer, 2004, p. 54; Hassan, 1999, p. 263). And there is a feminist project underway of arguing and explaining that verses like this one need to be understood in the historical context in which they were written, rather than taken as eternal and universal normative prescriptions (as they often are by conservative ‘ulama).4 Furthermore, many Muslim feminists have been pointing out that the original version of the Qur'an (and in fact there were several of them) was already an interpretation, as many of the revelations were written down only after the death of Muhammad from other people's memories of his pronouncements (Ahmed, 1992, p. 94). Going back to the controversial verse 4:34, which Hirsi Ali referred to several times during her lecture at ICA, it continues: “As to those women on whose part you fear disloyalty and ill-conduct, admonish them (first), (next), refuse to share their beds, and (last) beat them (lightly)” (The Qur'an: Translation). This part of the Surah lends itself to being interpreted, and has been interpreted by conservative Muslim clerics, as condoning wife battery. Hirsi Ali is certainly right to be critical of the literalist reading of the verse, and it has been at the center of debates concerning wife beating. The strategy used by many other Muslim feminists and women activists in approaching the issue has been to discuss this verse, as well as others, in their historical context. Doing so, Riffat Hassan (1999, p. 266), for instance, has arrived at a radically different reading of the passage as one whose intent is to “guarantee women the material (as well as moral) security needed by

them during the period of pregnancy when breadwinning can become difficult or even impossible for them”. Other feminists have dealt with the conventional interpretation of this verse (as one that presumably indicates women's secondclass status in Islam) by pointing out how contradictory the idea of wife beating or the idea of female inferiority is to the central ethical message of equality written into the Qur'an. They emphasize that as far as women are concerned there are two voices audible in the Qur'an. Represented by powerful conservative male clerics, the establishment Islam has tended to embrace the hierarchical voice and ignore the egalitarian one. That autocratic voice can be subverted by readings that emphasize the egalitarian vision (Ahmed, 1992, pp. 64–67; Ali, 2003, pp. 163–189; Ali Engineer, 2004, pp. 48–68; Shaikh, 2003, p. 148).5 While they are not represented in Hirsi Ali's Submission, many Muslim women and NGOs (most famously Sisters in Islam in Malaysia) have been working towards the realization of such subversion and have successfully invoked the egalitarian principle to reject wife battery and polygamy from within an Islamist position (Anwar, 2005, pp. 238–241; Othman 2006, pp. 348–350; Shaikh, 2003, p. 158). Hirsi Ali (2006, p. 6) has been explicit about the influence of the American feminist scholar Susan Moller Okin's ideas on her own thinking. Okin6 has argued that in liberal democracy all women, including immigrant/minority women, should have the same rights and protections, whatever their cultural or religious background. In her famous article “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?” (1999) Okin expressed her criticism of the position of Western “multiculturalists.” As she has summarized it, the multiculturalist position argues that since a sense of cultural identity is important for every individual's healthy development, the customs and traditions of minority groups (whose cultural identity is particularly vulnerable to extinction) require special protection (Okin 1999, p. 11). In practice, this argument has been sometimes invoked to censure mistreatment and abuse of minority women by men in their families. The main problem with this (as Okin calls it) multiculturalist position is that it approaches cultural/ religious groups as homogeneous and fails to consider that cultural practices affect different members of the group differently. It is the male members of the community who often speak on behalf of the whole community, even concerning those customs that constrain the everyday lives of women to a much greater extent than the lives of men. While Okin's arguments make a certain amount of sense, they have not been received without criticism from ThirdWorld scholars. The main problem with Okin's article, which becomes much amplified in the work of Hirsi Ali, is that while its argument begins from within a fairly narrow and welldefined framework — that of the certainly unacceptable misuse of cultural defense in courts of law in cases of immigrant women's abuse (such as honor killings, child marriages, polygamy, wife battery) — its broad brush strokes approach lends the text to being read as representing immigrant/minority cultures in terms of stereotypes, as backward, intractably misogynist, and as lacking indigenous feminist voices. I identify with Homi Bhabha's critique of Okin's rhetoric: “Her narrative … grows seamlessly into a comparative and evaluative judgment on minority cultures (largely represented

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by cultural defense cases) delivered from the point of view of Western liberal cultures … ” (Bhabha, 1999, p. 80). Similarly, while Hirsi Ali's project begins from a perfectly valid objective of turning her audience's attention to the fact of domestic abuse in Muslim communities and of protesting the double standard the police and legal authorities in the West tend to apply to violence perpetrated against immigrant as opposed to non-immigrant women, the strategies she uses to advance her arguments end up reinforcing some of the most ingrained, anachronistic, and unproductive stereotypes about Islam and Muslims. While Hirsi Ali begins from the position of a policy-maker concerned with abuse that certainly does happen in Muslim communities, she produces a discourse which openly and unequivocally represents the “true Islam” as a violent religion that leads to cruelty (Hirsi Ali, 2007, p. 272) and calls the characterizations of Islam as a religion of peace and tolerance as “fairy tales” (2007, p. 270). She ends up producing a discourse that dismisses the project of Islamic feminists to enforce their own egalitarian and pro-women readings of the Qur'an, and that insists that the trajectory she herself has taken as a feminist is the only legitimate way for Muslim women who desire emancipation. If they want to become liberated, Muslim women need to relinquish their cultural and religious identity, the “mental cage” of Islam (Hirsi Ali, 2007, pp. 285, 295). Commenting on Submission, Hirsi Ali has foregrounded the daring gesture of resistance on the part of the central figure/narrator, who, rather than lowering her gaze before Allah, looks up, and who turns her prayer into an occasion to confront God with the ways in which his words are applied to (other) Muslim women (Hirsi Ali, 2006, p. 142). By confronting God with her gaze and words, the film's central figure/ narrator refuses the master–slave relationship between God and herself (prescribed, according to Hirsi Ali, in Islam), thus presumably launching a process of becoming a liberated individual. What remains altogether unrecognized by the author is that the narrator's act of resistance and emancipation stands on her appropriation of the stories and voices of the other four women, who remain, from the beginning till the end of the film, represented as abused and voiceless heaps of flesh. The only way Hirsi Ali speaks of the narrator is as a figure lending her voice to the other women who seem incapable of speaking for themselves; never does the author acknowledge the tricky and potentially problematic nature of the act of speaking on somebody's behalf and the danger of appropriation inherent in such an act. The same lack of self-reflection seems to characterize Hirsi Ali's own career as a self-appointed spokesperson for Muslim women. While representing herself as a voice for Muslim women's emancipation, she has shown little patience with those Muslim women whose points of view do not coincide with hers, and her attitude towards them has been dismissive and patronizing. For instance, in The Caged Virgin, Hirsi Ali describes her encounter with a woman critical of her arguments as follows: “I have also met a Moroccan woman who said: ‘I want to wear the hijab, because Allah the Exalted has commanded it.' ‘Well,' I respond, ‘if you want to do everything that Allah the Exalted has said, then you'll stay in your cage” (Hirsi Ali, 2006, p. 32). Marc de Leeuw and Sonja van Wichelen (2005, p. 330) have described similar dismissive-

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ness and elitist attitude in their comments on a televised confrontation between the author of Submission and actual Muslim women survivors of domestic violence in a Dutch shelter home. On the whole, Hirsi Ali does not seem to be ready to acknowledge that relinquishing their cultural and religious identity (as she has done and as she advises others to do) is simply not an option for many Muslim women; that many Muslim women, while invested in fighting abuse and discrimination, are not interested in renouncing Islam, and that for them the struggle for their rights is “ultimately a struggle in defining ‘what Islam and whose Islam is the right Islam’” (Othman, 2006, p. 341). Overall, Hirsi Ali (following Okin) has accepted the “culture vs. women binary,” which, as Leila Ahmed has observed, was first created in the context of nineteenth-century Western colonialist expansion (Ahmed, 1992, pp. 144–68), and which is never invoked in relation to Western women's feminism but is ubiquitous in discussions of minority/ThirdWorld women's emancipatory efforts (Narayan, 1997, pp. 84– 85). While Hirsi Ali takes this binary for granted and has chosen to deal with it by exiting her religion/culture (as is certainly her right), numerous other Muslim women and feminist activists reject the logic according to which the only route open to non-Western women interested in emancipation is one of abandoning their culture for the Western, presumably women-friendly, culture. Ahmed has articulated the argument against this logic particularly eloquently. In her groundbreaking historical analysis of the development of issues concerning women and gender in Islamic discourses, Ahmed (1992) carefully examines the various ways in which Islamic societies have oppressed women. But she also points out: As the history of Western women makes clear, there is no validity to the notion that progress for women can be achieved only by abandoning the ways of a native androcentric culture in favor of those of another culture. It was never argued, for instance, even by the most ardent nineteenth-century feminists, that European women could liberate themselves from the oppressiveness of Victorian dress … only by adopting the dress of some other culture. Nor has it ever been argued … even by the most radical feminists, that because male domination and injustice to women have existed throughout the West's recorded history, the only recourse for Western women is to abandon Western culture and find themselves some other culture. The idea seems absurd, and yet this is routinely how the matter of improving the status of women is posed with respect to women in Arab and other non-Western societies … The presumption underlying these ideas is that Western women may pursue feminist goals by engaging critically with and challenging and redefining their cultural heritage, but Muslim women can pursue such goals only by setting aside the ways of their culture for the nonandrocentric, nonmisogynist ways (such is the implication) of the West. (Ahmed 1992, pp. 244–45) All women, including Muslim women living in Europe, must have a right to speak freely on their own behalf. That is, after all, what both Hirsi Ali and those Muslim women who have chosen to pursue feminist goals by reinterpreting their

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heritage are all seeking to do. Whether they choose to work within their religious or cultural traditions or decide to exit them, all women must have the right to choose the way that suits them, and do so vocally, without intimidation. But while feminists like Ahmed have been successful at articulating a position that both opposes the oppression of women under Islam and rejects Western representations of Islam as backward and innately contrary to the principles of equality, Hirsi Ali's Submission (and her other work) did not manage to do so. It is Hirsi Ali's voice, rather than the voice of those Dutch Muslim feminists who have been working from within their cultural heritage, that has been given prominence in public debates in the Netherlands. While this is at least partly due to the death threats Hirsi Ali has faced since her film was released, her arguments were being given much publicity even before that happened. Representing a dissenting voice in relation to the establishment Islam, hers is not the voice of dissent in relation to the broader public debate in the Netherlands. Rather, her opinions tend to reinforce the predominantly negative view of Islam. Having been aired on Dutch public TV within the context of larger public debate dominated by voices hostile towards Islam, Submission has been appropriated to justify that hostility. Certainly, the way a cultural text will be interpreted and the directions in which it will be used are not entirely in the hands of the author(s). However, as I have argued, there is nothing in Submission that would try to resist such an appropriation. Rather, by depicting Muslim women in the film as victims with no agency, by quoting from the Qur'an selectively and only those verses that represent its autocratic voice, and by ignoring the tradition of Muslim women's efforts to forge new readings of the Qur'an appropriate for the 21st century, in fact by the whole way the film's argument is expressed, Submission lends itself easily to appropriation by the Islamophobic discourse. And Hirsi Ali herself has done nothing to check this interpretation and appropriation of her film. It should give us pause that despite her earlier work with Muslim victims of domestic violence, as a politician, Hirsi Ali has not been able to build, and in fact does not seem to be interested in building, a coalition with other Dutch Muslim women. As surveys suggest and she herself acknowledges, Hirsi Ali does not have many supporters among Muslim women in the Netherlands — most of them see Submission as a film, and Hirsi Ali as a politician, who has heightened the Islamophobia that has been on the rise in the Netherlands ever since September 11, 2001. Dutch Muslim women are women, certainly, and there is no question that Islam has been used to abuse and marginalize women, just as any other religion or ideology has, whose dogma was written and codified in an androcentric, male-dominated setting. But Dutch Muslim women are also members of the Muslim community. And heightened Islamophobia is not going to help them. When I started working on this article, I was still much intrigued by the public and political drama surrounding this film in the various European contexts where it has found an audience. There was maybe also something poignant about the circumstances of personal risk Hirsi Ali has placed herself in — seeing this articulate, young, black woman surrounded by bodyguards, and realizing that for a long time on she will be living a life of fear, hiding, and death threats. There is certainly an impulse to sympathize with her, to think there is

something wrong with this situation, that things should be different. At the same time, thinking about how the film represents Muslims, comparing Hirsi Ali's representation of the Qur'an with its readings by other Muslim feminists, and also reflecting on the too often questionable agendas which feministc arguments have been used to justify when taken up by the mainstream Western public in relation to “other” women, gives me pause. I still sympathize with Hirsi Ali deeply and think the threats against her are deplorable. But I am also saying that we need to analyze critically in what directions her work and her case — often at her own urging — are being deployed. Endnotes 1 Hirsi Ali had by then been given permanent police protection while van Gogh had rejected the same arrangement. 2 I believe that the same argument could be made concerning Hirsi Ali's more recent works, The Caged Virgin (2006) and Infidel (2007). 3 Hirsi Ali's original script has been published in The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam (pp. 141–150). 4 ‘ulama are Muslim clergy. 5 This egalitarian voice is inscribed, for instance, into Surah 33, verse 35, which emphasizes the spiritual and moral equality of men and women. 6 I would like to thank the anonymous WSIF referee whose comments on an earlier draft of this essay have considerably sharpened my reading of Susan Moller Okin's arguments, as well as my overall analysis of Submission.

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FURTHER READING

Narayan, Uma (2004). The project of feminist epistemology: Perspectives from a nonwestern feminist. In Sandra Harding (Ed.), The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies (pp. 213−224). New York: Routledge. Submission: Part 1 (2004). Dir. Theo van Gogh. Script Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The Qur'an: Translation (2005). Trans. Abdullah Jusuf Ali, 14th US ed. Elmhurst, NY: Tahrike Tarsile Qur'an.