Liberal Feminism, Muslim Women, and the Pope

Cyra Akila Choudhury has posted a very interesting paper on SSRN entitled:  "Empowerment or Estrangement?  Liberal Feminism's Visions of the "Progress" of Muslim Women."

I haven't read it all yet, but the introduction sets forth her concern about the current feminist discourse about how to "help" Muslim women.  In this discourse, she writes

. . . there is an expectation that Muslims, particularly women, will eventually value the same rights and social orderings as those of their benefactors in the West.  Yet when Muslim women consistently articulate a different vision for themselves, it is a source of concern and puzzlement that can only be resolved through judgments about the 'progress' of thier consciousness, education, and/or experience relative to 'Western' women.  This article seeks to challenge those judgments.  To do so, I examine the Liberal theoretical underpinnings of these scholarly and activist projects to reveal how they advance a particular idea of human flourishing that seeks to ultimately 'reform' or extinguish those life forms (including traditional Islam) which do not comport with it.

In the first section of the article, I examine how Liberalism's justification for colonialism has been sublimated in Liberal (legal) feminism which subconsciously continues traditional Liberal political theory's judgments about the "East."  I suggest that most Liberal feminists also have a specific idea of women's flourishing that prevents it from fully comprehending Muslim women who choose to adhere to Islam, which is, in their view, a hopelessly patriarchal and gender oppressive religions.  Liberal notions of flourishing require progress towards a Liberal society.  As such, "reform" is used to further this vision.  I argue that Liberal feminism also shares this 'narrative progress' that reduces non-Liberal societies to "developing" and, consequently, global southern women to victims.

Yet, many women in the global south reject this characterization of their existence.  In the second part of the article, I offer some examples of Muslim women's visions of flourishing that show both overlap with Liberal values and, more importantly, divergence.  I propose that Muslim women's adherence to religion must be accepted as legitimate expressions of flourishing even if we, as Western feminists, are skeptical about the freedom of their choice.  I urge feminists who have continued to be extremely incredulous about Muslim women's choices to live according to Islam, to re-evaluate and see these women as exerting power in their own lives.

It struck me reading this that Choudhury is engaged in precisely the type of work that Pope Benedict is challenging us all to engage in -- broadening the discussion about how to engage modernity from the largely Western concerns about secular vs. Christian viewpoints to include the rest of the world.  That was certainly one of the major thrusts of his Regensburg address.  He also urged that same larger focus in one of the most interesting books I read the past year, the dialogue between Jurgen Habermas and then-Cardinal Ratzinger, reprinted in Dialectics of Secularization:  On Reason and Religion.  In that book, Ratzinger wrote:

. . . although the two great cultures of the West, that is, the culture of the Christian faith and that of secular rationality, are an important contributory factor (each in its own way) throughout the world and in all cultures, nevertheless they are de facto not universal.   This means that the question put by Jurgen Habermas' colleague in Teheran seems to be not devoid of significance -- namely, the question of whether a comparative study of cultures and the sociology of religion suggest that Europan secularization is an exceptional development and one that needs to be corrected. . . .

At any rate, it is a fact that our secular rationality may seem very obvious to our reason, which has been formed in the West; but qua rationality, it comes up against its limitations when it attempts to demonstrate itself.  The proof for it is in reality linked to specific cultural contexts, and it must acknowledge that it cannot as such be reproduced in the whole of mankind.  This also means that it cannot be completely operative in the whole of mankind.  In other words, the rational or ethical or religious formula that would embrace the whole world and unite all persons does not exist; or, at least, it is unattainable at the present moment.  This is why the so-called 'world ethos' remains an abstraction.

And, yes, this does mean that Ratzinger has to conclude, as he does in this same talk:

The natural law has remained (especially in the Catholic Church) the key issue in dialogues with the secular society and with other communities of faith in order to appeal to the reason we share in common and to seek the basis for a consensus about the ethical principles of law in a secular, pluralistic society.  Unfortunately, this instrument has become blunt.

Interesting challenges.  It's very exciting to see them being approached from the non-Christian perspective.