WIDE WORLD OF VIOLENCE
WHILE IT IS important that we address grave human rights violations perpetrated against Muslim women, Christina Hoff Sommers’s “The Subjection of Islamic Women” (May 21) misses the point about global feminism and grassroots advocacy. While Sommers sings high praise for feminist Muslim women who are critical of their own cultures, she negates the work of feminists such as Eve Ensler and Katha Pollitt who, using the same methodology as the feminist Muslim women, call for an end to violence within their own culture and country, as well as in other parts of the world. Their work stems from a sound understanding that violence and discrimination against women and girls is universal and takes on different forms in different settings.
Sommers assumes that women are better off in the “developed” world; moreover, she asserts that the United States has something to teach women in other countries. In reality, the “developed” world can be a dangerous place for women: There is not one country in the world where women have not been raped or where they do not fear rape. In fact, every year in the United States hundreds of women are killed as a result of domestic violence. Contrasting the levels of violence in various countries does not help end violence. Within their respective spheres of journalism, activism, and the literary arts, Ensler and Pollitt have supported the grassroots efforts that are working for both the advancement and protection of women’s rights overseas, as well as between our own shores.
Instead of unjustly criticizing Ensler, Pollitt, and underresourced women’s groups, Sommers should help us address women’s inequality wherever it is (which is everywhere) and ensure that women live a life free of violence in all corners of the world.
TAINA BIEN-AIM
Executive Director, Equality Now
New York, N.Y.
CHRISTINA HOFF SOMMERS accuses me of indifference to the oppression of Muslim women and of equating such atrocities as acid attacks and stoning with U.S. evangelical promotion of abstinence-only education. In fact, I said no such thing. In the sentences Sommers quotes, my point was that, around the world, the rise of fundamentalist religion has been associated with attacks on women’s equality. To note a common thread is hardly to place such phenomena on “the same plane.”
As for my supposed indifference to Muslim women’s human rights, I have written many, many pieces in the Nation and elsewhere about the horrific assaults on women’s dignity, freedom, and lives carried out under the banner of Islam–including the case Sommers mentions of a Nigerian sharia court condemning a supposed “adulteress” to death by stoning.
Just two weeks ago I wrote about “honor” killing and other assaults on Iraqi women. So far as I know, my New York Times Magazine interview with members of RAWA, the Afghan feminist organization that made the Taliban execution video Sommers mentions, was the first in a mainstream publication. For over a decade, in my column and elsewhere, I have raised money and awareness for Muslim feminist and human-rights organizations, including RAWA, Baobab, OWFI, Women Living under Muslim Laws, and Women for Afghan Women, on whose board I sit–and for Equality Now, a group I have supported for years and which Sommers mentions approvingly.
I would be happy to compare my record of support for Muslim women’s human rights with that of Sommers any day.
KATHA POLLITT
New York, N.Y.
CHRISTINA HOFF SOMMERS RESPONDS: Taina Bien-Aimé argues that because rape and other forms of violence against women exist in all countries, including the United States, there is no point to comparing violence between American and other Western societies and Muslim societies. She evidently sees no difference between societies where such violence may be common, socially sanctioned, and even ceremonial and those where it is exceptional, the occasion of widespread revulsion, and severely punished. In these and many other respects, the condition of women in America is fundamentally different from that of women in countries like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Somalia, and Iran. Muslim women are not averting their eyes from these differences: They are emphasizing them, making them central to their campaigns for political and social reform. It is a pity that many American feminists are too confused or self-absorbed to help; Bien-Aimé’s letter is another exhibit for my article’s thesis.
Katha Pollitt is able to draw fine distinctions–as between a “common thread” and the “same plane”–but she is as intent as Bien-Aimé on throwing a veil over urgent moral distinctions. It is she, not I, who conjoins Muslim stonings and acid attacks with the proselytizing of U.S. evangelicals; this connection is made in the opening chapter of the book Nothing Sacred, whose introduction Pollitt wrote and whose subtitle, “Women Respond to Religious Fundamentalism and Terror,” makes the same pithy point. And it is she who emphasizes the “common thread of misogyny that connects” the Taliban and the Christian Coalition. I am baffled that she is so defensive about a proposition that has been central to her writing for many years.
Pollitt concludes by citing her many philanthropies devoted to improving the lot of Muslim women. But what are these groups? One of them, RAWA, which stands for Revolutionary Women of Afghanistan, is described in Nothing Sacred as “a small Maoist organization.” Another, OWFI–Organization for Women’s Freedom in Iraq–is described by its president (in a 2005 interview with the British Workers’ Liberty) as part of a larger movement for “extending the agenda of worker-communism by reaching out to people who do not recognize themselves as worker-communists.” Before emulating Pollitt’s style of aiding Muslim women by supporting OWFI, one would want to know what that’s all about.
I predict that Western liberalism and individualism, with all their flaws, will prove far more attractive to Muslim women than Maoism, worker-communism, anti-Americanism, or violence-is-everywhere obliviousness. And I am confident that they will prove far more effective in achieving the legal rights and social status that Muslim women are seeking. As the drama of Islamic feminism unfolds, I will be happy to compare the record of my predictions with those of Taina Bien-Aimé and Katha Pollitt any day.
