Suspicion of Muslim women has returned to western scholarship

Too many in the West appear incapable of viewing Muslim women as anything other than submissive. But in an age of extremism, writes Rafia Zakaria, a new category has been created by academics: the subversive

Syed Farook, who killed 14 people at a party organised by his employer in San Bernardino, and his wife Tashfeen Malik are captured on CCTV as they pass through Chicago’s O’Hare airport in 2014. US Customs and Border Protection / AFP Photo
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Once upon a time, the central project of the western world, as it concerned Muslim women, was to “save” them. In those days not long past, the Muslim woman was imagined as an eternal captive to her culture and faith, submissive and exotic and quietly awaiting rescue.

In more recent days, as the fear of terrorism has replaced nearly all other orientations, the West is faced with a troubling dilemma. Should the terror paradigm that imagines all Muslims as potential terrorists also be applied to Muslim women?

For those who respond in the affirmative, the shadow of the previous paradigm so avidly directed at saving Muslim women from Muslim men is a problem. The submissive and the subversive, after all, cannot be easily reconciled; a choice must be made and it is likely to be a difficult one.

Among those who have decided that Muslim women must be considered worthy of suspicion rather than pity are a determined and growing gaggle of terrorism experts who have made female jihadists the subject of their self-avowed expertise.

If the orientalist paradigm of old deftly highlighted the “brutish” nature of Muslim men by underscoring the unparalleled misery of Muslim women, the emerging terror paradigm slyly aims to highlight the inherently violent proclivities of Islam and hence all Muslims, male and female. Just like the orientalists of old created purportedly objective frameworks to present the “truth” of their premise, similar frameworks are being constructed to highlight the threat of the now subversive Muslim woman.

“Cruel Intentions: Female Jihadists in America” is the title of one recent report that is part of the discursive project of proving that Muslim women are not submissive but subversive.

Its author, Audrey Alexander, eagerly tells readers that previous beliefs in Muslim women’s lack of agency are “historic distortions” that have led contemporary research to “overlook or diminish” their potential for subversion. Not to worry, however. Ms Alexander, who is a research fellow at George Washington University’s “Program on Extremism”, is about to set us all straight.

Except “straight” is the opposite of the content and method in “Cruel Intentions”, released last month, and duly featured on the Washington Post’s Lawfare blog as an offering to the policymakers of the incoming administration. Dizzying and circuitous, Ms Alexander’s argument jumps and hops, makes wild and unsubstantiated claims, all of which come together as a stultifying example of the conquest of American academia (which funds such research) by American fear.

Take for instance the words Ms Alexander uses to underscore just how big the threat of female jihadists is, including “notable uptick”, “increase,” “wave” and “ever-expanding”. Their collective meaning, however, is not held up by Alexander’s own data, which comprises 25 cases that have emerged in the five-year period between 2011 and 2016. In the executive summary to the report, Ms Alexander duplicitously describes this number, which includes at least five women not even convicted of a terror crime, as a “wealth of data”.

That is not all; Ms Alexander begins her report with a discussion of Tashfeen Malik, the wife of Syed Farook, the American responsible for last year’s massacre in San Bernardino, California.

Here she devotes a handful of words to note that “the FBI’s most recent report has not yet determined a direct link to ISIS”. For the remainder of the report, she chooses to forget this crucial fact, whose obvious interpretation suggests that Malik may not have been a jihadist at all.

In subsequent sections, Alexander handily conjures a typology that classifies female jihadists into one of three categories: plotters, supporters and travellers. Malik, whose link to jihad is unestablished, is a “plotter”. The other two female plotters included in Ms Alexander’s typology also do not belong: Noelle Velentzas and Asia Siddiqui were both charged in New York in 2015 over an alleged bomb plot, but the case has not yet delivered a verdict.

In any other field of research, a typology collapses if there is no data for its central category; in the whimsical and fanciful world of terror analysts, however, these rules of inquiry seemingly do not apply.

There are numerous other holes in Ms Alexander’s report; its cumulative contribution is the development of an arbitrary typology that casts a wide net and can include just about anyone. As she says herself of the “supporter” category, it has “a low threshold of participation”, sometimes amounting to nothing more than social media activity.

The import of this can be missed by those within and beyond the United States who are not aware of the already hawkish interpretation adopted by US courts of the material support for terrorism statute. Recent court decisions have held that even accidental dissemination of material without any knowledge of its content, or intent of actual material support, is sufficient for a conviction. What Ms Alexander wants is an even more draconian interpretation, one in which an accidental like or share on social media, or a Facebook friend of a friend involved in jihadist activity, can lead to a decades-long prison sentence.

It is no revelation that colonialism relied on its own epistemology, theories of knowledge that painted the brown and black peoples of the world as inferior, requiring civilisation and taming by enlightened and ever-benevolent Westerners.

In that era, locating Muslim women as suffering bore the advantage of presenting Muslim men as not simply racially and intellectually inferior but also morally flawed, unable to respect their own. Since colonialism’s field of operation was over there, instead of at home, this justified intervention.

In the age of terror, the battle is at home and this old paradigm yields no strategic dividends. Western Muslim women’s visible expressions of agency, manifested via their demands to decide for themselves how they wish to practice their faith or whether or not they wish to veil, require a new paradigm that justifies their exclusion, ostracism and even imprisonment. The emerging “research”, much of which consists of similarly flimsy and poorly articulated exhortations pointing to their secret subversion, does just that.

Curbs on the civil liberties of Muslim women can thus be easily justified, their treatment as suspects now a required precaution enacted to save society from their nefarious proclivities.

In “Cruel Intentions”, Audrey Alexander recognises that a reimagining of the Muslim woman, her transition from pitiable submissive to suspicious subversive, poses a challenge. Allotting too much agency to Muslim women threatens to dislodge the enduring arrangement of western feminism, for whom Muslim women have always been lesser sisters.

Ms Alexander devises a clever solution: female jihadists are no rebels; it is instead their propensity for “nurturing and sustenance” that is crucial to their diabolical ability to dupe. The kindly Muslim mother, the shy Muslim wife and probably any Muslim woman can easily, effortlessly “transcend” such roles, morphing into the violent, ruthless and extremely dangerous female jihadist.

In the guise of a research report, a tempting logic of widespread suspicion is thus offered up to Westerners who care to consider it, one that dictates that Muslim women are all in possession of cruel intentions, each of them secretly marching toward armed jihad, guilty or not yet guilty – but certainly never innocent.

Rafia Zakaria is the author of The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan