- Article Written By Arvin Niknia, Independent Author
Unlike Western democracies, the United States does not support a specific religion, and everyone can be American, but everyone cannot be Danes, Germans, or Austrians. Voting is also mandatory in four European countries, such as Belgium. This is why the USA has the best democracy in the world.
Democracy in the US is also more decentralized; however, Americans have failed to fully uphold basic democratic principles, such as assisting those experiencing poverty, unlike the success seen in the West. It is important to note that socialism alone does not ensure a better quality of life, as evidenced by Italy under Benito Mussolini (1883–1945). The results of states fusing democracy with ideologies might differ significantly. Each political system, capitalism in the USA and socialism in the West, has pros and cons of its own. Elon Musk, for example, probably would not have become the richest man in the world if he had decided to pursue his ventures in Europe instead of the United States. Socialism places restrictions on the West, including high taxes, close supervision, and restricted bank lending.
In the USA, capitalism created high competitiveness, development, and opportunities, while the weak in society were forgotten. In the Middle East, authoritarian states chose to follow their project and ideology. Iran chose to follow its ideology regardless of cost or human life. Authoritarian states in the Middle East violated human rights and conventions in favor of their state projects. In the West and the USA, politicians chose populism; they chose what they wanted to show and what they did not want to show and formed a fictitious truth.
The democracy inherited by the Middle East from the British proved short-lived due to several factors: high centralization, declining oil prices, the specter of communism, extensive state control, limited competitiveness, and a dearth of industrialization. Additionally, cultural challenges and escalating internal conflicts exacerbated the situation. For instance, Egypt fostered guerrilla fighters against Iran during Gamal Abdel Nasser’s reign, Arab nations grappled with tensions with Israel, and there existed strained relations between Egypt and Saudi Arabia, among other issues. Furthermore, the former Soviet Union bolstered militant movements in Palestine. It provided education to numerous African and Middle Eastern leaders, including Mahmoud Abbas, through institutions such as Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow.
Communism had already mixed with Islamism against American imperialism. These trained militants played a major role in the Iranian revolution. Authoritarian states like China showed that even if democracy does not exist, a state can still achieve high economic success if the focus is on the economy, tourism, and development rather than religion and create instability like Iran. Today, China is many years ahead of Europe. They live in the future.
Moreover, Pakistan is involved in economic initiatives like the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). In the future, China is probably going to be free of Indian rule, especially with regard to the Strait of Malacca. Even though China is the world’s biggest producer of grains and welfare is rising, it is expected that in the future, population decreases will cause efficiency problems for China just as they did for Japan. Similar to this, investments in tourism are being made by other autocratic nations like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, as demonstrated by initiatives like Oblisco Capitale. This change is explained by the expectation that oil will become less significant in the future.
In this article, I will write about feminism. Feminism is of Western origin, and the West inspires feminism in the Middle East. Like the word ideology, feminism has its roots in France. Even Islamic feminism is inspired by other feminisms, which in turn have roots in the Western world. Islamism blocked feminism in the Middle East because they would not accept female equality. Unlike the West, feminism was created by authoritarian states in the Middle East.
As said before, authoritarian states currently have a project, and in the beginning, almost all authoritarian states in the Middle East had a modernization project. The women had to be involved in this project; therefore, state feminism was created by the state. In the West, the women themselves fought for the right to vote and equality, and it did not come from the states. The same thing happened in Israel, where socialism and equality came from the people themselves, in contrast to Egypt, where they came from the state as a project. It turned out that all the countries that forced their people to embrace socialism, equality, and modernity lost the battle because they did not have enough popular support. On the other side, cultural barriers and Islam stood in the way. Of course, Islamism was cracked down on in almost every Middle Eastern country except Iran, but it still did not help the problem of the problem existing in the very fabric of society. For example, women experience bargains at work. Patriarchal bargains are not timeless or immutable entities but are susceptible to historical transformations that open up new areas of struggle and renegotiation of the relations between genders.
Different from the Western powers, authoritarian states did not touch patriarchal culture. In the West, the states broke the micro-patriarchal culture that existed in families. It meant that the father, or the oldest man in the family, could no longer decide. The West did this by introducing legislation to punish men. It gave macro-masculinity, which is the state itself, more power and authority (centralization of power). In the long run, it created more anxiety among men in society because men are constantly afraid to approach women or show hyper-masculinity.
In the Middle East, the states were not interested in interfering in the micro-patriarchal part because the states were not really interested in equality but were only focused on their projects. In other ways, the state had less responsibility in relation to women because most problems were solved in families, even by the oldest men in the family, and the state did not have to interfere.
Moreover, as denoted before, people in the Middle East are nationalists, and nationalism itself strengthens the patriarchal society. Both nationalism and Islamism, which were used against imperialism and colonialism in themselves, limited the women in the Middle East to practicing feminism. As I mentioned earlier, women in the Middle East also had less interest in feminism because of the traditional society that is still prevalent in the region. There are not really any female historians who have written about how women lived in the old days. Al-Sakhawi (1428–1497) was the first to write about women. Most sources are cultural misinterpretations written by European men and women who lived in the Middle East.
The nationalist project both initiated women’s access to modernity and set the limits of desirable modernity for women. Women needed to be modern, but they could not make a complete break from tradition. The woman of the anticolonial nationalist imagination, then, was not necessarily a “traditional” woman. She was more likely the “modern-yet-modest” woman who both symbolized the nation and negotiated its tension between tradition and modernity. For women, nationalist projects have often entailed a transition from “private patriarchy,” where women are under the patriarchal control of individual heads of families, to “public patriarchy,” where they experience the patriarchal control of an ethnic collectivity or a larger community of men. The nationalist construct of “women,” therefore, produces an anomalous experience of nationhood for women.
The Western feminist women who had a global approach had a great desire to save their sisters in the Middle East. Virginia Woolf (1938) says, “As a woman, I have no country. As a woman, I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.” The clash between imperialism and nationalism finally exposed the limits of international sisterhood. Despite their claims of solidarity with “Eastern” women on the basis of common oppression, Western feminists rarely considered themselves to be equally oppressed. Nor did they question the conviction that” Eastern” women needed their guidance. Between patriarchy and imperialism, subject‐constitution and object‐formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into a pristine nothingness but into a violent shuttling, which is the displaced figuration of the ‘third‐world woman’ caught between tradition and modernization”.
Inversely, women in the Middle East could not really use the feminist theories of Western women because they did not deal with black or Muslim women. Conceptualizing “epistemic violence” as integral to Western knowledge production, Spivak demonstrated how the discursive production of the subaltern, particularly the poor “third world woman,” silenced women of the global south. Under the guise of giving voice to the oppressed, Western academics and activists like Spivak suggested that every attempt to represent the subaltern woman was a way of asserting the West’s superiority over the non-West. “The white woman will save the brown woman from the brown man! Alternatively, the white man will save the brown woman from the brown man.”
Patriarchy is popular in the Middle East not for religious reasons but because families retain their wealth and self-determination. This is contrary to what the West believes about the Middle East and labels them as religious and unmodern. The veil and the’ harem’ have always been associated with Arab women and their oppression. In colonialist fiction, ethnographic writings, and orientalist paintings, the’ harem’ has always been used as a means of evoking every possible venue of erotic fantasy. It says in the Koran that women must cover themselves, but it says nothing about veils. Authoritarian states create veils to resist Western culture.
Many connect haram to the Bedouins and Muhammad, but that is not true because Muhammad learned it from other civilizations. We must not forget that Europeans cultivated male dominance in the Middle East. Lord Cromer (1841–1917) in Egypt cultivated discrimination against women “ The British Victorian male culture”.
Furthermore, discrimination against women in the Middle East was reinforced by Christianity and the Christian colonial powers. Therefore, it is not only Islam that is responsible for misogyny. The Assyrian civilization was perhaps among the first civilizations to practice patriarchy. The man owned the woman and the children. Islam is just a copy of other books and traditions. In the Bedouin culture, patriarchy was not found quite like in other cultures. The man had no obligations, and the woman had the child. The child grew up with the woman’s relatives. It all changed when Islam was born over time.
Also, the Massagetai people had a queen, “Tomyris,” and did not practice patriarchalism. Perhaps the civilizations that did not cultivate it came under the civilizations that cultivated it. It became culturally widespread in the world, and later, it was reinforced by religion and colonialism. Islam destroyed many civilizations, and many civilizations were inspired by Greek and Assyrian culture. Even Persian culture was influenced by both, and vice versa.
Certainly, all feminists helped women out of patriarchy. Both secular and Islamic feminists fought for women. Islamic feminists fell into the fight because they tried to create freedom within the Quranic framework itself by reformulating it and saying that men wrote it. You cannot change God’s word if you call yourself Islamic, and you cannot change the Quran. Therefore, feminists such as Saba Mahmood (1961–2018) were criticized for their idea of resistance to freedom within frameworks. This battle is nothing new and has been going on since the death of Muhammad.
On the other hand, the Egyptian feminist Qasim Amin (1863–1908) was wrong when he believed that Egyptian women should be like Western women and live like them. He supported the colonial view with his recklessness. For Amin and the colonials, the patriarchal view of women was more important than the women’s view. Instead of letting the woman decide for herself, the woman had to either wear clothes and a veil or expose herself in front of the man to be a modern woman. Unfortunately, neither the Western view nor the Islamic view succeeded in liberating the woman, but the woman became a product in the larger political context.
Arab feminism suffers from a double struggle: internally against the old religious, social, and economic order and externally against European colonization. Asserting a new national identity meant drawing on the very model they were resisting: the Europeans.
