The Subaltern of Your Dreams, and Mine: Egyptian Women in Tahrir Square

Over on facebook, Leil Zahra-Mortada has collected an album of photographs of women protesting in Cairo over the past weeks. Here are a few particularly striking ones:

My first impulse, after I broke out in tears, was to think about theories of subjectivity and the challenge of Berkeley anthropologist Saba Mahmood to feminist notions of agency in her book Politics of Piety. Mahmood had studied women who participated in the Islamic revivalist mosque movement in Egypt and focused on how they ethically "trained" their bodies and sensibilities to meet the demands of Islamic norms. In so doing, and building on the work of Talal Asad, she questioned the understanding of "agency" as a reflection of a subject's conscious will and desire. Instead, it was possible for women to express agency even in the very act of following norms that Western feminism would deem oppressive and patriarchal. This, of course, set her on a collision path with those feminists who allied themselves with neo-conservative imperialism in order to "liberate" the women of Afghanistan, Iran and the wider Middle East. In a 2008 essay entitled "Feminism, Democracy and Empire," Mahmood refuses to allow Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Azar Nafisi and Irshad Manji to serve as spokeswomen for all Muslim women. Why not listen, instead, to the myriad women's movements and organisations, across the political and religious spectrum, in the Muslim world?

The Revolution in Egypt, and especially the photographs above, have shown to whoever cared to listen that Muslim women can make their voices heard alongside with men, demand those same political and social rights that supposedly belong to the Western "liberal" tradition, and scream, cry, bleed and die for them. Of course, Ayaan Hirsi Ali doesn't care to listen. In a recent op-ed, written while Mubarak's security apparatus was still beating people to a pulp in the streets of Cairo, she worried about the Muslim Brotherhood's hypothetical takeover. Bemoaning the supposed weakness of the "secular democratic forces," she paints a dark scenario based, it appears, on some turgid autobiographical stories from when she was 15. It is assumed throughout, based on her previous books, that one of the bad things about the coming reign of Sharia will be women's oppression.

And then it hit me: what all these critics, from Ayaan Hirsi Ali to Glenn Beck to French legislators banning the veil, have done is to effectively de-humanise the majority of Muslim women. Any woman who wears a scarf and/or niqab, who bears the outward signs of the patriarchal oppression that lies beneath, cannot be heard in her own voice. Look again at those photos. Those women, caught in a snapshot of anger or passion, are not calculating their own future status under the Muslim Brotherhood, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali does for them while safely ensconced in the US. They are not theorizing how conservative or liberal they are, or how much agency they get. They stand side by side with women in jeans, T-shirts and fashionable scarves. Because what they're wearing doesn't matter, even their being women qua women ceases to matter for the moment. They are demanding Mubarak leave and the country see free elections. Subalterns do speak, and when they do they may not be the subaltern of your dreams, or mine. They don't say, "Freedom, but as long as what comes next isn't too Islamic, in which case we should just stay put." They say, "Freedom. Now."
So these are not Ayaan Hirsi Ali's subalterns. But they aren't Saba Mahmood's either. At this moment, they're not out in the streets to challenge Western norms from an Islamic perspective. They're not questioning Western secularism or ethically training themselves for modesty. They want to topple the dictator, vote in elections, and live a better life. Egyptian women, Muslim women, Arab women, all different kinds of women, do not belong to theories and models, even those put forth by women in the West like Saba Mahmood or Ayaan Hirsi Ali. They belong to themselves, and all we can do is try and listen.

To her credit, Hirsi Ali (unlike Beck, for example) does seem to support the Revolution and is more concerned with the future. Rightly so, it must be said. But it still begs the question why she is writing against a hypothetical oppression and not against a real one that has gone on for 30 years. Why has she not worked tirelessly against the Mubarak regime and other corrupt Middle Eastern dictatorships, and written books about the struggle of women's organisations in Egypt instead of shock-value memoirs about general Islamic oppression? What better example for her promotion of "Enlightenment values" to the Islamic world than women standing up for the right to vote? The hollowness of this kind of politics is here revealed. Because when the Revolution is made by women wearing niqabs and Muslim Brothers as well as by Western youths, it's something to worry about and not celebrate.

It's become sadly the norm to say that Egypt and other Arab countries aren't ready for democracy because of their backwardness (including their "treatment of women"). Even the writer of this article, which otherwise highlights the role of women as active participants in the protests, is most impressed by the fact that she wasn't groped! All the men were, you see, too busy making a Revolution.

Identity versus Subjectivity

The realisation that "we all have multiple identities" at some point in one's scholarly and personal development promises a lot but delivers little. Faced with a global political context in which serious cases of violence and inequality operate along the axis of "identity," and in which exclusivist claims acquire the negative epithet of "identity politics," a recourse to a more indeterminate notion of the self can point the way "out" to a more tolerant, pluralist and cosmopolitan path. Unfortunately, several unhelpful conflations between terms are thrown up in the process, obscuring the dynamics of the lived experience of recognition.

One distinction has been helpfully framed by Dipesh Chakrabarty as identity vs. identification. His critique of Amartya Sen's Identity and Violence shows that the assumption that recognising "multiple, contextual identities" can prevent sectarian violence is misguided because what counts is, in fact, "the external and surface signs by which I or others might identify myself as a member of a particular group: my skull cap, my turban, my beard, my name, my clothes, my circumcised or uncircumcised penis." Thus, during the Gujarat riots Muslims would conceal their real names, and Hindu shopkeepers would take care to paint images of Hindu gods on their storefronts to avoid being targeted. While the "complex sense of identity" that marked their "normal everyday life" did not disappear, it became less relevant than the largely symbolic conventions of identification.
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/section?content=a918280932&fulltext=713240928 [in South Asian History and Culture, Vol. 1, Issue 1 (January 2010): 149-154]

Chakrabarty's argument is welcome, but it understates the particularised nature of the identity discussion itself. When we speak of identity, we have been led to speak exclusively of an elective affinity. I am Indian because I say I am, but I am also a Sikh, schoolteacher, city-dweller, parent, and so on. In fact, only some of these "identities" merit the name. Whether we like it or not, there is something immutable about identity that all the multi-culti well-wishing in the world cannot make go away. Chakrabarty and Sen would both refuse to acknowledge the dark secret that what makes a Muslim a Muslim, much like what made a Jew a Jew, is not just an uncircumcised penis as a "sign" or an assumption of the name. An entire history, place-based and kinship-based, made one known as a Muslim or Jew. Escaping this complex of material and symbolic factors entails either a radical and never-quite-possible displacement (moving far away where one's new neighbours don't know you or your relatives, and carry no prejudices to boot), or a multi-generational process of re-signification. Of course I am not claiming that identities are stable, and that people take on the attributes of the natural communities into which they are born. But moving from one identity to another is hard work in the real world, and may never be complete. Presumed alterities (being a Jew or Muslim "within" the "body of a nation"), once configured, persist through time.

Moments of crisis like 1947, 1984 or 2002 expose the impossibility of simply assuming the identity one likes. A Muslim hacked to death cannot appeal to "also being a schoolteacher and a father" to save his life. This is Chakrabarty's point. But my explanation for this phenomenon would be that "schoolteacher" is less of an identity than a subjectivity. Most of the categories by which we identify ourselves and recognise others share the common characteristic of being more amenable to being "worked on." I make myself, rather than am, a schoolteacher -- through repetition of certain meaning-making activities. To an extent, this is Foucault's point about categories like "homosexual" (the result of distinct ethical projects), and it can be applied to religion (Saba Mahmood thinks Muslim-ness works this way, through cultivation of the self). I am not claiming that identity and subjectivity are hermetically sealed concepts; they do lie on a continuum and sometimes a category can fall under one or the other. But I do maintain that those categories which are the least malleable and the more susceptible to being "coded" in the signs of identification proposed by Chakrabarty should be seen as more identity than subjectivity. This also means that, for a pluralistic and tolerant future, we need to start thinking in general about subjectivity more than about identity.

In my own case, my identity can be approximated as something like, a Romanian (with some mixed ancestry) child of professionals from Bucharest. This can be dispelled only with great difficulty. My name, my life history, and my education all conspire against easy adoption of other identities -- American, Indian, rural (should I choose to live in a village), labouring (should I choose to start working with my hands). However, being a graduate student, an intellectual, someone interested in Indian history -- all these things are subjectivities, which I carefully work on every day. They are less open to being challenged, but also less politically powerful. When I am concerned with the security and mobility of my person, nationality and class background come into play. This is partly why I would prefer to bypass the reduction of debates about forms of being and belonging to the terrain of identity, and to refuse both its privileges and challenges.