Religion and the West

Even before imperialism and the Westernization of the Middle East, Christianity and Islam coexisted. However, it appears that it was mainly Muslim women who sparked the women’s rights movements in the Ottoman Empire, and Egypt within it, not Christian women. This contradicts the current Western view of Muslim women as a whole, as subservient women that are not active politically, allows their religion to suppress them. This is certainly not true, as previously mentioned, there are not any major women’s movements that currently exist in Egypt that are not entwined with religion, specifically Islam. This bias against Muslim women dates decades, even centuries back, and as Helena J. Kaler writes, “A problem…concerns the creation of the category, ‘Third World woman,’ who is then presumed to be oppressed and in need of salvation” (332). By this statement, Kaler means that the Western movements of feminism automatically assume that their Eastern counterparts need saving by them, instead of allowing the Eastern feminists to work within their own culture and society. The usage of the word presumed is also interesting to Kaler’s point because this presumption of the need of the “other” women that reside in what is typically called the Third World goes back even to the International Congress of Women in the early twentieth century. Although the conference existed to build bridges between the different ideologies of feminism in the West and Middle East, “Western feminists were not free from orientalist assumptions, ethnocentric attitudes, and from the belief in their own cultural superiority” (Bicer-Devici 353). So although these Western women claimed to be enlightened and wanting to better the treatment of women worldwide, they still suffered from the prejudices brought upon them by the patriarchal system they were trying to fight.

This was in the early twentieth century, but this issue still prevails in the third wave of feminism that we live in. While not attempting to delve into the history of feminism as a whole, third-wave feminism “…establishes itself upon new sensitivities to difference not only with regard to the function of sex and gender but also with regard to differences among women” (Seedat 28). This new wave aims to be as progressive and accepting as possible, but “…third-wave feminism frequently returns instead to posit white liberal ways of being woman as universal ways of being woman” (Seedat 28). This quote relates back to the influence of Western feminism on Eastern feminism because it shows that even though feminists and the feminist movement has changed a fair amount since its inception and the Congress of the early twentieth century, overall, the feminist movement is defined by white (Western) women that define being a woman based solely on their own experiences. This has not changed over the almost century since Western and Middle Eastern women activists came together for an international conference on how to better the treatment of women as a whole- not just Western white women. This new wave aims to be as progressive and accepting as possible, but still fails to improve on the ethnocentrism and cultural biases of their predecessors. Despite the Western biases against Middle Eastern feminists and their movement, and its influence on it “…the development of the Ottoman women’s movement… explains certain later developments” (Bicer-Devici 353).