International Perspectives on Gender
Week 13:
Gender and Religious Fundamentalism
Introduction
Aims: introduce the concept and practice of religious fundamentalism and take a look at some
of the gender issues it raises.
look at the rise of Hindu nationalism, the role of gender within it and the debate about
whether this is a form of religious fundamentalism
introduce our next topic, gender and Islam
1.
What is Religious Fundamentalism?
Gita Sahgal and Nira Yuval-Davis: all fundamentalist religious movements:
a) claim theirs is the only true version of the religion
-
orthodox (maintaining tradition)
revivalist (returning to the ‘truth’)
b) use political means to impose their version on all members of the religion
- attempts to merge religion and state
c) are patriarchal
Islam has no monopoly on fundamentalism - fundamentalist movements in Christianity,
Hinduism and Judaism can be readily identified.
2.
Gender and Religious Fundamentalism
Fundamentalist movements are patriarchal and seek to control women and maintain the
patriarchal family
Women’s bodies become a key site for the articulation of religious fundamentalism.
Examples from Israel in 2011-12:
Haradim, ultra-orthodox Jewish sect, claiming that Jewish religious teachings demand modest
dress, segregation of men and women in public, prohibition on women singing.
Opponents claiming that Haredi trying to ‘erase’ women from public life.
Haredi actions:
pressure on advertisers not to use women on billboards
Gender segregation in shop queues, ‘women at the back’ on buses
Long sleeves dress code for women workers, Haredi or not
Boycott of women singing
No women on the stage at awards ceremony
Resistance:
Women should be seen and heard photos
Female ‘singalongs’
3.
The Rise of the Hindu Right in India
BJP, the Bharatiya Janata Party and affiliated organizations.
-
a)
formed government 1998-2004
lost election to Congress in 2004
further loss of seats in 2009 election
Ayodyha – in December 1992 a Muslim mosque at Ayodyha was destroyed and
communal violence followed
Hindu belief that Ayodyha was the birthplace of Lord Ram (the seventh incarnation of
Vishnu) and that the mosque was built on top of a temple to Ram destroyed in medieval
times.
Mobilization in late 1980s by Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) culminating in destruction
of mosque on 6 December 1992.
b)
Right-wing mobilization against Deepa Mehta’s 1998 film Fire
c)
Gujerati rights, sparked by burning alive of 50 Hindu pilgrims in a train, saw over 1000
people killed
Discourse of Hindutva:
history is 1000 years of struggle between an indigenous Hindu
people and Muslim invaders and rulers (the Moghuls).
Post-independence appeasement of minority groups by Congress
has perpetuated oppression of Hindus.
A Hindu state (rashtra) must be established in India
But there are 154 million Muslim people in India, 13% of the
population.
After independence Nehruvian nationalism dominated and militant Hindu nationalism went
underground.
Economic crises of 1980s provided conditions for re-emergence of Hindu nationalism
4.
-
defined in opposition to Islam: Muslims are represented as the ‘other’ and blamed for
all ills in society
-
Shiv Sena in Bombay claiming Muslims were hogging jobs and opportunities
-
whipping up fear of Muslim population growth
Communalism or Fundamentalism?
Is the rise of the Hindu right religious fundamentalism or Communalism?
Ratna Kapur and Brenda Cossman: Communalism is the discourse that
-
a group following a particular religion have common social, political and economic
interests
-
the most important difference between people is that of religious belief and the world
is based on conflict between religious groups.
Arguments against Hindu nationalism as religious fundamentalism:
a) It’s not obsessed with controlling Hindu women’s sexuality and fertility and supports
the economic independence of women where expedient;
b) It’s not based on scripture or led by religious leaders;
c) It sees its main enemies as internal (Indian Muslims) not as the West;
d) It has no coherent strategy for government, no agenda to make the law follow
religious codes.
e) It understands itself as the direct opposite of fundamentalism, which it associates with
Muslims.
Arguments for Hindu nationalism as religious fundamentalism:
a) A preoccupation with and anxiety about moral corruption, especially by and from the
west;
b) Dissemination of patriarchal ideas about how women and men should behave. Eg
this advice to a wife being beaten by her husband: ‘The wife should think that she is
paying her debt of her previous life and thus her sins are being destroyed and she is
becoming pure’ (Ramsukhdas, cited in Basu, 1998, p. 175).
c) The claims of the BJP for a Hindu nation-state and the representation of Indian
Muslims as anti-national;
d) The use of gendered images of Hindu motherhood to symbolize the movement and
the negative representation of ‘enemy’ women. In 1992 13 Muslim women in
Gujerat were gang-raped, led by a BJP politician, an atrocity that BJP women were
conspicuous in their silence about;
e) A critique of western feminist ideals as imperialist and destructive of the family.
Pro Hindu:
http://www.hinduunity.org
Pro Muslim: http://sunninews.wordpress.com
5.
Gender and Hindutva
a)
Patriarchal controls over women;
http://www.bjp.org
http://anindianmuslim.com
b)
Positive gendered representations of Hinduism in relation to negative gendered
representations of Islam.
c)
Recognizing the active participation of many Hindu women in the Hindutva movement.
Sadhvi Rithambara and Uma Bharati are prominent female leaders of Hindutva.
Participation of Hindu women in violence undermines assumptions that women are
‘natural’ pacifists or refuse to engage in violence as recognise have most to lose (‘social’
pacifists)
Explaining women’s prominence:
Offers women a legitimate, if limited, space in the public sphere, an escape from
domestic drudgery and hardship?
Women re-enact their private roles in the public arena?
Seek new rights?
6.
Gender and Islam: An Introduction
Map of the world: Islam concentrated in North Africa, Middle East and parts of Asia but
significant minorities elsewhere.
The Prophet of Islam is Mohammed, the holy book is the Qur'an.
Key Questions:
Does Islam oppress women or does it empower them?
Is the hijab (‘veil’) an impingement on women’s freedom or does it
protect them?
It’s crucial not to generalise across all Islamic countries. Disaggregation is essential.
Islamic fundamentalism
A revival of the Islamic religion along strict patriarchal lines
Dates from the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and the overthrow of the Shah.
Characterised by conflict between fundamentalists and modernisers about merging of religion
and state
Turkey - still secular but in struggle
Afghanistan - fundamentalist Taliban-ruled government, overthrown following western invasion
Perceptions of Gender and Islam
Generally homogeneous and negative.
Haleh Afshar describes the: ‘imaginative and misleading literature... that in the past century has
been presented in the West in lieu of research’ (p. 3).
Afshar criticises the representations of Muslim women as ‘backward’, passive, unsuitable for
emancipation in some Western feminist writing
Moghissi argues that the gaze of the West on Islam has been both inferiorizing – women’s
subordination taken as symptomatic of the degeneracy of the whole – and imbued with European
male sexual fantasies.
Lord Cromer: condemned women’s treatment in Egypt
Founder member and one-time President of the Men’s League for Opposing
Women’s Suffrage in the UK
Afshar:
Muslim women have for too long been the known about, not the knowers.