Muslim Women and the « Right to Freely Choose »
Are Muslim women veiling out of choice or is this form of dress a dark sign of coercion by patriarchal families, religious traditions, or authoritarian states ? Should women be allowed to choose what they wear or do states that want to protect individual freedom, secular values, or the security of others have the right to legislate what women can and cannot wear ? Yet choice is also regularly deployed as a key symbol in the culture wars that pit the freedoms of the liberated West against the oppressions suffered by « the Muslimwoman » (in Miriam Cooke’s 2007 felicitous phrasing) to justify everything from border control and immigrant policing to military invasions and development projects. This article examines the value of « freely choosing » that is enshrined in the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women to argue, both on theoretical grounds and in light of the everyday dilemmas of women in one Egyptian village in which I have worked for over twenty years, that this ideal rests on a false confidence that one can know when a choice is freely made and an ideological conviction that freedom is the ultimate good. On a theoretical level, this view of choice ignores the most basic insights of Michel Foucault about the ways we are all made into subjects and subjects of power – the social process he calls subjectivation. And it ignores the critique some anthropologists have made of the ways liberal feminism excludes desires for social or moral conformity from the definition of agency. Looking closely at the ways some women and girls in this Egyptian village talk about veiling and arranged marriage, two of the practices critical to judgments of « the Muslimwoman’s » lack of choice, I argue that it is better to understand how choices are produced within specific configurations of power and culture to which women are subjected, and within which they become subjects of their own lives than to bask in the comforting fantasy produced by popular pulp nonfiction memoirs about abused Muslim girls that Western women in contrast do have choice, do have freedom, and do not suffer.