The Inconsistency of American Feminism in the Muslim World – The New Yorker

Late in the summer of 2001, a fourteen-year-old named Gigi Ibrahim left her home in Cairo with her father and sister to start a new life in the United States. They moved in with family members in Anaheim, California, and Ibrahim enrolled as a freshman at a nearby Catholic school. She was in her second week of classes when a group of mostly Saudi hijackers committed the 9/11 attacks, provoking a national spasm of grief and vengeance that would mark Ibrahims introduction to life as an American adolescent.

The day after the towers fell, stern F.B.I. agents upended the Ibrahims house while the family watched in dread. Terrorist tip lines were flooded with calls that week from jittery Americans. Among the anxious callers were the familys neighbors, who, the agents explained, were concerned that a U-Haul had recently been parked outside their house, and that Ibrahims uncle sometimes walked up and down the block late at night (morning in Cairo), carrying on animated phone conversations in Arabic.

At school, where she was the only Muslim in her class, Ibrahim was asked to stage a schoolwide presentation to explain Islam. Before that I was just Egyptian, but then I became the Muslim-Egyptian girl. And my family is not even very religious, she said. Thats when I realized: my life is going to be different just because of who I am.

Tensions only increased, she said, as politicians began to discuss the coming war in Afghanistan as a righteous campaign to stop medieval-minded Muslims from oppressing millions of women. The war against the Taliban would not be pure retributionthe invasion was also extolled as a liberation. The rhetoric was, like, These Muslims beat women and kill them. Were going to go liberate them, take off their burqas, take off their hijabs, Ibrahim said. This is where this anti-hijab sentiment started.

The irony, for Ibrahim, was that the speeches and headlines about rescuing Muslim women in Afghanistan fed the suspicion and slights that she, a Muslim-American teen-ager, had to bear at home.

I confess that I have always chafed at American talk about womens rights in Afghanistan, finding it, even when well-intentioned, self-congratulatory, especially in the context of a military invasion. But all the effort and money spent after 9/11 did create a generational widening of possibilities for Afghan girls and women. Girls schools opened to eager pupils. A sweeping law criminalized violence against women. A network of shelters allowed women to escape domestic tormentors, despite the objections of religious conservatives, who derided the shelters as brothels and tried to bring them under government control.

The gains made were serious and significant, Heather Barr, of the Womens Rights Division at Human Rights Watch, who has worked on Afghanistan since 2007 and lived in the country for six years, said. It may all be swept away now, but a couple months ago I couldve said to you that Afghan women have achieved genuine progress.

Barr was critical of U.S. shortcomings but said the picture was complicated. The U.S. government spent liberally on womens rights, she said, but diplomats were reluctant to devote political capital to the difficult task of pressuring men in the Afghan government to support womens advancement. And too often, she said, the deeds of newfound allies were swept under the rug. With one hand youre writing a large, generous check, and with the other youre shaking hands with war criminals whose crimes include violence against women, she said.

And yet, as a generation of girls made their way through school, as women found jobs in offices that had once been male-only, there spreadtenuously and unevenly, but undeniablya sense of possibility. The question now is whether, given how abruptly those opportunities were yanked away, they constituted another form of cruelty.

Did we believe in it? Yes, we did, Hosna Jalil, the first woman appointed to a high rank in the Afghan Interior Ministry, said. I believed my presence in the Afghan government was hugely because of the presence of the international community. Otherwise, I wouldve been kicked out the next day.

Its an embarrassment to say the international community is forcing my government to accept me, she added. But, yes, it mattered.

Jalil was nine when the United States invaded Afghanistan. Her mother, a doctor, quickly realized that the Talibans ouster might mean that her daughter could go to school. Until then, Jalil had been enrolled in furtive tutoring under the supervision of an educated neighbor; she was coached to hide her notebook on the streets and to lie if confronted by the Taliban. Another tutor, who taught her English, was eventually arrested for ties to the Taliban; the basement of the house where the course was held was revealed to be a warehouse for weapons. Jalil still finds those revelations hard to grasp; he was her teacher, and he was kind to her.

Having been a rising star in a government that looks, in light of its speedy collapse, like a stage set, Jalil now lives in Washington, D.C., and watches Afghanistan from a distance, bitterly reassessing the behavior of everyone involved. Shes watched as the Taliban has settled into powerbeating female protesters, abolishing the womens-affairs ministry, and summoning boys, but not girls, back to secondary school. Jalil said shes pained not only for Afghan women but for the Afghan men who backed their struggle. I couldve grown up with burqa, with the life style under the Taliban regime, and I wouldnt have had any expectations, she said. To give someone a sweet and then take it back, its very painful. For all these little girls, millions of people, to take it backits very painful.

The central goal of the terrorists is the brutal oppression of women, President George W. Bush said in 2001. First Lady Laura Bush used the same words that year in an impassioned radio address, and described the Taliban threatening to pull out womens fingernails for wearing nail polish.

But Bush could never credibly claim to be waging war on behalf of oppressed women, Sarah Leah Whitson, the executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now, a human-rights group, told me. The United States had already shown itself willing to fight for womens rights where we have enemy status and be silent about womens rights where we are friendly, Whitson said.

Despite all the talk of Afghan women, Bush had far less to say against Saudi Arabia, a country that arguably rivalled Afghanistan both in responsibility for the 9/11 attacks and in the repression of women. The kingdom had been home to Osama bin Laden, as well as fifteen of the nineteen hijackers. Saudi-funded mosques in countries around the world have long been accused of spreading extremist ideologies. Saudi officials have strenuously denied any involvement in 9/11 and have repudiated bin Laden, who was forced into exile, but leaked and declassified U.S. documents have fuelled speculation about financial and logistical links between Al Qaeda, the hijackers, and people in or around the Saudi government.

Meanwhile, Saudi women lacked custody and equal inheritance rights, and couldnt vote or drive a car. Male guardians dictated whether they could study abroad, get a job, travel, or even leave the house. Men had the de-facto right to beat or rape their wives and a legal entitlement to file complaints of disobedience against female family members.

Loujain al-Hathloul was among the activists who fought tirelessly for womens freedom. In 2018, Hathloulwhod already been detained in the United Arab Emirates, forced back to Saudi Arabia, and banned from travelwas among roughly a dozen of the kingdoms most prominent womens-rights advocates who were imprisoned.

The following month, Mohammed bin Salman, the young crown prince, granted women the right to drive. The announcement was a public-relations coup for bin Salman, garnering glowing writeups around the world. But the arrests made it look like a cynical double action: make a show of letting women drive, but imprison the women who asked for this reform.

American Presidents have long shielded and supported Saudi Arabia, eager to foster Saudi military coperation and maintain access to oil, but Donald Trump was unusually effusive and undemanding. Bin Salman is a friend of mine, a man who has really done things, Trump said in 2019. Especially what youve done for women... its like a revolution in a very positive way.

That same year, according to Hathlouls family, the Saudi government offered her a choice. She could walk free, but only if she appeared in a video denying that shed been tortured. Hathloul refused. Her family members say she has been sexually harassed, tortured, and held in solitary confinement. (The Saudi government has denied the allegations of torture and disputed the familys account of the offer to release Hathloul.)

Lina al-Hathloul, Loujains sister, believes that the Trump Administration bears responsibility for her sisters detention. Pressure from the United States could have curbed bin Salmans crackdowns, she said; instead, he was coddled. They gave him a carte blanche, she said. He could do anything. Among those things was the imprisonment of Loujain.

Just after Joe Bidens election, Hathloul was sentenced to five years and eight months in prison, under a counterterrorism law. Then, after Bidens Inauguration, she was released, with restrictions including a travel ban and a prohibition against talking to journalists. The family now hopes that the United States will pressure Saudi Arabia into abandoning the charges. Lina al-Hathloul feels that the Biden Administration has a moral obligation to intervene.

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The Inconsistency of American Feminism in the Muslim World - The New Yorker