Week 2 Memo by Safiya Merchant and Phillip Kemp Bohan

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Safiya Merchant and Phillip Kemp Bohan

Group Memo on Week #2

Summary

            In Malek Alloula’s “Women’s Prisons,” the author illustrates how the colonial postcards serve to perpetuate preexisting European stereotypes concerning the harem culture. In these postcards, women consistently appear as sexualized objects, sources of sexual frustration, and prisoners. Each of these images is staged, and Alloula notes that this staging process can ultimately produce an artificial reality based on the expectations and desires of the European photographer as opposed to the lives of the actual women in these cultures. Therefore, the postcard can be viewed as yet another instrument of colonialism, whereby European authorities silence the voices of the colonized and produce an alternative and supposedly authentic knowledge of these cultures.

            Ann Laura Stoler suggests in her essay, “Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power,” that European gender roles played a part in strengthening the idea of white privilege and  “imperial authority” in colonial settings. In early stages of colonialism, colonizing powers and companies preferred concubinage and interracial companionship over European nuclear family arrangements because European women were viewed as a financial hindrance to colonial success. Over time, class politics and a desire for a clear racial demarcation and hierarchy between colonizer and colonized fostered the inclusion of European women into colonial societies, although their new roles in these societies were strictly defined. Overall, the role of European women in colonial society reflected the evolving European goal of creating a distinct identity separate from the colonized.

            In the two chapters from “Inside the Gender Jihad,” Amina Wa’dud argues through her idea of the tawhidic paradigm that all people, regardless of gender, are created equal before Allah. She also states that it is important to acknowledge the power and importance of interpretation of the Quran, and how these interpretations are heavily influenced by one’s historical context. Wa’dud emphasizes that the absence of female scholarship and experience from discussions of Islamic law helps to reinforce gender inequality in some current interpretations of the Quran.

Questions

-How do the arguments presented in the piece about the colonial postcards reflect or contradict the arguments expressed in Said’s “Orientalism?”

-Wa’dud claims that the Quran is the word of Allah and, hence, unchangeable. How can this be reconciled with her theory that the Quran can be interpreted in different ways?

-How is the European struggle to create a colonial identity expressed in the strictly defined role of European women in the colonies?

-How are Western standards of feminism and human rights reflected, if at all, in Wa’dud’s chapters?

Quotes

“Sex in the colonies was about sexual access and reproduction, class distinctions and racial demarcations, nationalism and European identity—in different measure and not at all at the same time” (Stoler 31).

“When a person seeks to place him or herself above another, it either means the divine presence is removed or ignored, or that the person who imagines his or herself above others suffers from the egoism of shirk” (Wa’dud 32).