Book Review

By: Abdullahi, Abdurahman (Baadiyow)

Lamia Ben Youssef Zayzafoon, The Production of the Muslim Women: Negotiating Text, History and Ideology (New York & Toronto: Lexington Books, 2005), 213.

This book is a postcolonial and postmodern critique developed from the Doctoral Dissertation in English

Literature completed in 2002 at the Michigan State University. The central argument of the book is that

“Muslim Woman”, widely used as monolithic single category is an invention in the Western discourses,

Arab nationalism and Islamic feminism. Conversely, the author constructs a “Muslim woman” as flexible

signifier that cuts across the constructed binary oppositions of self and other or particularities and

universalities considering both “Muslim” and “woman” as heterogeneous. Moreover, the author argues

that “Muslim woman” is essentially a semiotic subject reproduced to fulfil political and ideological ends

of the various groups and places emphasis on the situatedness of the discourses with respect to the locus of

power. Furthermore, the author argues that Islamic culture is an invention like every other culture and

produced incessantly in the process of contestation between oneself and other. Thus, the author locates the

arguments on “Muslim women” within the discourses of how “cultures are invented, imposed and

transformed” (p.3). Finally, the author argues the ambivalence of the master narratives on “Muslim

woman” depending on the one’s location within the apparatus of power. Defying Edward Said’s

monolithic notion in the Orientalist discourses, the author employs the notion of patriarchy as a trans-

cultural signifier that takes different forms and configurations of power such as class, gender, education

and race.

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The book examines above stated arguments in five chapters each of which focuses on one particular

narrative obsessed in locating the apparatus of power. The first chapter “A semiotic Reading of Islamic

Feminism: Hybridity, Authority, and the Strategic reinvention of the “Muslim woman” in Fatima

Mernissi” is a critique to the discourses of the Moroccan Islamic feminist and sociologist Fatima Mernissi

on the production of “Muslim woman”. Mernissi’s works are examined in three particular areas. The first

is the re-interpretation of the Islamic tradition and text in order to justify her drive for unveiling from the

Islamic point of view and to criticize in the process “misogynist Muslim male” for obstructing true

meaning of Islam. The second is the ambivalence to the Orientalist discourses that consider veil as an

obstacle to the democracy and as a symbol of oppression linking women’s emancipation with unveiling

similar to the Qassim Amin of Egypt. Moreover, the author criticise Mernissi for attacking Islam and

relaying it in demanding legal reforms in Morocco. The third is Mernissi’s assumption of homogeneous

Islamic culture presenting “Islamic fundamentalism” and Islamic patriarchy as essentially male; the notion

that contradicts with the agency of women noted in the modern Islamic movements in many parts of the

Muslim world.

The second chapter “Isabelle Eberhardt, ou, “La Roumia Convertie”: A Case Study in Female

Orientalism” examines writings of Eberhardt, a white Russian convert to Islam that excessively traveled to

North Africa in the disguise of an Arab man in the nineteenth century. Eberhardt lived in Algeria, married

an Algerian neutralized French Muslim and becoming French citizen collaborated with the French

colonial authorities in Algeria. The author studies collected memoirs of Eberhardt as female Orientalism

that was missing from Edward Said’s production of Orientalism. Discourses of this chapter are an attempt

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to indicate the ambivalence of Eberhardt towards “Muslim woman” in her relations with the French

colonialism. This chapter provides valuable overview of colonial history and gender ideology in

nineteenth-century France explicating assimilation and association policies in the colonies and the location

of French women who lacked equality with men in many aspects. Within that context, Eberhardt writings

indicate a split in attitude to wards “Muslim woman”, where she at times shows racial prejudice similar to

the male Orientalists and at times deconstructs these narratives and emphasizes similarities of women in

the oriental and occidental domains. Moreover, Eberhardt even creates a “Muslim woman” who is more

independent than the French woman stripping moral superiority from the “civilising” French colonial

project. Discourses of Eberhardt are an excellent case of ambivalence of the female orientalism.

The third chapter “The “Muslim woman” and Iconography of the Veil in French Feminism and

Psychoanalysis,” investigates “the metaphor of veil and production of “ Muslim woman” in the discourses

of the French left” and “viability of Western feminist and psychoanalytic theory in the North African

context” (65). The author argues that these discourses are similar to the male Orientalism produced by

Edward Said. To substantiate these arguments, this chapter brings up Frantz Fanon’s discourse on the veil

in “the Algeria Unveiled” exposing how even the black revolutionary leftists remained as patriarchal and

Orientalistic. Moreover, Lacan’s notion of “veiled Phallus” and discourses of veil produced during the

Algerian Revolution is also discussed to advance the argument that phallocentrism remains in the writings

of some French feminists. Furthermore, “the Iconography of the Veil and the Harem in Simone de

Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray” is criticized in recycling of Orientalist’s discourses on the veiled “Muslim

woman”. Finally, Helene Cixous, an Algerian Jew whose writings present a “double vision” regarding the

veil and Algerian “Muslim woman” is examined to show her ambivalence towards the veil.

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The fourth chapter “Body, Home, and Nation: The production of the Tunisian Muslim woman in the

reformist thought of Tahar al Haddad and Habib Bourguiba,” examines the invention of the Tunisian

woman in both feminist and nationalist narratives in Tunisia. It examines the ambivalence of nationalist

narratives towards veil moving from being a symbol of Islamic identity before the independence to a

symbol of backwardness after that. Nationalist discourses in Tunisia follow western notion of modernity

and adopted representation that unveiled educated and working woman as a model for civility and

development. While projecting their nationalist production of the “Tunisian woman”, they also show

cultural difference, nationalist rhetoric and argue from the point of view of Islam and national

particularities in accordance with Qassim Amin and Mernissi.

The fifth chapter, “The house of the Prophet as a Technology of Power: Reinventing Domesticity and the

Sacred in the texts of Al Ma’arri, Al-Naluti, Djebar , and Rushdie ,” argues that the house of the prophet is

claimed by both hegemonic and marginal groups and were used as a tool for legitimization and

deligitimization of power. To demonstrate this argument, the author investigates four writings describing

domestic politics underlying the house of the prophet. These are The Epistle of Forgiveness (1032) of al-

Ma’arri (973-1057), Al-Tawba (The Redemption) (1992) by the Tunisian Novelist Arusiyya Al-Naluti

(1952-), Loin de Medine: Filles d’Ismael (1991) by Algerian writer Assia Djebar (1936-) and The Satanic

Verses (1988) by Salman Rushdie (1947-).

Indeed, the book is a major contribution to the postcolonial theory of women in general and “Muslim

Women” in particular. It is a profound critique of the mega-narratives on “Muslim women” in both

Orientalist and Occidentalist discourses focusing on the French colonies of North Africa. The

articulations of the book extend little outside of the North African context and Francophone culture in

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selecting writers to explore and develop major arguments. Evidently, only Salman Rushie and Al-Ma’arri

are outsiders to the French culture. Therefore, the audience of the book is the academic circles where the

author provides valuable contribution in creating new space between extremes of the binary divide. That

space, most likely, is the space of free choices that repudiate all forms of impositions and demonstrate

sensitivities to the notion of multicultural world within its universality.

The author’s criteria for selecting writing under evaluation are not clear. Moreover, though these writings

range from modern Muslim feminist, female orientalists and nationalist discourses, readers may ask are

there other discourses on “Muslim woman” worthy mentioning? Furthermore, another concern arises

from the use of the Qur’anic translation of Rasheed Khalifa, the spiritual small sect leader instead of using

more accepted English translations of the Qur’an. Finally, the arguments of the book are situated within

the western scholarship on “Muslim woman” that resist breaking away from the Orientalist’s production

of knowledge where key concepts like “Islam”, “Muslims” and “culture” are confused and the author does

not illuminate the concepts. Certainly, the book had satisfied to a certain degree its audience with its deep

literary critique of all major narratives on the “Muslim woman” in the francophone world and its mastery

of texts in Arabic, French and English. To reach out larger audience, substantiated and simplified version

may be required.

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