Review of International Studies (2013), 39, 665–684 6 2012 British International Studies Association

doi:10.1017/S0260210512000289 First published online 11 Dec 2012

American Occidentalism and the agential

Muslim woman
KATHERINE ALLISON*

Abstract. Through the War on Terror the United States developed a seemingly enlightened
understanding of Muslim women. In contrast to Orientalised representations of Muslim women’s
passivity and victimisation within brutal Islamic cultures these emerging representations posit
Muslim women in terms of their modernity and liberation. The emergence of this new Muslim
woman illuminates an attempt to secure an Occidental self through the negotiation of conflict-
ing impulses towards Islam. Islam is recognised as the repository from which the US enemy
other emerges yet the WoT also reflects a particular desire for a cosmopolitan inclusivity. The
presence of the Muslim woman acts to assuage these tensions. Her oppression confirms the
barbarity of the enemy yet the combination of her intrinsic agency and religiosity posits her
as an acceptable Islamic other whose presence confirms the pluralistic tolerance of the US
and the universal validity of its project.

Katherine Allison is University Teacher in Politics at the University of Glasgow.

After America was attacked, it was as if our entire country looked into the mirror and saw our
better selves.1

Introduction

The US-led War on Terror (WoT) has served to shape the unfolding debates con-
cerning the representation of Muslim women. What has evolved through US govern-
ment discourse is a representation of Muslim women as being invested in the values
of modernity, diversity, and liberation yet who also remain religiously observant and
culturally located. The emergence of what we might term an ‘agential Muslim woman’
appears to run counter to much existing feminist scholarship exploring how Muslim
women are made present within the WoT. From the earliest 9/11 moment, as the
international gaze fixed upon Afghanistan, critical feminist scholars have argued
that the condition of Afghan women under the oppressive rule of the Taliban regime
came to serve as a ready moral justification for military action.2 Edward Said’s

* I would like to thank Catia Gregoratti, Véronique Pin-Fat, and Ralph Young for their helpful sugges-
tions and encouragement.
1 George W. Bush, ‘State of the Union Address’, Selected Speeches of George W. Bush 2001–2008 (29

January 2002), {http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/infocus/bushrecord/documents/Selected_

Speeches_George_W_Bush.pdf} accessed 10 June 2011, p. 111.
2 Zillah Eisenstein, Sexual Decoys: Gender, Race and War (New York: Zed, 2007); Krista Hunt,

‘ ‘‘Embedded Feminism’’ and the War on Terror’, in Krista Hunt and Kim Rygiel (eds), (E)ngendering
the War on Terror: War Stories and Camouflaged Politics (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 51–72;
Maryam Khalid, ‘Gender, Orientalism and Representations of the ‘‘Other’’ in the War on Terror’,
665
666 Katherine Allison

Orientalism3 is central to the recognition of an Afghan woman, brought into subjec-

tivity through repetitious Orientalised tropes, as the passive victims of an inherently
misogynist and static Islamic culture. The political effect of such understandings are
to legitimate calls to ‘save’ Afghan women in ways that reinforce the imperial powers
of the US and deny voice and agency to those made subject to a supposed rescue.4
Yet attention to the discursive shaping of the WoT reveals a further positioning of
an Afghan womanhood made explicable in terms of religiosity. Rather than being
cast solely as a victim she is imbued with a very apparent form of agency. Her history
is cast as one of longstanding participation in Afghan society that was only diverted
from its path of modernisation by the incursion of the Taliban. Her suffering was
marked by bravery, independence, and resilient defiance.
The continuing development of a Muslim woman imbued with agency and
modernity seems indicative of not only a disruption to essentialised representations
of gender and Islam but also the ways that these representations are intrinsic to the
construction of relations between the US and Islam in the WoT and beyond. In
appointing itself as the rescuer of Afghan women, the US has been understood by
feminist critics as reflecting an Orientalised dichotomy of America/Islam self/other
in a true ‘clash of civilisations’ manner.5 Tropes of Afghan women become impli-
cated in ‘a range of binaries situating the ‘‘West’’ in opposition to the ‘‘East’’ – for
example, good vs. evil, civilised vs. barbaric, rational vs. irrational, progressive vs.
backward’.6 The agential Muslim woman, however, appears to subvert this polarisa-
tion of Occident and Orient by embodying both a recognisably Islamic practice and
Western standards of emancipated modernity.
Conflicting impulses are not only evident in the representation of Muslim women.
They correspond with wider US ambivalences to the Middle East and to Islam and
its constitutive role in the WoT. Howell and Shryock have examined how ‘the first
months after the 9/11 attacks were a time of hate crimes and intimidation, but a
simultaneous desire to ‘‘understand’’ and ‘‘protect’’ Arabs and Muslims [also] flour-
ished in America’.7 Simon Tate has explored an ongoing and problematic tendency
to essentialise the West in ways that prevent critical attention to the internal differen-
tiations and developing nature in the WoT.8 In particular he notes a qualitative shift
in the effort of Western leaders to denounce and distance themselves from clash

Global Change, Peace & Security, 23:1 (2011), pp. 15–29; Carol A. Stabile and Deepa Kumar,
‘Unveiling Imperialism: Media, Gender, and the War on Afghanistan’, Media, Culture and Society,
27:5 (2005), pp. 765–82.
3 Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1978).
4 Sonali Kolhatkar, ‘Saving’ Afghan Women, {http://www.zmag.org/content/Gender/kolhatkarwomen.cfm}
accessed 10 May 2009; Leila Abu-Lughod, ‘Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological
Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others’, American Anthropologist, 104:3 (2002), pp. 783–90;
Gayatri C. Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds), Marxism
and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 271–313.
5 Dana L. Cloud, ‘ ‘‘To Veil the Threat of Terror’’: Afghan Women and the ‘‘Clash of Civilisations’’ in
the Imagery of the US War on Terrorism’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 90:3 (2004), pp. 285–306;
Jasmine Zine, ‘Between Orientalism and Fundamentalism: Muslim Women and Feminist Enagage-
ment’, in Hunt and Rygiel, (E)ngendering the War on Terror: War Stories and Camouflaged Politics,
pp. 27–50.
6 Khalid, ‘Gender’, p. 15.
7 Sally Howell and Andrew Shryock, ‘Cracking Down on Diaspora: Arab Detroit and America’s War on
Terror’, Anthropological Quarterly, 76:3 (2003), pp. 443–62 at p. 448.
8 Simon Tate, ‘Whose Occident? Methodological Parochialism in Research on the West’, Scottish
Geographical Journal, 121:4 (2005), pp. 339–54.
 American Occidentalism 667

of civilisations rhetoric.9 Sayres Rudy expands this even further maintaining that the
WoT actually depends upon the denunciation of racism and the adoption of
a ‘progressive view of Islamism’.10 As such he even argues that, ‘the WoT has
embraced the anti-essentialist heart of Orientalism, rendering Saidian anti-imperial
ideology-criticism otiose. Said won.’11
How may this seemingly ‘progressive’ representation of Muslim women be
accounted for? How do apparently conflictual discourses positing Islam in terms of
Oriental barbarity and an enlightened progressivism coexist? If seemingly co-opted
can an anti-Orientalist critique continue to offer methodological and empirical insight?
What is the significance of this new trope for those made subject to it and how may
its recognition contribute to a critical feminist response? The existence of apparently
conflicting orientations towards Islam directs us towards the complexities in the
evolving representation of Muslim women and the relation of the US to Islam and
to its WoT enemies. Such concerns foreground tensions as to how we might expose
the exercise of power through an entrenched discourse of self and other but also
allow for variation and multiplicity and avoid erasing the participation of the oriental
subject in the shaping of the discourse.
In this article I propose to negotiate these contested dynamics made visible in the
emergence of an agential Muslim woman by tilting the analytical focus towards an
account of US Occidentalism. That is, how, through representational practices of
othering, the US hopes to realise and secure a sovereign self.
My specific focus begins with the WoT and its status an issue of foreign policy. I
therefore concentrate upon the Bush administration as the primary locus of the WoT
and the manner in which Muslim women came to be represented by its members.
The speeches of the key administration figures and the varied information output
of the State Department and its associated bodies are utilised as primary sources of
empirical data. My understanding of foreign policy is one that reflects the tenets
of Orientalism/Occidentalism and recognises that elite foreign policy practices are
explicable in relation to the creation of state identity.12 In drawing this out, the latter
part of the my empirical analysis focuses particularly upon the public diplomacy
wing of the State Department, the Bureau of International Information Programs,
and its America.gov project that contains many resources centred upon on Muslim
women.13 America.gov provides a direct means to consider how the domestic is
implicated in the international. America.gov was directed overseas, disseminating
information about foreign policy and American life and culture. Thus it attempts to
shape the PR image of the US in terms of foreign policy by constructing a positive
image of the US domestically. The WoT represents a specific historical moment asso-
ciated primarily with the Bush administration, yet, despite the change in administra-
tion and the fading of WoT parlance, the fundamental tensions concerning the
nature of the West remain current. Moreover, in terms of Muslim women there

9 Ibid., p. 349.
10 Sayres S. Rudy, ‘Pros and Cons: Americanism against Islamism in the ‘‘War on Terror’’ ’, The Muslim
World, 97 (2007), pp. 33–78 at p. 33.
11 Ibid., p. 39, emphasis in original.
12 David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Minnea-
polis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992).
13 See ‘America.gov Engaging the World’, {http://www.america.gov/} for a wide range of articles about
Muslim women and their relationship to the United States from within and without. From 31 March
2011 the website has no longer been updated.
668 Katherine Allison

is continuity in thought between the two administrations with both concerned with
positive representations. Therefore I also use America.gov materials produced under
the Obama administration.
What I want to draw out is an understanding of how this quest functions via the
inclusion of an other in the form of the agential Muslim woman. Including her as
other serves as a mirroring and a completion of a US self. The WoT is a site where
confirmation of the ideals of pluralistic tolerance and cosmopolitan universalism is
sought, with these being made the markers of difference between the US self and the
enemy other. The quest for self through the inclusion of an other thus enables us
to engage with the paradoxical invocation of Islam. Islam represents an American
enemy other, being the crucible from which the enemy emerges; yet the subversion
of the Islam/US binary offers the possibilities of realising a cosmopolitan self. Thus
the enemy is also understood to represent a perversion of Islam and a more authentic
and progressive practice may be found. The agential Muslim woman thus becomes
invested in the desire to posit this authentic practice of Islam recognised as com-
patible with the US and in opposition to the debased, extremist religiosity of the
enemy. Thus, in creating an idealised understanding of an agential Muslim woman,
the US ‘represents itself as a place of tolerance where ‘‘true’’ Islam can thrive’.14 This
becomes the centre of a foreign policy whose logic centres on the assumption that if
Muslim women are free and accepted within the US then Muslims can have no
reason to hate or feel threatened by the US. The America.gov PR project aimed at
the Muslim world is realised.
This is not, however, the acceptance of unmitigated alterity. Through the inclu-
sion of the Islamic other the US claims a universal cosmopolitan validity for its cause
but, as a decidedly American account of universality, it ultimately caters to the pro-
motion of US interests. The inclusion of the agential Muslim woman other illumi-
nates and assuages these conflicts. Her religiosity and her femininity locate her as
an ultimate point of difference, her persecution confirms the barbarity of the Islamic
enemy. Yet the particular confluence of gender and religion enables an enlightened
Islamic practice and holds the possibilities for an Islam amenable to US ideals. The
other and her otherness are thus deployed in ways conducive to the self. Her success-
ful absorption serves to confirm the cosmopolitan nature of the US and obscures the
specificity of its claims to universality.
In developing this argument I first return to Orientalism to consider the tensions
that accrue when we try to negotiate Orientalism as a discourse embodying unity,
stability, and dominance but also one of multiplicity and flow and a responsiveness
or even need for the other. I maintain that an orientation towards Occidentalism can
allow specific analytical attention to these underlying concerns in recognising the
positing of the agential Muslim woman as an active process of shaping subjectivity
involving aspects of variation and ambiguity and degrees of reciprocity between the
US and Muslim women.
A feminist perspective furthers this and facilitates the development of a critical
purchase as to how Muslim women are understood within, and made enabling of,
US policies. I then provide a genealogical sketch of the emergence of the agential
Muslim woman examining how discourses of victimhood and agency are mutually

14 Mitra Rastegar, ‘Managing ‘‘American Islam’’’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 10:4 (2008),
pp. 455–74 at p. 456.
 American Occidentalism 669

constituted via two key logics. The first posits the normality of Muslim women’s
agency. The speeches of members of the Bush administration are analysed to show
how they try to convey that the abuse of Afghan women gains meaning because it
is understood as aberrant to the Afghan norm; it is an outside imposition by the
Taliban/Al-Qaeda. This is closely intertwined with the second logic that develops
through a deliberate language of diversity and anti-essentialism to posit ‘stereotyp-
ing’ and ‘misinformation’ as the barriers preventing us from seeing the true reality
of liberated Muslim women. The creation of an agential woman thus melds the asser-
tion of the enemy’s brutality with its denouncement through the claiming of a ‘true’
Islamic practice embodied by Muslim women. I then consider these logics through
a case study of the veil. A United States Agency for International Development
(USAID) exhibition on Afghan women and America.gov interviews with American
Muslim women enables us to explore an evolving and multifaceted account of the
veil as symbolic of oppression, resistance, and contemporary cultural plurality. I
then explore how agential Muslim women are sought in order to confirm the
certainty of the US self. They are present as the embodiment of both difference and
similarity that, through a reassuring fusion of gender and religiosity, seeks to solidify
a US that domestically confirms liberal pluralism and internationally projects an
American/universal cosmopolitanism. The article concludes with a critical evaluation
of the political effects of the development of an agential Muslim woman. I outline
its disciplinary impetus but also how the Occidentalist approach may facilitate
opportunities for rethinking the operation of agency and the encounter between the
US and Muslim women as one involving aspects of mutual identity formation.

Ambivalent Orientalism

Questions and contestations as to how ambiguity and instability may be encom-

passed within Orientalist discourses are a lingering legacy of Orientalism.15 Said
sought to account for multiplicity within Orientalism by distinguishing it as operative
within two forms. Latent Orientalism remains unchanging and unified but in its
manifest form it is able to reflect variation and historical change.16 Homi Bhabha,
however, is critical of this typology, maintaining that although it articulates the
possibility of an alterity and ambivalence that may ‘threaten to split the very object
of Orientalist discourse as a knowledge’, Said is ultimately reluctant to follow this
through. Instead, the two forms are ultimately unified through the deliberate inten-
tionality of the West to project its power over the Middle East.17 Thus anomalies
are marginalised and Orientalist discourse remains recognisable for its ‘sheer knitted
together strength’18 as ‘a monolithic, undifferentiated and uncontested Western im-
position’.19 Such a position is problematic for two clear reasons. First, for the

15 See James Clifford, ‘Orientalism’, History and Theory, 19:2 (1980), pp. 204–23; and Gyan Prakash,
‘Orientalism Now’, History and Theory, 34:3 (1995), pp. 199–212.
16 Said, Orientalism, pp. 206–7.
17 Homi Bhabha, ‘The Other Question’, Screen, 24:6 (1983), pp. 18–36 at p. 24.
18 Said, Orientalism, p. 6.
19 Lata Mani and Ruth Frankenberg, ‘The Challenge of Orientalism’, Economy and Society, 14:2 (1985),
pp. 174–92 at p. 177.
670 Katherine Allison

possibility that such an Orientalist critique may transpose the frameworks of essen-
tialisation20 to understandings of the US. Second, that this replication may not only
lead to impoverished understanding of the US, but that it may also have the con-
tradictory effect of erasing the resistance of those under its purview by presenting a
limited account of the operation of power as the undisputed dominance over the other.
There are no simple means to negotiate the dilemmas of recognising both the
cohesive power of discourse and its fractures and ambivalences. In order to illuminate
the agential Muslim woman, I propose to place the very idea of US intentionality
under scrutiny. I want to engage with the US project to reveal strategies of domina-
tion but also the need for investment in the agential Muslim woman as a resolution
to underlying tensions and fragilities within it. I want to keep the US subject to a
sharp-eyed critique that seeks to ask where we might find the most productive open-
ings to register dissent but also to keep these politics at the fore in ways that engage
with their ambiguities and avoid easy summations.

An Occidental approach

Occidentalism refers to the creation of an essentialised West. Within the literature

this has taken two specific forms. In the first, Occidentalism broadly functions as
Orientalism in reverse. It explores the ways that Eastern societies have created and
utilised stereotypical representations of the West.21 The second addresses how the
West creates and reifies its own essential identity. It is this latter form that that is of
interest to me in this article. Here practices of Orientalism and the construction of
the West are fused. Occidentalism relates to Orientalism as a ‘condition of its possi-
bility’; through constructing the other, construction of the self is enabled.22
Overt attention to Occidentalism is necessary, as Alastair Bonnett maintains, due
to an ongoing lacuna in the social sciences and humanities concerning the study of
the West. For ‘although critical social theory in Europe and North America has
challenged the West in many ways it has been largely uninterested in how the West
is imagined, either in the West or around the world’.23 In the place of developed anal-
ysis we tend to encounter ‘general and generalising mediations that take its form and
nature as pre-given and beyond dispute’.24 This failure to attend to the construction
of the West with precision may reflect a problem of where in the unfolding of Orien-
talist practices we locate our critical scrutiny. To James Carrier we have ‘focused
most closely on Orientalism in the textual description of alien societies, which is to
say, on the product of Orientalism, rather than on the way that these descriptions
are generated, the process of Orientalism, the social, political, and intellectual factors
that lead to Orientalist constructions of alien societies’.25 In the context of the US,
20 Clifford, ‘Orientalism’, p. 219.
21 See, for example, Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies
(New York: Penguin Press 2004); and Xiaomei Chen, Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-Discourse in
Post-Mao China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
22 Fernando Coronil, ‘Beyond Occidentalism: Toward Nonimperial Geohistorical Categories’, Cultural
Anthropology, 11:1 (1996), pp. 51–87 at p. 56.
23 Alastair Bonnett, The Idea of the West: Culture, Politics and History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2004), p. 6.
24 Ibid., pp. 6–7.
25 James G. Carrier, ‘Occidentalism: The World Turned Upside-down’, American Ethnologist (1992)
pp. 195–212 at 196, emphasis in original.
 American Occidentalism 671

and its prosecution of the WoT, this absence of specific engagement with the varying
ways that an American self-identity is shaped as a process is apparent. US subjectivity
is largely either preformed or reconfirmed in relation to the other. To paraphrase
Fernando Coronil, the problem of the encounter with the other is one for the US,
not of the US or for the other.26 A postcolonial sensibility alerts us to consider how
the ‘cultures and psyches of the colonizer [are] not already defined, and only waiting,
as it were, to be imposed, fully formed, on the hapless victims of the colonial project’.27
It directs us towards an awareness of how US identity is shaped through the invest-
ment in the other, a process that also involves a recognition of the mutually constituted
roles enacted by the dominant power and the subjects of its interventions.28
Consideration of the role of the other in the mutual production of knowledge,
and of US Occidentalism as a process that reflects not only dominance but uncer-
tainty, not only provides for an expanded insight; it also extends the scope for political
engagement. We can understand the US as a production of particular institutions
and historical moments. Pathways to ‘provincialising’29 the US, to questioning the
narratives it instantiates as only one contested thread of history are opened up.

Feminism and questioning representation

Such strategies may be furthered and given greater specificity by connecting the
analysis with feminism. Feminist scholars have, as we have already noted, provided
an initial purchase into how the US sustains a self image through the Orientalising of
a Muslim woman other. Such insights reflect the wider scholarship of feminists con-
cerned with how gender and race are entwined with projects of nationalism and how
certain understandings of women subsequently come to shape the boundaries of
national identity and desired citizenship.30 Drawing in these perspectives and further
expanding their focus may help us negotiate both the process and the product of
US Occidentalism. The possibility of feminisms concerned with the questioning of
gendered subjectivities enables both sensitivity to wider issues of identity and the
means of its production, and the critical means to scrutinise them. They may enrich
a study of Occidentalism by making evident the conditioning factors of gender, reli-
gion, and race and the confluences that bind them.31 Furthermore, as these variants
of feminism also occupy an overtly normative stance, they sensitise us towards the

26 Coronil, ‘Beyond Occidentalism’, p. 61.

27 Ali Ratansi, ‘Postcolonialism and its Discontents’, Economy and Society, 26:4 (1997), pp. 480–500 at
p. 482.
28 Ibid.
29 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton
and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000).
30 Nira Yuval-Davies, Gender and Nation (London: Sage, 1997); Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davies
(eds), Racialized Boundaries (London: Taylor and Francis, 1992).
31 For a small sample of feminist scholarship questioning subjectivity and the intersections of gender and
race see Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism
(London: Routledge, 2005); Uma Narayan and Sandra Harding (eds), Decentering the Center: Philosophy
for a Multicultural, Postcolonial, and Feminist World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); and
Nira Yuval-Davis, ‘Intersectionality and Feminist Politics’, European Journal of Women’s Studies, 13:3
(2006), pp. 193–209.
672 Katherine Allison

necessity of drawing US Occidentalism and its invocation of Muslim women into a

realm of critique.32
In particular, a normative feminist stance encourages engagement with the central,
political, and ethical issues that flow from the practices of representation implicit to
Orientalism/Occidentalism. Feminist scholarship has offered a depth of scrutiny to
Western depictions of non-Western women, recognising that the act of representata-
tion reflects the operation of power in the production of knowledge, with the ultimate
effect typically being the silencing of those made subject to it.33 An awareness of the
problematic nature of attributing subjectivity has methodological implications that
directly impact upon the conduct of research and the shaping of this article.
Acceptance that representation is explicable only in relation to power poses diffi-
culties for how we might challenge US discourse and the policies that it enables. Any
attempts to create a ‘true’ account of Muslim women, as a counter to US depictions,
cannot negate the power/knowledge nexus and may act to inscribe a further discur-
sive violence. My response is therefore to provoke critical attention to the political
contexts of how Muslim women are construed and the ways that this may prove
enabling of the continuation of the WoT. The act of making representational claims
may be always inescapable but scrutiny of the plays of power and interests may
expose a means by which those made subject to them can begin to contest them. In
the final section of the article I address this further by discussing the possibilities for a
critical response to US policies.

The agential Muslim woman

The status of Muslim women remains politically polarising within Western societies.
Many continue to regard Islam itself as intrinsically hostile to women, a stance
encapsulated and perhaps most infamously espoused by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who con-
ceptualises Muslim women as continuously victimised by harmful religious norms.
Hirsi Ali’s response requires the complete rejection of Islam.34 Other voices such as
Irshad Manji remain committed to Islam but argue that Muslims must undertake a
radical reform of their beliefs in order to advance a more pluralistic, less dogmatic
religiosity more amenable to women’s rights.35 Moreover, depictions of Muslim
women as victims increasingly jostle alongside more problematic media interest in

32 It should be recognised that not all feminists have been critical of US policies and the representations of
Muslim women that they deploy. Jean Bethke Elshtain and the US-based feminist organisation the
Feminist Majority Foundation have voiced support for the administrations policies to rescue Afghan
women. See Jean Bethke Elshtain, Just War Against Terror: Ethics and the Burden of American Power
in a Violent World (New York: Basic Books, 2003); and Kolhatkar, Saving.
33 Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’; Linda Alcoff, ‘The Problem of Speaking for Others’, Cultural
Critique, 20 (1991), pp. 5–32; Amy Hinterberger, ‘Feminism and the Politics of Representation:
Towards a Critical and Ethical Encounter with ‘‘Others’’ ’, Journal of International Women’s Studies,
8:2 (2007), pp. 74–83.
34 Born in Somalia Ayaan Hirsi Ali is now a scholar at the US think tank the American Enterprise Insti-
tute. After writing the screenplay for Theo Van Gogh’s Submission, a film extremely critical of women’s
status in Islam she became the subject of death threats, and Van Gigh was murdered in 2004. Ayaan
Hirsi Ali, The Caged Virgin: A Muslim Woman’s Cry for Reason (London: Simon and Schuster, 2007).
35 Irshad Manji, The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim’s Call for Reform in Her Faith (New York:
St Martin’s Griffin, 2004).
 American Occidentalism 673

Muslim women’s involvement in violent acts of terrorism, most particularly as

suicide bombers.36
US governmental discourses cohere with Manji and Hirsi Ali in that they simi-
larly position Muslim women primarily through their religiosity. ‘Islam’ is therefore
recognisable as a reality unproblematised by interpretation and political context.
However, the specific drive of US governmental discourse differs through its coales-
cence around overtly positive accounts of Muslim women’s agency. Rosa Vasilaki
enables us to locate this within a wider change in the representation of Muslim
women that moves ‘from the discursive framework of submission, or victimisation,
to one of resistance, or empowerment’.37 Vasilaki locates this shift within a complex
refashioning of agency as its traditionally secular origins, within grand narratives of
emancipation, and reliance upon a universalised subject come under a postmodern
and postcolonial critique. The freeing of agency from its traditional locations and
possibilities permits a renewed political engagement by Muslim women and feminists
in challenging the assumed confluence between religious adherence and the denial of
agency.38
In the following sections I contribute to the analysis of this broader representa-
tional shift by relating it to the specific context of the US and the WoT. In doing so
I explore how a discourse initially concerned with Afghan women extends to en-
compass Iraqi women and crosses the domestic/international to give meaning to a
US self. Here familiar tropes of Orientalised victimhood, and emergent ones of
empowerment, are both present within the agential Muslim women. One does not
replace the other in a linear fashion. Rather, they are mutually sustaining in a
multi-faceted engagement that confirms the barbarity of the enemy other but also
establishes an inherent compatibility between Islam and women’s emancipation.

Victims and heroes

That the military intervention in Afghanistan on behalf of Afghan women required

the uncontested acceptance of their suffering under the barbarity of the Taliban
regime has been firmly established by critical feminist scholarship.39 And so, with
predictable regularity, the speeches made by members of the administration are fore-
grounded by descriptions of the deplorable abuses of Afghan women. Laura Bush’s
radio address in 2001 was the first time a First Lady had delivered the President’s
weekly address. She used it to inform us of a regime where ‘children aren’t allowed
to fly kites; their mothers face beatings for laughing out loud’, and where ‘women
cannot work outside the home, or even leave their homes by themselves’.40 Further-
more the conceptual prism through which we are to understand this shocking abuse

36 For examples see Bobby Ghosh, ‘The Mind of a Female Suicide Bomber’, TIME (22 June 2008),
{http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1817158,00.html} accessed 29 November 2011; Judy
Mandlebaum, ‘What drives female suicide bombers?’, Salon (5 April 2010), {http://www.salon.com/
2010/04/05/female_suicide_bombers_open2010/} accessed 29 November 2011.
37 Rosa Vasilaki, ‘Victimization’ Versus ‘Resistance’: Feminism and the Dilemmatics of Islamic Agency,
paper presented at the British International Studies Association Annual Conference (2011), p. 3.
38 Ibid., pp. 3–4.
39 See fn. 1.
40 Laura Bush, Radio Address by Mrs Bush (17 November 2001), {http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.
gov/news/releases/2001/11/20011117.html} accessed 10 August 2009.
674 Katherine Allison

is made clear as Bush outlines how ‘the severe repression and brutality against women
in Afghanistan is not a matter of legitimate religious practice. Muslims around the
world have condemned the brutal degradation of women and children by the Taliban
regime.’41 Thus, despite attempts to isolate and condemn the illegitimate religiosity
of the Taliban/terrorist, Islam ultimately remains as the pre-eminent explanatory
variable to understand Afghan women and the oppression they are subjected to
and an unproblematised discursive slide between ‘Afghan’ (women) and ‘Muslim’ is
enabled.
Yet, a classic Orientalist scope of Afghan/Muslim women as powerless victims
does not entirely capture the Bush administration’s project. Although a victim status
is assumed, it is also transformed through the evocation of heroic endurance and
resistance under the years of tyranny. The words of the then Secretary of State Colin
Powell made at the beginning of the invasion of Afghanistan encapsulate this dual
impulse when he states that, ‘during these years of great suffering, the women of
Afghanistan have been the backbone of the Afghan society. It is in large measure
a thanks to their endurance, their ingenuity, their courage that their country has
survived.’42 Applying a marker of ‘agency’ to ‘victim’ can begin to encompass both
elements of what Powell is looking to express here, as the administration seeks to
assure us that Afghan women are undoubtedly the victims of a cruel regime whom
we must defeat, but Afghan women’s response is not one of passivity. Rather, it
is one premised upon an active struggle against the Taliban and an unceasing com-
mitment to maintaining the true fabric of Afghan life and values.
This allusion to Afghan women as the custodians of Afghanistan throughout the
era of tyrannical rule also requires an understanding of the agential victim that goes
beyond courageous resistance. In order to further sustain this account of women’s
struggle against the Taliban, a very particular construction of Afghan history, its
cultural and religious contexts and most especially the role of women within it is
duly constructed. Afghan women may have suffered the ruthless denial of their rights
under the Taliban, but this is not to be understood as the intrinsic condition of
Afghan society. In the place of this misconception we are instead to understand
the Taliban moment as essentially aberrant within Afghan history. Prior to their
unwanted and apparently unforeseen incursion, Afghanistan was a society where
women were fully active within all aspects of the public sphere. Laura Bush outlined
a society where women had the vote as early as the 1920s43 and President Bush was
quick to tell us that, ‘You know, life in Afghanistan wasn’t always this way’, as he
presents an image of the pre-Taliban Afghan woman conveyed through the statistical
‘proof ’ that ‘seventy percent of the nation’s teachers were women. Half of the
government workers in Afghanistan were women, and 40 percent of the doctors in
the capital of Kabul were women’, but then ‘the Taliban destroyed that progress’.44

41 Ibid.
42 Colin Powell, Remarks at a Conference on Women in Afghanistan (19 November 2001), {http://2001-
2009.state.gov/g/wi/7250.htm} accessed 10 August 2009.
43 Laura Bush, Mrs. Bush’s Remarks on International Women’s Day at the United Nations (8 March
2001), {http://georgewbushwhitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2002/03/20020308-15.html} accessed
10 August 2009.
44 George W. Bush, Remarks by the President at Signing Ceremony for Afghan Women and Children Relief
Act of 2001 (12 December 2001), {http://2001-2009.state.gov/g/wi/7246.htm} accessed 10 August 2009.
 American Occidentalism 675

Whatever the veracity of these statistics45 the effect is to inscribe Afghan women
within a linear history of unfolding progress towards liberation. Afghan women
may be made intelligible via religion but they are positioned in a way in which the
period of Taliban rule becomes recognisable as one where women were unnaturally
excised from history, while the operations of the WoT form a corrective in the
reclamation of normality. Thus Powell goes on to tell us that, ‘the recovery of
Afghanistan must entail the restoration of the rights of Afghan women’. This is
assured because they are ‘eager and ready to resume their active participation in the
life of the country’.46

Stereotypes and misconceptions

This desire to locate and sustain a truth about Afghan women has subsequently
evolved through a wider discourse concerning Muslim women. It appears to reject
the tired tropes of Orientalist representation and instead pursues a progressive stance
of anti-essentialism. Exploring its tenets makes apparent the relationships between
Islam as a presence within American visions of the international and the domestic
realms. America.gov has created a large output of web-based materials, including a
youtube channel, web chats, a flickr site, magazine articles, and workshops. In doing
so it has introduced us to the diverse nature of contemporary Muslim women, be
they members of the State Department, homemakers, artists, students, scientists,
fashion designers, entrepreneurs, or even the first Muslim woman in space. They are
women of achievement who inspire and the mood is relentlessly upbeat. The framing
of Islam as a driving force of women’s agency is increasingly central; we encounter
Muslim womanhood as diverse, modern and liberated but remaining focused upon
traditional values of family, community, and a deep sense of religious commitment.
This diversity is deployed in a way that directly seeks to challenge what are
perceived as erroneous stereotypes. Tayyibah Taylor is the founder and editor of
AZIZAH, a glossy magazine ‘by and for Muslim women’ (Department of State,
2007).47 Within the magazine positive affirmations abound confirming the presence
of contemporary Muslim woman: ‘Informed, Inspired, Illustrious: The AZIZAH
Woman: Catch the Spirit’, and ‘Discerning and Assertive, the AZIZAH woman
knows her potential and strives to fulfil it’.48 During a web chat hosted by the State
Department Taylor voices her concern with the misperceptions of Muslim woman-
hood and the mission of AZIZAH to correct them:
Concerning many problems of Muslim women in the US, I think that really the biggest
challenge is dealing with the misconception. People’s misconception of who she is. Muslims
and Muslim women and Islam, it is usually reported on in the US through the lens of Middle
East politics and so, usually the Muslim women seen in the media is an only Arab woman,
(sic) often times a vicim of either war or a victim of Muslim men or a victim of religion. And

45 The accuracy of these figures is questionable. The Soviet backed regime are thought to have exaggerated
women’s employment participation for propaganda purposes and the statistics do not reflect the fact
that many men were absent due to participation in ongoing conflict.
46 Powell, Remarks, emphasis added.
47 Department of State, Azizah Founder, Publisher Discusses Muslim Women in America (24 April 2007),
{http://www.america.gov/st/washfile-english/2007/April/20070424112504eaifas0.6452753.html} accessed
1 June 2011.
48 See the magazine’s website at: {http://www.azizahmagazine.com/info-upfront.html}.
676 Katherine Allison

so having a magazine that depicts her positively, and really gives her story from her perspec-
tive, I think it helps to undo those negative the stereotypes and those misconceptions so this is
something that she’s dealing with constantly, trying to educate people who she is (sic) and
what she stands for’ (Department of State, 2007).49

A subjectivity is shaped once again around the Muslim woman as a victim, but this
time she is only a victim of our failures to recognise her true nature through the
faulty prism of a skewed view of Islam. Taylor illuminates the difficulties in the
search for identity and, perhaps indirectly, the ultimate impossibility of its realisa-
tion, but the processes of searching constructs a new account of Muslim women’s
agency shaped in overt opposition to what is understood as negative stereotypes and
misconceptions.

Unveiling the essential Muslim woman

These concerns and strategies regarding how we are to understand Muslim women,
both within the United States and beyond its borders, can be brought together most
clearly within the developing discourse concerning Muslim women and the wearing
of the veil. Escaping a discussion of veiling seems to be impossible as debates around
Muslim women’s dress seem omnipresent and channel us quickly to wider questions
of the status of Muslim women and contentious political issues of integration
and secularism within multicultural societies.50 Veiling has become the subject of
a growing academic literature51 and may best be approached as the ultimate empty
signifier for the ‘Muslim woman’, its meaning being subject to variation, contest, and
context.
Focusing upon representations of Afghan women, critical scholars have explored
the near fetishised politics of the infamous blue burqa that renders Afghan women as
oppressed victims. Here the veil functions as a convenient catch-all for the brutalities
of the Taliban regime and enables the consolidation of a strict Occident/Orient binary.
Yet this does not exhaust the political possibilities as to how the veil functions as a
means of representing Muslim women.52 Understanding the complex practices of
othering that constitute US Occidentalism brings to view the double effect of the
veil concerning how it signifies both the suppression of Afghan women but also a
certainty as to their inherent, resistant agency.
US discourses gain meaning by construing veiling as brutal acts of imposition
but, crucially, they are also to be understood as alien acts of imposition that are
not intrinsic to Afghan society or its cultural norms. Rather, the default condition
of Afghan women is one of progress along a familiar pathway of emancipation.
Thus veiling is construed within a narrative of what lies ‘under’, ‘beneath’, or

49 Department of State, Azizah Founder.

50 The veil as an issue of political debate and sometimes legislation has resurfaced within a number of
European and Middle Eastern countries including the Netherlands, France, the UK, Syria, and Turkey.
51 For a small sample of the varied discussions on the issue of veiling see Katherine Bullock, Rethinking
Muslim Women and the Veil: Challenging Historical & Modern Stereotypes (Herndon: International
Institute of Islamic Thought, 2002); and Faegheh Shirazi, The Veil Unveiled: The Hijab in Modern Culture
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001).
52 It is perhaps insightful to note a distinction between the US media and the Bush administration. Within
administration there was very little direct focus upon the veiling of women in Afghanistan. None of the
key members of the administration make any particular mention of it.
 American Occidentalism 677

‘behind’ the burqa, as recounted within countless media stories. The burqa becomes
manifest as a physical obscuring of the truth about Afghan women. The act of
unveiling is to reveal this essence of active resistance affirming that despite the
horrors of persecution Afghan women remain committed to a project of rights. Motifs
of oppression and victimisation are realised only in conjunction with a reinstated
movement towards progress. This is to facilitate a restoration to normality, not a
conversion. A USAID exhibition on the women of Afghanistan following the down-
fall of the Taliban is illustrative. The introductory commentary states:
To many in the West, the fall of the Taliban meant that the people of Afghanistan could once
again enjoy their freedom . . . The most popular image was that of women cautiously lifting the
veils of the once mandatory burqa to see for themselves the promise of a new Afghanistan.
Although seen by the Western world as an icon of Taliban oppression, the burqa remains a
common sight in Afghanistan, especially in rural areas. Yet it is now a personal choice, not a
mandate. And although some women continue to wear the burqa, all women across the country
are being given the opportunity to step out of the shadows to play vibrant and significant roles in
the rebuilding of their beloved country . . . When USAID returned to Afghanistan in January
2002, its mission was clear: to rebuild what had been lost, restore what had been damaged, and
put the country on the path to a peaceful and prosperous future.53
The exhibition thus begins by predictably deploying the burqa in order to establish
the mood of the Taliban interlude, but this is something that is briskly set aside in
favour of business-as-back-to-usual. Following the overthrow of the Taliban, the
exhibition is able to move on to show us what it is far more interested in, that is,
the depiction of women re-establishing themselves in Afghan national life within the
spheres of education, the home, work, and roles of leadership. The potential horror
of the burqa is then neutralised into a personal choice or a benign relic of a tradi-
tional rural life.
Subsequently, US governmental responses to veiling have continued to develop
within the State Department and are particularly evident within the America.gov
project. Here the veil is enmeshed within discourses of anti-essentialism, personal
choice, and religious freedom that meld into an account of Muslim womanhood
that encompasses both devout religious observance and modern emancipation. Thus
one article covers the production of the Hijabi Monologues, a play that borrows the
format of Eve Ensler’s famous Vagina Monologues, to engage with the diverse nature
of Muslim women in order to ‘challenge stereotypes’54 while another article discusses
an art exhibition, The Seen and the Hidden: [Dis]covering the Veil, where various
understandings of the veil and its role in faith and culture and the politics that accrue
around it are explored.55 Developing a reconciliation of veiling and agency is made
most overtly in an interview with a Muslim woman and a member of the State
Department, Seema Matin. Matin explains the meaning in her decision to wear the
veil and the experiences that have flowed from it.56 A subtitle within the interview –
53 A web based version of this exhibition may be found at: {http://www.usaid.gov/missions/shadows/}.
54 M. Scott Bortot, Hijabi Monologues’ Dispels Stereotypes of Muslim Women (25 March 2010), {http://
www.america.gov/st/peopleplace-english/2010/March/20100325091607smtotrob0.6598627.html} accessed
1 June 2011.
55 Carolee Walker, Artists Use Images of the Veil to Explore Identity, Culture (26 August 2009), {http://
www.america.gov/st/peopleplace-english/2009/August/20090826162258bcreklaw0.5873377.html} accessed
1 June 2011.
56 Lauren Monsen, Acceptance of Religious Garb in US Shows Diversity Tolerance (30 November 2006),
{http://www.america.gov/st/peopleplace-english/2006/December/20061129163534GLnesnoM0.5619928.
html} accessed 1 June 2011.
678 Katherine Allison

‘Contemporary Muslims choosing to wear the hijab’ – may be rather blunt in state-
ment of its objectives, but in the attempt to secure its premise the article is able to
engage with current debates surrounding the veil and subsequently offer a developed
account of the veil and its relationship to agency. Here, wearing the veil is made a
signifier both of personal identity and sociological change. The article depicts how
veiling is to be read as a practice that is now at ease with the politics of American
modernity; there is no friction between women wearing a veil and working in a high
profile position for the US government. Matin herself describes for us her own ‘journey’
towards adopting the veil in the mid-1990s despite the initial objections of her parents,
elite first generation Pakistani immigrants, for whom the wearing the veil was an alien
symbol of backwardness. Outlining her concerns that the veil is widely understood as
a symbol of oppression she directly counters this by assuring us that her decision
‘was probably one of the best, most liberating decisions of my life’. Wearing the veil
is recounted as a deeply held religious commitment and as a constant reminder of
Islamic principles that enable Matin to be ‘a better person’ and as a stipulation for
modest dress. But Matin also makes it clear that there is no dogmatic position on
the issue within Muslim society; rather ‘there’s a full spectrum of opinion’, with
some women choosing to cover their heads, whilst others choose not to.

Including the other and the sovereign self

The title of the interview with Matin does not seek subtlety in its declaration that
‘Acceptance of Religious Garb in US Shows, Diversity, Tolerance’. Such a clear
statement quickly alerts us to how Muslim women are brought into the complicated
politics that attempt to fuse and sustain US national identity. What this pivots upon
is the wish to absorb the other, to encompass its difference in order to attain, as
Cynthia Weber outlines, a completed self ‘freed from the trap of self-referential
morality’.57 Thus, in addition to letting Matin relate her personal story of the veil,
the article seeks to demonstrate how this is also realised as a particularly American
story. Here Muslim women wearing the veil is to be recognised as a completely
normal practice, as ‘diversity’ and ‘tolerance’ are already central to what it means
to be an American. A distinction is even posited between the easy-going acceptance
in the US, as the nation of immigrants and religious freedoms safeguarded by the
Constitution where ‘wearing the hijab is unlikely to elicit comments’, and the seem-
ingly unenlightened European response of national anxiety and recourse to legisla-
tion and varying degrees of prohibition.58
Matin’s story is therefore a familiar one as a reinscription of the well-known
American story of nation-building as a quest to realise the ‘E Pluribus Unum’ ideal.59
This fusion of identity further distinguishes this stance from that of Hirsi Ali. While

57 C. Weber, ‘Not Without My Sister(s): Imagining a Moral America in Kandahar’, International Feminist
Journal of Politics, 7:3 (2005), pp. 358–76 at p. 372.
58 Monsen, Acceptance of Religious Garb.
59 ‘E Pluribus Unum’ translates as ‘Out of Many, One.’ It was first suggested as the US motto in 1776. It
was never formally adopted but has remained in unofficial use. It was noticeably used in an American
Ad Council campaign following 9/11 which attempted to counter hate attacks against Asians and
Muslims by showing a racially diverse American citizenry. See Evelyn Alsultany, ‘Selling American
Diversity and Muslim American Identity through Nonprofit Advertising Post-9/11’, American Quarterly,
59:3 (2007), pp. 593–622.
 American Occidentalism 679

Hirsi Ali locates and maintains a strict US/Islam binary, Sayres Rudy draws out a
distinction between the possibility of a European identity forged through an Orien-
talism, centred upon ‘externalizing a radical other across a hard border’, and the
American mission that seeks a ‘plural ethos by internalizing familiar others across
a soft boundary’.60 An idealised citizenship of bounded, recognisable communities
successfully hyphenated with ‘American’ is once again sought and apparently realised
through the presence of Muslim women typified in a State Department statement that
‘many young Muslim women in America take pride in their choice to cover their hair
and their freedom to express such a choice in this country’.61
The search for an Occidental certainty through the absorption of the other is
furthered via its externalisation into the WoT where domestic American ideals of
liberal pluralism are transposed from the domestic to the international. Specifically,
what we see in the prosecution of the WoT is the attempt to evoke a particular stance
of cosmopolitanism.62 Thus an ethos of tolerance and diversity is posited to mark the
US from its enemy threat.63 As President Bush outlines, ‘We face enemies that hate
not our policies, but our existence; the tolerance of openness and creative culture that
defines us.’64 In contrast, the failure to embrace cosmopolitan values positions the
enemy as ‘a movement defined by their hatreds’ of ‘progress, and freedom, and
choice, and culture, and music, and laughter, and women, and Christians, and Jews,
and all Muslims who reject their distorted doctrines’.65 Moreover, innumerable
declarations claim these values, and the actions that flow from them, to hold a
universal validity and enable a universal good:
When it comes to the common rights and needs of men and women, there is no clash of civili-
zations. The requirements of freedom apply fully to Africa and Latin America and the entire
Islamic world. The peoples of the Islamic nations want and deserve the same freedoms and
opportunities as people in every nation.66
The tenability of these claims depends upon the obscuring of their investment in the
promotion of American interests through an American account of what universality
is to encompass. There is an obvious paradoxical conflict here67 but the included
other serves as a means by which American universality may be extrapolated to
global applicability. Consider an excerpt from an op. ed. written by Paul Wolfowitz,

60 Sayres Rudy draws attention to this, p. 40.

61 Louise Fenner, Muslim Women in America a Diverse Group, Scholar Says (16 April 2007), {http://
www.america.gov/st/washfile-english/2007/April/20070416155301xlrennef0.7087213.html} accessed 1 June
2011.
62 James Brassett, ‘Cosmopolitanism vs. Terrorism? Discourses of Ethical Possibility Before and After 7/7’,
Millennium – Journal of International Studies, 36:2 (2008), pp. 311–37; Helen Dexter, ‘The ‘‘New War’’
on Terror, Cosmopolitanism and the ‘Just War’ Revival’, Government and Opposition, 43:1 (2008),
pp. 55–78,
63 See Brassett, ‘Cosmopolitanism vs. Terrorism?’ for a parallel argument as to the invocation of cosmo-
politanism in order to cast the 7/7 London bombers as enemy others.
64 George W. Bush, ‘Address to the United Nations General Assembly’, Selected Speeches of George W.
Bush 2001–2008 (10 November 2001), {http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/infocus/bushrecord/
documents/Selected_Speeches_George_W_Bush.pdf} accessed 10 June 2011, p. 89.
65 George W. Bush, ‘Address at the Citadel’, Selected Speeches of George W. Bush 2001–2008, (11 December
2001), {http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/infocus/bushrecord/documents/Selected_Speeches_
George_W_Bush.pdf} accessed 10 June 2011, p. 93.
66 George W. Bush, ‘West Point Commencement’, Selected Speeches of George W. Bush 2001–2008,
(1 June 2002), {http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/infocus/bushrecord/documents/Selected_
Speeches_George_W_Bush.pdf} accessed 10 June 2011, p. 131.
67 Rudy, ‘Pros and Cons’, p. 50.
680 Katherine Allison

a deputy secretary for defense in the Bush administration, about a visit to a US-
funded women’s centre in Iraq:
One young woman wearing a conservative Muslim head covering pressed me forcefully about
what the United States was doing to support women’s rights. In return, I asked if she saw
any contradiction between her conservative dress and her advocacy of women’s rights. With
evident conviction, she said, ‘There is no inconsistency between my practice of my religion and
human rights and rights for women.’68
Reference to the young woman’s ‘conservative Muslim head covering’ swiftly evokes
the ultimate possibility of difference. Wolfowitz draws in our expectations of the
extreme cultural otherness represented by the veiled Muslim woman. Given the wide-
spread connotations of the veil as symbolic of oppression we might expect her to
adhere to the passive trope of Islamic womanhood. Yet Wolfowitz seeks to challenge
and subvert our expectations by demonstrating how forcefully she frames her
demands. If this presumably religious woman, as the embodiment of religious/cultural
Iraq, can be so enthusiastic and adamant about the possibilities of democracy and
human rights, then we can be certain as to the innate correctness and universal validity
of the US project. The veiled Muslim woman provides a complete motif for the
idealised fusion of Islamic and (American) democratic values and women’s rights.
However, tensions are inherent in the seeking of confirmation of the self in the
difference of the other. What is subsequently sought is a Muslim woman carefully
delineated to reaffirm the pluralistic, tolerant fabric of American life, yet also assimi-
lated enough to keep it all quietly stitched together. Here I am reminded of how
Slavoj Žižek captures this paradox when he states how ‘tolerant liberal multicultural-
ism wishes to experience the other deprived of its otherness’.69 This dynamic becomes
present in the agential Muslim woman through her subjectivity being created within
two potentially radical points of otherness, that of Islam and that of the (feminist)
woman. When fused together, however, these markers of alterity are effectively
neutralised into an acceptable other/non-other. The discursive power of a formation
of emancipated, enlightened and (possibly) feminist Occidental womanhood has been
central to the establishment of an enemy marked by the barbarity and backwardness
in its treatment of women. But through the agential Muslim woman this repository
containing gendered ideals of civilisation and modernity may be extracted from the
sole possession of the Occidental self and sutured to Islam. Thus a potential threat is
transformed into a familiar ideal. In a specific form, the invocation of a certain form
of feminist emancipation filters religious practices through a liberal understanding of
self-expression and political citizenship. Thus to return to Seema Matin, her decision
to wear the veil becomes explicable as one of individual choice, religion is personalised
and privatised.
Yet it would be a mistake to understand the agential Muslim woman as solely a
celebration of a quasi-feminist liberal individualism. Liberalism’s status within US
political discourse is ambivalent. Neoconservatives in particular fear the contem-
porary possibilities of liberalism becoming divorced from the robust values of civic
participation and decaying into an unrestrained libertarianism. Within this schema
68 Paul Wolfowitz, Women in the New Iraq (1 February 2004), {http://2001-2009.state.gov/g/wi/28686.htm}
accessed 10 August 2009.
69 Slavoj Žižek, Passion: Regular of Decaf ? (27 February 2004), {http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/
146/passion_regular_or_decaf/} accessed 10 June 2011. See also Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion:
Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
 American Occidentalism 681

feminism becomes associated with a corrosive identity politics of self-interest leading

to relativism and the emptying of American bourgeois values. However, the religiosity
of the agential Muslim woman serves as a marker of both a traditional femininity
and a commitment to community that counters the dangers of the nihilistic feminist
other. Muslim women are typically presented as being fully engaged in service to the
Muslim and the wider American community. A session of Islamic Society of North
America’s annual convention, ‘Standing Strong: Women Creating Legacy Com-
munities’ is highlighted and its participants understood as ‘Muslim-American women
who combine faith with talent to improve their society’.70 Other Muslim women are
associated with an idealised heterosexual family embodying both traditional com-
mitments and modern values. A State Department webchat introduces us to Kari
Ansari, the editor in chief for America’s Muslim Family magazine, who discusses
her life ‘as a businessperson, mother and Muslim in America’.71 Another publication
entitled Muslim life in America focuses upon the Tagouri family. The Tagouris repre-
sent ‘a typical American family’. This typical family is an affluent one; the father is a
pathologist and they are photographed within their large home in a ‘quiet upscale
neighbourhood’. This family is also a young, modern American one, a modernity
embodied by the mother Salwa Omeish, who ‘like many young, married American
women . . . has kept her own last name’. Salwa is a devout Muslim who wears the
hijab; yet she is educated and independent and currently is studying for a Masters
degree in counselling. She is also a dedicated mother; ‘like countless women, she
carefully balances her own desire to further her education with caring for her family’.72
The agential Muslim woman appears to represent a familiarisation of the self, a
reflection both idealised and domesticated. She reconciles the conflicts of a fractured
US society being devout in her religious beliefs and practices but equally at home
in the modern, liberal, and pluralist society that is the US. Stories that seek to unite
opposing cultures abound on America.gov; we meet a successful Saudi scientist on a
visit to the US to both learn how to market her inventions and to dispel false percep-
tions about Saudi women;73 businesswomen from the United Arab Emirates travel to
Kentucky and give talks on the ‘Facts Behind the Veil’;74 two American girls of
mixed Western and Pakistani heritage are designing fashionable Western clothes
that also meet the modesty requirements of Muslim women.75

70 M. Scott Bortot, Role of Muslim Women in Enriching American Society Spotlighted (9 July 2010),
{http://www.america.gov/st/peopleplace-english/2010/July/20100709112827kcsniggih0.4330866.html}
accessed 1 June 2011.
71 Department of State. Editor Discusses Life as Businesswoman, Mother, Muslim in America (13 March
2009), {http://www.america.gov/st/washfile-english/2010/April/20090313172222eaifas0.8560755.html}
accessed 1 June 2011.
72 Phyllis McIntosh, ‘The Tagouris: One Family’s Story’, Muslim Life in America (n.d.), {http://usinfo.
org/enus/education/overview/muslimlife/tagouris.htm} accessed 10 August 2009.
73 Daniel Gorelick Saudi Arabian Scientist Works to Empower Women (24 December 2008), {http://
www.america.gov/st/develop-english/2008/December/20081224125138adkcilerog0.590542.html} accessed
1 June 2011.
74 Chris Thornton, Arab Businesswomen Hone Skills at United Arab Emirates Summit (21 December
2006), {http://www.america.gov/st/washfile-english/2006/December/20061221123429ndyblehs9.627932e-
02.html} accessed 1 June 2011.
75 Howard Cincotta and Deborah Conn, Muslim Designers Create Clothes that Combine Fashion with
Modesty (19 September 2008), {http://www.america.gov/st/diversity-english/2008/September/
20080918111528maduobbA0.3181116.html} accessed 1 June 2011.
682 Katherine Allison

Contesting the agential Muslim woman

Undoubtedly the set pieces of Orientalism have been refashioned. As Prakash observes,
it is problematic to assume that Orientalism can remain as a ‘self-contained system
of representations’. When put into use it has to ‘open itself to conflicts, change, and
displacements generated by its operation in actual historical conditions’.76 Here then,
Orientalist tropes are invoked in order to be denied as a product of illegitimate and
false stereotyping standing in the way of our ability to engage with Islam and to
construe Muslim women as an embodiment of ‘authentic’ Islam through a frame-
work of agency, modernity, and emancipation appears to embody progressive
change and possibility. Yet how should we comprehend the political implications
of this ‘progress’ for both Muslim women and the wider contexts of the WoT and
US engagements with Islam? How can we develop existing feminist critiques? How
does a framework that is attuned to the ‘process’ of Occidentalism and attentive to
domination, variation, and ambivalence shape the possibilities for resistance?
The conclusions to be drawn do not provide any tidy responses to these ques-
tions. These representational shifts appear to deepen a stasis in the structures of
power that maintain US control. Said’s identification within Orientalism of a ‘flexible
positional authority which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relation-
ships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand’77 seems con-
firmed. The issues surrounding the veil demonstrate how it can be invoked to signify
the oppression of Muslim women or a benign expression of religious choice within a
tolerant society. In both cases the legitimacy of the US in relation to an undesired
other is apparently strengthened. However, a focus upon the processes of Occiden-
talism also assists us to connect with those tensions within Orientalism concerning
the place and possibility for contest, resistance, and ‘the mutually constitutive role
played by colonizer and colonized . . . in forming, in part, the identities of both the
dominant power and the subalterns involved in the imperial and colonial projects of
the ‘‘West’’ ’.78 Thus we may also consider how the alternative meanings of the veil
have been actively fought for by women such as Seema Matin and Tayyibah Taylor.
In concluding, therefore, I wish to consider the political effect of these discursive pro-
cesses that signal a continuing assertion of US power but also the ways that they are
enmeshed with ideals of the US self and the openings this may provide to further
explore resistance to US projects and dialogical aspects of identity.
Through the agential Muslim Woman the WoT seeks to deny race, culture, and
religion as its enabling factors. Thus the ‘progressive’ dimensions of the WoT gain
support and legitimacy through an appeal to universalism. The veiled but agential
Muslim woman, recognised by Wolfowitz, becomes the ultimate diffusion of the spe-
cific and local (other) into a common (American) humanity. However, this supposed
denial has a paradoxical effect. It makes race culture and religion central to the
meaning and conduct of the WoT through their evacuation from the sphere of
political engagement. By representing Islam in wholly positive terms, a distancing
from the sites of political contestation occurs. US discourses of Muslim women and
veiling reflect important issues concerning the right to personal religious expression

76 Prakash, Orientalism, p. 207.

77 Said, Orientalism, p. 7.
78 Ratansi, ‘Postcolonialism and its Discontents’, p. 481.
 American Occidentalism 683

but they bypass wider questions of the problems of integration. In the absence of
critical reflection, the demonisation and the celebration of Islam occurs along the
same ideological axis. Understandings of Muslim women continue to flow from their
interpellation as subjects of a particular religion, a process that Mahmood Mamdani
captures as ‘culture talk’.79 In operation culture talk ‘tends to think of individuals
(from ‘‘traditional’’ cultures) in authentic and original terms, as if their identities are
shaped entirely by the supposedly unchanging culture into which they are born’.80 As
subjects of culture Muslim women are homogenised into a manageable grouping.
Access to issues historical context, varying interpretations of religious tradition,
political struggle, and differences in socioeconomic situation that are the true requisites
to any meaningful engagement with an understanding of Muslim women’s lives are
pushed further from the field of contestation.
The evocation of the agential Muslim woman has a further, disciplinary impetus.
A single, acceptable form of religious observance and liberal citizenship is sought.
Moreover, the collective evocation of Muslim women is problematic for its tendency
to facilitate collective punishment.81 If the embrace of Muslim women occurs without
extensive critical dialogue then it may easily be reversed to facilitate collective sanc-
tion. The attempt to police the parameters of acceptable religious identity has far
reaching and diverse repercussions for the political participation of Muslim women
and their own attempts to negotiate complex subjectivities and political pressures.
Under such circumstances, where do the possibilities to contest the agential Muslim
woman and the political power plays that shape her lie? Some feminist critiques have
argued that the legitimation of the WoT claimed through depictions of passive victims
may be subverted via the counter positing of women’s agency, and of ‘images of
Afghan women marching militantly with fists in the air, carrying banners about free-
dom, democracy, and secular government. Those women wouldn’t need saving as
much as the burqa clad women seem to’.82 Recognition of the appropriation of
agency problematises this strategy such women would seem highly amenable to a
US ideal. Moreover, reflecting upon the dynamics in the creation of the agential
Muslim woman asks fundamental questions as to how we might theorise agency
and the spaces in which its potential for resistance may be practiced. In particular it
asks whether such a perspective further replicates depoliticised practices that, in lack-
ing attention to how they may be embedded in the contested processes of the search
for subjectivity, regard agency/passivity as a simple binary.83 The shaping of the
agential Muslim woman as a process intrinsic to the US search for an Occidental
certainty, rather than as a purely instrumental cooption, questions whether agency
and resistance can be external to this dynamic.
However, if we begin our critique from a perspective internal to the encounter
between the US and Muslim women then we are brought to the centrality of under-
standing some of its complexities. Moreover, a sensitivity to the dialogical moments
that shape this discourse may have further possibilities for developing the political
opportunities to contest it. Michaela Ferguson outlines how the US intervention in

79 Mahmood Mamdani, ‘Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective on Culture and Terrorism’,
American Anthropologist, 104:3 (2008), pp. 766–75.
80 Ibid., p. 767.
81 Ibid.
82 Kolhatkar, Saving.
83 Vasilaki, Victimization, p. 8.
684 Katherine Allison

Afghanistan must be recognised in part as a success for feminism’s ability to shape

the rhetoric of US security to the extent that women’s rights may become a legiti-
mate concern of foreign policy.84 Using the same logic, I would argue that the adop-
tion of the agential Muslim woman reflects the efforts of Muslim women, feminists,
and activists to recast the discursive terrain in which they are construed. An interface
between Muslim women and the US is apparent and it becomes important to ask
about the ways that Muslim women may be utilising and shaping the possibilities
that are created. As an example, Zakia Salime has explored how various women’s
organisations in Morocco have utilised the openings of the WoT to advance their
own calls for greater political rights. In doing so they ‘shift the gaze from the binary
of oppression/resistance to look at the various ways in which women have created
new spaces through a selective appropriation of the war’s narrative’.85 Furthering
such work may help move towards the complexities of agency, to imbue it with
greater political substance and push it beyond a framework of presence or absence,
victimhood, or agency. This is not to deny the effect of crucial asymmetries of power.
But recognising that the investment in Muslim women is something that reveals not
only an exercise of imperial power but also the precarity of the US self and its
constant need to be reinvented and restated is crucial.
Connecting with the instabilities and ambivalences of US Occidentalism and
questioning intentionality enables possibilities to negotiate universalising claims and
confirms that the Muslim woman cannot simply be understood as the passive recipient
of a one directional flow of power. As such it helps to prevent us from yet again (albeit
inadvertently) erasing the presence of Muslim women by focusing solely upon the
imposition of a disciplinary agenda from a fixed, fully coherent subject.

84 Michaele Ferguson, ‘ ‘‘W’’ Stands for Women: Feminism and Security Rhetoric in the Post-9/11 Bush
Administration’, Politics and Gender, 1:1 (2005), pp. 9–38.
85 Zakia Salime, ‘The War on Terrorism: Appropriation and Subversion by Moroccan Women’, Signs:
Journal of Women and Culture in Society, 33:1 (2007), pp. 1–24.
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