Rafia Zakaria review

Winter 2008

Review

Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran

By Fatemeh Keshavarz

University of North Carolina Press, 2007, 192 pages (cloth), $24.95

Rethinking Global Sisterhood: Western Feminism and Iran

By Nima Naghibi

University of Minnesota Press, 2007, 232 pages (paper), $22.50

Reviewed by Rafia Zakaria

Like nearly every other activity that casts focus on the world beyond the West, the academic and literary consumption of the post-modern “other” has taken a markedly different turn after 9/11 and the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. Illustrating this tension was a speech given by Laura Bush in 2005. She said: “Because of our recent military gains in much of Afghanistan, women are no longer imprisoned in their homes. They can listen to music and teach their daughters without fear of punishment. Yet the terrorists who helped rule that country now plot and plan in many countries. And they must be stopped. The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women.”

This appropriation of human rights issues and the “liberation” of women as a justification for war has cast an onerous pall on the question of whether “helping” the women of these countries is part of an imperialist agenda born from orientalist stereotypes or a well-meaning attempt at global sisterhood. It is under the shadow of this discourse, and the unceasing rhetoric that Iran may be next in line for a U.S. invasion, that the two authors under review present their discussion.

Fatemeh Keshavarz’s Jasmine and Stars is an evocative book in which the author skillfully weaves a narrative of her childhood in Iran and the basis of her love for Iranian literature. The lyricism of Keshavarz’s book; her near-poetic rendition of nights spent under a starlit sky interspersed with Persian literary classics; her relationship with her father, with whom she “had the most explosive arguments and finest poetry exchanges of her life” – all present an Iran notably different from the land of black chadors to which Western readers have become accustomed.

This is precisely Keshavarz’s intention. She says repeatedly that her purpose is to counteract the harsh, monolithic, and orientalist narrative presented by Azar Nafisi in her widely-read memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran. This memoir is accused of presenting Muslim women as “passive masochistic victims” with an obstinacy that refuses to “acknowledge their commitment to gender equality on the basis of their Muslim faith.” This ultimately presents a “stereotype of Iranians as harmful and distorted as to make them subhuman.”

Keshavarz presents another, more humanized Iran. In specific contrast to Nafisi, Keshavarz unfailingly reminds us, she portrays Iranian men as anything other than overbearing barbaric brutes whose ultimate project in life is to control their women. As a counterpoint, she presents her maternal uncle, an army officer impenetrable to corruption and unfailingly tender to his niece, urbane and loving – a far cry from the domineering figure of, say, Mr. Bahri in Nafisi’s memoir. Nafisi’s presentation, Keshavarz states, affords a “level of supremacy” to the Iranian male stereotype that makes “loving male family members, teachers’ cousins, neighbors or colleagues invisible, unimaginable to the point that the reader does even ask … where are they?”

Given the current climate of relations between the United States and Iran, one can certainly sympathize with Keshavarz’s point, yet it leaves many crucial unanswered questions. Prominent among these is the issue of memory and representation. At their core, both books are memoirs: does this not mean that both have the right to represent Iran as they personally experienced it? It is disconcerting that Keshavarz never addresses this conundrum: is it even possible to question which set of memories is more “correct” or representative of Iran, or is she saying that those memories that present a deleterious or less flattering view should not be represented in literature because of their contribution to orientalist stereotypes? This seems to follow from her critique. It is particularly troubling since it hits at the heart of what women’s liberation arguments have done to the cause of feminist movements in Muslim countries. What indeed must be done about those women who do face oppression and who cannot state their case or their stories within solely indigenous contexts … should they be denied the right to tell their stories of abuse to an international audience because they may malign Iran, Pakistan, or Oman?

Nima Naghibi’s book Rethinking Global Sisterhood presents another aspect of this debate. However, instead of being focused against a particular book, Naghibi presents a historical analysis of how conceptions of “sisterhood” that inform global feminisms have been devotedly committed to an image of themselves as “an intellectual and political vanguard at the forefront of history” against the image of the “eastern woman who belongs to a more primitive era.” This construction, whose substance Nagihibi demonstrates through a presentation of the writings of Presbyterian and Anglican women, inevitably constructed the Persian woman as “abject” and “submissive.”

Chapter 2 is entitled Scophilic Desires and is devoted to how Iranian feminists during the Pahlavi era, along with Western feminists, monolithically portrayed the veil as evil and oppressive. Naghibi thus hopes to “move outside binary representations of the veil by gesturing to the complexities of the practice of veiling within the Iranian context.” But the gem of this book is its final chapter. She presents the work of contemporary Iranian filmmakers, such as Tamineh Mir and Ziba Mir-Hosseini, as venues for the growth of an “indigenous” Iranian feminism. This model offers “a challenge to the dated and imperialist model of ‘hierarchical’ global sisterhood by refusing to offer false promises of equality.”

Nagihibi’s effort is commendable and her historical analysis presents a notable exception to the emotional vitriol sometimes displayed against Western feminism’s hegemonic “sisterhood.” It is difficult to question the veracity of this existing power dynamic within feminist conceptions of sisterhood. However, it is useful to wonder whether the genealogical unearthing of this paradigm fulfills any pragmatic purposes in forging real relationships of solidarity between Western feminists and their counterparts in Muslim countries. What stance must Western feminists take in issues where global sisterhood, however suspect, can nevertheless fulfill useful purposes in building transnational networks of advocacy and public education? Is an international feminist discourse impossible if one believes that concepts like global sisterhood have hegemonic origins?

Ultimately, both Keshavarz and Naghibi leave their readers with crucial questions about the complex power dynamics that have resulted from the twin discourses of orientalism and neo-conservatism. They reveal the conundrum facing Muslim women, who must articulate a discourse that both opposes patriarchy in their local contexts and also remains committed to deflating the insidious discourse of orientalist stereotypes. Their salvation lies not in critiquing each other, by labeling one set of experiences as “real” and another as a duped instance of native informing, but rather in embracing the plurality and complexity of the lives of Muslim women and their feminist projects.

Rafia Zakaria is an attorney from Pakistan who is a doctoral candidate at Indiana University. Her research, teaching, and activism focus on gender, multiculturalism, and the politics of Islam.