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The War on Terror, Feminist Orientalism and Orientalist
Feminism: Case Studies of Two North American
Bestsellers
Roksana Bahramitash a
a
Simone de Beauvoir Center for Women's Studies, Concordia University. Montreal.
Canada

Online Publication Date: 01 June 2005

To cite this Article: Bahramitash, Roksana , (2005) 'The War on Terror, Feminist
Orientalism and Orientalist Feminism: Case Studies of Two North American
Bestsellers', Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies, 14:2, 221 - 235
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Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies,

Vol. 14, No. 2, 221235, Summer 2005

The War on Terror, Feminist Orientalism

and Orientalist Feminism: Case Studies
of Two North American Bestsellers
ROKSANA BAHRAMITASH
Simone de Beauvoir Center for Womens Studies, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

Since the 11 September 2001 events and US initiation of its war on terror, Islamic
fundamentalism has attracted major attention and become the center of many political
controversies. A main focus in the debates over Islam concerns the situation of women in
Muslim countries. These debates often revolve around a major theme: Muslim women as
victims of religious dogma. While it is true that some conservative interpretations of
Islamic religious texts are misogynist, many Muslims are strong advocates of womens
rights, both inside and outside the Muslim world. Naturally, the latter are concerned about
the simplistic and generalized ways in which criticisms of the status of women under Islam
are formulated and the context in which these issues are raised. For example, in the
aftermath of 11 September, US President George W. Bush has frequently campaigned to
save the civilized world from evil. In the case of Afghanistan, military action gathered
support on the basis of a feminist causedefending the rights of oppressed Afghan
women. It is this criticism of the position of Muslim women for the purpose of war
propaganda that is worrisome and needs to be examined. This article discusses both
feminist Orientalism and Orientalist feminism. The former refers to Orientalists who used
womens rights as an excuse to legitimate their colonial presence and their modern version
such as the current neo-conservatives who raise support for war in defense of womens
rights. Orientalist feminism, in contrast, is a modern project and a type of feminism that
advocates and supports particular foreign policies toward the Middle East.
In this article, two books that have become bestsellers in North America will be
reviewed to analyze the ways in which feminist Orientalism and Orientalist feminism
come together. I begin with a discussion of the feminist Orientalism that informs both
books from a historical perspective. Then I review the post-colonial era in which
Orientalist feminism has inspired a genre of books that purport to defend womens rights
but are steeped in classic Orientalist stereotypes. In the aftermath of 11 September,
feminist Orientalism and Orientalist feminism have come together to raise support for the

Correspondence address: Roksana Bahramitash, Simone de Beauvoir Institute, Concordia University Annex
MU, 1455 de Maisonneuve West, MU 201-3, H3G-1M8, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Email: rbahramitash@yahoo.com
ISSN ISSN 1066-9922 Print/1473-9666 Online/05/020221-15 q 2005 Editors of Critique
DOI: 10.1080/10669920500135512
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222 R. Bahramitash

neo-conservative agenda to stir anti-Muslim sentiment in North America as well as to

promote the war on terror. These two books are Nine Parts of Desire by Geraldine Brooks
and Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi.1
Although both these books have earned considerable academic and media attention
because they are perceived as feminist, their popularity is linked to the ways in which
they reinforce popular stereotypes of Muslims as backward and primitive. Furthermore,
they have helped to create and to maintain a widespread (albeit factually erroneous) notion
that Muslim women are victims of an inherent misogynism in Islamic tradition. These
books are examples of a type of feminism that is neither new nor rare. Borrowing from
Edward Saids Orientalism,2 Parvin Paidar has given a sophisticated understanding of
Orientalist feminism. In her study of the role of Iranian women in public spaces, Women
and the Political Process in Twentieth Century Iran, she analyzes three characteristics of
feminist Orientalism.3 First, it assumes a binary opposition between the West and the
Orient: The Occident is progressive and the best place for women, while the Muslim
Orient is backward, uncivilized, and the worst place for women. The second characteristic
of feminist Orientalism is that it regards Oriental women only as victims and not as agents
of social transformation; thus it is blind to the ways in which women in the East resist and
empower themselves. Therefore, Muslim women need saviors, i.e., their Western sisters,
as in the case of Afghan women, who, always being covered, are seen as unable to become
agents of their own liberation. Even President Bush, not a man known for advocacy of
feminist causes, has spoken about the need to save Afghan women. The third aspect of
feminist Orientalism assumes that all societies in the Orient are the same and all Muslim
women there live under the same conditions.
The theoretical analysis in this article borrows from Laura Nader, whose seminal 1989
article brought together Antonio Gramscis concept of hegemony with Michele Foucaults
notions of true discourse and positional superiority.4 The negative images of Islam and
Muslims that are dominant in North America can best be understood through Gramscis
concept of hegemony. Gramsci argues that hegemonic knowledge is a system of thought
that is formed over time and that is representative of the interests of the dominant class that
manages to universalize its own beliefs and value systems to subordinate classes.5 Such
beliefs are formulated and reformulated by the intellectual elites, the organic
intellectuals of the dominant class, and result in controlling structures that are imposed
through civil society rather than through the state. Negative stereotypes of Muslims as
part of the dominant ideology of North America are reinforced through institutions
independent of the state such as the mainstream mass media. More recently, the

1
Geraldine Brooks (1995) Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women (New York:
Anchor/Doubleday); and Azar Nafisi (2003) Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (New York: Random
House).
2
Edward Said (1978) Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books).
3
See Parvin Paidar (1995) Women and the Political Process in Twentieth Century Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press).
4
Laura Nader (1989) Orientalism, occidentalism and the control of women, Cultural Dynamics:
An International Journal for the Study of Processes and Temporality of Cultures, 2(3), pp. 133.
5
Antonio Gramsci (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebook, Quinton Hoare & Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (Eds)
(New York: International Publishers).
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The War on Terror, Feminist Orientalism and Orientalist Feminism 223

neo-conservative agenda has strengthened these negative stereotypes to justify its foreign
policy in the Middle East.
Gramscis analysis of hegemony can be complemented by Foucaults analysis of the
way in which the truth about Muslims and Islam is formulated according to the social
structure of power relations. Foucaults notion of true discourse refers to a discourse that
is restrictive and exclusive of alternative conceptions of reality.6 Such discourse excludes
concepts that could bring understanding of how different forms of power can operate.
Thus, negative stereotypes of Muslims have become part of the dominant discourse.
Gramsci and Foucault agree that a hegemonic relationship is established not
through force or coercion, nor necessarily through consent, but most effectively by
way of practices, techniques, and methods which infiltrate minds and bodies, tastes,
desires . . .7 Nader, in bringing Gramscian-Foucauldian concerns together with those of
Said, argues that the hegemonic discourse dictates a realm that defines the relation
between the East and the West in such a way that the West is located as a positional
superior to the East.8
When looking at how this theoretical conceptualization operates with respect to
feminism, it is helpful to go back to Gramscis idea that hegemonic knowledge is not only
successful in forming an ideological base to protect the interest of the powerful elite but
can also engage the opposition successfully in such a way as to serve hegemony. In the
case of Orientalist feminism, the very same feminism that technically is critical of
hegemony actually becomes a tool to reinforce hegemony. Consequently, in the context
of post-11 September, Orientalist feminism has complemented the current military
agenda of US foreign policy while fueling racism against Muslims, even in North
America, where immigration from the East has led to the establishment of several large
urban communities of Muslims.9 Books written by Oriental feminists essentialize Islam as
a religion and portray Muslim women only as victims; those by authors such as Brooks and
Nafisi became bestsellers because they reinforce the message that the political elite seeks
to convey. Simultaneously, such books make it difficult for Muslim women, both in North
America and Muslim countries, to defend their rights as citizens as well as their gender
rights. Before analyzing the books by Brooks and Nafisi, in the dominant discourse which
has brought Orientalist feminism and feminist Orientalism together it would be helpful to
review the historical roots of feminist Orientalism.

Feminist Orientalism during the Colonial Era

Western political domination over the Muslim world and military action against it
throughout the colonial period was legitimized on the assumption that Muslim societies
were inferior to those in the West. Civilizing the Orient through whatever means was
deemed appropriate and was the pretext under which colonization of the Middle East and

6
Michel Foucault (1972) The Archaeology of Knowledge, A. M. Sheridan (Trans.) (New York: Pantheon Books).
7
B. Smart (1989) The politics of truth and the problem of hegemony, in: David Couzenshoy (Ed.) Foucault:
A Critical Reader (New York: Basil Blackwell), pp. 157 174.
8
Nader, Orientalism, Occidentalism and the control of women, pp. 133.
9
For an interesting analysis of how feminist Orientalism manifested itself against Muslims in the media of
Montreal, see Yasmin Jiwani (2004) Gendering terror: representations of the Orientalized body in Quebecs
post-September 11 English-language press, Critique, 13(3), pp. 265291.
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224 R. Bahramitash

North Africa took place. Historically, the status of women was invoked as an indication of
the Muslim worlds backwardness, even though in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries women in Western countries had few legal rights and were not allowed to vote.
Lord Cromer, the British colonial governor of Egypt (1883 1907), illustrates the double
standards inherent in early Western attitudes: On the hand, he was critical of Muslim
practices that he thought led to the mistreatment of Muslim women; on the other hand, he
opposed the suffragettes campaigning for womens rights in England.10
Cromers attitudes about Egypt were derived from the general body of Western
knowledge of the Orient that Edward Said identified as Orientalism. In his path-breaking
book, Said explained how Orientalists regarded the Orient as a place of corrupt despotism,
mystical religiosity, irrationality, backwardness, and the ill-treatment of women.11 British
colonial rule in Egypt is not the only historical example of these attitudes. In Algeria,
which France invaded and conquered in 1830, civilizing the Arabs and the issue of
womens rights became important reasons for the French colonial project. As Frantz
Fanon has demonstrated, the French attempted to civilize Algerians by encouraging
de-veiling: here and there it thus happened that a woman was saved and symbolically
unveiled.12 Ironically, the forced de-veiling and Gallicization that were the ideological
basis of French colonial power in Algeria were being carried out while many women in
France were fighting for their rights against those very men who dreamed of liberating
Muslim women. Throughout the colonial era, French officials denounced the status of
women in Algeria and used the assumed oppression of Muslim women to deny Algerians
any political or civic rights. Because Algerian men oppressed their women, they were
uncivilized, and their behavior, argued the French, was conditioned by their religion,
Islam. Such attitudes, of course, reinforced colonialism, for the more uncivilized were
the natives, the more necessary it was the French (or other civilized Europeans) to
rule them.
The European colonial enterprise was not an entirely male project. White middle-class
women, though still subordinate within the dominant society, could acquire influence and
power by using the discourse of Orientalism. An interesting example is that of the
nineteenth-century painter Henrietta Brown, who made a career out of depicting the lives
of Oriental women. Brown used her position as a woman to enter a world to which
European men had been denied access: the harem of the Ottoman court. According to
Yegenoglu, It is with the assistance of the Western woman (for she is the only foreigner
allowed to enter into the forbidden zone) that the mysteries of this inaccessible inner
space and the essence of the Orient secluded in it could be unconcealed; it is she who
can remedy the long-lasting lack of the Western subject.13 Based on her visits to the
harem, Brown created two paintings that brought her considerable success and fame: Une
joueuse de flute (interieur de harem: Constantinople, 1860) and Une visite (interieur de
harem: Constantinople, 1880). Both paintings are perfect examples of the way the
colonial world thought about Muslim women: as victims of the cruel patriarchal practice

10
Margot Badran (1995) Feminists, Islam and Nation (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
11
See further Said, Orientalism.
12
Frantz Fanon (1967) Black Skin White Masks (New York: Grove Press), p. 42.
13
Meda Yegenoglu (1998) Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press), p. 75.
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The War on Terror, Feminist Orientalism and Orientalist Feminism 225

of polygyny. Brown portrayed the harem as a prison for women who had no control over
their destinies to bolster the appeal of the civilizing mission.14 As a clear example of
Orientalist depiction, the paintings presented to the public through the medium of art
essentialized the binaries between the civilized West and the uncivilized East.
Browns paintings inspired many similar images that collectively provided evidence
for Western critics of the Muslim world throughout the colonial period. Malek Alloula, for
example, has assembled many of these depictions, especially an extremely valuable
collection of colonial post cards that French soldiers in North Africa sent home to relatives
in France.15 As Gayatri Spivak has noted, brown women saved by white men from brown
men is the major underlying theme of these images.16
By the early twentieth century, Orientalism even became dominant among the educated
elites in those countries in the Orient that had avoided direct European colonial rule.
In Turkey, for example, the elite views about the Middle East resembled those of the
Europeans with respect to notions of a civilized West/primitive Orient binary, particularly
in reference to the position of women. The Kemalist movement regarded the decline of the
Ottoman Empire as the result of its traditions, boasting that [T]he Turkish nation has
perceived with great joy that the obstacles, which constantly for centuries had kept Turkey
from joining the civilized nations marching forward on the path of progress, have been
removed . . . [and made possible] the transformation of the nation from a backward to a
civilized identity.17 Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Republic of Turkey in 1923,
advocated changing womens role in order to achieve this civilized identity. Not
surprisingly, he encouraged Western clothes as a sign of civilization, and this meant the
de-veiling of women.
In Iran, Reza Shah Pahlavi, who came to power through a military coup detat in
1921 but decided in 1925 to retain the monarchy with himself as king, subscribed to
similar views with respect to the position of women in society. Like Ataturk, he saw
changing the role of women as necessary for the transformation from the backwardness
of the Orient to progressive civilization. Reza Shahs feminism translated into a
policy of forced de-veiling in 1936, a policy imposed on Iranian women as a means to
liberate them.18
It is worth noting that womens liberation under both Ataturk and Reza Shah was very
much in line with the project of imposing a European way of life that replicated the
economic and political interests of the West. While Western women were fighting for
equal rights, these dictators and Westernizers adopted the Western model without question
and imposed it on their women. In both cases, the idea of de-veiling and educating women
was an aspect of the overall policy to modernize the country, and it had little do with
what women may or may not have wanted for themselves. Elite women initially, and after
World War II middle-class women, adopted European models; for the masses of peasant
and the working-class women, however, such liberation was irrelevant, and their lives
barely changed.

14
Ibid.
15
Malek Alloula (1986) The Colonial Harem (Manchester: Manchester University Press).
16
Quoted in Barbara Harlow, Introduction, ibid., p. xviii.
17
Yegenoglu, Colonial Fantasies, p. 131.
18
Paidar, Women and the Political Process.
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226 R. Bahramitash

The Post-colonial Era and Oriental Feminism

In the post-colonial world, the rise of feminism as a social movement in the Western
world has improved the status of women in Australia, Europe, and North America, and
many gains have been earned in employment and the legal domain. However, these
changes tend to benefit mainly white middle-class women. In North America, for
example, non-whites, immigrants, and the indigenous Indians continue to suffer from
poverty and discrimination, and their women remain at the bottom of society. These
realities tend to be absent from the analysis of white middle-class feminists who
dominate the mainstream discourses on the issue of gender. This situation is especially
true with respect to discussions of Third World women. Increasingly, white-middle class
feminism, or liberal feminism, has become embedded as part of hegemony.
Since Margaret Meads Sex and Temperament was published in 1926, comparing
Western women and their relationship to their men with that of women in primitive
societies has become common, especially in the United States. Nader argues that the
comparison has been more implicit than explicit but the comparison always assumes
the experience of women in Western countries as the self and that of women in the
Third World as the Other. As Said points out, Orientalism is a discourse that
Orientalizes the Orient for the purpose of Occidental consumption.19 Mohanty argues
that liberal feminism produces colonial knowledge systems when referring to the third-
world, which is comprised of a monolithic category.20 It is through the discourse that
creates the Third World woman that the First World is brought out as privileged and
singular. But the West is dominated as much by patriarchy in ideology and government
as is the East. The dominant ideology is preserved in the West by avoiding any criticism
of the way immigrant, non-white, and economically disadvantaged women are treated;
their lack of status vis-a`-vis the sources of power and their lack of access to economic
resources strengthens the hegemony. This ignorance is at the heart of the problem with
liberal feminist analysis, and in many respects it is a continuation of the imperial era.21
According to Trinh and Mohanty, in their critique of liberal feminist imperialism,
feminist opportunists seem to speak to the third world through a shared vocabulary
which insists: They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented.22 Women
of color and other feminists have been criticizing liberal feminism for more than a
decade, and we now have a large body of literature about the problems of Oriental
feminism.23
The growing critique of Orientalist feminism has been prompted by its alarming
impact and its popular appeal in North America. Orientalist feminism is popularized

19
Leela Gandhi (1998) Postcolonialism and feminism, in: Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction
(New York: Columbia University Press).
20
Chandra Mohanty (2003) Feminism without Borders (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).
21
See further Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory.
22
Ibid.
23
See, for example, Uma Narayan & Sandra Harding (Eds) (2000) Philosophy for a Multicultural, Postcolonial
and Feminist World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press); Floya Anthias & Nira Yuval (1992) Radicalized
Boundaries (New York: Routledge); Partha Chatterjee (1986) Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World:
A Derivative Discourse (London: Zed Books); and Lila Abu-Lughod (2001) Orientalism and Middle East
feminist studies, Feminist Studies, 27(1), pp. 101 113.
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The War on Terror, Feminist Orientalism and Orientalist Feminism 227

through novels and films, and it has become a boom industry that has created huge
problems for Muslims. True accounts, such as the book and movie Not without My
Daughter, helped to incite racist, anti-Muslim and anti-Iranian feelings across Europe
and North America;24 in the aftermath of 11 September, this genre has gathered a
new momentum.
During the colonial period, the colonizers believed they were bringing civilization to the
Orient. Now President Bush wants to bring democracy to the same region, and with the
same methods of the past: war and occupation. Of course, Bush also wants to protect
civilization from barbaric terrorists, so there is a war on terror in tandem with a drive to
export democracy. And what better way to earn the necessary public support for these
colonial campaigns than by going back to the proven colonial strategy of focusing on the
Muslim worlds treatment of women? The most effective propagandists for this effort,
however, are not government employees but rather independent, self-proclaimed
feminists whose personal experiences with the situation of women under Islam impart an
aura of authenticity to their portrayals of the primitive and misogynist nature of the
religion. It is in this sense that we need to examine the books by Brooks and Nafisi, both of
which have reached large audiences.

The Quran as the Root of Womens Treatment

Brooks Nine Parts of Desire is based on her work as a journalist in the Middle East and
North Africa. Originally published in 1994, it has since been reprinted several times and
continues to remain popular. Like her predecessors during the colonial era, her position as
a woman gave her access to the private world of Muslim women, a sphere that Western
men cannot enter. Her work is the result of her observations turning Muslim women into
subjects of study. Her conclusions derive not only from observations but also from her
own background as a white, middle-class woman from Australia who was raised as a
Catholic and converted to Judaism as an adult.
Nine Parts of Desire, which was on the New York Times and/or the New York Review of
Books bestseller list for several weeks, is aimed at the North American market.
Interestingly, its cover is a modern version of a colonial post card: At the center there is a
picture of a woman covered in a black head-to-toe veil and seen from behind moving away
from the reader while against the backdrop of a mosque a clergyman is coming toward the
viewer. Below this picture there are two miniature paintings of a harem from the Mogul
era in India. Although the Middle East has been transformed in multiple ways since the
colonial eraas has India, it is surprising how little the Occidental image has changed and
the extent to which the harem continues to be at the center of much discussion about
women in the Orient. Brooks objective is to dis/uncover the hidden world of practicing
Muslim women, but in this journey the book overlooks millions of secular Muslim
women, as well as non-Muslim women who live in Muslim countries. Consequently,
for readers who are uninformed about the Muslim world, Brooks encounters with

24
Not Without My Daughter, by Betty Mahmoody, with William Hoffer (New York: St. Martins Press, 1987), is
basically an account of the breakdown of a marriage between an American woman and her Iranian husband but
presented in a sensational narrative that portrays Iran of the mid-1980s and Islam as brutal, frightening, and
exceptionally misogynist; it became a bestseller and was made into a movie.
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228 R. Bahramitash

an unrepresentative sample of the devoutly religious become the entire story of women in
Muslim countries.
Brooks introduces each chapter with a few Quranic versus, verses that can be construed
to disparage women. This is intended to reinforce the underlying theme that the Quran and
the religion of Islam are the roots of a very grim life for Muslim women. She implies
strongly that the situation of women is the same in all Muslim countries, and she
frequently uses Saudi Arabiawhere the situation of women is problematicas an
example of various kinds of repression based on gender. There is no recognition of the vast
differences among Muslim countries in terms of social, political, economic, and cultural
systems in general, and the great variety in the position of women in particular. If her goal
was to inform readers about these differences, then she would have mentioned the active
participation of Muslim women in politics in such Muslim countries as Bangladesh,
Indonesia, Pakistan, and Turkey, all countries in which women have been elected to the
highest political offices, but are countries that merit virtually no references in the book.
But the heavy emphasis on Saudi Arabia and certain Muslim countries rather than all
Muslim countries does serve a purpose. It provides evidence for Orientalist
feminisms misconceptions, including: (a) an essentialist view of Islam; (b) a belief
Islam is the root cause of the adverse situation of women; and (c) a homogeneous picture
of the lives of women in the Muslim world. These views, unfortunately, have helped to
make the book a bestseller because they reinforce the popular image of a monolithic
Islam in which Muslim women, like those who live in Saudi Arabia, are victims of
male oppression.
The book is full of examples where Brooks as an Orientalist feminist takes the
experience of Muslim women as the Other. One such example is when she discusses the
problems that work outside the home poses for women in Cairo as though this is a problem
specific to Egyptian women. Another example is her discussion of the role of the extended
family in the lives of Muslim women, which she treats as an oddity and peculiarity of
Muslims. These examples show Brooks situational superiority vis-a`-vis the women
about whom she is writingor perhaps judging. She is unable to accept these Muslim
women as her equals (there are rare exceptions, such as her admiration for Jahan Sadat, the
widow of former Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, who was assassinated in 1981). Yet she
is determined to reveal their hidden lives, from how they dressshe suggests that readers
can learn about the lives of Muslim women in Egypt by observing what they wear at Cairo
airportto their alleged lack of empowerment or any gender consciousness, to their
oppression, which is related back to the Quran.
Islam and the Quran are not the only subjects about which Brooks is uninformed.
She also has scant knowledge about the history and political economy of the Middle East.
For example, her sweeping historical discussion of the region fails to record vitally
important information such as the role of the followers of the eighteenth-century
puritanical reformer Ibn Wahab in the later formation of Saudi Arabia. She also seems
unaware that other followers of Ibn Wahab went to the Indian subcontinent and established
seminaries out of which, two centuries later, would emerge the Taliban movement that
ruled most of Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001. These facts have critical links to
twentieth-century international politics: The United States, for more than 50 years,
supported the Saudi royal familyself-proclaimed guardians of Wahabi interpretations of
Islamand initially welcomed the Talibans ascent to power. The Muslims who follow
the interpretations of Ibn Wahabthey never refer to themselves as Wahabisare not
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The War on Terror, Feminist Orientalism and Orientalist Feminism 229

a unified group but are split into extreme fundamentalist factions, such as al-Qaeda, that
perceive the United States as a threat to Islam, and moderate factions (i.e., the Saudi
political elite) that view cooperation with Washington as beneficial. In fact, Saudi Arabia
and the United States have been close allies, even though it, but no other Muslim country,
enforces the discriminatory policies against women that Brooks describes as being
common throughout the Islamic world. What is obvious here is that Brooks as a feminist
who professes concern about the situation of Muslim women is ignorant of the ways US
foreign policies can impact the status of women (and overall human rights) in
Saudi Arabia and other authoritarian countries such as Egypt that are allied to the
United States.
The only Muslim country for which Brooks sees any hope for the future is Jordan, which
was ruled by King Hussein at the time she wrote her book. But she does not give him or his
government any credit for the improvements she observes. Rather, positive developments
in Jordan can be traced to King Husseins marriage to an enlightened, white American
woman, Queen Noor, who apparently transformed her Arab husband into a benevolent and
progressive monarch. Thus, an American woman is the real savior of Muslim women.
Brooks praise of Queen Noor can be understood if we examine this writers own
objective: to enlighten North American white, middle-class women about ways to help
their unfortunate unenlightened Muslim sisters.
Next door to Jordan, in the Palestinian territory of the West Bank, occupied by Israel,
Brooks does not see any negative experiences related to the Israeli occupation. Although
she writes about problematic treatment of women in Palestinian society, she traces such
treatment back to the Quran.25 In fact, the focus of her story about Palestine is a man
who wants to have a second wife because his first wife does not have a son. Brooks
portrays him as a rich man who hides his gold and shows it only to her. The implicit
message here is that the occupation really has not hurt the people, and if they appear to
be living under harsh economic conditions, it may be because they have hidden away
money and valuables.
Her accounts of Egyptian Islamist groups and Iran are simplistic and uninformed. In
the case of Egypt, she sees a monolithic Islamic movement that treats issues such as
womens rights, hijab, and womens work outside the home the same. Apparently,
Brooks is unable to examine the different views of the various Islamic groups because
the nuanced positions would contradict the essentialist picture that she is painting of
Muslims and the Islamist movements. In the case of womens situation in Iran, she does
not even present personal observations but relates anecdotal information provided by an
American woman who has married an Iranian man. Brooks never meets an Iranian
woman who is empowered or has any sense of gender sensitivity, an amazing feat for
a foreign woman journalist in a country where Shirin Ebadi, who eventually would
win a Noble Prize for Peace in recognition for her work promoting human and
womens rights, was already active and many vibrant womens magazines were
being published. But perhaps Brooks met only women with little or no feminist
consciousness because such women confirmed her preconceived ideas of what Muslim
women are like.

25
See Brooks, Nine Parts of Desire, p. 155.
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230 R. Bahramitash

Nineteenth-century Occidental Literary Models in Twentieth-century Iran

Reading Lolita in Tehran has much in common with Nine Parts of Desire. While Brooks
gives an overall picture that represents Islamic women as the Other, Nafisis very
personal account of the lives of women in Iran as an insider is a confirmation of Brooks
outsider portrayal of Muslim women as the victims of religious dogma. Brooks starts her
book with a horror story from Saudi Arabia, while Nafisis book starts in Hitchcock style,
presenting her characters individually before she delves into the horror story of Iran.
Brooks endorses Reading Lolita in a preface to the book: Nafisi takes us into the vivid
lives of eight women . . . a cry of outrage at the reality in which these women are trapped.
The ayatollahs dont know it but Nafisi is one of the heroes of the Islamic Republic.
Nafisis acts of heroism consist of her experience in teaching English literature in post-
revolutionary Iran and then leaving university to teach eight women at home about the
glories of English literature.
Reading Lolita in Tehran has become a major success in North America because it is
regarded as a book that supports the womens cause. But it is infused with feminist
Orientalism. In this sense it reinforces what many North Americans want to believe about
the oppression of Iranian women while the United States is at the height of its war on
terror and Iran has been signaled out by the US president as a member of an axis of evil
and an outpost of tyranny. In fact, this book is highly recommended and promoted by the
neo-conservatives. Nafisi says of neo-conservative mentor Fouad Ajami, her boss at the
School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, that he has been among her best
supporters (the quotations appear at the back of the book in a list people who have been
strong advocates of Nafisi). In the same list at the end of the book, Bernard Lewis, the guru
of the neo-conservatives, wrote: A memoir about teaching Western literature in
revolutionary Iran with profound and fascinating insights into both.
It is not surprising that Nafisi enjoys such great support among the neo-conservatives
who are pushing for regime change in Iran. There is a close alliance between some neo-
conservatives and monarchists in the Iranian diaspora community in the United States.
Nafisis own background and her familys political ties to the regime of the last shah
explain her position as a supporter of regime change. She is an upper-class woman whose
father was a mayor of Tehran under the shah, and her familys wealth enabled her to be
raised in Switzerland and educated in London and the United States. The family continued
to provide Nafisi with a highly privileged life even after her father was imprisoned for
embezzlement of public funds. Her mother was a member of parliament during the shahs
reign. Nafisi did join the anti-shah movement in the 1970s, but admits I joined the
Iranian student movement reluctantly (p. 85). She adds that joining the movement had
a great deal to do with the imprisonment of her father, and not necessarily because she was
against the injustices committed under the shah. In the same way she describes her
involvement in anti-Vietnam War activities as singing songs on the green in front of the
English Department (p. 84).
Nafisi focuses on eight young middle-class urban women who come to her on a weekly
basis to learn English literature, and through their stories she provides a representation of
oppressed Iranian women. It is striking that in her teaching of English literature at
university level she fails to teach her students about the most influential feminist literary
criticism of the time, that of the post-colonial theorists. And this failure is at the heart of
the problem with the book. Nafisi gives no indication that she is aware of such feminist
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The War on Terror, Feminist Orientalism and Orientalist Feminism 231

post-colonial literary criticism other than a line in passing about Edward Said, who is
actually quoted by a student who always challenges her intellectual authority. Yet English
literature of the period Nafisi is covering, mainly nineteenth-century England, was written
at the time when Britain was at the height of its imperial power, and it is very much an
important part of literary criticism.26 In reading English novels from the nineteenth
century as an attempt to liberate women, it is essential to realize that the voices of
colonized women are excluded from the entire literature. As Spivak argues, the notion that
works of authors such as Emily Bronte advocate Western individualist feminism needs to
be questioned.27 But such questions do not arise for Nafisi who seems to support middle-
class liberal feminism.
However, Nafisis failure to deal with post-colonial theory may be deliberate, because if
she had included the recent feminist critique of nineteenth-century British literature then
her representation of oppression of Iranian women would come under heavy criticism.
Again, Spivaks critique of those who claim to represent subaltern women is relevant
here.28 For example, while Nafisi writes extensively about herself and her eight students,
who like her are of middle-class background, she writes only a few lines about her nanny.
The nanny, her immediate subordinate and presumably the person entrusted with the
important job helping to raise her children, is mentioned only briefly, when the
revolutionaries use Nafisis house to capture an armed drug dealer. Nafisi uses the nanny to
deal with the revolutionaries because Tahereh Khanoom . . . knew their language better
(p. 64). This only time that we hear the voice of the nanny is a good example of Spivaks
argument about the way Third World women are represented. Nafisi clearly demonstrates
in this passage how the claim of Third World women academics to represent all women of
their countries is highly biased toward their own positions as members of the elite. If she
had included her nanny in her narrative, i.e., treated her as a woman whose views were
valid and worthy of representation, the reader would have received a more nuanced picture
of Iranian womens experience, one that may be parallel or in contrast to that of Nafisi and
her immediate circle of privileged women.
Nafisis exclusion of subaltern women is not limited to ignoring her nanny. She taught
briefly at Al-Zahara, Irans only all-women university, but an institution whose students
come from the most underprivileged strata of society. Even though Al-Zahras many
graduate degree-granting programs include an engineering school that is considered one of
the best in the whole country, Nafisi found her experience teaching the girls at this
college alienating. She failed to comprehend that the girls at this college could not
understand the heroines in nineteenth-century British literature like the women at the
university (of Tehran) because they never knew any family members who had been
raised abroad and/or were bilingual in English and Persian. Nafisi admits to having no
patience for these girls, whom she boasts of leaving in darkness, promising herself
never to go back to that college. Unable or unwilling to hear their voices, she misses
completely the significance of these girls actually being the first women in their families

26
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1996) The Spivak Reader, Donna Landry & Gerald MacLean (Eds) (New York
and London: Routledge).
27
Ibid., p. 139.
28
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988) Can the subaltern speak?, in: Cary Nelson & Larry Grossberg (Eds)
Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Chicago: University of Illinois Press), pp. 271313.
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232 R. Bahramitash

to go to university, and in most cases even to high school. Thus, they did not look upon an
English course as a chance to discuss the lives of nineteenth-century British women but as
an opportunity to acquire the linguistic skills necessary to achieve their dreams of a
university degree and professional job.
In dismissing the voices of these girls, as well as that of her maid, Nafisi shows her
own impatience to waste time learning anything about the lives of the less privileged. Her
class position overshadows her ability to learn about, let alone give voice to, subaltern
women, who comprise the majority of Iranian women. Instead, she presents a monolithic
image of Iranian women, one that is in line with that of her own views. This exclusion on
the basis of class position is not unique to Nafisi. As Iranian feminist scholars such as
Homa Hoodfar, Azadeh Kian, and Maryam Poya have demonstrated, the experience of
Iranian women is tied closely to their class position.29 These scholars argue that Iranian
women experienced the Revolution differently depending on their social class. For
example, while the imposition of hejab restricted upper middle-class womenclearly the
experience of Nafisifor the majority of Iranian rural and urban women of low income
hejab provided them the opportunity to enter the very public space from which they had
been excluded before the Revolution because they had worn the chador (hejab). While
Nafisis personal struggles with hejab were probably genuine, she failed to see that
millions of her fellow countrywomen had no similar difficulty because they had always
observed hejab. Spivaks path-breaking work is relevant here: the representation of
subaltern women as a homogeneous group is highly problematic and often ends up with
the exclusion of the real subalterns.30 Nafisi does just that by assuming that she and the
eight women about whom she writes represent a homogeneous category of Iranian women
who are victims of misogynist state policies.
There is considerable evidence that one may cite to argue that Nafisis experience
hardly explains the experience of all Iranian women. For example, during the three years
that the university was closed (1980 83) and Nafisi was wallowing in sorrow (but found
some time to read Persian literature), many middle-class urban women, including many
feminists, found an opportunity to join programs that empowered women, such as the
mass-based literacy program. Nafisi is clearly unable to see that millions of Iranian women
remained active and pressed for changes; no one could make them irrelevant and/or
victims, such as Nafisi feels she had become. As Gramsci argues, power comes with
resistance and power is a negotiated process. In Macleods interpretation of Gramsci,

Women may appear as passive victims, unable to muster any opposition to the forces
allied against them; or consenting partners, acquiescent and apparently satisfied with
their deferent role; or even as active participants, supporting and sustaining their
own inequality; yet women also, when the times are ripe seize the opportunity to
participate in an ongoing series of negotiations, manipulations, and strategies
directed toward gaining control and opportunity. Whenever changing circumstances

29
See, for example, Homa Hoodfar (1999) The womens movement in Iran, Women Living Under Muslim
Laws, series no. 1; Azadeh Kian-Thiebaut (2002) Women and the making of civil society in post-Islamist
Iran, in: Eric Hooglund (Ed.) Twenty Years of Islamic Revolution (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press),
pp. 5673; and Maryam Poya (1999) Women, Work and Islamism (London: Zed Books).
30
Spivak, Can the subaltern speak?
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The War on Terror, Feminist Orientalism and Orientalist Feminism 233

open a political space for the possible renegotiation of existing relations, this
contradictory process of hegemonic politics is at work.31
In fact, as the result of the mass-based literacy program, and thanks to the role of
middle-class educated women who participated in it, as well as some other social
programs provided by the state, important changes occurred in the lives of women,
changes that one cannot learn about in Reading Lolita. To cite but a few examples of these
changes: data from the World Development Indicator show that infant mortality dropped
from 131.20 in 1975 to 25.50 in 1999; life expectancy at birth increased from 49 for men
and women in 1960 to 70 for men and 72 for women by 1999; and the illiteracy rate for
young women declined considerably, from over 55 percent in 1970 to 8.70 percent by
1999.32 More recent data indicate that Iran has lowered its infant mortality rate by 50
percent.33 A more remarkable change is the drop in the fertility rate from 7.24 in 1960 to
2.66 in 1999.34 For anyone familiar with the literature on women and development, such
changes in basic indicators cannot be dismissed easily. Nafisis account of Iranian
universities as bastions of male domination also needs to be evaluated against official
enrollment data that show over 60 percent of Iranian students in higher education are
women. But Nafisi could not see any of these changes because they would obscure or even
contradict the monolithic image of oppressed Iranian women that she wanted to present.
Women, she told the Washington Post after her book was published, felt utterly helpless
in Iran.35 In view of the powerful presence of activist women in Iran since at least the early
1990s, it is obvious that not all Iranian women shared either her experiences or feelings.
The most striking example of such activist women is the womens rights and human rights
lawyer Shirin Ebadi, who was honored with a Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 in recognition of
her work promotingoften successfullythe rights of women.
Nafisis selective and partial view of Iran is not innocent but seems to have a particular
agenda, namely to contribute to the Islamophobia that already exists in North America.
Nafisis contempt for Islam as a religion pervades Reading Lolita, as demonstrated by
statements such as It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Muslim man, regardless of
his fortune must be in want of a nine-year-old virgin wife (p. 257); similar unsubstantiated
claims are found throughout the book. Her support of Islamophobiaand Iranophobiain
the name of feminist heroism is neither unusual nor surprising given the huge support in
her adopted country, the United States, for white middle-class Western feminism in its
Orientalist version, or liberal feminism in the terminology of many women of color who
have criticized this form of feminism. The latter, in particular, challenge the liberal
feminist agenda for imposing a Western linear path of economic development in the
Muslim world. Nafisis own comparison of Iran to England in the nineteenth century
reveals that she shares the liberal feminist view of the Third World as a place to export
progress as defined and prescribed by the West. There is not a phrase in Reading Lolita to
indicate that Nafisi has any awareness of the scholarly literature by Iranian feminists

31
Margaret Mead (1929) Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (New York: W. Morrow).
32
United Nations (2004) World Development Indictor (New York: UNDP).
33
United Nations (2003) Human Development Report (New York: UN).
34
Roksana Bahramitash (2004) Market fundamentalism versus religious fundamentalism, Critique, 13(1),
pp. 3346.
35
Cited in Negar Mottahedeh (2004) Off the grid: reading Iranian memoirs in our time of total war, MERIP,
available at: khttp://www.merip.org/mero/interventions/mottahedeh_interv.htmll.
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234 R. Bahramitash

(as well as by others) that is critical of the Western-type modernization/development

program that the last shah tried to implement in Iran during the 15 years that preceded
the Revolution.
One needs to read Nafisis descriptions of Iran with a great deal of skepticism. There are
numerous hints throughout the book of her lack of understanding of or empathy for the
overwhelming majority of her fellow citizens. For example, she says of Tehran: When I
walked down the streets, I asked myself Are these my people, is this my hometown, am I
who I am? (p. 74). Perhaps, having spent so much of her childhood outside Iran, she
genuinely feels that she does not belong in Iran. Even an Iranian manone of the few for
whom she admits having respectsays that Nafisi is very Americanlike an American
version of Alice in Wonderland (p. 175). And she acknowledges as much about herself: I
miss speaking English preferably with a New York accent, someone who was intelligent
and appreciated Gatsby and Hagen-Dazs and knew about Mike Golds Lower East Side
(p. 107). Clues such as these can forewarn the reader that the author is looking at Iran from
an outsiders point of view. In fact, she does see herself as an outsider, as she reveals in her
description of attending a concert in Tehran: I pretended to be an outside observer who
had come not to have fun but to report on a night out in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Perhaps in her words we can begin to understand why Nafisi is successful: So many
people have made their name through their opposition to the regime (p. 181).
In conclusion, Azar Nafisis book has remained on the bestsellers list for more than
one year and during a time when the Bush administration has been preparing the
American public to support its foreign policy against Iran. In effect, Reading Lolita in
Tehran targets the very audience that potentially would be opposed to warfeminists.
It communicates to a wide public the same negative messages about Iran that neo-
conservative gurus such as Bernard Lewis, Fouad Ajami, and Paul Wolfowitz make to
policy makers. For those who genuinely care about the status of women, this book has
hijacked the issue of womens rights from them, and it helps to prepare broad acceptance
for the neo-conservatives Greater Middle East Initiative agendaa Middle East
dominated by US economic and political interests. Simultaneously, the books success
hinders those who aspire to mobilize feminists against a possible military confrontation
with Iran. Thus, the popularity of Reading Lolita in Tehran among North American
feminists is extremely problematic, and the situation calls for a reconsideration of the
reasons why gender rights advocacy, anti-war activism, and anti-racism have failed to
come together in this case.

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