Who knew that a movement of women empowerment could have a paradoxical effect? Growing up as a girl in Jordan in this day and age, I was highly exposed to feminism in global media mainly through a Western lens. Media outlets portrayed articles and stories written by dominantly Western women. It was empowering to see a movement that strived towards gender equality all over the world and fought against misogyny. It gave me hope as a little girl for my future being a woman in this society.
But what I hadn’t realized until I grew older, was that the feminism I was exposed to did some damage; it made me, as an Arab woman, feel ashamed of my own culture. It made me view deprecate my own ancestor’s values and as a result produced cultural cringe; a hatred of my entire background. I slowly came to realize that instead of viewing it as a liberating movement from society’s oppression towards girls and women, Western feminism began to feel more like an attack on my culture’s ideologies. In short, Western feminism is a feminist movement but its danger is the universalization of women’s experiences as it excludes the various social groups from which women may emerge. And since it is based on the context of the West, Western feminism almost began to feel imperialist. This ignorant and ethnocentric approach of criticizing Arab women by some feminists almost felt like Arab ideologies are under colonialism as the Western world is blindly enforcing its values upon us.
As part of the Anthropology class I took in my freshman year of university, I was assigned to read Lila Abu Lughod’s, a Palestinian-American anthropologist’s book “Do Muslim Women Need Saving?” Her perspective was part of what shifted my view on feminism and what it means to me as a young Arab woman. She wrote that Western feminism does not consider the experiences of all women. The writer builds a case for how anthropology can help us understand the Arab culture within its own context, hence liberating our vision from American intervention such as the one she discusses in Afghanistan. Taking this into consideration, I began to look at feminism in the Arab context. This new approach taught me that, at its core, feminism should be a movement of love, unity, and hence equality, to reach a reality with no gender discrimination, as opposed to it being an attack on my culture.
What I found was missing all along in Western feminism was cultural relativism and the inclusivity of all types of women. Ironically enough, even I had lost a clear vision of my own culture due to my polluted perspective. And so, as a feminist, I came to realize that it is my duty as an Arab woman to redefine what feminism means to me. I believe that we owe Arab women a version of feminism that is genuinely empowering, one that embraces our culture rather than destroys it. On our part, we must educate ourselves on the historical context of powerful women from the Arab world, because those are the realistic examples to set for the generation of feminists to come, boys included. And even though the reality is that women in the Middle East face the most gender-based discrimination in terms of employment than anywhere in the world, applying feminism through a Western lens in the Arab world is not part of the solution.
This is our journey to face, as we, Arab women, have a much higher sense of agency than the Western world imagines. It starts with our community, respecting our values, reconnecting to our roots, and most importantly considering our culture. Because authentic, long-term change comes from within. Implementing Western standards of feminism in the Arab world is like working on the exterior, while short-term statistics and data might show results of progress, in the long-run this version is unsustainable. I, personally, am still fighting to escape the damage that Western feminism portrayed in global media has done and learning to not just accept but love my culture and repair my relationship with my own background and myself. Only then will I be able to adopt my own feminism.
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