Feminism Friday; Ali, Okin and Cultural Relativism

"So, you believe in the concept of human rights, right?", my friend asked me a few days ago. She is a dedicated feminist vegetarian activist and I've known her as a fellow activist; so at first I doubted I had heard it correctly. It was the most obvious thing she could ever ask me; the question was so awkward. Then she continued on; "I agree with human rights, but essentially, it's a Western concept, so it is questionable that it should be applied universally without taking diverse cultures into account..."

I was stunned. I had read about some left-wing or postmodern intellectuals advocating cultural relativism to an extent that undermines the principle of universal human rights, in books and magazine articles. However, now, I've found out that such a phenomenon wasn't confined to somewhere distant from my daily life, like a Parisian cafe in the Left Bank or the RESPECT party headquarters. I had taken it for granted that liberal-minded activist friends of mine, while respecting different cultures, are all dedicated to universal human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and vigorously campaigned by Amnesty International.

Cultural Relativism has come to be the dominant discourse within the liberal left. And Ayaan Hirsi Ali embodies the impact of new ideological current, while valid to a certain extent and certainly worthy of consideration, that can possibly fatally undermine the struggle for the ideals of universal, fundamental human rights that every single human being in the world, regardless of her or his gender, race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, place of birth, social status, sexual orientation or whatever else. From inside, like the Trojan Horse.

Her tale is well-known. She was born and grew up in a sexist society where she was genitally mutilated, and which fundamentalists in the Deep South (likes of Rush Limbaugh, Pat Robertson) would dream of. She fled to the Netherlands, the epitome of the tolerant, free, secular and equal modern West, to escape from forced marriage. "I left the world of faith, of genital cutting and forced marriage for the world of reason and sexual emancipation", she says. Then she decided to become a politician in the Netherlands, after witnessing oppression of female refugees and immigrants, based on traditions of their country of origin, persisting even in the liberal Holland. However, to stand for an election, she had to choose to leave the Labour Party, which she firstly joined; a natural choice for a young, idealistic feminist who is dedicated to ending oppression of women; to the Liberal party, a classical liberal party that combines economic neoliberalism with social liberalism.

Moreover, Ali is now with the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank in Washington DC usually affiliated with the Republicans, a party dominated by the anti-Choice religious fundamentalists. That she has been forced to move to the right is a reflection of the sad reality that the Left, the natural guardians of human rights and feminism, has not been keen supporting her. Multiculturalism and feminism sometimes clash (no matter how much I like to deny this, it is true), and the Left doesn't feel comfortable to defend the latter at the expense of the former. In her words, "the Labor types usually felt uneasy about my critique of their multicultural tolerance of Islamic practices".

Indeed, her advocacy is highly prone to the exploitation by right-wing Islamophobes who care nothing about Islamic women's rights. But it doesn't mean the core of her messages is anti-Islamic or racist; especially if you read her book, you notice that she is not a simple bigot or a hate-monger (For example, she clearly states that FGM pre-dates Islam but Islam is used to justify it). The liberals and feminists should show solidarity with her and oppressed non-Western women, rather than dismissing her experience of misogyny as a mere part of anti-Muslim agenda. We can't rely on conservatives to continue fight against misogyny of non-Western origin, when it is so evident that the main motivation of their criticism is their belief in the Western supremacy not feminism.


Susan Moller Okin, a New Zealand-born liberal feminist whom I greatly admire, articulated a feminist viewpoint that doesn't conform to the dominant discourse of multiculturalism. Though she is little-known to the wider public, she achieved academic fame with her 1989 book Justice, Gender and Family, critical analysis of the family institution from an individualist, Rawlsian perspective. In 1999, she published an essay simply titled "Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?", in which she concluded that it could be. "Most cultures are suffused with practices and ideologies concerning gender... there are fairly clear disparities of power between the sexes, such that the more powerful, male members are those who are generally in a position to determine and articulate the group's beliefs, practices, and interests. Under such conditions, group rights are potentially, and in many cases actually, antifeminist. They substantially limit the capacities of women and girls of that culture to live with human dignity equal to that of men and boys, and to live as freely chosen lives as they can", she writes. I can't agree with her more. (She defines multiculturalism as "the claim, made in the context of basically liberal democracies, that minority cultures or ways of life are not sufficiently protected by ensuring the individual rights of their members and as a consequence should also be protected with special group rights or privileges"; so multiculturalism is fundamentally different from anti-racism or anti-xenophobia, which focuses on individual rights of people of colour and immigrants.)

Then she provides ample evidences that even in the West, hard-won rights and equality for women are privileges that are not allowed for immigrant women just because she was born in a different culture. "...Much more common, however, is the argument that, in the defendant's cultural group, women are not human beings of equal worth but subordinates whose primary (if not only) functions are to serve men sexually and domestically... wife-murder by immigrants from Asian and Middle Eastern countries whose wives have either committed adultery or treated their husbands in a servile way... In a number of such cases, expert testimony about the accused's or defendant's cultural background has resulted in dropped or reduced charges". "When a woman from a more patriarchal culture comes to the United States (or some other Western, basically liberal, state), why should she be less protected from male violence than other women are?"

I am not arguing that non-Western culture is inherently sexist than Western civilisation. It would amount to bigotry, considering the history of gruesome misogyny in the West before feminism. However, it is also undeniable that now, women are more equal and free in the West than in the most of the non-Western world. There doesn't exist a paradox; as Okin notes, "most cultures have as one of their principal aims the control of women by men", including the West. The difference is that the West has had the Enlightenment and the waves of feminism; Mary Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill (the philosopher Ali most admires) Susan Anthony, Kate Sheppard, Emmeline Pankhurst, Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Andrea Dworkin, Naomi Wolf, and millions of feminists who dedicated their lives to the emancipation of women. The heritage of feminism is embedded in the modern Western society, and it is what we should strive to preserve, even if at the expense of cultural relativism if necessary. Okin's eloquent academic literature matches with Ali's testimony grounded on her lived experiences and suffering. "Don't deny us the right to have our Voltaire, too. Look at our women, and look at our countries... we are truly living in the Dark Ages." "Why is it antiracist to indulge people's attachment to their old ideas and perpetuate this misery?"

I am an individualist, and believe that any claim for group rights must be accompanied with individual rights within a group. However, when people fight for group rights, the struggle tends to focus on group leader's rights, which usually means patriarch's rights. A right of a patriarch to take back control over "his" people from another white patriarch. I believe in human rights, absolutely, without any reservations. It is universal and applies to everyone; when I say everyone it means every single human being living on this planet. Every single one of us, the humanity. It is important to respect cultures, but even more important to defend human rights against multiculturalism if a culture contradicts to human rights. Because, as Ali says, "All persons are equal. All Cultures are not." And as Herbert Marcuse, a prominent sixties New Left noted, "Tolerance of Intolerance is Intolerance. Intolerance of Intolerance is real Tolerance."