The system of genders within sharia, which included the role of women within families and households, was in many respects flexible. It was shaped simultaneously by religious concepts and the pragmatic needs of society.
European colonialism transformed this in two ways. It froze sharia requirements, which had until then been subject to various interpretations in different communities, as a uniform set of unchanging ideas. The rigid separation of women from men who were not mahram (not related to them) is one example: what had once been a principled guideline with religious connotations was transformed into a legal dictate enforced by coercion. Colonialism then inscribed those ideas into a static set of civil and criminal codes imposed on local societies and enforced by new courts, military orders and government decisions.
What had previously been a pluralistic mix of religious norms and informal practices around gender turned into something radically different: a rigid hierarchy of systemised laws that allowed no exceptions. It reflected the Western view that Islam, and Muslims, were backward and uncivilised – and that their women were therefore crudely oppressed and needed to be saved. Yet this imperialist mission of ‘civilising’ Muslims did the reverse by subjecting local societies to authoritarian rule, military violence and economic exploitation. Middle Eastern women were part of all this. They were not so much liberated as absorbed into a new legal apparatus that enforced a Westernised vision of gender hierarchy.
The transformation of local traditions under the effect of colonial state formation was most evident in the realm of LGBTQ rights and identities. In many Muslim societies, conceptions of gender and sexuality were fluid, with ambiguous relationships and sexual practices tolerated and widespread through tacit understandings, though these were religiously not permissible. Western laws [e.g. French and Victorian laws], however, imposed new standards of classification that demarcated a clear line between the ‘hetero’ and the ‘homo’. They codified sexuality to criminalise deviancy. In effect, this removed all gendered relationships and sexual practices from their traditional setting and forced them into formal categories that were alien to the Middle East.
The women’s rights movement took hold in the West in the mid-20th century, when homosexuality was still criminalised and heterosexuality was championed as the sole norm. So when, in the early 2000s, the Western world sought to extend equal recognition to those identifying as LGBTQ, it was seen as guilty of double standards: it blamed Muslim societies for not legalising non-heterosexual practices that its own societies had until relatively recently criminalised.”
The following assertion is problematic though:
Kemalism in Turkey and to a lesser extent Bourguibism in Tunisia followed a strategy that was “inspired by the West but not indebted to it. The aim was to entirely transform society, including its economic basis and class structure, in order to rebuild the nation following aim at entirely occupation.”
Did Kemalism and Bourguibism aim at “entirely transform society, including its economic basis and class structure.”?
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