WOMEN AND SEXUALITY IN MUSLIM SOCIETIES

WOMEN AND SEXUALITY IN MUSLIM SOCIETIES Pinar Ilkkaracan, ed. New York: Women for Human Rights (WWHR), 2000; 455 pp.

A discussion of women's sexuality in Muslim societies begs for compliance with an unspoken convention that requires one to clearly indicate one's political/ideological location in the "West," "Islam in the West" or "the Muslim World." I could begin simply by listing the well-publicized violence against women that has mobilized many Muslim women towards political struggle - forced marriages, violent punishments for sexual expression, and socalled honour killings of wives, sisters, daughters and female cousins. Such an approach may find itself positioned within the self-righteous outrage against "Islam" from conservative forces in the West at a time when Muslim women's sexual freedom has become an important rhetorical weapon in the discursive battle of "Islam versus West." On the other hand, there appears to be a strategic commitment among progressive academics to contextualize all women's struggles in Muslim societies within the resurgence of colonial ideas about Muslim women's oppression in order to forestall the denigration of Islamic culture through deliberate misreadings of women's political activism. Feminist scholars, particularly those associated with the "Muslim World," must write from an indeterminate location that is neither within "the West," nor within "Islam." This preferred strategy clears the necessary space for drawing attention to other issues that are integral to any discussion of women's sexuality, in fact to overall democratization, in Muslim societies such as the monopolizing of "Islam" by patriarchal authoritative voices, the compelling need for dissent, discussion and reform within the Muslim world and the undemocratic nature of social, economic and political structures that have become entrenched in most Muslim states and communities. It is, therefore, propitious that a Turkey-based women's group has assembled a collection of articles and documents which easily demonstrates that women's sexuality is not simply a pawn in the representational battle between Islamic and Eurocentric "fundamentalists" or between Islamic "extremists" and "moderate" Muslims. Women and Sexuality in Muslim Societies enables us to argue that politicizing the issue of Muslim women's sexuality, in its narrow and broader connotations, is both necessary and timely. This book substantiates the notion of sexuality as the individual woman's "right to pleasure" and, as the legitimation of women's uncensored economic, cultural and...