Women’s Struggles and Strategies in the Rise of Fundamentalism in the Muslim World: From Entryism to Internationalism

Abstract

It is important to use the plural when speaking of fundamentalisms; significant differences characterise the emergence of these movements, the political conditions which encourage their growth, and the dialectical relations which link them to national powers and international finance, as well as their forms of expression. We are witnessing the spread and the generalisation of the fundamentalist phenomenon in the world.¹ Here we are concerned specifically with fundamentalisms in Muslim countries and communities and the way in which women are affected and respond. We are not trying — as others have done² — to define fundamentalisms as totalitarianism, fascism, revivalism, traditionalism or Islamism; neither are we analysing their links with specific political formations. Rather, we are concerned with what, in the various geographical and historical forms fundamentalisms have taken since the Second World War, these different types have in common: their attempt to elaborate a general discourse. Within it, we will confine ourselves to those concepts which specifically affect women, and consider the way in which they are internalised — or called into question — by women and women’s movements, and how their responses to situations which they must survive are shaped by this discourse.

I owe to my friendship with Farida Shaheed to support her questioning the loose use of the concept of fundamentalism; she rightly argues that fundamentalists are those who go back to the fundamentals of Islam to promote its best progressive aspects; those now called ‘fundamentalists’ are just usurpers who cover their reactionary stands with religion; they should be labelled as a ‘religious extreme right’.