For many years, the integration and emancipation of Muslim women has been the subject of a heated debate. Women living in Norway who have a Muslim background – whether they were called immigrant women, minority women, Pakistani/Somali/Moroccan women or Muslim women – have often been portrayed as the passive victims of an oppressive culture and/or religion. How have the concepts “religion” and “culture” been used in the debate about the position of Muslim women in Norway between 1975 and 2010? How have women with a Muslim background been presented throughout these years in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten? What was seen as the cause of their oppression? Which role was given to “religion”? To what extent has “Islam” been essentialised and by who?
In their works about conceptual history, both Reinhart Koselleck and Quentin Skinner have shown how concepts acquire their meaning from their uses in their historical context at the same time as they change the world around them. Concepts can be used as tools in a discussion. Here, I analyse how different actors have used the concepts “culture” and religion” in strategic ways to pursue a certain political agenda or to defend certain aspects of their identity.
The imaging of Muslim women in Aftenposten
While women with a Muslim background received little attention in the 1970s and 1980s, the debate about their “weak position in society” increased strongly from the late 1990s onwards. At the same time, these women have more and more often been labelled “Muslim women”, while “Islam” has become central in the discussion. In the 1970s and early 1980s, women migrating from Muslim countries were almost without exception presented as “pathetic housewives”: oppressed, unemancipated women who seldom left their homes and were unaware of women’s rights in Norway. By contrast, many of the women who arrived as asylum seekers in the late 1980s and early 1990s were portrayed as “brave refugee women”: heroic figures who had faced war and oppression but who kept struggling for their political freedom and their right of residence. They evoked pity and admiration at the same time.
Until 1995, the focus was on adult women and mothers. In the late 1990s the number of articles and especially the attention for the “second generation” Muslim girls strongly increased. Frightening reports came about forced marriages, domestic violence and female genital mutilation. The “brave refugee woman” disappeared from the scene. The debate intensified after the turn of the century. With the tragic murder of Fadime, honour killing was added to the political agenda. After the 9/11-attacks the “danger of Islam” became more prominent in the media than ever before. An indirect result was that issues of forced marriages, domestic violence, female genital mutilation and honour killing became seen as interrelated “Muslim” problems.
The headscarf was seen as the symbol of this oppression, and boundaries between ethnic groups and different crimes were blurred. Both the stereotypical “oppressed Muslim girls” and the “pathetic housewives” desperately needed the help of the Norwegian majority society to become emancipated and sexually liberated. The new heroes of the post-9/11 period were those few young women who had become “liberal” and “modern” and who took distance from their own minority groups. However, in the same period more and more alternative voices were heard. So far, most articles had been written by non-Muslim Norwegians, but by now Muslim women took active part in the debate more and more often, due to which alternative images of Muslim women emerged. The “assertive, independent Muslim girl” was portrayed as educated, ambitious, integrated, proud to be Norwegian, but also eloquently defending the right to wear hijab.
Muslim women as “Others”
Overall, the debate about the position of Muslim women in Norwegian society seems to have been closely connected with the Othering of Muslim women and Muslims in general. This was especially true with regards to the “pathetic housewives” and the “oppressed Muslim girls”. The problems that Muslim women supposedly have, were presented as problems that “We” (the Norwegian majority society) do not have. While women with a Muslim background were presented as unemancipated, oppressed, weak, pathetic and in need of help, majority women were implicitly presented as emancipated, sexually liberated, independent and strong.
While Muslim husbands were presented as barbaric, conservative, oppressive, unemancipated, anti-Western, and violent, Norwegian men appeared all the more civilised, rational, modern, and emancipated. Muslim women were perceived to have only specific problems that were different from the emancipation issues relevant for majority women, such as parental leave, the availability of kindergartens and the sexual exploitation of girls in commercials and videoclips. “Their” problems had to be explained by their very “Otherness”: their cultural and/or religious background. Muslim women’s emancipation was thereby framed as a matter of integration.
In many articles it was implicitly assumed that immigrant Muslim women were unemancipated because they were not Norwegian. In some articles “culture” and “religious beliefs” were mentioned together as the causes of women’s oppression, while in other articles “culture” was used alone, as an encompassing term. During the last decade the blame was often put on “the Islamic culture”: as if the whole Muslim world had one homogeneous culture that could be called “Islam”.
Competing essentialisations: the role of the “real” Islam
Interestingly, there were two cases where “Islam” was essentialised as a timeless set of religious teachings that could (but did not necessarily have to) be different from everyday practices and “cultural traditions”. In the first case, non-Muslim and ex-Muslim authors pointed at specific Qur’an verses and narrations about the life of the prophet Muhammad while arguing that Islam is inherently oppressive to women. This trope was not found in the articles dating between 1975 and 1977, but became more and more common after the Iranian Revolution, the Rushdie Affair, and the 9/11-attacks. It seems that these events caused an increased concern with the religion of immigrants. A relatively recent development is the distinction between a “moderate Islam” and “Islamism” or “Islamic fundamentalism”. Although the latter is presented as more problematic to women’s rights than the former, the difference between the two concepts was seldom made explicit and seemed to vary from article to article. Linking local contemporary issues to the core texts of a world religion was often used as a strategy to present these issues as parts of a bigger problem: a worldwide, dangerous ideology that threatens “our” values. This also helps to stress the need for assimilation, since “Islam” can not offer anything good in its “original” form – or perhaps in any form.
In the second case, the blame was not put on the “real” Islam, but on “cultural traditions”, “patriarchal interpretations”, and “abuse of religious texts by Muslim rulers”. This mode also appeared as early as 1978. Until the late 1990s it was relatively often used by Norwegian converts to Islam, later mainly by young Muslim girls with immigrant parents and by non-Muslim experts and aid-workers. Muslim women often presented the “real” Islam as a perfect and empowering religion, of which the image had been distorted by the daily practices of “ignorant Muslims” who “didn’t know their own religion”. For these women, separating a “pure religion” from “culture” was a strategy to recognise and challenge certain issues without discrediting their own religious beliefs. For non-Muslims, criticising “culture” was often easier than criticising “religion”, since freedom of religion is stipulated in the Norwegian constitution, while “freedom of cultural practices” is not. “Religion” is often a more sensitive issue, since it is commonly perceived to include deeper personal convictions, while “cultural traditions” are than seen as practices that can be unlearned.
Both the argument that Islam and its “core teachings” were to be blamed for the oppression of women and the argument that malpractices were the result of cultural traditions instead of the “real” Islam were repeated over and over again, until today. Very few authors have tried to find a solution for this deadlock. Those who did have hardly been listened to. What is interesting is that no matter how hard different actors in the debate have claimed to know the “real” Islam, whether they were devout Muslims or fierce Islam-critics, they all had their own essentialised but different views. This shows all the more how constructed the concept of “Islam” is – or that of any religion, for that matter.
In his recent work Holy ignorance Olivier Roy views the claim of a “pure Islam” as an illusion and as the hallmark of a religious radicalism that is typical for a modern globalised world. But separating “religion” from “culture” can also be seen as a typical example of a common trend among second-generation Muslim immigrants, who cherish a Muslim identity but who are critical towards the practices of their parents: a trend that by far not always leads to radicalisation. For converts to Islam, distinguishing “the original message” from “cultural practices” is often an important part of their conversion process. For Muslim feminists, it opens the way to legitimising women-empowering interpretations of Islamic texts. Perhaps it is not the search for something “authentic” that is problematic, but the labelling of other Muslims as “ignorant”. Talking about “disagreements in interpretations” instead of “ignorance” may lead to a much more fruitful debate about religion and the role of women.
Further reading:
Elisabeth Eide, “Down there” and “up here”. Europe’s “Others” in Norwegian feature stories (Oslo 2002).
Helge Jordheim, ‘Thinking in convergences – Koselleck on language, history and time’, Ideas in history 2:3 (2007) 65-90.
Olivier Roy, Holy ignorance (New York 2010).
Edward Saïd, Orientalism (New York 1978).
Quentin Skinner, ‘The idea of a cultural lexicon’, Essays in criticism 29:3 (1979) 205-233.
Berit Thorbjørnsrud, ‘Weeping for the Muslim cinderellas. A lament of tears shed but not shared’, Norsk tidsskrift for migrasjonsforskning 4:2 (2003) 133-145.
Margareta A. Van Es is a PhD candidate at the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History at the University of Oslo
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