A Plea To ‘Middle Eastern and North African’ Feminists: Let’s Liberate Ourselves from Notions of Coloniality

the Rabat fellowship: encountering coloniality

The 15th of October 2019 was a sunny day in the beautiful city of Rabat, Morocco. A group of twenty fellows at the ‘Women and Politics: Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Experiences’ programme gathered in the hotel’s meeting room to present our work and receive feedback from one another. When it was my turn to share my review, I challenged the persistent dominance of canonical Western theory and methodologies to study and understand women and gender in the ‘MENA’ region. In that moment, I was able to voice a different opinion thanks to the academic resilience and grounding which I owe to the emotional labour and scholarly contributions of pioneering anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-capitalist decolonial feminists. I also draw my inspiration from conversations and contentions I continue to have with mentors and colleagues who are concerned with destabilising accepted modes of knowledge-making in other regions of the world.

A couple of days later, I presented my research on decolonising knowledge production of gender-based violence in the Arab Gulf while also narrating my struggles of being a doctoral candidate with a Saudi background, holding an American passport and having had first-hand experience of violence. I located my doctoral research project at the heart of these intersecting identities because I understand the personal to always be political and that objectivity in research is a delusion. I shared some anecdotes about my misjudgments while conducting dissertation research in the city of Kuwait. When I attended a lecture in a community centre during the sixteen days of activism to end violence against women in 2019, the Kuwaiti ‘religious’ lecturer asked the audience if a husband forbidding his wife from leaving the house was an act of violence. The biases I internalised had me thinking at the time: ‘here we go again’. However, to my surprise and contrary to my prejudiced expectations of what she would say next, the lecturer continued with stating that according to Islam, a man restricting his wife’s mobility is a form of violence. This was one of numerous moments that occurred throughout my research journey in which I had to rethink, relearn and readjust my perception of the people I was listening to and building relationships with so I could record their complex lived experiences and write my dissertation. I also continue to question my motives and intentions behind conducting the research: am I a careerist feminist or do I care about the impact of my scholarship on the people I researched? After presenting my work in the Rabat programme and when the panel was over, I received the following comments:

‘You’re the only one in a Western university who rejects Western knowledge.’

‘Some of us have to make a living.’

‘You have to mature.’

As these statements convey, some seemed to address me from a position of authority. Others were sarcastic and spoke to me jokingly. Many did not feel the need to engage with or acknowledge my arguments. I felt uneasy. Defeated. Perhaps triggered? I shared my frustrations with two women I met in the same programme with whom I built close connections and who seemed trustworthy. Both understood my confusion because, due to their respective positionalities as Black and Palestinian, they were familiar with such hostility for speaking up against the canonical epistemic hegemony and ways of conducting research in academic settings. During an earlier session of the fellowship that took place in Abu Dhabi, UAE, the co-leaders decided to give the podium to a white American journalist who conducted ‘research’ in Saudi Arabia among the elites and was present to educate us, two fellows, one Saudi and one Kuwaiti, on women’s rights.

I remember the first time I raised my hand during this programme to push against the loosely used terms of democratic and authoritarian states—the former being a reference to the West and the latter being restricted to the ‘MENA’ countries ¹ (or what I prefer to name ‘West Asia and North Africa’, WANA, ² to avoid the limitations of the ‘MENA’ term). I asked the presenter what democracy meant in the age of Trump, when almost fifty per cent of white women voted to elect a racist bully, a sexual predator and a narcissistic elite to power. In response, she became defensive and later avoided speaking with me altogether. Another professor approached me saying that the type of institutional inequality and misrepresentation I was pointing out takes time to change and that I should be patient. Shame on me.

Throughout my higher education journey, I struggled with vocalising the gut-wrenching feelings I had about such experiences while trying to engage with theories, methodologies and narratives that dared not diverge from the normalised and internalised mainstream of Western-centred categories and world views. I was excited when I received this fellowship because I expected to have the support to finally break free from such pressures to adhere to the ‘norm’. Yet, again, during most of the experience, the subtle differences of each story, each region and each struggle were masked and remodelled to forcefully fit into pre-existing Western hegemonic, neoliberal ideas of women’s rights and women’s empowerment (Mahmood, 2005; Al-Ali, 2019), as well as state feminism and authoritarianism and, most importantly, ‘the myth of universal truth’ (Patel, 2016, p. 8). Counter to what my peers claimed, these were not my observations or contentions alone. The movement that decolonial feminists sparked within the academy was the main reason I did not drop out of graduate school, despite the coloniality of academia in relation to my areas of interest.

In this brief personal reflection, I share snippets from the resistance I encountered when challenging and refusing to accept coloniality within academia. As a Saudi American survivor of violence who chose to research gender-based violence in Kuwait, I share some of my experiences as a way of both diagnosing some of the problems and outlining what I see as a humble plea for resisting coloniality.

confronting coloniality in my doctoral journey

The previous Rabat encounter is one of multiple scenarios I found myself confronted with in intellectual feminist spaces when I dared to challenge ‘the particular manifestations of settler colonialism in feminist scholarship and/or activism’ (Runyan, 2018, p. 5). It has been a recurring theme throughout my doctoral journey in the ivory tower. On one occasion, a methods professor remarked in a seminar that premenstrual syndrome isn’t real because it hasn’t been ‘proven scientifically’ and God doesn’t count as knowledge. On another, when I announced my research topic and region of interest (Arab Gulf) during the Research Proposal Writing class discussion, the response I got from my supposedly progressive professor was ‘but we know why gender violence happens there’, insinuating that Islam and cultural backwardness provide a shorthand explanation. I retorted to challenge her arrogant presumption: ‘Do you? Can you enlighten me?’. Soon after, I realised the multifaceted dilemma I needed to tackle in my work: dispelling contemptuous generalisations and stereotypes of the ‘rich oil countries’; countering endless arguments in the majority of English scholarship produced under the ‘whitestream’ male gaze; refuting essentialist views of Islam which depict it as condoning violence; and providing a nuanced analysis of gender-based violence through people’s world views. Where do I even begin?

What was disturbing about the Rabat incident was that I had different expectations from WANA feminists. Even when we as emerging scholars were advised about publishing strategies, the motives were ‘greater visibility, to write a book, to publish what didn’t make it into the book, and to get feedback’. I had to ask: ‘what about the people who gave us their time, entrusted us with their pain and stories? Shouldn’t we publish to give back to them?’. While at times like these I felt hopeless, at other times I had optimism when I worked in collaboration with feminists who offered guidance, support and solidarity embarking on a journey of decolonisation; a wholehearted engagement with decentring racist and sexist ways of knowing, researching, writing, seeing, thinking and living. To understand that certain feminist analyses and scholarship have become central to structures that reproduce violence globally. To situate contemporary social struggles within the systems of Western-centric, heteropatriarchal and capitalist knowledge production. To decolonise is to be intentional in citing and centring racialised, indigenous and other non-Western scholars (and translating their work); to have the humility and willingness to unlearn and relearn; to use our privileged positions to counter self-serving and extractive research rather than assimilate into institutional ways of knowing and doing.

not an Arab apologist nor an enemy of the West

When I present my work on the Arab Gulf in conferences, I am often asked about patriarchy, gender-based violence, Islamic extremism and oppression in the region. A few feminists have noted the challenge of having to resist coloniality in research and scholarship while simultaneously critique heterosexism, racism, slavery and classism in local communities (Al-Ghabra, 2018; Al-Ali, 2019). I concur. It is a challenging task, but that doesn’t give me the right to do one and ignore the other, and hence become complicit in such abuses. All oppression is connected. Having said that, I want to emphasise that coloniality is not merely about the West’s imposition on systems and spaces of power and knowledge elsewhere. Since the establishment of ruling elites and the formation of nation states, the Arab Gulf has emerged with its dynamics of coloniality as symbols of modernity, capitalism, militarism, heterosexism and ‘the accompanying changes in the legal system brought about through the nation-state building process’ (Sonbol, 2014, p. 21).

When I highlight the problems in feminist knowledge production and call for renewed caution and consciousness when studying and writing about Gulf communities, I do not intend to detest Western academia or be the Arab apologist. I am aware of my privileged position as a graduate student in a Western university, and I am grateful for being able to learn and engage critically. I also realise the severity of the violence and racism inflicted on children, women and migrant workers in the Arab Gulf, and in the rest of the world equally. What I am advocating for—and here I specifically address researchers with roots in and projects in WANA—is to question prevailing feminist frameworks or ‘the intentional colonial frameworks of domination’ (Patel, 2016, p. 14) and to grasp the implications of ‘damage-centered research’ (Tuck, 2009, p. 409) on communities being studied. The WANA region is diverse; it has a rich and complex history, and a long legacy of colonialisation and Western interference with sociopolitical implications. We as WANA feminists need to imagine, vocalise and act upon gender relations and solutions grounded in non-Western and indigenous world views and relational ontologies outside the canon. How? Allow me to illustrate with a small example.

During a course I taught about gender-based violence, ³ I had established with my students that Western theories of gender do not necessarily speak to ‘how indigenous people establish relationships between men and women, either in terms of their roles or social structures’ (Zapata-Sepúlveda, Jara-Labarthé and Espinoza-Verdejo, 2014, p. 929). In class, I played a video of Khalid Al Ameri, the popular Emirati social media celebrity (with 1 million followers), titled ‘WHY WE EAT LIKE THIS’. ⁴ The video highlighted why Muslims and Arabs sit on the floor to eat from the same plate: ‘one day I heard a beautiful story of an elderly Arab couple who were so in love that they could only eat when they were together and from the same plate. Since hearing that story my wife and I always ate from the same plate and only order one drink to share’. The video showed him taking his wife to a restaurant where they sat on the floor and ate from the same plate. I posed the question to my students: why can’t this be a new way of understanding gender relations in the Arab Gulf, for example? Their response was heartwarming.

To my surprise, a few months later while interviewing Awaishah Alqahtani, ⁵ a Kuwaiti woman who identified as Bedouin, the theme of food and eating became a symbol of her conception of gender relations and feminism. At first, she expressed cynicism about mainstream feminist agendas. Then she told me about her book project, Bedouin Acts of Feminism. ⁶

She believed that ‘simple acts of feminism can no longer go unnoticed by the global feminism waves. We need to expand our definition of what feminism means’. ⁷ She shared a story about a woman’s act of resisting sexism. In early Bedouin cultures, and still existing in some families today, women tended to prepare lunch and serve it to the men in the house first, while they waited to eat the soor (leftovers). Each woman must eat the leftover side of her husband’s plate. One woman decided to change this custom. So, the next day after she had finished serving the men’s lunch, and while the other women kept to the customs of soor, she prepared a dish for herself and ate it in the kitchen. ‘It was her victory; her unknown simple victory to women of her kind’. ⁸ Although I am still in the process of writing my dissertation, meeting Alqahtani and listening to her memorable story echoed María Lugones’ (2010) assertion that decolonial feminist theory and methodology must interpret a society based on their philosophies of life and conceptions of the world, rather than imposing a gendered reading on them.

feminist knowledge: a careerist agenda versus an ongoing process of personal and collective accountability and growth

In a recent conversation with a Khaleeji ⁹ student, she confessed her confusion about people who should be speaking for ‘us’ Khaleejis. She had an argument with a white woman on social media for quoting a problematic book that depicts Arab Gulf people in light of derogatory stereotypes (that is, as rich, lazy, filthy, ignorant, entitled). Despite this woman having grown up in and doing her PhD on the region, her responses rehashed the coloniality entrenched in almost every book, article and news headline about Gulf countries. My colleague asked me: ‘Was this white woman an insider or an outsider? Did she have the right to speak authoritatively on the region? Where do we draw the line that separates who should have the authority to speak and who should not?’.

I responded quoting Leigh Patel (2016) that we must all understand that our social locations are intertwined with the ongoing projects of coloniality whether in educational research or in the real world of practice and activism. There are no clear lines or boundaries that separate who has the authority to speak and who does not. Even as citizens of the Gulf, when we reflect on our own experiences, especially coming from a different class, we cannot speak on behalf of all Khaleejis. That’s too great a burden for one individual to carry and does little justice to the cause of respecting people’s self-determination and dignity. Abstract theorisation, rooted in stigmatising other world views as irrational and scientifically invalidated, has erased heritage as other forms of knowledge. No researcher is without prejudice. I now clearly see a distinction between feminists who, intentionally or unintentionally, promote coloniality and feminists who are committed to decoloniality. The latter group is comprised of a feminist movement humble enough to admit to partial world views and to promote situated knowledge, and that believes in learning as a lifelong process. At the heart of this feminist struggle is an ongoing refusal of the existing structures and materials of coloniality that prevail in every encounter. This movement is still relegated to the margins of academic discourse. I told my friend that the only authority we are granted is speaking for our experiences and ourselves. Whoever says otherwise insists only on the defective nature of ‘objective’ and ‘rational’ research and generalised feminist theories. To create a space for something new does not mean that we speak on behalf of every Saudi, Emirati or Khaleeji. The point is not who has the authority to speak for whom, but to have the humility to listen, to admit when one is told that perhaps this knowledge is racist, sexist, exclusive or even a reflection of coloniality. If the knowledge does not address the roots of the problems, and instead contributes to perpetuating more violence, that is a cause for concern. Are we willing to listen and challenge our world views?

my humble plea for resisting coloniality

I reiterate that my opposition to coloniality is not one that endorses hatred of the West or denies the reality of gendered violence in my community. Nothing constructive is born out of resentment. And I do not want to romanticise Gulf societies. As a survivor, my research is part of my healing journey. Therefore, I am committed to undoing coloniality in my work as well as addressing the roots of violence that led to my suffering. I acknowledge that this hard work is messy, yet we, as WANA feminists, need to support each other doing the work and falling short because nothing is perfect. Healing, growth and change take place if they are accompanied by making visible the pervasiveness of coloniality in academic and everyday life.

In conclusion, I share my humble plea for resisting coloniality as I continue to grapple with and hone my approach on my journey as a feminist scholar: