Situating Globalization

Prologue

Globalization, Islam and the Indigenization of Knowledge

The Islamization of Knowledge between Particularism and Globalization: Malaysia and Egypt

Gendering Globalization: Alternative Languages of Modernity

Struggling and Surviving: The Trajectory of Sheikh Moubarak Abdu Fadl. A Historical Figure of the Egyptian Left

Creating Bodies, Organizing Selves: Planning the Family in Egypt

Problematizing Marriage: Minding My Manners in My Husband’s Community

ANITA HAUSERMANN FÁBOS

A Tale of Two Contracts: Towards a Situated Understanding of “Women Interests” in Egypt

Hesa EL-KHOLY

“We Are Not Feminists!”

Egyptian Women Activists on Feminism

The Contributors

PREFACE CYNTHIA NELSON AND SHAHNAZ ROUSE

The idea of this book came into being following a panel on the theme: Gender Discourse and the Indigenization of Knowledge Debate, that Nelson organized for the Sixth Congress of the International Association of Middle Eastern Studies held at Bayt al-Ayn University, Mafraq, Jordan April 10-14, 1996. We broadened the theme to encompass issues of globalization and the indigenization of knowledge debates and, in addition to the five original panelists who presented at that conference (Nelson, Rouse, Abaza, Al-Ali, El-Kholy), we invited six additional scholars (Didier, Marfleet, Asdar Ali, Hausermann Fabos, Kuppinger, Tabishat) all with theoretical interest in and research experience on issues of globalization/localization in Egypt. The title Situating Globalization: Views from Egypt was chosen precisely to reflect the fact that not only did we all meet each other in Egypt but also because the many dialogues and debates we engaged in with each other catalyzed much of the original research reflected in this book. All authors have written original papers each of which explores a particular dimension of the indigenization of knowledge debate emerging from the intersection of local experience with the broader processes of globalization - one of the most timely and relevant issues that is being debated in both the North and South.

The range of perspectives and original materials dealt with by each author highlights the renewed urgency of the struggle for cultural autonomy and voice within the context of the globalization process. In other words each paper explores how the various processes at both the local and global level intersect to create new discourses and debates around the “indigenization of knowledge”. If a new wind of cultural decolonization is blowing through the Arab Middle East, which is having profound impact on the lives of men and women, then we should expect a new scholarship to emerge in order to grasp and understand it. This book is a contribution in that direction.

However, we would not have been able to complete this project without the support and commitment of a number of individuals and institutions. First, we would like to acknowledge the generosity of the Social Science Research Council, the Council of American Overseas Research Centers which helped fund the research of Professor Rouse, and Sarah Lawrence College for providing the leave of absence that enabled her to spend the necessary time in Egypt to undertake this project. Second, we would like to extend our deep appreciation to the American University in Cairo for its support to Professor Nelson in the form of conference grants to assemble the first panel in Jordan, research assistence for seminars and open forums and continuous academic encouragement. Thirdly, we would like to offer our special thanks to Rania al-Malky and Nelly El-Zayat, Graduate Merit Fellows, for their many hours of library reference work, editing and typing of first drafts and their continuous communication with all the participants. Last but by no means least, goes our deepest gratitude to Roseline Matalanis and Yvette Fayez Isaac, loyal staff in the office of the Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences of the American University in Cairo, whose constant readiness and ideal of perfection, were generously devoted to many extra hours assisting the editors in the final preparation of the manuscript.

PROLOGUE CYNTHIA NELSON AND SHAHNAZ ROUSE

One of the key dimensions of this volume concerns the issue of borders and boundaries. These are both real and imaginary (i.e. symbolic and metaphoric), hegemonic and counter hegemonic. Among those real borders are spatial ones that determine individuals’ and communities’ everyday location and place in the world — these include borders/boundaries of class, gender, territory, and language(s). Each of these separations in turn has embedded in it, and rests on constructions of ‘imaginary’ borders and boundaries — for instance the roles ascribed to women, the permissions and opportunities that stem from class and spatial/territorial location. In other words the real and imaginary do not exist as two disparate entities but are inextricably linked to each other in a dialectical move that simultaneously enables and disables movement and action. And it is this circular yet not tautological relation that defines the dilemmas and the promise of globalization.

Until recently, three elements dominated thinking and writing on globalization: first, the newness of the phenomenon. Globalization was thus represented as a radical departure from the colonial and early post-colonial period. Second and in relation to the first, globalization was envisioned as a homogenizing process, one which threatened to engulf the local and overcome it. Implicit in such thinking is the notion that movement emanates from the north to the south; and furthermore, that the south is helpless in the face of the overwhelming power that still accrues and rests in the advanced capitalist world. The turning point in the view of many progressives and conservatives alike, was the decline and collapse of the Soviet Union, and the emergence of a ‘new’ world order. Finally, the global was represented as ‘foreign’, external

(to the local). The struggle therefore was posited as consisting of a dialectic encounter between hegemonic forces of globalization and ‘indigenous’ forces of resistance.

Current re-visioning of globalization challenges all these suppositions. For those of us born in the ‘South’, globalization is nothing new. It is a new form of an on-going process that took inception during the heyday of colonialism. It might serve as a descriptive term to articulate the current historical period, but it remains theoretically problematic and imprecise. While theoretically globalization is often explained in terms of time-space compression, we feel bound to reiterate, borrowing from Doreen Massey’s Space, Place and Gender (1994: 147), the extent to which such a conceptualization represents the coming home of capital’s outward spread on localities in the core. She states:

The sense of dislocation which some might feel at the sight of a once well-known local street now lined with a succession of cultural imports ... must have been felt for centuries, though from a very different point of view, by colonized peoples all over the world as they watched the importation, maybe even used, the products of, first, European colonization, maybe British ..., later U.S., as they learned to eat wheat instead of rice or corn, to drink Coca Cola, just as today we try out enchiladas.

Moreover, as well as querying the enthnocentricity of the idea of time-space compression and its current acceleration, we also need to ask about its causes: what is it that determines our degrees of mobility, that influences the sense we have of space and place? Time-space compression refers to movement and communication across space, to the geographical stretching out of social relations, and to our experience of all of this. The usual interpretation is that it results overwhelmingly from the action of capital, and from its currently increasing internationalization ... . But surely this is insufficient. Among the many other things which clearly influence that experience, there are, for instance, ‘race’ and gender ... . In other words, and most broadly, time-space compression needs differentiating socially. This is not just a moral or political point about inequality; it is also a conceptual point.

The close of this quotation slides into our second point: globalization is not a homogenous process, nor is it straightforwardly homogenizing. It affects different localities and peoples within them differentially. The very term ‘people’ conceals as much as it reveals: are we talking

PROLOGUE about men, women, the educated or those without education, the rich or the poor, those culturally dominant in a particular context or those culturally marginalized? Should we not re-think globalization as a struggle between dominant groups in different arenas — the economic, the cultural, and/or in terms of gender and/or race, ethnicity, as opposed to those marginalized? Reconsidered in these ways, maybe it might be more useful to think of globalization as a multiplicity of flows in a variety of terrains, bearing witness to the emergence of new political realities and accompanying shifts in power, as well as struggles around these transformations.

Our volume picks up on these problematics of power and its dispersal and concentration. Thus both Philip Marfleet’s and Mona Abaza’s papers point to the manner in which cultural idioms travel across borders; and these borders are not the traditionally antagonistic ones of ‘east’ and ‘west’ but constituted by means of a flow from south to (other parts of) the south. However, the bearers of these cultural flows seek legitimacy from their potential constituency by positing their language — cultural and religious — as local and therefore inherently in opposition to the hegemonic cultural knowledge that has seeped in from ‘outside’ and led to disempowerment of local ‘peoples’ and ‘knowledges’. No mention is made by bearers to this Islamist knowledge, of the ‘foreignness’ of this idiom to many within the societies in question. Any attempt to contest their positioning and bearers of the indigenous results in charges of either betrayal or brain washing. This mode of articulation, in other words, which masks its own attempts at hegemony and control over all other local languages, represents itself instead as egalitarian — a furthering of democracy, albeit democracy in a new form. Regardless of the self-representation by its proponents, such a positioning disregards multiple cultural languages, knowledges and experiences that are ‘authentic’ to individuals who live them on a daily basis.

The majority of the papers in this volume address this multiplicity: Heba El-Kholy’s article speaks of the manner in which working class women use customary practices as a means of empowering themselves within a marital arrangement and the obliviousness of secular, middle class feminists to such arrangements; Mohammed Tabishat’s article shows that both health professionals and men and women of the popular classes rely on a mixture of modern and alternative medical

II and spiritual remedies in the treatment of al-daght i.e. hypertension. Rather than invoke a clear distinction of medical and other languages between professionals and ‘the people’, this work demonstrates the interpenetration at all levels of various languages and remedies.

But this interpenetration of language can also lead to the dominance of certain discourses over others. For example, in their papers Kamran Asdar Ali and Petra Kuppinger focus on the hegemonic role that the discourse of development and public health play in constructing what constitutes ‘healthy behaviors’ defined basically as those that affect the economy. Asdar Ali specifically emphasizes how women-sensitive development agendas in Egypt are linked to the larger historical debates on how to control women’s bodies in particular and create responsible citizens in general. Kuppinger on the other hand shows how the loss of midwifery skills and eventual control of female bodies by state medicine is part of larger developments in both colonial and post-colonial Egypt. By moving back and forth between the lives and work of midwives within a local community and the larger state policies of order, control and domination we come to understand the hegemonic power of medical/development discourse.

In their piece Gendering Globalization: Alternative Languages of Modernity Nelson and Rouse point out how the period of modernity can be seen as transitional, during which individuals are cast into particular identities by their particular location in time and place.

The instance of Doria Shafik speaks to the multiplicity of languages not across peoples but in the same person. Her persona exemplifies the manner in which these are not contradictory impulses but integrated practices consequent to a person’s particular existence at a given historical moment. Nonetheless, Doria Shafik suffered at the hands of her peers, both secular and religious, in being denied both as a woman (the Dean of Cairo University refused to give her a job on these grounds) and as a supposedly ‘westernized’ woman (by the mufti of al-Azhar for her feminist stances). Her ultimate flight from active politics, ironically, resulted not from her religious adversaries but from the left, some among whom condemned her for her critique of Nasser’s regime and its denial of women’s and human rights to Egyptian women.

Doria Shafik’s example speaks volumes for the manner in which identities are thrust upon people, what some Indian writers have referred to as ‘forced identities’. In other words, identities that one does

PROLOGUE not assume but that are imposed on a person by others. There are numerous examples of such ‘forcing’ in the contemporary world: in Sarajevo, in Cyprus, in many parts of contemporary Africa. For our purposes, the need to distinguish between identities one assumes and dons deliberately, and the identities which one is forced to assume is paramount. In the latter case, the most obvious instance is that of people caught in historical crisis points: during the burning of Babri Masjid in India in the nineties, at India’s partition in 1947, and following the 1967 Israel conflict in various parts of the Middle East.

Here the issue of the identities one ‘chooses’ and the identities into which one is ‘forced’ become complex and knotted. Conventionally, the resolution to this crisis in identities has been sought in placing people caught between worlds — the old and the emergent — as either modern or traditional; and each of these two terms is either valorized or denigrated depending on those doing the labelling. The articles in this volume suggest — and the instance of Jahanara Shahnawaz and Hamida Akhtar Hussein highlights this — that the languages we speak are as often the consequence of our own life histories and experiences as they are deliberate choices we make. And by extension, to take them out of this experiential context, is to render them meaningless and simply the target of ideological accusation and subterfuge.

The articles by Didier Monciaud, Anita Hausermann Fabos and Nadje Al-Ali particularly illustrate this point. Monciaud for example reconstructs the trajectory of a particular historical actor by locating him in the context of the communist movement in Egypt. Through a biographical approach he unveils and reconstructs the underlying meaning of a life as well as the self-representation of this historical actor. As a result of his experience and the place he occupied in this movement, Moubarak Abdu Fadl figures as a living legend, representing in the present the human continuity and political memory of Egypt.

Häusermann Fabos and Al-Ali, on the other hand, choose to situate themselves in the very process of knowledge construction. In her article Problematizing Marriage: Minding my Manners in my Husband’s Community Hausermann Fabos considers the dialectical projects of negotiating the roles of spouse and researcher in relation to changing gender ideology for a northern Sudanese immigrant community in Cairo. Her personal understanding of Sudanese norms of propriety, developed through marriage to a man from her research community, led her along an epistemological path towards a hypothesis on the role of manners for Sudanese in marking ethnic boundaries in relation to Egyptian society. Through this process of negotiation, Hausermann Fabos came face to face with the challenge of authenticity and the ethical implications of the research process itself.

Al-Ali appropriately concludes our series of essays by challenging assumptions about western as opposed to indigenous scholarship within the context of the author’s research among secular oriented women activists in Egypt. The author’s own positionality vis-a-vis the women she interviewed is explored in order to reveal the complexities and ambiguities inherent in the research enterprise. The experience of shifting boundaries between self and other, between the researcher’s identity and those of her informants became central to this inquiry. While occasionally presenting a source of self-knowledge, mediation and bridging, the experience of ‘being here and there’ may pose great dilemmas and conflicts for the researcher who cannot be clearly positioned inside or outside her research community.

This brings us to a final point: might not a better way to approach treatment of globalization be through a more thorough going empirical investigation into the multiple dimensions of the process and its related social relations through the lens of experience and life histories? While recognizing that experience itself does not exist outside representation, can we not simultaneously interrogate people’s lives even as we probe the languages in which these lives are explained and made sense of? What we are suggesting is a return to a feminist framework. Not as a way to study women’s histories alone, but as a perspective that permits us to better understand the lives of the marginalized and their desire for a genuinely egalitarian social order rather than one that posits its egalitarianism in discursive terms alone.

Bibliography

Massey, Doreen (1994) Space, Place and Gender, Minneapolis/MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Mignolo, Walter D. (1997) Local Histories/ Global Designs, Princeton/ NJ: Princeton University Press.

Oncu, Ayse/ Weyland, Petra (1994) Space, Culture and Power, London: Zed Books.

GLOBALIZATION, ISLAM AND THE INDIGENIZATION OF KNOWLEDGE PHILIP MARFLEET

The rise of theories of globalization has brought increased interest in the idea of indigenous knowledge. As notions of the world as “a single place” have become more influential, there has been greater interest in movements which are said to be expressive of the new global condition. Among these, the current which seeks “Islamization” of knowledge has attracted particular attention. For its leading ideologues, Islamic approaches alone are adequate to understand the contemporary world and to advance a new universal morality. This essay looks at their claims, especially at the idea that Muslim intellectuals are uniquely equipped to contest dominant Western discourses. It argues that rather than contesting such ideas Islamization has complemented them.

Islamic traditions have long developed within a complex of intercultural flows and exchanges. This essay therefore also looks at some of the diverse influences that have shaped modern Islamic movements. It argues that by minimizing or even ignoring such experiences, theories of globalization and of Islamization greatly distort the processes at work within contemporary society.

Islamization

For its proponents the movement for Islamization of knowledge aims at salvation of the world community of Muslims — the umma - and by extension the whole of humanity. Al ‘Alwani, a leading figure within the movement, views Islamization as “the most important issue before the Ummah” (1994: x). It is, he comments, “the Ummah’s future, its destiny, its objective, the means of its emergence from its crisis, and the way to building a new civilisation and a new renaissance” (Al- Alwani 1994: x).

The movement’s energies are directed overwhelmingly into intellectual activity that aims to provide a suitable framework for Muslims to examine the contemporary world in terms of Islamic belief and practice. This is to be achieved by the identification of foundational religious principles in all areas of life: to assert what Turner calls “a claim about the authenticity of tradition over inherited, imported or alien knowledge” (Turner 1994: 7). The development of a comprehensive Islamic perspective, it is argued, will allow Muslims to challenge dominant models which have emerged within Western academia and which are viewed by the Islamizers as false.

Sardar, who is a leading contributor to the Islamization literature, comments that much of the Western academic tradition requires radical revision. The social sciences are a matter of special concern, he argues, being “cultural constructions of Western civilization [which] have virtually no meaning or relevance for Muslim societies” (Sardar 1997: 47). Muslim intellectuals are therefore required to engage in a new academic practice:

[t]o generate disciplines that are a natural product of the world view and civilization of Islam; [to] use Islamic categories and notions to describe goals and aspirations, thought and behaviour and problems and solutions of Muslim societies.

To this end, a considerable literature has been produced by Muslim scholars, especially those associated with a series of specialist institutes and study centres established since the early 1980s. They have succeeded in generating debates which challenge Muslim academics to reconsider orthodox attitudes towards scientific thought. Stenberg (1996b: 273) suggests they have had a significant impact, not least because of the implications for the whole Islamic tradition. In effect, the Islamizers have nominated themselves as interpreters of the religious tradition, making claims which define a “true” Islam.

Religion and Globalism

For the Islamization movement the notion of a “global” order is of special significance. On the one hand, it is seen as highly problematic: thus Sardar (1997: 41) identifies the difficulties presented by globalizing processes associated with Western capitalism and what he calls “disciplinary imperialism”. On the other hand, the global context is seen to offer opportunities. El-Affendi (1991: 3) comments: “It is time we Muslims realize that we live in a global community, and that our ideas and beliefs are under scrutiny from the whole of humanity”. Such scrutiny, he argues, allows Muslims to display fully the qualities of Islam. Abul-Fadl (1992: 10) argues similarly that Islamization “entails reshaping the future of the global order”. What is required, she maintains, is nothing less than development of “a new global consciousness which is inclusive” (Abul-Fadl 1992: 9), one in which Islamization will play a key role in “renegotiating the terms of the global encounter” (Abul-Fad1 1992: 11). In promoting Islamic goals, committed Muslims will be “appropriating global interdependence” — in effect, Muslims will seize the opportunities presented by the global condition (Abul-Fadl 1992: 34).

Such references to globalism and to its significance for Islam in the modern world are striking features of the Islamization literature. They might be seen as consistent with the views of non-Muslim theorists of globalization, who suggest that contemporary religious movements in general express a “global calling”. In this view, such movements are intimately involved in the generation of a singular world, what Robertson (1992: 6) calls a “global unicity”. This development, it is argued, is a function of socio-cultural changes associated with world integration. But what is the “global” condition and what processes can be identified as “globalizing” influences?

Theories of globalization have developed a pervasive influence. According to Waters (1995: 1), “globalization may be the concept of the 1990s, a key idea by which we understand the transition of human society into the millennium”. Although notions of the global are often diffuse and sometimes elusive, they hold in common the idea of a unifying or integrating world. Among organisation theorists such as Ohmae (1990), who have dominated discussions about the global, the world is best understood as a series of interlocking networks. Here globalism meets conservative economic theory in the shape of neoliberalism. The global entity is the market, a structure within which entrepreneurial activities sweep over old boundaries such as national frontiers to make a “borderless world”. Tensions arise only to the extent that outdated state structures attempt to intervene in rational decision-making processes among transnational corporations and a vast mass of individual consumers. Such notions have had an impact across the spectrum within Western social science, so that writers such as Desai and Harris, once fierce critics of global market models, can also identify the transforming power of capital. For Harris (1995: 228), for example, transnational economic changes are now so profound that they serve “world interest and a universal morality”.

Social and cultural theories of the global elaborate a similar theme. Writers such as Giddens (1990; 1991), Harvey (1989) and Hall (1992) emphasize the interconnectedness of the contemporary order, especially the “compression” of time and space which results from technological innovation associated with transnational economic changes. More and more, it is argued, notions of physical distance are challenged by the possibilities of electronic communication. The global system therefore unifies but is also one in which all are affected by the proximity of “elsewhere”, producing a new consciousness of Self and Other.

Some currents within this discourse have attempted to use a global framework to criticize dominant models of world culture and especially of historical change, with positive outcomes. Focusing on the long record of interaction between socio-cultural and political formations, they have challenged modern nation-centred perspectives and the associated cultural determinisms which celebrate European “civilizational” values.’ The mainstream of globalization theory which examines social and cultural matters has, however, suggested a “stronger” theory which has proved more problematic.

Globalization is said to bring rapid change, social and cultural flux, ambivalence and uncertainty — conditions often associated with the “postmodern condition” of fragmentation and diversity. Here, globalization is not merely marketization or mass consumerism but is in Featherstone’s words, a “generative frame of unity within which diversity can take place” (Featherstone 1990: 2). The result may be an engagement of large numbers of people in efforts to discover secure locations in a fluid and sometimes disturbing world. Globalization is said to speak both of integration and of dislocation: it is the context within which the attempt to discover authentic socio-cultural locations is pursued. As part of this quest, Robertson argues, a “search for fundamentals” — for certainties or foundational values — is increasingly significant (Robertson 1992: 170).

For Robertson, perhaps the most influential theorist of the socio-cultural dimensions of globalization, world integration is best understood as a series of processes which have brought into being a “globality” or “unicity”. This is a systemic condition: all effective social units are shaped by global integration and at the same time play a part in shaping it. In this context the search for fundamentals is highly significant. Robertson (1992: 166) observes: “Defining globalization in its basic sense as involving the compression of the world, one must insist that it is the globality of the ‘search for fundamentals’ which is its most interesting feature.”

The “search” is part of a general quest for particularisms which are simultaneously universal claims. Borrowing from Wallerstein’s world systems theory, Robertson argues that by the late 20th century a twofold process was under way, “involving the interpenetration of the universalization of particularism and the particularization of universalism” (Beyer 1994: 28; original emphasis). The effect is to constrain “civilisations and societies” to be increasingly explicit about their “global callings (their unique geocultural or geo-moral contributions to world history)” (Robertson 1992: 130).

Such developments are said to have special significance for religion. Increased interconnectedness at the global level is viewed as heightening awareness of the diversity of human experience, challenging local belief systems and the worldviews they sustain. The retreat into isolation sometimes associated with particularism is less and less feasible. Atthe same time, global pressures become more demanding, requiring interpretation and explanation, and encouraging the reworking of worldviews — promoting the search for fundamentals. Localisms not only discover new elaborations of the universal but also have access to novel means of projecting them, both through innovative technologies and in terms of the heightened receptivity to universal perspectives which is an aspect of the global condition.

As world views, religions are said to have special significance within the globalizing process: of all complexes of ideas they are best equipped to prosper within a “unicity”. Waters (1995: 125) refers to the “globalizing sense of mission” of major world religions such as Christianity, Islam and Hinduism, which have now, he suggests, discovered a highly congenial environment. Turner (1994: 83) argues similarly, noting that the changes associated with modernity bring closer the possibility that such belief systems might “realize” themselves.

In this context the search for fundamentals can produce religious movements which, according to Robertson (1992: 170) are nothing less than “a product of globality”. Modern religious movements, he argues, are both an expression of the global condition and a force for its consolidation. Beyer (1994: 3) elaborates: “religion can be a proactive force in the sense that it is instrumental in the elaboration and development of globalization: the central thrust is to make [believers] more determinative in the world system.” Here even “antisystemic” religious movements — those formally committed to contesting dominant ideas and structures — complement globalizing processes. Religion becomes a positive force in the making of the global condition.

“Islamic Science”

Archer (1990: 1) argues that globalization is pervasive:

Globalization affects everyone since it presents them with a world context which influences them in some of their doings ... we all become global agents because reactions to a single context produce powerful aggregate effects which act back on the world environment.

Within this context, some theorists of globalization also maintain that certain collectivities are more expressive of the global condition than others; most important, that those operating within a universalizing framework may seek more energetically to assert their mission in an integrating world. Here the Islamization movement can be viewed, in Beyer’s terms, as one of the “proactive forces” for globalization. Its proponents maintain that Islamization challenges dominant values at a world level, in particular that it contests what AbuSulayman (1993b: xvi) calls the “excess and desecration” characteristic of Western society and which is said to have become a pervasive influence worldwide.

Islamization, he maintains, “must not stop at any physical borders, but must be extended to every corner of the earth and contemporary civilization” (AbuSulayman 1993b: xvi).

For the Islamizers, mainstream Islamic discourse is judged inadequate to this task. Manzoor (1989: 59) argues that contemporary Islamic thought is largely irrelevant to the Muslim reality, being nostalgic, rhetorical, abstract and ineffective in contesting the West. These gross shortcomings require to be confronted:

Obviously ... for Muslim thought, the problem of relevance is a problem of history; indeed it is a problem of the West’s power and ascendancy. It is a problem that forces the Muslim thinker to relate his Islamic self to the outside world, which is a creation of Western man, in a spirit of accommodation and compromise, if not downright capitulation. Little wonder, then, that nearly all Islamic discourse is a pathetic exercise in apology: it has arisen after all, as a response to the Western attack ... if Islamic thought is to end its courtship with irrelevance, it must end its debilitating fascination with the West and make a genuine rediscovery of its authentic self.