Revista CIDOB d'Afers Internacionals (Apr 2006)
Islam, Woman and Trumps of the Identity Imaginary
Abstract
At a time when women are beginning to assert their rights as citizens, one also observes a clear tendency to highlight signs and meanings that denote a referent that advocates not for submission but for abnegation with respect to the social order. This self-denial refers to a certain acute sense of belonging and also to a strong need for salvation, both social and metaphysical. There is the temptation to explain this paradox by affirming, with FatimaMernissi, that the veil, which for her symbolises the clearest sign of the identity trump, is the balancing entry that women find themselves obliged to contribute in order to pay for a citizenship right, in a society that is undoubtedly patriarchal but post-traditional. This hypothesis of Mernissi’s is limited when it is a matter of explaining how women become active agents of an ideology that, if it does not alienate them, at least justifies the inequalitythat turns them into subordinates in a social order that they do not control. On the other hand, if the concept of the price of the right of citizenship is merely hypothetical, are we not perhaps seeing the acts of pious women in terms of unfortunate conscience, when it isconsidered that the sign which means piety or identity, or both at the same time, is found at the antipodes of the “true interests” of women? Would it not be more prudent, from the methodological and analytical point of view, to see in these signs a certain search for imaginary solutions (in the other world, in identity membership) to real problems of poverty, precariousness and vulnerability? The fact that these solutions are imaginary does not mean that they are not real for these women, that they constitute solutions that they imagine, that they desire, that they dream of achieving. The sign of identity or piety is a decision, the objective of which is to activate the process in order to achieve that dream. But, at the same time, it is a political sign, not because it refers to a certain fundamentalist conception of the world, but because it signals this social and economic alignment that women suffer.
