by FAWZIA AFZAL-KHAN
“It is very clear that neo-colonialism and religious fundamentalism are two faces of the same coin. You cannot exploit people without some sort of divine power or some sort of religion.”
Rereading this sentence from Nawal’s foreword to my edited collection, Shattering the Stereotypes: Muslim Women Speak Out, published by the wonderful Palestinian-American press Interlink Books in 2005, I was struck afresh at how clearly she saw the systemically intertwined roots of our world’s injustice, and how unapologetically and unequivocally she framed for us what she saw and knew to be true.
That bold spirit of hers, immortalized in over 50 books she published during her lifetime, and her unwavering commitment through her writing and her activism to debunk our rationalizations of religious and racialized economic and patriarchal ideologies, is what drew me to her as it did countless others across borders north and south. We met on a fateful evening in spring of 1998, when I drove my little red Suzuki car from Ossining NY, 25 miles south to where the Brecht Forum was then located in downtown NYC in Chelsea. That white shock of hair was like a secular halo around her brown, vibrant, mischievous face, her presence at once commanding and welcoming, her gaze as it looked at you, piercing and unforgiving, yet full of curiosity and humanity, her talk that night engaging, warm, full of humor and pulling all of her audience into its seductive embrace—yet deadly serious, and brilliantly scathing in its attack on all manner of pieties. Not least of these was her unmasking of Islamist right-wing movements in Arab and other Muslim countries, as having little to do with religion, and everything to do with power; both a consequence of, as well as handmaiden to, a postmodern neoliberalism that serves the needs of Empire. Her phrase for this historical conjuncture of forces, succinct and electrifying in its clarity, was “the global imperialist class patriarchal system.” As an immigrant from Pakistan, I was acutely aware and troubled by this confluence of factors that had and was continuing to create havoc in my country of birth, an unleashing of extremist Islamism aided and abetted by both the USA as well as Saudi Arabia at the expense of the rights of women and religious minorities back home. Unholy alliances, indeed.
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