In her article for the Women’s Defense, Mine Melek states that women’s struggle for a secular life principle is a daily and political feminist act of self-defense.
“The feminist principle of secularism is not a pragmatic concept. It is about raising the principles of women’s freedom struggle to the level of a common political-ethical principle that builds a new society/life.”
Mine Melek
Iranian women waving their headscarves like a flag of rebellion; Arab and Kurdish women who take off their chadors and throw them away immediately after Syria is liberated from ISIS occupation; women who raised the slogan of “Shut down the Directorate of Religious Affairs” in Turkey a few years ago, which might sound “extreme” to many… Starting out from these examples, the path from women to secularism and from there to feminist-secularism may seem clear to some of us. After all, Vida Mohaved, or Middle Eastern women in general, are the offspring of other women who committed the “crime” of defending women’s liberation against religious fundamentalism in these lands, even before it was identified with the invention called Political Islam. For example, the successors of Tahirih, another Iranian woman who was executed in 1852, at the age of 38, for committing this “crime.” You can kill me as soon as you like, but you will never stop the emancipation of women,” said Tahirih, before being executed by strangling with her own headscarf. In the 21st century, these words are once again embodied in the new struggle for women’s liberation, which is flowing like a never-ending flood.
Like all women in history who challenged patriarchy legitimized by religion, Tahirih committed a major crime: She opened her head and face that is, her body demanding equality and freedom with impudence befitting a new historical subject; dared to participate in men’s assemblies as an equal individual and to leave her husband and children to spread the word and demand equality not only against the king but also among the anti-shahs, to usher in a new era. According to those who issued the death warrant, “This woman had transgressed all the boundaries we inherited from our fathers and grandfathers and violated the Sharia.” What we have inherited from her are these lines:
Look up! Our dawning day draws its first breath!
The world grows light! Our souls begin to glow!
No ranting shaykh rules from his pulpit throne.
No mosque hawks holiness it does not know.
No sham, no pious fraud, no priest commands!
The turban’s knot cut to its root below!
No more conjurations! No spell! No ghosts!
Good riddance! We are done with folly’s show!
The search of truth shall drive out ignorance.
Equality shall strike the despots low.
#WhiteWednesday protests against the compulsory hijab aw imposed by the mullahs regime since 1979, combined with the latest wave of riots in Iran. A young woman standing on a telephone box and waving her white headscarf became the symbol of the riot: Vida Mohaved. Mohaved, 31, was kidnapped and arrested by Iranian police on December 27, 2019. While Vida was released after the backlash, another young woman was detained on the very same day, because of waving her headscarf.
The year was 1852 and some might say Tahirih carried it too far, but now it makes sense to talk about history! When we turn to a revolutionary woman who lived almost 200 years ago, we are actually turning to the present day, to understand why we have to put the adjective feminist before secularism. Tahirih is an example, and like many women whose names have been forgotten in the history of the struggle for secularism, who helps us to remember that secularism is not a gift bestowed on women by some men at a certain time in history and then taken back by other men, but rather one of the essential values of women fighting for freedom in every corner of the world, including the Middle East. Also, that women who struggle for freedom contributes more to a secular life principle than anyone else, and pays a greater price than anyone else; but that it is also a history stolen, confiscated and washed away by powerful men.
Remembering the forgotten is also important for women today and for the struggle against fascism. What does fascism, which we try to define in various ways, mean for women? The death and disappearance relatives, children, fathers, husbands, lovers or wars? But what is the feminist definition of fascism? According to the Italian feminist and communist writer, politician and anti-fascist activist Maria-Antonietta Macciocchi, the definition is “patriarchy + religion”: “Mussolini was functioning under the protection of the pope, the church and its supreme power, the Vatican” and his work basically, was based upon the themes of “isolating women from working life” and “pulling them into the hearth.”
From Mussolini to Hitler, from Franco to Trujillo and Erdoğan, the meaning of all kinds of fascist and dictatorial regimes for women is male domination, equipped with and legitimized by religious reactionism, elevated to the level of misogyny is one of the main founding ideological and practical pillars of the regime. This is the reason why it is so typical to impose motherhood, family, “acceptable” womanhood.
For women, the struggle for a secular life principle, as this struggle inevitably combines with the struggle against fascism, is the liberation of women, the struggle for women’s liberation against toxic male domination; It is an act of daily and political feminist self-defense for women. However, since these are not emphasized in the discussions of secularism or fascism, or because the usual definitions are made regardless of the autonomy of the women’s liberation struggle, a special emphasis must be placed on this autonomy.
What is the mechanism that causes religious reactionism and toxic male domination to easily meet and blend into fascism? This mechanism is based on the assumption of a strict policy of body control by all three. When we consider the body not as a mere physical entity, but as a human body that desires, thinks, acts and transforms life, the common denominator of fascism, religious reactionism and toxic male domination is the claim of control over women’s bodies which cannot act for itself, cannot speak for itself, cannot decide on its own life, and always obey both physically and mentally.
Now, as we move towards the middle of the 21st century, all the forces of the market, religion, masculinity and fascism are obsessed with the right to control the female body. For these forces, the human body consists of a disposable means of production, a disposable instrument of war, and for women, this means being reduced to a disposable handmaid that cannot speak for herself. From the one-man regime’s imposition of three children to LGBTI bans; from the abortion ban to the religionization of family law; all misogynistic steps, from the prohibition of divorce to the demonization of the free female body, are aimed at the normalization and legalization of this situation. The one-man dictatorship is a male violence regime that aims to confine women to their fitrat, that is, to their supposed religious-biological fate, to the prison of family and masculinity.
Children’s bodies are the biggest victims of this aggression, which reduces the body to a disposable object and the owner of the body to a domain of sovereignty. When it comes to children, the claim of male domination and religious reactionism to have a right to use and dispose of the body by taking it under unconditional control leads to a major child rape. What is clearly revealed in this process is that the fiction of masculinity blended with religious reactionism is the weakest spot of the one-man regime. The abused children’s bodies constitute a point of departure for the deeper rage of the masses.
We need the concept of feminist-secularism in order to transform the subject of this struggle, namely women and the organized women’s movement, into a new political force of will that will determine the common future of this country.
Secularism and the women’s movement or feminism are two children of the same era, modern times; If secularism was able to become a universal norm, it was thanks to women, more than anyone else, who fought to the death but results were seized/assimilated. The power holders, who have made official secularism the flag of the state and the survival of the order, want to be content with the first generation rights called “modern rights” for women, that is, the right to formal equality in the public sphere, and imposed confinement within a new patriarchal bargain in wider areas of women’s freedom such as division of labor, family, body, love and sexuality. The patriarchal bargain of official secularism, which aims neither to create the conditions for the real realization of formal equality rights, nor to make a secular life principle an effective means of combating male dominance, made possible today’s new aggression that declares women’s autonomous existence, and their lives and rights of women, including modern rights, as enemies.
Today, neither modern rights and the classical definition of secularism on which it is based nor a secular life principle with a gender-blind proletarian content is sufficient for women. It is not enough for women to define a secular life principle and struggle alone as the purification of capital from religion and religion from capital. Historically, the first generation struggle for secularism demanded the expropriation of the clergy; the second generation demanded the elimination of religious intervention in scientific thought and the political/public sphere. Women’s struggle, which is now developing around the world, with the slogan of “Secular state, free body”, along with the current responses to these demands, demand that the morality of private sphere relations be purged from all kinds of religious ideologies, rules and patriarchal domination legitimized as culture, tradition, and to be re-established with the principles of the women’s/LGBTI freedom struggle. Feminist secularism turns the principle of freeing the state, public and private spheres from religious intervention into a means of defending the freedom of the “body.”
The feminist principle of secularism is not a pragmatic concept. It is about raising the principles of women’s freedom struggle to the level of a common political-ethical principle that builds a new society/life. It means raising awareness that a secular life will only be possible by securing the material, political, cultural and ideological conditions of equality of women and men in all fields, and reconstructing not only the public-political sphere, but also the private sphere as a patriarchal-free space of equality and freedom. To the extent that the struggle against fascism is an act of feminist self-defense aimed at preserving their autonomy, feminist secularism is a call to re-establish not only the struggle against the one-man regime, but also the struggle and the morality of a new society with the principles of women’s liberation.