Women in Middle East Western Influence on the Lives of Islamic Women

September 11th and the war on Iraq have managed to demonize and stereotype Islam in the popular Western mind even more than its foreign nature had independently achieved. In addition to the furor over Islam spawning terrorism, renewed attention has been pointed at the supposed oppression and abuse of women in Islamic cultures, to the degree that these human rights abuses have been cited as one of the justifications for Bush's war on Iraq. However, there remains among thinking people, particularly those with cultural, religious, or ethnic ties to both Islamic and Western cultures, as to whether or not Islam has a negative impact on women's rights in the modern and historical Middle East. Because the false dichotomy between "good" Western ideals and "bad" Islamic ideals has been propagated for so long, it might surprise a Western reader to learn that many people, including many women, do not feel that Islam is abusive to women, and may even feel that it is Western ideals that threaten the well-being and freedom of women. When one attempts to answer the questions regarding the positive and negative impact which the West has had on the lives and status and rights of Islamic women, one is immediately confronted with the difficulty of determining what one will define...

This is a value judgment which depends overly on one's point-of-view. To a socially conservative person (even a conservative Christian or Jew), negative factors would be those that undermine the traditional family, traditional marriage, and the heterosexuality and monogamy of Islamic women. Is this wrong? Bush just won an election in America campaigning largely on his commitment to family values. For a socially liberal person of any religion, on the other hand, those same factors might be construed as positive if they functioned by defeating patriarchy, paternalism, and restraint. So rather than try to approach this question by listing two positive and two negative factors, it would be more appropriate to list two issues and discuss the way in which each is seen as negative and positive by those experiencing it.
The first topic worthy of attention is the fact that Western military and economic colonialism (from British occupation to American banking interests and military meddling to Soviet expansionism) appears to have been one of the larger contributors to a resurgence of fundamentalist Islamic sentiment, whenever and wherever it occurred. This has been evidenced both in the aftermath of the Ottoman Empire and again today with the war in Iraq. Of course, such a cause-and-effect relationship is…