The response by Hammami and Rieker to my article ‘Feminism or the Eternal Masculine in the Arab World’ cannot be seen as a straightforward critique of my analysis. Its approach is so contrary to my own, and rejects with such fervour my conception of feminism, social development and what constitutes the personal and the political that we end up opposed in those very values we would wish to be universal. An adequate reply must therefore address both conceptual and factual questions. It is not clear where I should begin, given that I do not accept those categories which identify themselves intellectually as either ‘Occidentalist’ or ‘Orientalist’, and given that I see no need, in grasping a specificity, to adopt a method of thought derived from that specificity. The facts may differ, but does method have a nationality? Is logic the daughter of any particular ideology or culture?
Rather than embark on an abstract, theoretical discussion of our opposing approaches, I would like here to attempt a reformulation or clarification of certain propositions put forward in my original article. I will try to avoid the indignation of polemic and shall not linger over the kind of facile accusation that claims that ‘although blatant racism and elitism are no longer respectable, more subtle forms of racism embedded in conceptual categories and the constitution of history and the subject continue to dominate Middle Eastern studies’.
The issues I wish to raise are at the heart of the problematic which is today shaking the Arab world. For there is not one intellectual, one journalist, one scientist, one architect who does not have to confront a veritable crisis of values and orientation in the modern Arab world, or who is not daily accused of ‘Western progressivism’ or sterile traditionalism, and who does not search passionately to reconcile or vehemently oppose either Marxism and tradition, or modernism and fundamentalism.