Women, religion and security

Formulating the call for papers for this special volume, the dear late Elaine Salo and I began an exchange that quickly gelled to reflect a common feminist analysis that expanded beyond the traditional approaches to security. We were agreed that insecurity was not limited to times of war, and that the sources of insecurity were not exclusively militaristic, but that, from a feminist perspective, the debate on security extends to a broad spectrum of spaces of insecurity for women. Unfortunately we never got to prepare even the rudimentary aspects of this introduction before her passing and so, in the absence of her considered wisdom and the insights I’d hoped to glean from Elaine’s lead in this project, what follows is my own analysis of how the issues we’d hoped to profile have materialised in this volume.

Building upon our expanded notion of security and, drawing upon the breadth of papers that have come to fit the call that framed this volume, it soon became clear that indeed feminist readings of security are concerned with a comprehensive range of issues through which we may collectively reduce women’s vulnerability and enhance the resources women may use to increase control over our lives and ourselves.

Following the critique of security studies as “an almost exclusively male domain” during the nineties, feminist security studies has since come to represent a gendered reading of the field (Tickner, 1992:27; Sjoberg and Martin, 2007). It has since defined security “in multidimensional or multilevel terms – as the diminution of all forms of violence, including physical, structural and ecological” (Tickner, 1997: 625).

A feminist approach to “security logics” promotes “alternative treatment of vulnerable bodies” in armed conflict (Lewis, 2013: 15). And so, the primary impact of a feminist analysis of security occurs in the context of war and peacemaking which, until now has included efforts to increase women's participation in peacemaking and security practices, recognising that women experience unique impacts in situations of conflict.

Yaliwe Clark’s briefing note on gender and peace-building in Africa (2013), traces these debates in terms of women’s situated knowledge, and the potentially essentialising aspects of “peaceful femininities” (Clarke, 2013:89). Clarke directs us instead to an analysis of conflict that recognises the role of “militarised patriarchal gender identities” and the place of “subservient masculinities and femininities as root causes of war”, highlighting the ways in which “the complex relationship between gendered capitalist processes and militarism” impact on women (Clarke, 2013:88 & 90).

Outside of armed conflict, the achievements of feminist security studies include the reformulation of security concerns and recasting the causes of insecurity to expand the concept of security beyond the “absence of war” and to include a more general sense of well-being (Shepherd, 2013; Basu, 2013: 457). This expanded definition of security in feminist security studies also stretches beyond state security to human security, including “domestic violence, rape, poverty, gender subordination, and ecological destruction” (Sjoberg and Martin, 2007:9). This analysis is a necessary corrective to traditional understandings of security which ignore the interests of marginalised groups (Hudson, 2009). For women, the central feminist concern in reconceptualising human security is the suppression of “violence against women on a continuum ranging from rape as a weapon of war to violence in the domestic realm (such as femicide or wife battering) and abuse of personal relationships, including sexual harassment or homophobic violence” (Lewis, 2013:16). Conceptualising violence as a continuum, feminist scholarship recognises the relationship between the violence at home and the violence of war, the two are different locations but they are equally violations of the human security of women.

conceptualising violence as a continuum, feminist scholarship recognises the relationship between the violence at home and the violence of war

Acknowledging how even in the absence of war or conflict patriarchal gender norms place women’s ordinary lives at risk allows us to recognise that very often a post-conflict return to pre-conflict norms characteristically also entails a return of pre-conflict patriarchal gender norms, though now exacerbated by the contribution of “‘disempowered’ masculinities” which emerge in the moments of war or conflict and may subsequently continue to produce similar or increased levels of domestic violence against women (Clarke, 2013:91).

Beyond military readiness, securitisation functions conceptually as well as instrumentally, in that it transforms the approach to security (Hudson, 2009:55). Securitisation scholarship takes for granted that security does not have a “pre-existing meaning” but relies instead upon a “social and intersubjective construction” of what it means to be secure (Taureck, 2006:55). And so, securitisation is also a political act (Hudson, 2009:56). Securitising women’s concerns entails articulating these concerns in terms of an existential threat, and a high priority, which must be met by heightened attention and resources (Sjoberg and Martin, 2007). Characterising spaces, ideas, individuals or behaviours in a discourse of security has the effect of securitisation, a double edged theoretical framing, which brings the referent under threat and allows for a response that ensures survival. The political act of securitisation therefore has the effect of adjusting the locations of power, and this is the second effect of locating women’s concerns in the framework of security.

These two avenues of thought feature in this volume to varying degrees and speak to a definition of security which must needs-be sufficiently expansive to include women’s comprehensive concerns for security including personal, communal, environmental, and global security and also ensure that women are not themselves securitised in disempowering ways. While suggesting an expanded idea of security, traditional feminist security studies remains largely focused on conflict, international peace and security and has recently come under criticism for scholarship located mostly in military/political/economic power and for the limitations of a commitment to emancipatory goals (Basu, 2013). The collection of writings in this volume reflect gender concerns for human security beyond state security, outside normative centres of power and express, in varying registers, an emancipatory politics. The issues include the terms of entry and exit into marriage, the legal treatment of rape, the war time sexual trade and slavery, gender-based violence (GBV), secure employment and the gendered dimensions of the precarity that ensues from social and environmental change.

As it pertains to religion however, the entries in this volume do not suggest as cohesive an approach, varying from sociological to theological analysis, occasionally aligned with cultural critique, and less commonly also confessional. Much of this is because the treatment of religion here is not confined to the academic distinctiveness of religion as a category of investigation, whether sociological, phenomenological or theological. Religion is used in these ways in some instances but also in its more popular characterisations. In security debates, expanding the referents of security, Laustsen and Waever (2000) identify the three ways in which religion functions in international politics where securitisation debates originate; a religion may be thought to be a threat to the state, a religion may find itself under threat from a non-religious actor and finally a religion may find itself under threat from another religious actor. Fundamentalism falls in the second of these categories when its religious mode is a hybrid of new and traditional or orthodox religious understandings (Laustsen and Waever, 2000). Ostensibly upholding past “orthodoxy (right belief) and orthopraxis, (right action)” fundamentalist religious groups are in effect crafting new methods and ideologies while “adopting the latest processes and organizational structures” to maintain religious authority. Thus fundamentalism functions at the “interface of politics and religion”, the defense of the latter against the former (Laustsen and Waever, 2000:722–3).

Securitisation discourses, by contrast, ostensibly function in a framework of secularism designed on Enlightenment values hostile to religion for its legacy of religious wars (Laustsen and Waever, 2000). Religion in this framework is “the ultimate threat to security and civility”, as a result of which state “securitization on behalf of secularization against fundamentalism justifies many violations of democracy and civil liberties” (Laustsen and Waever, 2000:739).

At the intersection of the securitisation of women’s rights and the securitisation of religion, where securitisation refers to recognising an existential threat and opening the option for the use of ‘exceptional force’, is the securitisation of the human rights of women who are religious or otherwise impacted by religion. As Hudson and others observe securitisation moves an issue from the political to a space beyond it, where threat is imminent and survival imperative. It is beyond social security and concerns for social justice, and into the realm of international security, a matter of “collective survival” (Hudson, 2009:57).

To securitise an issue not previously deemed to be a security issue is to challenge society to promote it higher in its scales of values and to commit greater resources to solving the problem (Sheehan 2005:52, quoted in Hudson, 2009:57).

Understanding securitisation of women’s rights in this way has the effect of highlighting ‘gendered insecurity’, namely the ways in which security functions as a speech act while the collective of radically diverse women across the global may share various states and levels of insecurity but may not hold the means through which to articulate a collective insecurity (Hudson, 2009: 58). Accordingly, Security Council resolution 1325 acknowledges the need to expand traditional security concerns to include protection for women in conflict and the inclusion of women in peace processes and conflict resolution, effectively acknowledging the link between the protection of women’s rights and the maintaining of peace and security (Hudson, 2009:60).

women’s rights concerns enter the securitisation agenda with potentially disastrous effects for Muslim communities rendered targets of securitisation agendas

However, the discussion of this intersection through the securitisation of the human rights of women living with or impacted by religion, is well established in some respects only; Lila Abu-Lughod (2002) offers insights on how women’s rights concerns enter the securitisation agenda with potentially disastrous effects for Muslim communities rendered targets of securitisation agendas. In response, she asks rhetorically “do Muslim women really need saving?” More recently, Tania Saeed (2016) has explored the securitisation of Muslim women considered a threat to British interests, and the Islamophobia produced through this securitisation agenda. The securitisation of religion or the employ of ‘sacred referent’ for securitisation functions prominently in the associations of women in Islam, American incursions into Afghanistan exemplifying how the threat to women’s rights is now an established geo-political cause of war against more than a billion Muslims. This illustrates the ways in which securitisation is easily employed to promote prejudiced perspectives, in much the same ways that black men and boys have been securitised in the policing mentalities of the United States of America (U.S.A.). Therefore securitisation discourses must also be interrogated for their use against marginalised and vulnerable communities.

Securitisation proves valuable when it is instead used in the interests of vulnerable or marginalised communities to bring attention and resources to their concerns. In these respects however the discussion on the securitisation of the rights of women in religion is less developed, namely in terms of the ways in which women themselves experience gendered insecurities because they belong to securitised religious communities or, more specifically for our interests, because they live within religious communities that threaten their rights, and it is in this aspect of the debate that the entries here become relevant. In the articulation of the experiences of women living with religion as security concerns, the effects of religious norms and values on the lived experiences of women are highlighted as “existential threats” to women, necessitating heightened attention and urgent response to ensure women’s survival and wellbeing. They raise the consequent “right to use extraordinary measures to defend” the securitised concerns of women (Laustsen and Waever, 2000:708). While traditional security studies in religion examines how religious beliefs are securitised in a geo-political context, the entries here speak to the ways in which the threat to women’s rights in a religious context may be securitised. In the varying levels of threat or vulnerability that religious teachings and practices may bring to bear upon women’s and men’s pietistic commitments, the entries here illustrate the threat to women affected by misogynist religious practices and doctrines and the ways in which women act to defend themselves and ensure their survival despite these threats.

the effects of religious norms and values on the lived experiences of women are highlighted

Concern for the ways in which Islam has come under exceptional scrutiny in securitisation discourses ensured the call for papers extended beyond a single faith tradition. In the final outcome the volume is somewhat balanced in the entries on Muslim and Christian faith traditions, and our perspective on the security implications of sacred referents is also expanded through entries addressing African Religion, Hindu ritual and secular state practices.

Nonetheless, the militarised aspects of the securitisation discourse emerge more strongly amongst the entries on Islam possibly because of the ways in which Islam has come to be hyper-politicised in the context of rising fundamentalisms, whether of the Trump or Baghdadi type. Accordingly, militarism features only, though not entirely, in entries concerned with Islam, and not in regards to other faith traditions. Between Christopher Anzalone and I, the common focus is on the tension between the lived realities of Muslim men and women and the advocacy of textual norms on war and sexuality.

I have tried to show the ways in which Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) manipulates legal texts and religious doctrine to produce a fundamentalist reading of Islam and through it a system of sex slavery designed to supply the sexual economy of the wars for the caliphate. Rather than the suggestion that this is an aberration to western understandings of war or sexuality, I illustrate the ways in which war is seldom conducted without the trade of women’s sexuality. I analyse “sexuality and subjugation in the context of Islamist militarism” (p25) to argue that (ISIS) and Boko Haram (BH) in Nigeria, use historical legal and military practices “in distinctly contemporary ways to produce new militarised masculinities” premised on extreme forms of sexual control originating in “contemporary sexual technologies of the body” (p25) and which “run contrary to how ordinary Muslims conceptualise both sexual relations and resistance to imperialism” (p26). Women’s security concerns here are multifold, as subjects of war, as slaves in war and as sexual subjects of war.

Anzalone’s analysis of the approach that “jihadi idealogues” take to “women as militant activists”, their “place in jihadi media” in Sunni and “transnational Shi'i jihadi discourses” (p18) uncovers some of the militarised aspects of women’s anti-imperial resistance. The challenge for ISIS lies in the tension between narratives of domesticity and jihad; militant discourses seek to inspire Muslim women on both fronts. While “the chaste, pious Muslim woman” (p22) is the normative narrative “on the ground operational realities among Muslim militant cells operating in western countries are often more fluid and less restrictive regarding the active participation of women in planning, supporting and even carrying out attacks” (p22). While “global jihadi leaders and ideologues seek to construct an inclusive movement” they also “adhere to conservative, neo-traditional social codes and interpretations of Islamic law (shari‘a) in which men and women’s interaction is strictly regulated and the latter’s role is usually circumscribed” (p19).

Mariam Bibi Khan, poses a set of important questions to Sarah Eltantawi, an intellectual historian who moves from the premise that security includes “physical, psychological, domestic, financial and political components” (p12). She asks Eltantawi to theorise the links between religious extremism and women’s security in the context of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. Eltantawi’s reponses to Khan make clear the links between religious thought and social organisation where communities are inflected by “a severe toxic masculine culture” (p13) in which domestic circumstances leave women at the caprice of husbands who may be kind but also potentially cruel or abusive, with the power to produce existential threats to their wives and other women around them.

The theme is repeated in the study of the African Independent Church in the Gumburu case in Zimbabwe where Rosemary Chikafa-Chipiro illustrates the links between women’s personal marital experiences and the power of a husband to curtail and manage the lives of his wives. In both instances the extreme degrees to which women are required to adhere to pietistic norms that preference male leadership and the interests of the family over their personal interests places restraints on women’s agency over their marital lives to the point of threat. In the Gumbura case the threat to some women’s lives is framed as rivalry amongst women competing for the affections and resources of a wealthy and influential man.

Khan identifies an important link between women’s sexual negotiations to produce peace in their marriages and their social negotiations to ensure peace in the broader social context which Eltantawi locates in the domestic violence experienced by women in societies where “individual men feel they do not have a lot of personal power” (p14) to determine their lives outside the home. This is perhaps the most salient point of connection in the securitisation of women’s religious experiences, namely the connection between the personal and the political. Islamic law, whether recognised by the state or not, represents a link between the political and the personal. Various understandings of shariah feature, in the interview with Eltantawi, Shahana Rasool and Muhammed Suleman’s discussion on Muslim religious leaders, Anzalone's discussion of Muslim women`s militancy and my discussion on concubines in the caliphate, indicating the various ways in which securitisation discourses intersect with religious laws.

The effect of Rasool and Suleman’s discussion is to highlight the structural and cultural aspects of domestic violence, namely the ways in which religious opinion can effectively imprison women in situations of violence; the “lack of recourse to forms of support outside of religious structures” they argue, “confines marital violence within the private and religious sphere” (p41) limiting the possibilities women have for exiting violent situations. An important aspect of this discussion is the weight they give to religious interpretation and popular understandings of scripture. A woman who is repeatedly told to return to an abusive relationship or a woman who takes twenty years of abuse before attempting to exit her marriage through a divorce before a judicial body reminds us of the degree of threat that women experience before they attempt to leave an abusive marriage. By bringing attention to this, they indicate the power of religious opinion in maintaining social norms, where these opinions or textual understandings work against the interests of women, they also potentially threaten women’s lives.

religious opinion can effectively imprison women in situations of violence

The South African Faith and Family Institute (SAFFI) engages much of this dilemma too. Elizabeth Petersen illustrates how a rights discourse such as ours in South Africa “is not in itself an effective intervention strategy in contexts where religion (embedded in culture) is a social determinant of hierarchical gender power-relations” (p50). Established in 2008, SAFFI “address(es) the faith dimensions of violence against women” (p50) and offers faith based resources to religious leaders. She locates this violence in a broader context of deepening brutality which she argues characterises South Africa at present. Women who leave abusive situations face “theological struggles” (p52) reconciling their belief with their survival. While most women will look to religious leaders for counselling and support, the majority of leaders are not trained to respond adequately to the situations of violence they encounter. The common suggestion that wives extend themselves beyond their normal limits, that they pray for strength to endure their hardships and that they maintain a marriage “at all costs” (Rassool and Suleman, p44), indicate the degree to which women’s lives are placed at risk in the interests of religious norms and where care to preserve marriage and maintain a patriarchal model of family supersedes the interests of women. Peterson offers a solution in new leadership models based on power sharing.

As an instance of localised conflict, the resolution of marital conflict may or may not bear resemblance to the negotiation of larger political conflicts and women’s roles in the two may differ markedly. The experiences of Vhavenda women who, as aunts, play a designated role in conflict management take us into another traditional site of community leadership and conflict resolution. Pfarelo Matshidze and Veronica Nemutandani introduce us to the Makhadzi whose role as “custodians of religious and traditional knowledge and as a resource” to the family “maintain family security and integrity” (p70). Women who are aunts in their natal families are expected to manage marital conflict employing systems of “discussion, mediation, accommodation, and separation” (p72). The article explains the diminished role of Makhadzi in present day family dispute resolution through their exclusion from the Traditional Leadership and Governance Act 41 of 2003, and argues for recognition of the value of the Makhadzi in resolving family conflict and maintaining the integrity of the family. They offer valuable insights into women lead forms of conflict resolution, there is however, little reflection on the ways in which the customs and traditions Makhadzi uphold may also maintain the patriarchal traditions of the family.

the dynamics of a polygynous marriage leave women in characteristically precarious situations

Amongst these traditions in the greater Tzaneen area is the practice of polygyny in the African Initiated Churches (AICs) where menstrual and childbirth practices work to isolate women from their husbands, and thus render their marriages insecure. At these times a woman “cannot cook for her husband and the couple cannot share a bed as the wife is deemed to be ‘dirty’” (p84) and “(i)n the case of child birth, the wife and husband do not have sexual relations until the child has reached the age of one to two years or when the woman has stopped breastfeeding” (p84). To maintain the status of a wife, to ensure her husband’s sexual needs are met and that he has food prepared for him, a woman is required to agree to her husband’s polygynous marriages. Not only do the dynamics of a polygynous marriage leave women in characteristically precarious situations, at the point of the death of a polygynous man also, “widows in polygamous marriages can be left destitute” (p87). While they promote polygyny, Mogomme Masoga and Allucia Shokane explain that “the AICs are silent about the financial fate of widows” (p87). In deference to religious traditions, wives “looked to religious beliefs which prescribe how women should behave during their reproductive cycles. They endure long periods of isolation in between bearing children” (p88), but they are “unwilling to displease their husband as they are dependent on him as the family provider” (p88). As a result they find themselves “unable to demand safe sex. They are consequently vulnerable and experience (various states of) precarity” (p88).

The menstrual taboos of the AICs are not isolated, as Chitra Karunakaran Prasanna explains, “the stigma of ‘purity and pollution’” attached to menstruation in the Indian subcontinent “curtails women’s freedom of movement, the right to education and the right to worship” (p91). Religious norms prescribe physical and social exclusions for menstruating bodies, rendering menstruation a source of personal insecurity as communities police women’s bodies, and ordinary female bodily functions are used to produce guilt, shame and restrict women’s access to public and religious sites. Chitra reflects how women’s bodies are produced as sites of violation, threatening the purity and spiritual security or sanctity of male believers and the religious community at large. In response, a number of recent advocacy campaigns illustrate a new commitment to challenging the restriction that menstrual taboos place on women’s religious experiences whether permission to enter religious spaces, lead religious communities or participate in religious rituals. The effects of isolation and exclusion from the collective community of believers at times when women are already bleeding presents women with unique challenges in terms of their collective social belonging, illustrated here in the shift from bleeding bodies that are taboo to bleeding bodies that are “#HappyToBleed” (p94).

The precarity of a disintegrating social system, as in Zimbabwe of the early nineties, brings with it threats and uncertainty to women’s religious lives, as illustrated in Isaac Ndlovu’s analysis of Panashe Chigumadzi’s Sweet Medicine (2015). Caught between religious prescriptions on sexuality and the burdens of economic want, the character Tsisti finds herself in a precarious “politically induced condition” where social and economic support networks are failing her and with them the religious norms that Tsitsi uses to make meaning of her life (p96). In contrast to the singular moral anchor of Christianity, however, the story also illustrates the syncretic ways in which variant religious practices come together, to produce a complex network of securities and insecurities for religious women navigating new political and economic challenges.

The imperative that it is a woman’s responsibility to maintain the integrity of a tradition informs a number of women’s social and political choices, as various entries in the volume illustrate. The converse of this argument is that women must be at liberty to make sexual choices without judgement, as Sarojini Nadar and Elisabeth Gerle illustrate. As a result the law creates spaces of ‘privacy’ which it ostensibly does not enter, yet as their two cases studies show, the courts make religious and moral judgements of women’s sexuality indicating that the law is no guarantee of women’s security. The assumption is “that the law and those who interpret and enact the law are impervious to religious and cultural values and that these do not play a role in the judgments meted out in cases of sexual violence. This is a fundamentally flawed assumption” (p112). Accordingly, Nadar and Gerle question the “assumption that the more religion and culture are privatised, the more equal rights for women are ensured, as promised by the constitutions of liberal, negative states” (p112).

The courts were faced with a similar concern for privacy in the article by Juanita Easthorpe. She takes up issues of “leadership in the church and the right to marry one’s partner of choice in the case of Reverend Ecclesia De Lange … a self-identified lesbian, (who) lost her job in the Methodist Church when she announced that she planned to get married.” Pursuing her “constitutional right to equality and dignity and her right to keep her religious beliefs intact” (p115), it emerges that while the Church was aware of De Lange’s homosexuality at the time of her ordination, her public marriage made the Church reconsider her position and “De Lange was penalised for being open about her sexual orientation to the church” (p115). De Lange experienced job insecurity in the way that many other LGBTQI identified people do when their personal choices do not meet with public religious morality. The insecurity of the closet is an area of securitisation that can be further theorised for the ways in which sexually diverse people come under existential threat from their families and broader society upon disclosure and the need to bring further resources and attention to their concerns as a matter of survival.

Finally, the volume includes an entry on the material security offered by food sustenance where religious rituals offer women the security of a good harvest. Sejabaledi Rankoana explores the religious rituals adapted by women in Polokwane in response to “erratic rainfall patterns” (p124). With the shift of farming practices, “the longer absence of men from home as a result of migrant labour, (has meant that the) production of subsistence crops is done mostly by the women” (p128). Adapting traditional rituals to their present day crisis, women are able to respond to the rainfall crisis and ensure their food security.

the broader imperative of feminist scholarship on religion is to bring attention to the ways in which women negotiate the various religious forces that impact their lives

The entries in this volume suggest that marriage, sexuality, and the dynamics of the family unit are the strong focus of women’s security concerns in their religious lives. The domesticity of the location of these concerns does not however limit the security concerns to the domestic arena, their ramifications extend into broader social spaces and produce a picture of women’s lives under multiple dimensions of threat. The challenge for feminist scholarship is not only to highlight this threat but to ensure that women are not also defined by the vulnerability initiated by this threat. Similarly, religious women and women impacted by religion cannot only be viewed as women under threat; the broader imperative of feminist scholarship on religion is to bring attention to the ways in which women negotiate the various religious forces that impact their lives, the ways in which these curtail and embolden women’s religious experiences, and to understand how women make meaning of these experiences in order to survive. The entries here are valuable for taking us a little further than we were before in understanding the securitisation of women’s religious lives and the impacts of religion on women’s security.

I am grateful to the Board of Agenda for inviting Elaine and I as guest editors for this volume and also for the opportunity it gave me to think through some theoretical aspects of securitisation, religion and gender. I hope they find their trust well placed.

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Notes on contributors

Fatima Seedat

FATIMA SEEDAT lectures in the Gender and Religion Programme at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) where she also coordinates the Masters programme in Gender, Religion and Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights. Prior to this she held an Innovation Fund Post-Doctoral Fellowship in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Cape Town, an NRF Equity Scholarship for Doctoral Studies Abroad at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University, Canada, and a Chevening Fellowship at the Human Rights Law Center at University of Nottingham, United Kingdom. She holds a PhD in Islamic Law from McGill University where, through a study of legal capacity in Islamic jurisprudence, she investigated the discursive construction of women as legal subjects. She has also published on the politics of the convergence of Islam and feminism. Outside of academia, she has worked for the Commission on Gender Equality, at the Women’s and Children’s Rights Desk of the Department for International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO), co-founded Shura Yabafazi, a South African NGO that focuses on sex difference in Muslim family law and consulted on criminal law reform for UNWomen Afghanistan.