When gender turns right: racializing Islam and femonationalism in online political discourses in Belgium

ABSTRACT

In Flanders-Belgium, a Belgo-Iranian politician has gained nation-wide attention for her critique of Islam. Safai's political discourses are built around her opposition to the violation of women's rights in Iran, and to the hijab as a political-patriarchal symbol. Through this latter opposition, she has gained prominence among Flemish nationalists. The emphasis in Safai's discourses has been on using Iranian gender politics to frame her antagonism to Islam as opposed to a patriarchal political ideology and the supposed progressive elite who threaten the secular order. Sparking fear of political Islam–in her words, ‘you should be more scared'1–and gender as her subject matter has gained Safai acceptance not only among some Belgian and Flemish, but also among some Iranian nationalists. This paper investigates Safai's gender activism and femonationalism featured in online media to show how emancipatory gender discourses are employed in the service of right-wing agendas.

KEYWORDS:

• Belgium
• gender
• femonationalism
• racialization
• right-wing politics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Ladan Rahbari (PhD, MA, BA) is a political sociologist and assistant professor at the Department of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam. Rahbari is also a senior researcher at the International Migration Institute (IMI). Rahbari was awarded a post-doctoral fellowship (2019-2022) by FWO (Research Foundation Flanders) for her project on Muslim migrant motherhood in Belgium. She obtained a PhD in Gender and Diversity (Studies) from UGent and VUB and has a PhD in Sociology from the University of Mazandaran. Rahbari lectures on migration, religion, (digital) media, and gender. Her current research engages with Iranian nationalism and the diaspora. Rahbari was editor-in-chief of the Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies (DiGeSt) between September 2020 and September 2021.

Notes

1 In Flemish: ‘Jullie zouden gerust banger mogen zijn’ (De Tijd 2017).

2 Iranian dual nationals and residents of foreign countries have increasingly faced persecution the Islamic Republic (Ditmars 2018).

3 This is a complex issue. The diaspora might be immune to Iranian regimes propaganda, but it is still prone to other forms of State propaganda depending on their location. Additionally, Iranian diaspora do not equally feel empowered to publicly engage in political commentary in online spaces. Depending on forms of residence rights they have and their relationship and connections to Iran, speaking out might be considered risky even from outside the country.

4 The white savior industrial complex is the social and emotional system of valuing the efforts that white people make for saving the seemingly poor and unfortunate non-white individuals (Aronson 2017, 37).

5 Reza, one of the characters of the American reality TV show Shahs of Sunset, stated this in an interview HuffPost Live (Katz 2015). The video snippet of the odd interview is publicly available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jR63-jQjMG4

6 A series of military and intelligence interventions after 9/11 carried out in Muslim majority countries by USA and other Western allies launched to fight global ‘Muslim extremism’.

7 While not entirely representative of the political diversities in Iran, the political forces are usually divided in two categories of reformist and conservative. In short, reformists attempt to reconcile Islam with democracy and human rights, while conservatives insist on keeping intact the founding ideologies of the Islamic Republic (Mir-Hosseini 2002)

8 By this I do not mean to undermine women's participation and role from inside the country, but that the coordination of the activities from outside of the country and brought about more visibility.

9 My Stealthy Freedom (MSF) campaign is an online movement that started by former journalist and Masih Alinejad who is Iranian born but runs the campaign from the UK and USA. The movement shares selfies and photos of women in Iran without the hijab to protest Iran's compulsory hijab law.

10 Veiligheid van de Staat: https://www.vsse.be/nl

11 The Federal State of Belgium is divided into three regions: (i) Flanders, the predominantly Dutch-speaking region; (ii) Walloon, the predominantly French-speaking region; (iii) and Brussels, which is the multilingual capital region. 

12 the national public-service broadcaster for the Flemish Community of Belgium.

13 in Dutch, ‘buitenlander’.

14 The Pahlavi Dynasty (1925-1979) was the Persian monarchy that was overthrown by the Iranian Revolution. The Pahlavi dynasty was founded by Reza Shah Pahlavi and was heavily reliant on cultural and political modernization of Iran and revival of pre-Islamic Persian culture and heritage.

15 In Dutch, ‘Ze is een voorbeeld voor nieuwkomers’.

16 VOA is an international broadcaster that has a channel in Persian language. As a governmental institution, the channel is owned by the Federal government of the United State of America.

17 Three suicide bombings coordinated by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) took place in Brussels, on 22 March 2016. The attacks killed thirty-two civilians and three perpetrators and injured more than 300 people.

18 A contested and not always critically recognized and validated condition which causes captives and hostages to develop empathy/affinity/alliance with their captors.

19 Many sources were quick to blame migrants and refugees for the assault and a media panic was created. These allegations have however been debunked ever since, e.g. see Nolan Brown (2017).

20 Moral panics are collective societal reactions in condemning something by creating sensationalized reports and folk devils who are held responsible to the public outrage. The moral panics have social and political implications that might encourage more surveillance and control (Rahbari, Longman, and Coene 2019).

21 The purpose of the war on terror as an orientalist ideology in the post-9/11 era is to influence the public's thoughts, affects and actions to justify militarization and a large array of supposedly (counter)terror actions which normalize othering of migrants and Islamophobia (Beshara 2018).

22 The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

23 Homonationalism according to Jaspir Puar is the movement in which certain queer constituencies have embraced nationalist agendas and have also been embraced by nationalist agendas. Within this movement gendered, raced, and sexualized counterterrorism illuminate the production of normative patriot and terrorist corporealities (see Puar 2018).

24 While the full discussion is beyond the capacity of this paper, Safai has compared Islam and Judaism as well as Islam and Christianity in the past. In a TV appearance she compared Islamism and Orthodox Judaism and explained, ‘Islamism wants to conquer the world. It is a danger. It cannot be compared to ultra-orthodox Jews because what they [Islamists] want is an Islamic State’ (Safai 2018b). In relation to Christianity, Safai has stated that, ‘Christians revolted here in the twentieth century against the dogmas of the church. Now it is the turn for Europeans with a Muslim background to reject the discriminatory laws of sharia’ (Safai 2017a).