The Woman King and the Obfuscation of Dahomey’s History

This part of the actual history is, of course, obfuscated in the movie, covered up by invented scenes where Nanisca protests slave trading and even makes the king promise that he will abolish it. In this way, The Woman King’s “feminism” exactly fits the feminism of the liberal upper classes in the West. The Amazon warriors from Dahomey are like today’s #MeToo feminists who can be very severe in their condemnation of all forms of binary logic and patriarchy, or even traces of racism in our daily language, but who are also very careful not to really disturb today’s “slave trade” in the form of global capitalism, which provides the real ground of persisting sexism and racism. Two things should be added to the usual debate on slavery. The first is the fact that white slave traders barely set foot on African ground: slaves were brought to them by privileged groups like the kingdom of Dahomey, which went raiding for slaves and delivered them to white traders. Even a brief visit to colonial museums in Accra, the capital of Ghana, makes this abundantly clear. The second thing is that slave trading was widespread not only in West Africa but also in the east, where Arabs also enslaved millions, and where slavery lasted even longer. Remember that Saudi Arabia only prohibited slavery in 1962, and that the idea of slavery now enjoys a modest revival. Muhammad Qutb, brother and promoter of the much better known Sayyid Qutb, vigorously defended Islamic slavery from Western criticism, telling his audience: “Islam gave spiritual enfranchisement to slaves,” and that “in the early period of Islam the slave was exalted to such a noble state of humanity as was never before witnessed in any other part of the world.”66 He contrasted the adultery, prostitution, and casual sex, which he called “that most odious form of animalism,” found in Europe with (what he called) “that clean and spiritual bond that ties a maid [i.e., slave girl] to her master in Islam.” In recent years, there has been a “reopening” of the issue of slavery by some conservative Salafi scholars after its “closing” earlier in the twentieth century when Muslim countries banned it. In 2003, Shaykh Saleh Al-Fawzan, a member of Saudi Arabia’s highest religious body, the Senior Council of Clerics, issued a fatwa, claiming: “Slavery is a part of Islam.” In 2016, responding to a question about taking Yazidi women as sex slaves, Al-Fawzan reiterated that “enslaving women in war is not prohibited in Islam,” and added that those who forbid enslavement are either “ignorant or infidel.” This, of course, in no way impedes the emancipatory potential of Muslim nations. What is going on now (in September 2022) in Iran—the so-called Mahsa Amini protests—has a world-historical significance. The protests, which spread to dozens of cities, began in Tehran on September 16, 2022, as a reaction to the death of Amini, a twenty-two-year-old woman of Kurdish origin who died in police custody. She was beaten to death by the Guidance Patrol, known as the Islamic “morality police” of Iran, after being arrested for wearing an “improper” hijab. The protests combined different struggles (against women’s oppression, against religious oppression, for political freedom against state terror) into organic unity. Iran is not part of the developed West, so Zan, Zendegi, Azadi (“Woman, Life, Freedom,” the slogan of the protests) is very different from the #MeToo movement in Western countries. Iran’s protests mobilize millions of ordinary women and is directly linked to the struggle of all, men included—there is no anti-masculine tendency, as is often the case with Western feminism. Women and men are together in it; the enemy is religious fundamentalism supported by state terror. Men who participate in Zan, Zendegi, Azadi know that the struggle for women’s rights is also the struggle for their own freedom. The oppression of women is not a special case, it is just the moment the oppression that permeates the entire society is most visible. The protesters who are not Kurds also see that the oppression of Kurds puts limits on their own freedom—solidarity with Kurds is the only way toward freedom in Iran. Plus, the protesters clearly see that religious fundamentalism can only remain in power if it is supported by the raw state power or the Morality Police. They can see that a regime needing a brutal Morality Police to maintain itself betrays the authentic religious experience it uses to legitimize itself. Iranian protests thus realize what the Western Leftists can only dream about. They avoid the traps of Western middle-class feminism by directly linking the struggle for women’s freedom with the struggle of women and men against ethnic oppression, against religious fundamentalism, and against state terror. What is going on in Iran is something that awaits us in the developed Western world, where political violence, religious fundamentalism, and the oppression of women are growing daily. The West has no right to treat Iran as a country that just has to catch up with us. The last thing Iran needs now is a dose of Western Political Correctness! The West has to learn from Iran, because we will soon need a similar movement in the U.S., Poland, Russia, and many other countries. Whatever the immediate result of the protests, the crucial thing is to keep the movement alive, to organize social networks which, even if state oppression temporarily wins, will continue their underground work and lay the foundation for a new explosion. It is not enough just to express sympathy or solidarity with Iranian protesters: They are not out there, far from us, or part of a different exotic culture. All the babble about cultural specificities (often used by reactionary forces to justify religious and ethnic oppression) is now meaningless. We can immediately see that the Iranian struggle is the struggle of us all. Today, we don’t need Women Kings like Truss or Nanisca; we need women mobilizing us all for “Woman, Life, Freedom.”