Mira Al-Bitar, Samir Sadek:
Objectification simply means reducing the value and existence of a human being to the level of an object that is bought and sold, It is a belittling of his existence and a denial of his humanity before turning him into a mere consumer commodity, If religion is accused of belittling women, this does not theoretically mean that it is the sole possessor and monopoly of this characteristic, Therefore, it is necessary to search for other sources of this belittling!
Modernity and then secularism changed the status of women to the extent that their status differed in the West compared to their status in the East,The postmodern stage is characterized by the freedom to market and consume everything by creating a need rather than covering a need, We do not buy pants because the old pants are torn, but because the color of the new pants is “fashionable,” and fashion changes every season of the year, Modernity has given women a lot in terms of their independence, equality, and freedom, Will the postmodern stage turn against modernity, or will it be a continuation and development of it?
The objectification of women denies their existence as independent human beings, equal in value, dignity, and needs to others, especially men, Objectification reduces women to inanimate objects, stripped of privacy, independence, and will, Nawal El Saadawi said of this: “Women live with stark social contradictions. They must be cold, chaste, and pure, neither feeling nor desiring sex, They must be instruments of pleasure, satisfying their husbands sexually to the point of intoxication,Their bodies are considered shameful and must be hidden according to moral standards, Yet, their bodies are also considered fair game and must be exposed according to the standards of commercial marriage and advertising, I don’t think there is any exploitation more severe than this, nor any degradation more profound than the degradation women endure. They are prey between two conflicting and opposing forces, like a piece of meat between two predatory jaws, All of this is considered normal in a society where women have lost the components of their personalities, been emptied of their humanity, and transformed into objects or tools, Sometimes they are tools for advertising, sometimes tools for buying and consuming, and sometimes tools for other purposes ” For pleasure and to serve desires, and sometimes a vessel for children, in short, a servant during the day and an unpaid slave at night.
We don’t know much about postmodernism yet, but there are some suspicions that are generally unsettling, The culture of consumption leading to destruction is a capitalist necessity, but it is not necessarily a human need, Postmodernism addresses consumer instincts, Some believe that Muhammadanism has taken a single leap and moved from the cave to the constellation, i.e. to globalization and thus to the postmodern stage, There are those who claim that Muhammadanism’s objectification of women is equivalent to postmodernism’s objectification of the human being by turning him into a consumer material to be bought and sold.
They claim that the creation of the new Muhammadan woman, who is not equal to anything, is achieved by fighting the wave of sexual liberation for women and what they call sexual permissiveness, the implications of which they do not understand, They want her to return to the home and adhere to what is called chastity, as if men do not have chastity to adhere to! Then, she must refrain from mixing with the opposite sex and wear the hijab(veil) so that she does not become a source of arousing male desires and temptation, The new Muhammadan woman is primarily represented by her being protected of her reproductive organs, and this protection is necessary in order to privatize the use of these reproductive organs and to avoid experimental use,Each woman has only one experience, and with only one man, while men are allowed to have multiple experiences, even rape.
Some members of the Muslim Brotherhood claim a similarity between the capitalist objectification of women in postmodernism and the situation of the modern Muslim woman, However, they fail to grasp that this analogy represents an indirect admission that, according to their perceptions, the modern Muslim woman is also objectified, Furthermore, the wave of consumerism in the postmodern era does not mean that women alone have been transformed into consumer goods,Although postmodernism consumes everything, even knowledge, its consumerist philosophy differs fundamentally from that of the Muslim world, For example, they overlook the significant difference between nudity and covering, Nudity is based on personal will and is therefore, in essence, liberation, while covering with the hijab and niqab is based on external will, such as religious will, and is, in essence, coercion, tyranny, and imposition. The claim that “someone is undressing her to market her” is false; nudity is a voluntary act, while covering is a forced one.
In the Islamic tradition, a woman is defined by her body, while in postmodernism, she is defined by her body and her vulva, The Muslim Brotherhood fails to grasp the difference between these two perspectives, particularly regarding the state of the mind, The difference is vast, and it seems as though the mind is diminished or nonexistent when a woman is reduced to a mere vulva and its associated functions—a distorted view of her nature, The body with a vulva is natural, and it is human nature to possess a mind, This is evidenced by the contrasting status of women and men in both Islamic and postmodern societies, In postmodernism, women represent a consumer and producer, not a parasitic appendage. There is no progress in modern or postmodern societies that adheres to the principle of equality between men and women, In fact, in many cases, men are oppressed, transformed from oppressors to oppressed, In modern societies, women have become key players, and in some cases, leading actors. No force can revert women to a passive role or strip them of their agency in postmodern societies. ???.