‘Woman vs. Islamist’–Dueling Protests, Flag Switching, And Zero Sum Games

This black-and-white depiction of the rift between the “Save the Prophet” and “Save Benghazi” protests reminded me of the “flag-switching” incident in Tunisia, also known as the tale of “Khaoula Rashidi and the Salafi,” which involved Rashidi refusing to accept a Tunisian flag being replaced by a black banner, an act she was later honored for. As with all symbolic moments, that moment, of course, involves an element of simplification. One of the demands of the students, for example, was that women should be allowed to wear niqab, underlining the fact that there are women who want to wear niqab and secular men and women who would like to stop that.

Personally, I think one of the difficulties in all of these “post-revolutionary” countries, where the struggle between “hardliners” and “moderates” is underway, is this persistent idea of modernisation as a process with secularization as the desired result, like a rainbow with a pot of gold at the end. There is such a thing as prescriptive secularism, and one can be a fundamentalist and secularist, as one can be a despot and secular–people in the region have lived under secular dictators long enough to know that. Symbolic images and exaggerated rifts depicting a confrontation between secularism/moderates and Islamism/hardliners as a struggle over which flag gets hoisted up does no good.

Instead, we should be pushing for the idea of everyone having space in a pluralist setting, as long as they are willing to accept that others have the same space. This cannot be a zero sum game–if only because the problem with zero-sum games is that one side will have no stake in the future and nothing to lose.

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