ABSTRACT
This chapter assesses one aspect of the implications of the cultural relativist argument: appeals to what might be called "Islamic particularism" to justify the denial of civil and political rights to Middle Eastern Muslim women. Middle Eastern governments have made deliberate attempts to stifle dissenting women's voices when they could discredit the authenticity of the official constructs of Islamic/Middle Eastern culture that are used to rationalize the treatment of women. In Pakistan in 1984 the government violently suppressed women's protests over a new law reviving elements of Islamic evidentiary law that downgraded the value of women's testimony. The brutal repression by the postrevolutionary Iranian Government of women's protests against the retrograde version of Islam, which interprets the law its most discriminatory form, is notorious. The cultural relativist might reply that there is a difference between the way feminist currents arose in the West and the way feminist standards are employed to judge the cultures and societies of the Middle East.
