Imperialist Feminism: Women's 'liberation' as a colonial pretext from Tehran to Gaza

Women’s struggles are too often invoked in political discourse not as independent demands for justice, but as instruments to justify broader projects of domination; especially in turbulent contexts like the Israeli–Iranian war.

The focus on women’s oppression in Iran, framed within this conflict, is not only shallow; it produces a misleading narrative as it collapses two fundamentally different struggles into one.

The feminist movement inside Iran is an internal, deeply rooted struggle against a religious, patriarchal, and authoritarian regime. The confrontation with Israel, however, belongs to a very different register: an existential fight against an occupying, expansionist, settler-colonial state that feeds on the subjugation of the region, one country at a time.

Yet these two contexts are fused, as if resistance to occupation can only gain legitimacy once preceded by a certificate of “internal liberation,” especially concerning women. This conditional framing denies the complexity of both struggles. It also erases the fact that even with its crimes against its own people, Iran has unsettled the Western dominance in the region at a politically complex moment.

When women’s suffering is employed in this way, the goal is not to support their struggle, but to use them to delegitimize political rivals. “Women’s liberation” becomes a cloak for domination, their voices and pain are exploited to serve new colonial narratives.

The colonial feminist tradition

Colonial powers have always relied on moral claims to justify conquest. Military occupation was never separate from cultural and ideological projects aimed at reshaping colonized societies in the image of the West. Within this, women’s issues were centrally framed as evidence of the so called “civilizing mission.”

Flags of “women’s liberation” were raised against despotic regimes and oppressive traditions, but many of these banners were never innocent. In multiple historical periods, particularly under European colonialism in the Middle East, they merged with control.

This gave rise to what is known as colonial feminism or imperialist feminism—discourses that claimed to defend women’s rights while in fact intersecting with and sometimes serving the colonial system.

The “civilized” save women

With the British occupation of Egypt in the late 19th century, and the French occupation of Algeria and Tunisia, colonial narratives painted the “Eastern woman” as a silent victim, living in the darkness of tradition and religion, awaiting the “white savior” whether a soldier, intellectual, or Western feminist.

These narratives were not confined to books or newspapers; they took shape in policies, school curricula, and legal interventions. In Egypt, a number of intellectuals and activists expressed positions that, at their core, echoed colonial discourse, influenced by European modernity and its notions of progress and civilization. This discourse reproduced patriarchal structures, leaving little space for women’s own voices to define their struggles.

Although Qasim Amin’s 1899 book “The Liberation of Women” was groundbreaking in sparking the debate of criticizing the veil, polygamy, and the exclusion of women from education; his critique did not emerge from a structural, internal reckoning. Instead, it reflected an internalization of colonial rhetoric, linking progress to the European way of life and framing women’s emancipation as possible only through imitation of the West.

In doing so, this discourse reinforced male authority, sidelining women’s own agency. As scholar Leila Ahmed observed in “Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate”, Amin was not a voice for women, but for masculine modernity. His version of women’s liberation was conditional upon their subordination to Western standards that did not reflect their reality. Rather than celebrating contemporary women writers and activists, the spotlight was placed almost exclusively on Amin, elevated as the “father of Egyptian feminism,” while women such as Malak Hifni Nasif and Ceza Nabarawi, who were engaged in genuine struggles to claim rights and redefine women’s roles, were marginalized.

This marginalization reveals the central contradiction of modernist patriarchal discourse. It raised the banner of “women’s liberation” while denying women the legitimacy to speak for themselves, imposing a predetermined, conditional model of emancipation.

Anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod’s edited volume “Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East” provides a critical lens on these dynamics. It reconsiders how women in the Middle East were “remade” in the 19th and 20th centuries. This occurred not only through Western colonial policies, but also through nationalist modernization projects that promoted women’s liberation and societal reform. Yet these projects often came from elite, patriarchal perspectives, seeing women’s emancipation as a way to “improve the nation’s image before the West” rather than as a struggle in its own right.

Women as a pretext for rescue

The colonizer cast the Muslim woman as a helpless victim in need of rescue. The rescuer was, of course, the white colonizer himself. The “colonized woman” was imagined as voiceless, expected to welcome liberation in the form of soldiers, advisors, or white feminists.

The irony was staggering. These same colonial powers were perpetrators of sexual violence, political repression, and economic exploitation—against women both in their colonies and at home. The “woman question” in the East was a velvet glove covering the iron fist of empire.

In her essay “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses”, Chandra Mohanty criticized Western feminism for creating a stereotypical image of Third World women as a single, unified victim, ignoring diversity and differences. Under the banner of “defending women’s rights,” some strands of feminism—sometimes unintentionally—converged with imperial ideologies.

Out of this critique emerged the concept of imperialist feminism, which highlights how Western feminist values and standards are imposed on other societies. The term gained prominence in the late 20th and early 21st centuries among academics and activists who exposed how governments and institutions exploited feminist discourse to justify military interventions, particularly in the Middle East and South Asia.

Imperial feminism and Palestine

In today’s politics, this legacy is alive. Nowhere is this clearer than in Palestine. Israel deploys the rhetoric of “women’s rights” and “combating sexual violence” to justify its massacres. Allegations of sexual violence—unsupported by evidence—are used to paint Palestinians as savages and threats to women. Meanwhile, the Israeli state itself commits documented violations against Palestinian women: arrest, torture, denial of basic human rights. The theft of land is inseparable from the theft of narrative.

The disaster lies in how misleading narratives have been promoted, accusing Palestinian resistance of committing sexual assaults against female soldiers of the occupation in a propaganda campaign aimed at demonizing the resistance and justifying colonial rule. While most feminist platforms in the region have maintained their anti-occupation stance, some activists in the Arab public sphere echoed this narrative. UN reports also appeared, stating there were “reasonable grounds to believe” that acts of sexual violence, including rape and gang rape, took place in several locations during the Hamas attack on October 7.

It is impossible to be a feminist while ignoring the colonial question

The report faced widespread criticism for multiple flaws. Chief among them was its heavy reliance on Israeli sources, even though Israel is a direct party to the conflict, in contradiction to scientific standards.

Its methodology and the nature of the evidence were also challenged: were these allegations based on actual violations or speculative analysis? Questions were raised about why the committee was allowed entry into Israel after previously being denied, while UN missions were barred from Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem. This opened the door to accusations of “double standards” in believing accounts of sexual violence only when they came from the occupier’s side.

Are the female soldiers of the occupation—hailed by Israel as symbols of empowerment—suddenly recast as mute victims? Sexual violence cannot be understood outside the structures of power. Believing or dismissing women’s testimonies has never been neutral; it is shaped by their place within systems of dominance. In this context, the occupier holds the weapons, the prisons, and the propaganda machine.

It is impossible to be a feminist while ignoring the colonial question. Feminism is not a rigid model, but an analytical tool to dismantle intersecting systems of oppression. True feminism must be intersectional, recognizing that women’s struggles span multiple fronts: against patriarchal structures within our societies, and against colonial domination from outside.

When women’s suffering is instrumentalized for propaganda, their cause is betrayed. The liberation of women cannot be reduced to a political card played in wars of empire. It must remain what it always was: a just struggle, rooted in women’s own voices, for dignity and freedom.