This is the second instalment of our special series of translations on Marxism, Clara Zetkin, Islam and the hijab, taken from Zetkin’s book, ‘In the Liberated Caucusus’ (1924). The first part can be read here.
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The Muslim Women’s Clubs in the Eastern and South-Eastern republics of the Soviet Federation are a child of the proletarian revolution, the embodiment of that revolution in flesh and blood. They are a strong and victorious expression of the fact that the women of the Orient are awakening to an understanding of their own humanity following many centuries of existing under stupefying conditions, and are demanding their human rights, just as the rich Muslim women in Paris, London or Berlin are. (Which is, of course, not to underestimate the significance of these and similar cases, for these are also significant in light of the social position of women in the Orient and the shackles placed on their thinking and feeling). Such cases are akin to the temperature markers on a thermometer that record an increase in the barometric column and thus a change in temperature. And there is a huge difference whether this barometer displays 20 or 100 degrees. The social pyramid of the old order will not collapse if things only disintegrate at the top: only a shock to, or a coming apart of, the foundations that support it will bring down the pyramid as a whole.
The Muslim Women’s Clubs in the Soviet countries are an expression of life among the broad masses of women in the Orient. The emergence and growth of these clubs are a product of significant historical development. In the Orient, the working women are beginning to move and long to take action for emancipatory social conditions. These most disenfranchised of the disenfranchised, who have been forced into the deepest depths of social unfreedom and bound there by tradition, law and religious statutes, are now rising up. With body and soul bearing scars, they timidly and yet irresistibly rise up in order to demand their freedom and equality. Lenin rightfully attributed the greatest historical significance to this phenomenon, for he had a fine sense of each and every flash of revolutionary energy and assessed it in the context of the greater whole of global social change. Even if the stirring of the masses of women in the Orient still only amounts to a weak summer lightning, it is the precursor of the looming storm. It confirms how the proletarian revolution will be a world revolution in word and deed, and that in this revolution the last among the oppressed and enslaved will liberate themselves. In the Soviet republics, the Muslim Women’s Clubs are not a care centre for bland feminist tendencies, but a rallying point and school for revolutionary forces.
The Muslim Women’s Club in Tiflis was founded by the Communist Party and is both the product, and the sphere of activity, of its Women’s Section [Zhenodtel]. It was initiated due to the fact that the Soviet order had deeply stirred the psyche of undreamt of numbers of Muslim women. For them, the revolution signifies a turning point in their lives, because Soviet laws do not recognise any authority of men over women, no preferential rights for one sex over the other, because they proclaim the full equality of women in all social areas, and because the soviets strive to realise this equality. The soviets energetically demand that the new legal position of women is brought to the fore and that women themselves play an active role in remaking society into an edifice in which working women too will be able, in line with their talents and abilities, to have an impact and to develop. But the longing of the majority of Muslim women remains bound by the power of hoary old prejudice. These women recoil from taking their place alongside men in public life by placing their demands, learning and cooperating in the building of the new order. An invisible barred harem window stands between their aspirations and their activities to realise these aims. The male and female comrades in Tiflis have become convinced that they have to meet the Muslim women halfway by establishing a social interstation between the secluded domestic lives of these women, on the one hand, and the meeting and conference halls of public life on the other. In other words, a place where the emerging feelings and strong aspirations of Muslim women can mature into clear-sighted consciousness and a decisive will to struggle. Informed by the understanding that the building of a revolutionary society in Georgia is impossible against the will, or without the active participation of, the masses of Muslim women, these comrades set up such an institution in the form of the Muslim Women’s Clubs.
During my trip, I was to visit the first such club, in Tiflis. I travelled to the club in a state of great excitement. The club’s members had been informed of my visit. Had they not been told about my arrival, then I would have only been able to visit the premises and speak to a small number of Muslim women comrades, but I wanted to gain an impression of the community as a whole, and if possible to learn about the broader circles of women who are influenced by the club and its work. And so it was that I am an expected guest; the road and the pavement in front of the club are blocked by a throng of Muslim women, all of whom are unveiled. The car has to slow to a snail’s pace and is unable to make it all the way to the entrance. With some effort, and more as a result of being pushed and shoved than by actually walking, I finally make it into the entrance hall, head up the spiral staircase and arrive in the club’s large main room. There is the same pushing and shoving here as in the adjacent rooms, and the atmosphere is oppressive. It is akin to the excited hustle and bustle of an anthill.
When the Tiflis Women’s Club was founded in 1923, it had 40 members, and this was undoubtedly a big success. The Soviets provided the club with premises to accommodate this number of people. The founding of the club represented such a great and radical innovation that nobody expected it to grow quickly. But then the unexpected happened. Both the propaganda for the club and the work within it fell on fertile soil. Hardly a year has passed since it was found, and the organisation already counts 200 members, with other Muslim women applying to join. There can be no doubt that the Soviet government will give the club a larger premises. But this building must be in a certain location so that it can have reach greater numbers of Muslim women, meaning that setting up a new premises is not as straightforward as it might first appear.
The particular nature of the club demands that only women can gather here – women from the various peoples of the Stepp and the mountain regions who adhere to Islam.