Abstract
In the 6 years that have elapsed since the events of 9/11 Muslims have become the Other and veiled Muslim women have become their visible representatives. Standing in for their communities, they have attracted international media attention. So intertwined are gender and religion that they have become one. I have coined the term the Muslimwoman to describe this erasure of diversity. Some women reject this label. Others use it to empower themselves and even to subvert the identification. In the process they are constructing a new kind of cosmopolitanism. This essay asks how women can derive agency from an ascribed identity that posits their invisibility and silence.
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Notes
Michael Slackman, “In Egypt, a new battle begins over the veil” New York Times 28.1.2007.
For an analysis of the question of identity and speaking positions see cooke 2001.
“Veils in the twenty-first century are a mental shortcut to signal ‘Muslim woman’ – like afros in the 1970s were used to signal ‘black power’.” Nancy Snow http://www.slate.com/id/2153013/ accessed April 11, 2007.
In 1997, the Turkish government made the veil illegal for adolescent school girls. AKDER was established to prevent violation of women’s rights and “to promote social awareness regarding these issues.” In1999 Merve Kavakci became the first veiled women to be elected to the Turkish parliament. However, members of the Democratic Leftist Party refused to swear her in because she was veiled. In March 2001 she lost both her seat and her Turkish citizenship (Ali 2004). Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk’s novel Snow (2002) revolves around the prohibition for Turkish girls to cover, their brave insistence on its moral and religious necessity and their consequent suicides in remote Kars. In February 2007 BBC reported a protest in Zanzibar over the police ban on women driving while veiled.
The President of Helwan University recently forbad women in niqab to enter the campus unless they first checked in with an officer who could verify the woman’s gender. His justification was that men could disguise themselves and enter the segregated women’s campus (“Debate about wearing the niqab in Egypt” in Al-Hayat 21 October 2006, 4).
On January 14, 2004 the Iraqi Council declared that the Sharia would replace the secular civil family law that had given women rights to divorce, choice in marriage and custody. The new system went so far as to include mut`a, or temporary, marriage. Riverbend, the pseudonym for a young Iraqi woman blogger, writes: “Women are outraged… this is going to open new doors for repression in the most advanced country on women’s rights in the Arab world! … Please don’t misunderstand – any oppression to women isn’t a reflection on Islam … no religion is clearer on the rights of women.” (Riverbend 2005, 187–190).
Women are protesting the “porno-action” bill before parliament that threatens to forbid all women’s non-Islamic dress and any display of public intimacy. If passed, this bill would try to ensure that each Indonesian woman, regardless of whether she is Christian, Confucian, Buddhist or Hindu, becomes a Muslimwoman.
Dr. Saltanat Musuralieva founded Hadisy, a “Progressive Public Association of Women” in Bishkek 5 years ago. This innovative medical practice combines health care for women and children, particularly those suffering from HIV Aids, with Islamic education. She warned against teaching Islam in a vacuum lest students become religiously fanatic. Hadisy is trying to balance religion and medicine and social responsibilities (conversation in Durham NC July 31, 2006).
e-communication with author 16 December 2006. In their citation the judges called the novel a “narrative of loss par excellence. Sahar Khalifeh begins by invoking an absent space like that of the pre-Islamic poet lamenting the ruins of his beloved’s encampment. … Woman’s agency is deliberately obscured by the male revolutionary who seeks to liberate the plundered homeland with no success.”
In 2003, Ayaan Hirsi Ali collaborated with filmmaker Theo van Gogh to produce Submission, a film “dramatizing what she saw as Islamic abuse of women by projecting quotations from the Koran onto the naked bodies of several young women… For many Muslims, this was a deliberate provocation.” (Buruma 2006, 4, 176) On November 2, 2004 a young Moroccan called Mohammed Bouyeri gunned van Gogh down while he was cycling to work and Hirsi Ali fled to the U.S. where she was welcomed with open arms. She is at the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute. She has published two insider books that reveal all. In Caged Virgin (2006), she includes the screen script of “Submission” pp.143–150, and an interview with Irshad Manji in which both attack Islam, pp.89–93. What is more persuasive than two Muslim women agreeing on the alleged inherent misogyny of their religion? She has been awarded numerous prizes, including the Swedish Democracy Prize, the Moral Courage Award.
Kola Boof stormed the internet with wild stories about her relationship with Osama Bin Laden, and she had herself photographed bare-breasted to give Americans the inside scoop about African Muslims (http://www.kolaboof.com/feast.htm accessed 29 September 2006).
Al-Sana caused an international stir when she published Banat al-Riyad the first insider novel about Saudi women’s lives. Written as a weekly blog posted after Friday prayers and often headed with an Islamic epigraph, it is the story of four girlfriends in constantly foiled searches for love in marriage. The internet provides a controversial vehicle for communication previously unavailable. In 2006 already the book was in its fifth printing.
A self-declared secularist with no formal training in Islam, Nafisi is the director of the conservative Johns Hopkins Dialogue Project: Culture and Democracy in the Muslim World and the West. Her Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003) was heavily underwritten by American neo-conservative organizations Bradley Foundation (who also funded Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations) and the Smith Richardson Foundation (thanks to Farzaneh Milani for this information).
Tahawi’s autobiography The Blue Eggplant (2005?) describes her transformation from a heavily veiled sister in the Muslim Brothers movement to a woman who no longer considered herself to be a mere body and a source of shame. She left the movement and unveiled (Al-Raya 18 October 2006, 41).
See, for example, Iranian Fatemeh Keshavarz’s Stars and Jasmine (2007) that details the misinformation in Nafisi’s book and provides a corrective through a narration of her own cultured upbringing in Iran.
Muslim women artists in the U.S. in particular have been organizing exhibitions around their religion and gender, e.g. the summer 2006 exhibition at the New York Museum of Modern Art (Conversation with Salah Hassan at Duke University, 28 September 2006).
Egyptian actresses like Abir Sabri, Sabrine, Hanan Turk, Suheir al-Babli, Suheir Ramzi, Mona Abdel Ghani and Hala Shiha were the talk of Cairo when they decided to veil and to choose a life of contemplation. In “Egypt’s veiled actresses make a comeback,” Alain Navarro writes: “Egyptian actresses who left the world of entertainment for a more “religiously correct” lifestyle are back on TV screens this Ramadan, in a bid to reinvent their image more in line with the growing Islamic trend… Their choice to return to entertainment while wearing the veil reflects the growing “modern” religious trend.” http://www.kuwaittimes.net/spectrum.asp?dismode=article&artid=1045360703 (accessed 20 October 2006).
Afzal-Khan writes about “a whole ‘new’ category of playwrights to emerge and be accorded recognition in post-9/11 USA (the irony of which is almost unbearable): Muslim-American Women.” (Afzal-Khan 2005, 15).
Indonesian Nia Dinata’s 2006 film Berbagi Suami (Share a Husband) pastiches together the lives of three polygamous men to show how destructive the practice is.
Some work in mainstream papers, e.g. Salima Ghezali who is the editor of La Nation, Algeria’s leading French-language daily (Cheref 2006, 74). Other Muslim women journalists have a more gendered agenda and they call themselves feminists. Like Zanan, some Iranian e-zines like Bad Jens and the California-based Iran-Dokht are concerned “to increase the visibility of alternative feminine voices and ‘deconstruct stereotypes’ in Iran and the West about the dominant images of passivity and victimization” (Skalli 2006, 52).
Their “About Us” page announces: “The success of the magazine is due to the services it caters to veiled women. Over 100,000 female aging 18 to 55 find in the magazine the ideal and most convenient method to window shop in the comfort of their own homes. By browsing through Hejab Fashion, readers can get a practically good impression how the latest veiled fashion trends as well as the places where certain clothes are available… A number of advertising pages in Hejab Fashion are dedicated to advertise about Hejab-related products and services such as beauty salons, spas, hair care products, and scarves.” A frequently asked question is: “What are the most suitable outfits to wear during the hot summer days, especially on the beach? Designer Eman Fathy recommends wearing baggy pants made of cotton or any other natural fabric. A matching blouse or long “tunique” of the same shades would be perfect. As for the colors, the designer recommends white, off-white along with pale olive and sky blue. These shades will help you look glamorous while staying cool under the sun.” http://hejabfashion.com/ (accessed October 17, 2006).
See Asma Barlas’ January 25, 2007 attack on the Saudi state’s control of the Hajj that robs women of their ancestral place in the history of the Pilgrimage and their equal rights in its rituals http://www.theithacan.org).
“Extreme case formulations on the hijab (’It is clear in the Qoran’ or ‘the Qoran commands it’, etc.)… are both rhetorical and ideological. They are rhetorical because they are calculated to win over audiences… They reflect, without further need for any logical evidence, commonsense maxims pertaining to (misogynist) orthodox discourses on women in Islam. These formulations are, furthermore, ideological or hegemonic because they support, through religious consensus and public consent, existing socio-religious power relations. They conveniently ‘close’ the polysemic meaning of Islamic Scriptures and de-legitimise any alternative, non-misogynistic interpretations or ‘rethinking’ of religious tradition” (Dabbous-Sensenig 2006, 72).
In April 2007 Laleh Bakhtiar scandalized conservative Muslims by publishing a new translation of the Qur’an that strove to be friendly to women. She is “recording an audio version. And some day soon she hopes to add a Web page where other women also record themselves reciting the Quran-another break from tradition, but one she feels is crucial to bringing new voices to her faith” (Ahmed-Ullah 2007).
Lara Deeb “The Women of Hezbollah” talk given at UCLA July 12, 2006.
In Qatar during Ramadan of 2006, a record number of mosques had to construct new prayer places for women (Abdallah Mahran “238 Prayer Places for Women during Ramadan” al-Sharq 19 October 2006).
On December 12, 2005 Newsweek magazine featured “Women of Al-Qaeda.” From Chechnya to Iraq to Jordan to Palestine Muslim women are now more than ready to take up arms, or to carry bombs, whenever the organization needs them” (p.36).
The Islamic scholar Nazira Zayn al-Din in 1928 reminds her readers that in pre-Islamic Arabia women “went to war wearing coats of mail to aid their brothers and husbands defend fortresses and citadels” (Zayn al-Din 1998, 161).
In his book about Hirsi Ali, Buruma writes: “the world had indeed changed since 9/11, and that world had caught up with Amsterdam, just as it had with New York, Bali, Madrid, and London… (a Moroccan woman said that before 9/11) I was just Nora. Then, all of a sudden, I was a Muslim” (Buruma 2006, 17, 137).
In Why I am a Muslim: an American Odyssey (2005), American lawyer Asma Gull Hasan claims the right for Muslim women to affirm their faith even if they do not veil. “And ain’t I a Muslima?” demands Halimah Abdulla, an African-American journalist who also refuses to cover and pleads for a generous understanding of what it means to be a Muslimwoman (Abdulla 2006, 217–221).
In late January 2006 Gamma Gamma Chi Sorority, Inc., “the first Islamic based sorority” was established. The main page of their website quotes sophomore Saba Berhie who thinks that living in a Muslim women’s sorority house might “make it easier for young Muslim women to face the pressures of American college life.” (http://observer.medill.northwestern.edu/301-wi06_sec03/03campus_faith/01main). Newsletters also refer to their project to create a new generation of Muslimwoman leaders. In May 2007 they declared that their vision was by 2015 to have chapters in every US region and several international countries, insha’Allah.
WLUML was launched in 1986 and with the arrival of the Internet went online in 1994. At first a clearing house for information, it has become an arena, says Cassandra Balchin from the London office, where “a common convergence (can accommodate) diversity in opinion… People in the network can agree to disagree… The network requires a commitment to international solidarity and reaching out… This is the network principle: local people know the most appropriate local strategies. This recognizes that your strategy is not necessarily my strategy; however, we are interlinked” (Sharify-Funk 2005, 256, 261–2).
For an elaboration of this argument see Boyarin 2004, 15.
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cooke, m. The Muslimwoman. Cont Islam 1, 139–154 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11562-007-0013-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11562-007-0013-z