05. October 2010

What does a Muslim woman look like?

What does a Muslim woman look like?

By Shazia Kamal, contributor to Altmuslimah.com

I am not "visibly" a Muslim female-- in other words, I don't wear a hijab, the headscarf worn by some of my Muslim peers. Because people cannot instantly identify my belief system through my physical appearance, specifically my garb, I have not been at the receiving end of the direct hatred and vitriol that has been spewed at those who do don the headscarf; I have not had someone snatch off my headscarf in order to taunt and humiliate me; and I have not been dismissed or ignored in a professional or social setting because of my "suspicious" appearance. In truth, I have passed as a non-Muslim female, making my post 9/11 experience fundamentally different from that of my fellow hijabi sisters, but I still consider myself a Muslim woman, in every sense of the term.

Living in the United States, I have both been a part of and observed the transformation in America's perception of my faith--more specifically its fascination of and fixation with Muslim women over the past 9 years. The term "Muslim" has its own narrative and impact on the world, but when you attach the descriptive "Woman" to "Muslim," it stirs up entirely new sentiments, debates, and criticisms. This zoom focus on "Muslim woman" took flight when media and academia circles began to inquire into the domestic sphere of the Muslim world after 9/11, beginning, of course with the enigmatic and exotic place of women in Muslim countries. At this time, we saw the reappearance of the famous image of a forlorn looking Afghani girl (Sharbat Gula) in the 1985 issue of National Geographic magazine.

Her haunting face captivated readers and the mystery that was her life story proved so alluring that seventeen years later, the National Geographic team tracked her down in Pakistan and took another cover shot accompanied by a feature story on her struggles in the last two decades. The research and narratives of women done in Muslim countries abroad soon reached the West, where comparisons began to shape the perception of Muslim women from China to Africa, and back to the United States. A few years later, the assassination of Pakistan's Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto opened up the books on her life, which received a cautious wonderment of her by Westerners. Her western ideals mixed with her Eastern roots made her THE symbol of female identity politics in the modern era. In 2010, Arab American Miss USA Rima Fakih stirred up the anxieties of Muslim women around the globe; we all perched at the edge of our seats to find out how she would identify herself; waiting with bated breath for her to state whether she was Muslim was just as adrenaline-inducing as waiting to hear the winner of the pageant itself.

The notion of a separate identity of a "Muslim woman/female" has emerged through a complex matrix: the Orientalist framework, feminist philosophy, the lens of Judeo-Christian scripture, and of course media portrayals. Orientalist philosophy focused on using a Western lens to analyze Muslims and Islamic practices in the East, contributing to those exotic images that people are still amused by even in present day (See: Sex and the City 2 .) This philosophy also sustained itself on the false notion that the only Muslims in the world were Arabs, and so Arab women became the one-dimensional, monolithic image of Muslim women for more than a century.

Feminism, feminist theory and feminists alike have been engaged in "healthy debates" with the 'Muslim Woman' for ages. Whilst united on the essential struggle for women's rights and equality, feminism's changing philosophy has often disagreed with the definition of 'equality' and the 'separate but equal' role of Muslim women that is taught in the Quran. The distinguishing element between these "sects" of women's rights groups has been the question of submission. The choice for Muslim women to submit to what they believe God has commanded of them (including ideas of modesty) is absolutely a factor that contributes to the notion of the separate and individual 'Muslim woman.'

The Judeo-Christian view of women has been also been an impetus for the rise of the 'Muslim Woman' in that it offers a fundamentally different view of women than Islam, going back to the idea of Original Sin. The Quranic narrative teaches that both Adam and Eve were both equally responsible for their sins and were later forgiven by God, and the pangs of childbirth that are considered punishment for women in the Bible, are actually moments of reward and blessing for women in Islam. These are examples of the way differences in scripture have given space and authentication to the 'Muslim Woman.'

The concept of the 'Muslim Woman' arose also as a reactionary device on the part of Muslim women living in the West to the idea that Islam was violent both to people outside of the faith and to the weak within its fold. The 'Muslim Woman' had to stand up and define herself rather than be labeled oppressed or submissive by the West. All the while, she faced having to explain the very real cases of oppression, domestic violence, and genital mutilation taking place in Muslim countries, and attempting to distinguish these human failings from the teachings of Islam.

As the world moves forward in time and thought, we are witnessing how the 'Muslim Woman' is evolving into the champion of choice, the builder of the broken, and in some parts, the religious leader of her clan. Muslim women, like Suraya Pakzad, creator of the Voice of Women Organization in Afghanistan have stepped into advisory positions in the government, invested in charitable and entrepreneurial endeavors and have become star athletes, amongst a myriad of other accomplishments. In 2012, Muslim women boxers will be seen competing in Olympics, with their hijabs on.

These roles and capacities have become vastly enriched and enhanced due to the unique narratives that the 'Muslim woman' has contributed to them, especially the narratives defying oppression, subjugation and lack of choice.

Muslim women have come to own the notion that we are spiritually, physically, socially, emotionally, politically, and influentially Muslim females. On a journey of both collective introspection and self-reflection, Muslim women also have been at the forefront in producing scholarship that deconstructs this multi-faceted identity. Asma Uddin (Editor-in-Chief of AltMuslimah.com), writes in her article, "The Difficulty of Being a Modern Muslim," "This self-reflection involves quite a bit of confusion, as it is hard to reconcile the heart-wrenching news of oppression with our daily experience of meeting, interacting with, living among - being - strong, confident, successful Muslim women."

It is through these vehicles that we are helping to build the collective Muslim identity as well as our own Muslim female identity. Our pursuits are defined and amplified by virtue of these identities, whether conscious or unconscious. This movement to self-understanding has occurred in response to the need for alternative perspectives to improve and diversify the globe. In the future, whenever there is a forum discussing Muslims or Islam, we will naturally emerge as the female Muslim voices. We will retain an authentic and distinct voice that will mold and shape society and politics for generations to come.

Tags: Roger, Islam

Write a comment

Comments: 0

Fri

Nov

2015

Are Languages Products of their Environment?

shutterstock_222422665_151112

DISCOVER MAGAZINE published this very interesting article:

Languages Are Products of Their Environments

The characteristics that make each language unique may actually be adaptations to the acoustics of different environments.

2 Comments

Thu

Jun

2014

Fun with Newspaper Headlines

Newspaper Headlinigs

0 Comments

Tue

Jun

2014

The Case for Reparations

The Case for Reparations

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

By Ta-Nehisi Coates

May 21, 2014

Chapters

0 Comments

Mon

Jun

2014

A Look At 19th Century Children In The USA

PHILADELPHIA — DINNER with your children in 19th-century America often required some self-control. Berry stains in your daughter’s hair? Good for her. Raccoon bites running up your boy’s arms? Bet he had an interesting day.

As this year’s summer vacation begins, many parents contemplate how to rein in their kids. But there was a time when Americans pushed in the opposite direction, preserved in Mark Twain’s cat-swinging scamps. Parents back then encouraged kids to get some wildness out of their system, to express the republic’s revolutionary values.

The New York Times

Sunday Review

By JON GRINSPAN MAY 31, 2014

A late 19th century family taking a stroll down a set of railroad tracks

American children of the 19th century had a reputation. Returning British visitors reported on American kids who showed no respect, who swore and fought, who appeared — at age 10 — “calling for liquor at the bar, or puffing a cigar in the streets,” as one wrote. There were really no children in 19th-century America, travelers often claimed, only “small stuck-up caricatures of men and women.”

This was not a “carefree” nation, too rough-hewed to teach proper manners; adults deliberately chose to express new values by raising “go-ahead” boys and girls. The result mixed democracy and mob rule, assertiveness and cruelty, sudden freedom and strict boundaries. Visitors noted how American fathers would brag that their disobedient children were actually “young republicans,” liberated from old hierarchies. Children were still expected to be deferential to elders, but many were trained to embody their nation’s revolutionary virtues. “The theory of the equality” was present at the ballot box, according to one sympathetic Englishman, but “rampant in the nursery.”

Boys, in particular, spent their childhoods in a rowdy outdoor subculture. After age 5 or so they needed little attention from their mothers, but were not big enough to help their fathers work. So until age 10 or 12 they spent much of their time playing or fighting.

The writer William Dean Howells recalled his ordinary, violent Ohio childhood, immersed in his loose gang of pals, rarely catching a “glimpse of life much higher than the middle of a man.” Howells’s peers were “always stoning something,” whether friends, rivals or stray dogs. They left a trail of maimed animals behind them, often hurt in sloppy attempts to domesticate wild pets.

And though we envision innocents playing with a hoop and a stick, many preferred “mumbletypeg” — a game where two players competed to see who could throw a knife closer to his own foot. Stabbing yourself meant a win by default.

Left to their own devices, boys learned an assertive style that shaped their futures. The story of every 19th-century empire builder — Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt — seems to begin with a striving 10-year-old. “Boy culture” offered training for the challenges of American manhood and a reprieve before a life of labor.

But these unsupervised boys also formed gangs that harassed the mentally ill, the handicapped and racial and ethnic minorities. Boys played an outsize role in the anti-Irish pogroms in 1840s Philadelphia, the brutal New York City draft riots targeting African-Americans during the Civil War and attacks on Chinese laborers in Gilded Age California. These children did not invent the bigotry rampant in white America, but their unrestrained upbringing let them enact what their parents mostly muttered.

Their sisters followed a different path. Girls were usually assigned more of their mothers’ tasks. An 8-year-old girl would be expected to help with the wash or other physically demanding tasks, while her brother might simply be too small, too slow or too annoying to drive the plow with his father. But despite their drudgery, 19th-century American girls still found time for tree climbing, bonfire building and waterfall-jumping antics. There were few pretty pink princesses in 19th-century America: Girls were too rowdy and too republican for that.

So how did we get from “democratic sucklings” to helicopter parents? Though many point to a rise of parental worrying after the 1970s, this was an incremental change in a movement that began a hundred years earlier.

In the last quarter of the 19th century, middle-class parents launched a self-conscious project to protect children. Urban professionals began to focus on children’s vulnerabilities. Well-to-do worriers no longer needed to raise tough dairymaids or cunning newsboys; the changing economy demanded careful managers of businesses or households, and restrained company men, capable of navigating big institutions.

Demographics played a role as well: By 1900 American women had half as many children as they did in 1800, and those children were twice as likely to live through infancy as they were in 1850. Ironically, as their children faced fewer dangers, parents worried more about their protection.

Instead of seeing boys and girls as capable, clever, knockabout scamps, many reconceived children as vulnerable, weak and naïve. Reformers introduced child labor laws, divided kids by age in school and monitored their play. Jane Addams particularly worked to fit children into the new industrial order, condemning “this stupid experiment of organizing work and failing to organize play.”

There was good reason to tame the boys and girls of the 19th century, if only for stray cats’ sake. But somewhere between Jane Addams and Nancy Grace, Americans lost track of their larger goal. Earlier parents raised their kids to express values their society trumpeted.

“Precocious” 19th-century troublemakers asserted their parents’ democratic beliefs and fit into an economy that had little use for 8-year-olds but idealized striving, self-made men. Reformers designed their Boy Scouts to meet the demands of the 20th century, teaching organization and rebalancing the relationship between play and work. Both movements agreed, in their didactic ways, that playtime shaped future citizens.

Does the overprotected child articulate values we are proud of in 2014? Nothing is easier than judging other peoples’ parenting, but there is a side of contemporary American culture — fearful, litigious, controlling — that we do not brag about but that we reveal in our child rearing, and that runs contrary to our self-image as an open, optimistic nation. Maybe this is why sheltering parents come in for so much easy criticism: A visit to the playground exposes traits we would rather not recognize.

There is, however, a saving grace that parents will notice this summer. Kids are harder to guide and shape, as William Dean Howells put it, “than grown people are apt to think.” It is as true today as it was two centuries ago: “Everywhere and always the world of boys is outside of the laws that govern grown-up communities.” Somehow, they’ll manage to go their own way.

________________________________

A National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the Massachusetts Historical Society who is writing a book on the role of young people in 19th-century American democracy.

0 Comments

Mon

Apr

2014

Investigating Family's Wealth, China's Leader Signals a Change

From The New York Times

By CHRISTOPHER DREW and JAD MOUAWAD

APRIL 19, 2014

HONG KONG — His son landed contracts to sell equipment to state oil fields and thousands of filling stations across China. His son’s mother-in-law held stakes in pipelines and natural gas pumps from Sichuan Province in the west to the southern isle of Hainan. And his sister-in-law, working from one of Beijing’s most prestigious office buildings, invested in mines, property and energy projects.

In thousands of pages of corporate documents describing these ventures, the name that never appears is his own: Zhou Yongkang, the formidable Chinese Communist Party leader who served as China’s top security official and the de facto boss of its oil industry.

A visitor at the Zhou family's ancestral graves in Xiqliantou, eastern China. Intrigue surrounds the family after a spate of arrests. Sim Chi Yim for the New York Times

But President Xi Jinping has targeted Mr. Zhou in an extraordinary corruption inquiry, a first for a Chinese party leader of Mr. Zhou’s rank, and put his family’s extensive business interests in the cross hairs.

Even by the cutthroat standards of Chinese politics, it is a bold maneuver. The finances of the families of senior leaders are among the deepest and most politically delicate secrets in China. The party has for years followed a tacit rule that relatives of the elite could prosper from the country’s economic opening, which rewarded loyalty and helped avert rifts in the leadership.

Zhou Family Ties

Zhou Yongkang, a member of China’s ruling Politburo Standing Committee from 2007 to 2012, is the subject of one of the highest-level corruption investigations in the history of the People’s Republic of China. Several members of his family, over the years Mr. Zhou was in power, made investments in companies with ties to the China National Petroleum Corp., the state oil company formerly run by Mr. Zhou, although there is no evidence to show that Mr. Zhou was personally involved in the dealings.

1 Comments

Fri

Nov

2015