Akram's Razor - Reflections on Islam, Muslims & America

Marietal doublestandards about Muslim women

Reacting to an idiotically misogynist comment on my blog, I posted the following status update on Facebook a few days ago.

Svend White  is pondering the paradox of American Muslim women professionals finding it so hard to find husbands given how comparatively well educated, integrated and well-to-do American Muslims are.

The cavalry always rides the instant in when male privilege gets challenged in any way, so an exchange ensued.

Not that this is a terribly significant one, but it does highlight certain lamentable social realities that persist in the American Muslim community despite all its economic and educational advantages compared to other parts of the Muslim diaspora, I think.

[deleted]:
Where's the paradox? :-)

Svend White:
Hmm, to make this point without being obnoxious... A lot of us come from more privileged, [better educated] education backgrounds than Muslims immigrants to other places, but I'm not sure you see that translate into a more mature, open-minded attitude towards marriage. On the things that count, a lot of us are almost as "paindoo" as the folks showing up straight from the villages. Demographically, this should be the Promised Land for Muslim women professionals, but the opposite often seems to be the case.

[deleted]:
In some ways, the villagers are simply more raw in their expressions of human nature, while we "educated" folk are slightly veiled to these realities by heady liberal ideals of egalitarianism. I think part of the reason for the problem you describe is that deep down, both men and women prefer an arrangement when the male takes the lead, and Muslim women professionals (a) aren't willing to settle for someone "lesser" than them and (b) men feels somewhat emasculated by this.

Svend White:
Perhaps such a relationship is "natural", perhaps not. THat's beside the point, I think. As usual, women are expected to carry a double burden--men may adapt to the world around them pragmatically and on their own terms, while women must remain frozen under glass, embodying traditional values that their brothers have long since forgotten in our individualistic culture. Traditional marriage requires traditional values from both parties, but it's often a one-way street today.

[deleted]:
Well, putting career ahead of marriage & family is a pragmatic and non-traditional choice that many professional women make, one that naturally curtails their chances of finding a mate in the long run given what the sexes generally look for in one another. The situation is complex, and the loss of traditional values isn't one-sided. (It's not that I don't sympathize with professional women; I'm just acknowledging the underlying realities that lead to such an unbalanced dynamic.)

Svend White:
What many people fail to notice when they level such charges against all these supposedly self-absorbed women iis that men make equally "pragmatic and non-traditional" choices all the time today, but the Muslim community makes polite excuses and minds its own business when men are involved. Women live in fear of being seen in short sleeves, but men may wear tight jeans, adjust their attire to the heat, etc. etc. Men may remarry easily after a divorce even if they've been cads, but women are stigmatized. And so on. We're so accustomed to these double standards that they're as invisible as the air.

A modern-day Scheherazade in Khartoum

A disturbing case of stupidity and intolerance masquerading as Islamic law in Sudan.

Sudan trouser woman 'ready for 40,000 lashes' - Yahoo! News

KHARTOUM (AFP) – A Sudanese journalist facing 40 lashes for wearing "indecent" trousers vowed on the eve of her judgment that she is ready to be whipped 40,000 times in her bid to change the country's harsh laws.

Lubna Ahmed al-Hussein, who works for the media department of the United Nations Mission in Sudan, is to be judged on Tuesday after waiving the immunity granted to UN workers.

She is to be judged under Article 152 of Sudanese law, which promises 40 lashes for anyone "who commits an indecent act which violates public morality or wears indecent clothing."

According to the article, she's foregoing her legal right to invoke her special status as a UN staffer to escape this punishment. A modern-day Scheherazade, choosing to undergo a punishment she could easily avoid to protect others.

Cases like this illustrate why I'm opposed to the blanket endorsement of shari'a as it stands today. Those calling for its revival in modern life need to explain which Shari'a they want and why the rest of us needn't fear its imposition will lead to more such abuses of people's rights.

The personal is theological

Two years ago, I shared a great cartoon commentary on hijab in  "The infinite varieties of hijab," and wrote:

Doing a web search, I came across an entertaining cartoon drawn by Syrian cartoonist Puppeteer cataloging the many styles of hijab out there. Its focus is on Syria, but aside from the Kubeisya it seems pretty universal to me. And every community has its well-meaning but unnerving glarers who more or less share the aesthetic (if not the trademark coat...or the cartoon's unibrow). [HT:  My Adventures in Syria]

Brilliant and wonderfully playful.  I especially like the "ninja", who's ready to pounce.  And that Indonesian maid bit is biting but painfully familiar social commentary.

Responding to a new comment the other day, I realized that an eloquent previous contribution from a reader in either Denmark or Norway* deserved to be considered in its own right, so here it is without any further ado along with the still-entertaining cartoon.

...some Muslims do carry themselves in public with a stern, intimidating demeanor that can make the community a cold place (and which I do not think is anyway encouraged, much less required by, the Sunnah). I think that's a legitimate concern to raise in a constructive manner.
[From my original post. --SW]

In the cyber world I can pick and choose which sisters to befriend...and I would only be able to befriend the friendly ones. In RL (real life) I have been scared out of my boots by the stern, intimidating demeanors of some sisters I see on the street...I also get it from the scandinavians for being in hijab at all (and probably because I am an 'obvious' convert) and from the ummah for probably tying my hijab scarf 'all wrong' and looking like a 'wannabe'. Talk about between the devil and the deep blue sea.

Many's the time I've espied a muslim sister in the street and thrown a big smile getting ready to utter my practised 'assalamu alaikum søster!' only to be looked at like I have done something really really wrong and am about to snatch someones handbag. Just where do I fit in? Oh. With Allah. That's right. So long as I don't lie to myself. Am I any less a muslim if my hijab is not acceptable to all? I have given up now and am tired of looking like a wannabe Arab...(we have that here)...I am in hijab of my own style..and which muslim sister is not? I have yet to see two muslim sisters interpreting hijab in exactly the same way...there is always individuality even if is subtle.

I was curious about this 'cartoon' because for a long time now I have wanted to see something that presents all the different styles of hijab (and being a muslim woman in public) on one page. I am very curious since the argument rages on in all muslim circles about the 'right' way to hijab (and hijab is more than clothes right??). Isn't mastering the other (non cloth related) aspects of hijab (demeanor and vibes put out) the greater jihad?

I resent the fact that I am judged for the fact that sometimes a square centimetre of my neck is sometimes showing...when in fact I am swathed in so many layers of voluminous fabric, including a head scarf, that I cannot be in anything other than hijab, appearance wise. But technically..am not..due to the square inch of neck? I need to breathe for personal reasons. (LOL). Not a laughing matter though (can feel stern intimidating glares). It is worth exploring ad infinitum our attitudes to how we carry ourselves...even if this does destroy the humor.

As I noted when I  replied, I find the woman's testimony very powerful, and I see it as worth a heap of footnoted scholarly articles.

Feminists have long argued that "the personal is political", which I think means different things to different people. The reading of the phrase I find most stimulating is that it privileges the reliance on the proof of individual experience over the dictates of abstract, totalizing ("male"?) systems that are unlikely to address all people's needs.

In that sense, the personal is eminently theological, as well. In fact, I have profound concerns about theologians no matter how erudite who don't feel it necessary to test their theories and rulings against the personal experiences and struggles of real people today, especially those whose backgrounds, challenges and dilemmas are unfamiliar to a still overwhelmingly male-dominated scholarly class.

And, no, this isn't a complaint against a straw man. In a world where one-size-fits-all approaches are rightly out of favor, a lot of people pay lip service to the ongoing evolution and adaptation of Islamic law based on circumstance while ironically fighting tooth and nail at every turn to deny the possibility of rulings crafted centuries ago in far-off lands being in need of reevaluation. Especially in the area of gender.

But this is an old hobby horse of mine.

* The giveaway is the choice of the word søster [sister]. Were she Swedish or Finnish, it would be syster or sisar, respectively.

Not that I could even order a cup of coffee in Finnish. It is not an Indo-European language with more in common grammatically with Turkish than its the neighboring tongues. And they don't have Thor, which I find very disorienting. But I digress.

Yoginder Sikand on "unveiling the hidden history of women ulema"

Yoginder Sikand has an informative book review of a pioneering book written in Urdu (yes, Urdu; for a change, something enlightening on gender relations will be translated in the other direction) on women scholars.

Sikand is a treasure, btw. He's being churning out illuminating studies of Sufism and Islam in India based on hard to find primary sources for many years.

Book review: unveiling the hidden history of women ulema | TwoCircles.net

Books in English and Urdu on Muslim history rarely, if ever, mention the role and contribution of numerous remarkable Muslim women scholars. Yet, as the author of this fascinating monograph, the late Qazi Athar Mubarakpuri (1916-1996), points out, early Muslim history records many such women, several of whose names are mentioned in contemporary Arab chronicles. Indeed, he asserts, many of these texts had separate chapters devoted to such women. Some early Arab Muslim writers even penned separate books dealing with women scholars.

There's a lot more. Read it if you want to live.

Oil, the bane of Muslim women

Check out this fascinating examination of the role of oil in retarding the advancement of women in developing countries like Nigeria and Saudi Arabia.

Yet another example of how the contemporary Muslim problems often facilely ascribed to "Islam" or "Muslim culture" can be sociologically explained. That is, if you're willing to roll up your sleeves and consider them scientifically rather gleefully file them away as ammunition for culture wars.

The sooner they run out of this foul "resource" the better.

The natural resource curse is such a bitch | Gristmill: The environmental news blog | Grist

The quick version is that Ross makes a strong case that women are hurt by a previously unappreciated effect of the infamous "resource curse" that imperils democracy in countries with abundant fossil fuels.

Saudi Arabia and Nigeria are textbook examples of the "curse": when ruling elites and governments can get rich quick by exporting oil (or natural gas, or even tropical timber), they don't so much have a reason to care about the well-being of their citizens, or anything else for that matter. Many. Bad. Things. Ensue.

Speaking today at Brown University's Watson Institute, Ross emphasized that when developing economies are dominated by oil and don't diversify into things like textiles and manufacturing, women don't go into the labor force, their social status remains low, and -- because women are stuck at home or in informal employment -- their political movements remain nascent. The preponderence of oil in the Middle East and parts of North Africa would explain why traditional gender roles remain enforced even as oil wealth brings the accoutrements of liberal modernity.

The infinite varieties of hijab

Doing a web search, I came across an entertaining cartoon drawn by Syrian cartoonist Puppeteer cataloging the many styles of hijab out there. Its focus is on Syria, but aside from the Kubeisya it seems pretty universal to me. And every community has its well-meaning but unnerving glarers who more or less share the aesthetic (if not the trademark coat...or the cartoon's unibrow). [HT:  My Adventures in Syria]

Brilliant and wonderfully playful.  I especially like the "ninja", who's ready to pounce.  And that Indonesian maid bit is biting but painfully familiar social commentary.

Free yourselves, Muslim women!

I don't have time to comment at length, but check out this gem of neo-colonial paternalism, unvarnished prejudice and ironic sexism from the youth wing of the hardline Danish People's Party. 

They have launched a campaign directed towards Muslim women entitled "Free yourselves" ("Befri jer selv").  They're referring to Islam, of course.

You can order a poster and get postcards for spreading the good news that they are waiting with open arms to receive Muslim women exiting Islam.

Below is a quick translation of a typical passage from the introduction on their hompepage (the paragraph "Hvis du som muslimsk kvinde frigør...)".

If you as a Muslim woman free yourself from old Muslim traditions that require you to submit to male family members, you can become an independent woman and member of modern society.  A woman who is not dependent on a man.  A woman able to create for herself a career on the job market and not just stand over the stove or serve as a baby machine.  You can show your children what a woman's potential is by having a job, home, and family while remaining a good  mother.  Women in the West have done it for decades.  We live well and are thriving.  You can be one of us.

Ah, where to begin?

I particularly like the offensive dismissal of normal, un-"liberated" Muslim women as simply cooks or breeders.  An inspiringly progressive sentiment in people selflessly committed to empowering women, no?

Note also how these Danish hardliners make it clear that the only way to become "one of us"--i.e., be accepted as members of Danish society--is for Muslim women to abandon their traditions.    These crusaders for women's rights exhibit curiously conditional solidarity with the supposed victims of Islamic patriarchy. 

That's no accident, though, as loud, self-interested protestations on behalf of oppressed Muslim women are a centuries-old staple of Western propaganda in conflicts involving Muslims.

I'm reminded of Leilah Ahmed's insightful obsevation in Women and Gender in Islam that at the very same time British colonial authorities were crusading to "free" Muslim women at the turn of the century they were actively opposing women's suffrage tooth and nail back in Europe.   

Katharine Viner explains in "Feminism as Imperialism":

The classic example of such a colonizer was Lord Cromer, British consul general in Egypt from 1883 to 1907, as described in Leila Ahmed's seminal Women and Gender in Islam. Cromer was convinced of the inferiority of Islamic religion and society, and had many critical things to say on the "mind of the Oriental". But his condemnation was most thunderous on the subject of how Islam treated women. It was Islam's degradation of women, its insistence on veiling and seclusion, which was the "fatal obstacle" to the Egyptian's "attainment of that elevation of thought and character which should accompany the introduction of Western civilization," he said. The Egyptians should be "persuaded or forced" to become "civilized" by disposing of the veil.

Do they have similar concerns about other "Western" women who make the same choices around the globe?  Or are "submissive" housewives only oppressed when they are Muslim?   Do women leading old-fashioned lives in rural America or southern Europe also need to be saved?  There's a lot of 'em.

I think it's a fair to assume they only pay any notice to Muslim women's welfare when it serves their machinations to further demonize the immigrants that they evidently despise so passionately. 

Note as well how the poster not only removes the scarf, but puts Muslim women in what appear to be slight tank tops.  There's something Freudian here.  They want Muslim women "freed" so they can undress for their liberators. 

Turkish govt to censor hadiths

I blogged elsewhere about a harebrained and counterproductive Turkish scheme to publish a "politically correct" hadith collection that is free of any traditions that violate modern gender sensibilities.

Promoting reform by hacking up sacred texts - Eteraz.org

In a move reminiscent of Thomas Jefferson's rationalistic rearrangement of the New Testament, the Turkish government is planning to bowlderize hadith collections so as to eliminate traditions deemed misogynistic.

This strikes me as an intellectually indefensible and politically tone-deaf move that is far more likely to undermine the cause of gender reform than inspire much needed debate.

There's more.

The curious history of the codpiece

I generally steer away from racier topics, schizophrenic quasi-prude that I am.   On the one hand, the romantic (Or is it elitist snob?) in me can't get enough "Murder She Wrote", "Rumpole the Bailey", and "Brideshead Revisited", but I'm probably better known among friends for switching on David Chappelle or, history's funniest movie ever, "Booty Call" (to which I'm not going to provide a link, beta).  In fact, "Booty Call" was, to poor Shabana's horror, the first movie I rented after we got married five years ago.  It's a movie I can watch all day and all night.  As I can the "Jamie Foxx Show", as well.  His comedic talents seem to know no bounds.  But I digress.  Sure, it's raunchy and highly un-Islamic fare, but, lord, it's has the touch of genius.   

All this is a roundabout way of saying that I reserve the right to  include the occasional titillating tidbit that I find amusing and/or edifying in these ethereal pages, prudish Muslim sensibilities or no.  (As the hadith says, La haya fi din.  "There is no shame in [discussion of matters of] religion.")   

Anyway, I was reading a quite innocent webpage and came across a word I remembered faintly from English literature class but couldn't quite place: The "codpiece".   So I googled it and discovered a  bounty of interesting and titillating information that I think is worth sharing.

It is an article of clothing worn by men in Europe during the 15th and 16th centuries to ostensibly to cover their genitals (this was a time before underwear and apparently the hemlines of men's tunic kept rising during that era; that's a fad I'm grateful has been left in the past) but which became highly increasingly exaggerated, erotically stylized and sometimes even imbued with political significance. 

You've probably seen this curious item in old paintings depicting scenes from English history or literature and not given it any thought because of how accustomed we are today to the sight of men's legs or the fact you can't tell how revealing these curious items were by looking at the old paintings.

There's a lot of entertaining stuff (e.g., the author speculates that the Spaniards in Columbus' day choose a vertical style to celebrate the dynamism and virility of Spain in the Age of Discovery), but you might be wondering why I'm sharing it.

Here's the fascinating thing. Note this intriguing observation:

Of course, all of this was an affront to the Church that considered that the body was sinful and should be covered. When the Black Death hit Europe in 1347, the Church was quick to declare that this was, in fact, divine punishment for the sinful clothes men were wearing. However, terrible that the Plague was, it did not put a stop to the fashion and afterward coats continued to grow shorter and things became ever more fanciful.

What a refreshing notion.  The Black Death was the result of the male sin and decadence!   It wasn't because of that old standby explanation, women running around out of control, but rather men who weren't covering themselves properly.

That has to be the first time I've ever heard of any religious establishment singling out men for immodest dress and viewing calamities as divine judgment for male vice and immorality.  And not any old calamity, but the Black Death, one of the words natural disasters of history.

It's also quite striking to consider that a style that was basically little different from a penis gourd [Warning for the squeamish: Illustrates the idea with National Geographic-style pics of scantily clad tribesmen.] you'd associate with pagan "natives" could become the rage centuries ago in Christian Europe and across class lines (i.e., this wasn't just something uncouth peasants did). 

I'm no historian of Islamic history and realize that Muslim societies have known their share what a moralist would deem vice and deviance (see for example, "Pederasty in the Islamic World" in Wikipedia), but I doubt you could find comparably libertine social trends in the Muslim world then.   Is this an example of how early the process of secularization began to develop within the bosom of Christendom? 

Speaking of penis gourds, this fascinating report from 2000 in Salon explains how this rude accent piece has become a symbol of political resistance in Irian Jaya, the province of Indonesia annexed by Jakarta in 1969 and which still has a separatist movement.

Let's all get down on our knees right now and pray that this trend doesn't catch on among rebels elsewhere.  The world has enough problems without Basques, Kurds, Baluchis, Palestinians, Irishmen, Kashmiris, West Saharans, Uyghurs, Dinkas and so on running around naked. 

Go Lady Caliphs!

I have a heretical admission to make, given that March Madness is underway.

Now that I no longer live in Boston and now that professional sports teams are gangs of spoiled prima donnas lacking any local roots and/or loyalty to their "hometowns", it's pretty hard for me to identify enough with a team to get terribly worked about about its success or failure (of course, my indifference lifted briefly during the Red Sox' historic triumph over the Curse of the Bambino at the 2004 World Series; to a Bostonian, that's the next best thing to the arrival of the Mahdi).   

But it took all my will power not to cheer in my cubicle when I watched this powerful, 7-minute segment on ESPN on the Lady Caliphs, a girl's basketball team at the WD Muhammad High School in Atlanta.  Watch it before the link gets taken down.

To my great surprise, I actually got choked up watching this.  This, as Shabana can ruefully attest, is an exceedingly rare occurrence, cold, analytical northman that I am.  But it really touched touched me.  I found it inspiring on so many levels (i.e., race, gender, the indigenization of Islam in America).

In keeping with my penchant for being a party-pooper (see my sniping last year at Muslim pride at Iranian women who scaled Mt. Everest), as you watch the wonderful segment and find your bosom swelling with pride at these girls' achievement, stop and ask yourself whether you would've supported them. 

Would you have given these girls the emotional and political support they needed?  Or would you joined the whisperers and critics whose neo-Victorian guilt trips about what is "proper" behavior for Muslimah prevent many Muslim women from participating freely in the world around them?  Would you have made them obsess so much about the "immodesty" of them being physically active in public that they would've quit? (In most cases, only wealthy upper-class women have the luxury of exercising in private or fully segregated facilities; the rest must often choose between their health and their reputation thanks to our skewed priorities.)

This isn't to bash immigrants--my wife is a quasi-FOB (shoot, in some things, she's a straight-up auntie) and of course many of my bestest friends hail from other lands--but it has to be asked:  Can can you even *imagine* a "normal" (read:  immigrant-led) Islamic high school being supportive enough of women's athletics to produce a team like this?  I ask this as

(A case in point:  The story of a friend of ours is is particularly apropos.  A young, 2nd generation Muslim woman, as a girl she excelled at basketball and found it a pleasant means to make social inroads at in the mainstream community, but eventually gave it up because of all the grief she got from her foreign-born parents and the local  Muslim community, even though she played with hijab, sweats, etc. )

Another example of the amazing things that can happen when American Muslims are allowed to shed many of these arbitrary taboos that are foisted upon us from abroad and lead normal, balanced lives that aren't hamstrung by a constant fear of being culturally inauthentic. 

This openness is a trait that I still find most often among African-American Muslims, who never had the luxury of deluding themselves with the pernicious fantasy that American Muslims can rely on  norms developed on the other side of the globe without reference to American life to guide them through their lives here.