November 21, 2007
· Filed under Islam, Rants, gender issues, social issues
I was in a hair salon this afternoon with my husband since he wanted to get his hair cut. While I was waiting on him, a woman sitting next to me asked me if I was Muslim. I assume the hijab gave it a way but I think she was asking to be certain. So she asked me how long I’ve been Muslim and then she asked if I like being Muslim. I told her yes but I found the question rather bizarre. It’s like me asking a Christian “Do you like being a Christian?” I would never ask that question because frankly it’s stupid. I mean it would be obvious that a Christian wants to be a Christian. Yet this woman found nothing wrong with the question she asked.
Her question was full of assumptions that she didn’t state. I’m sure she asked if I liked being Muslim because there is the implicit assumption that a woman couldn’t possibly like such an oppressive religion and would never want to cover her hair. Somehow someone (possibly my husband who was sitting in the barber chair in front of us) was forcing me to be Muslim. The fact that my husband looks like an immigrant probably reinforced that idea. Even though we live in America where freedom of religion is a right taken for granted, I was still asked this question.
The question reeked of Orientalist overtones. Even though I doubt the woman in question ever read or looked at any Orientalist works, her question was inspired by this ideology that has so much influenced the discourse between Muslim societies and the West. Here is a definition of Orientalism:
Orientalism is “a manner of regularized (or Orientalized) writing, vision, and study, dominated by imperatives, perspectives, and ideological biases ostensibly suited to the Orient.” It is the image of the ‘Orient’ expressed as an entire system of thought and scholarship.
The Oriental is the person represented by such thinking. The man is depicted as feminine, weak, yet strangely dangerous because poses a threat to white, Western women. The woman is both eager to be dominated and strikingly exotic. The Oriental is a single image, a sweeping generalization, a stereotype that crosses countless cultural and national boundaries.
http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Orientalism.html
For this woman and for so many others, I represent that woman who is “eager to be dominated” and yet “exotic”. I am inferior and alien despite the fact that I am American. It’s not just the woman in that salon who thinks that way but it also people who are well educated. Often, I encounter professors who are baffled by me and I know they are. They want so hard to put me in a box, that Orientalist box. I wear hijab and sometimes jilbab so I should be oppressed yet I am vocal about women’s rights and human rights and I use Islam to do so. I am a paradox, an uncomfortable paradox for them. The fact that I even roam the campus is baffling. I could blame all of this on the portrayal of Muslim women in the media or lack of understanding about women in Islam but it goes so much deeper than that. Some non-Muslims have this need almost to always think of Muslim women as oppressed and exotic no matter how much education they are given about Muslim women. For people like this, the solution isn’t slogans like “Muslimahs are free” or “Hijab is our choice” but a complete revamping of the way they think about Islam, women and non-Western women.
November 20, 2007
· Filed under Islam, ummah issues
Thanksgiving is two days away. Most Americans are probably frantic about details at this point. “Didn’t get the turkey yet. Greens or green beans? Why are the lines so long?” etc. However, Muslims will not be frantic about these details (ok, maybe some of us will be). What will occupy us is whether or not we should celebrate this holiday at all. You can go to a million Islamic discussion boards and I assure you there will be at least one thread with Muslims arguing over why we should or shouldn’t celebrate turkey day. There are fatwas allowing for its celebration and fatwas against. I figure take your pick of the fatwa that you feel is most sound and call it a day because I’m sure they’ll both quote Qur’an and hadeeth to back up the arguments. It seems so simple. Right? No, it’s not. At least not for Muslims.
This post isn’t actually meant to discuss whether or not we should celebrate Thanksgiving as Muslims. The paragraph is simply another example of Muslims fretting over small fish. Another example of petty debate is the debate over music. Last Friday, I listened to an entire khutbah chock full of completely unscientific claims and sexist insults on why music is “haram”. Why are we listening to khutbahs on why music is haram as if the scholars of past and present haven’t already grappled with this issue!?
The ummah has bigger fish to fry and yet we expend so much energy on these petty issues that will honestly never be resolved. There will always be Muslims who celebrate Mother’s Day, wear trousers and no beards, listen to Beyonce, and do khutbahs in the native tongue of the jamat (yeah, people argue about this too). We should discuss the abuse of Shari’ah in the recent gang rape case in Saudi, we should discuss how Muslims manage to rationalize selling alcohol, pork, and soft porn in low-income black neighborhoods, we should discuss the treatment of women in the masjid and in their homes, we should discuss Darfur (which is problematic but still not right). These things aren’t even ambiguous. They’re all wrong. Yet we act as if these problems don’t exist. We have so many things to discuss that actually affect the dignity and quality of life for Muslims yet we endlessly debate things which ultimately have no real significance beyond the debate itself. Why is that we find it so easy to criticize Muslims for listening to the top-40 radio station yet most of us find it so hard to criticize that brother at the corner store who is selling beer and wine like nobody’s business? The former can be ambiguous and yet the latter is not ambiguous at all.
Has the ummah become so small that we overlook the obvious while debating the insignificant? I don’t know the answer. I would like to think that isn’t the case but my dealing with many Muslims make me think otherwise. What do you all think? Drop
November 12, 2007
· Filed under Islam, Rants, gender issues
I Have Left No Greater Fitnah…
Sorry I haven’t been blogging a lot lately. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) I’m coming down the homestretch for the semester and things are getting rather busy for me. I actually meant to write about this topic for a while but never got the chance.
I went to the first annual MANA conference in Philly earlier this month. There was a bazaar with a ton of vendors getting out their products. There was quite a variety of vendors. I saw one vendor who was a Sufi and associated with Hamza Yusuf and another vendor that was Salafi. I have to say there were separated quite a bit but hey, at least they were in the same space.
At the Salafi table (run by that most “progressive” [note: sarcasm] of masajid, Germantown Masjid), there were quite a number of CDs and a good portion of them were dedicated to that most interesting of topics: women. So my husband did a barter of sorts and traded one of his CDs for one of theirs. The title of this CD is “I Have Left No Greater Fitnah…” Now I had an idea of what this CD was all about but I figure what the heck. Why not give it a listen? I could learn something after all. Well, that is the last time I will do that.
When I got back home, I listened to the lecture (or shall I call it slander?) about women. I couldn’t believe that someone could be so hateful towards women. The lecturer (Dawoud Adib) went on for a good 35 mins about how women are nothing but fitnah (source of temptation, confusion, trial, etc.) for women and how women are just inferior to men. He spitted out some of my favorite ahadeeth about women to support his vile view of women. You know the ones that say women are deficient in their deen and intellect, women are the majority of inhabitants in the hellfire, and women are the greatest fitnah for men (hence the title of that lame lecture). He actually starting screaming about how a woman could never be smarter than a man and how man should never let a woman overpower him. He told the women at this lecture (who I’m sure were in a different room) that they were basically committing a sin if they didn’t go home immediately after the lecture. I wonder how any of those women could have felt good about being women after hearing that misogynist mess! Wallahi, that lecture beat another lecture I heard by him about women over a year ago in the most misogynist department. My heart actually breaks to know that there are men who think so badly of me and my sisters simply because we are women.
What breaks my heart even more are the women who fall for this. You know, there are so many sisters who attend Germantown Masjid. I’ve met some of them and they honestly think that this is what Allah (swt) wants for women. They think Allah (swt) wants us to be second class members of the ummah, that Allah wants us to be subservient to men. Speaking of Allah (swt), the speaker didn’t even mention the Qur’an. He didn’t mention any ahadeeth that speak kindly of women either. If this was the only Islam I knew, I would not be Muslim. I refuse to believe that God hates me and has given me a lower intellect and aptitude simply because I am a woman. If someone believes this then he is not speaking for God or speaking in the name of Islam, he is speaking for his own misogyny and insecurity.
November 12, 2007
· Filed under Islam, Rants, gender issues
Sorry I haven’t been blogging a lot lately. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) I’m coming down the homestretch for the semester and things are getting rather busy for me. I actually meant to write about this topic for a while but never got the chance.
I went to the first annual MANA conference in Philly earlier this month. There was a bazaar with a ton of vendors getting out their products. There was quite a variety of vendors. I saw one vendor who was a Sufi and associated with Hamza Yusuf and another vendor that was Salafi. I have to say there were separated quite a bit but hey, at least they were in the same space.
At the Salafi table (run by that most “progressive” [note: sarcasm] of masajid, Germantown Masjid), there were quite a number of CDs and a good portion of them were dedicated to that most interesting of topics: women. So my husband did a barter of sorts and traded one of his CDs for one of theirs. The title of this CD is “I Have Left No Greater Fitnah…” Now I had an idea of what this CD was all about but I figure what the heck. Why not give it a listen? I could learn something after all. Well, that is the last time I will do that.
When I got back home, I listened to the lecture (or shall I call it slander?) about women. I couldn’t believe that someone could be so hateful towards women. The lecturer (Dawoud Adib) went on for a good 35 mins about how women are nothing but fitnah (source of temptation, confusion, trial, etc.) for women and how women are just inferior to men. He spitted out some of my favorite ahadeeth about women to support his vile view of women. You know the ones that say women are deficient in their deen and intellect, women are the majority of inhabitants in the hellfire, and women are the greatest fitnah for men (hence the title of that lame lecture). He actually starting screaming about how a woman could never be smarter than a man and how man should never let a woman overpower him. He told the women at this lecture (who I’m sure were in a different room) that they were basically committing a sin if they didn’t go home immediately after the lecture. I wonder how any of those women could have felt good about being women after hearing that misogynist mess! Wallahi, that lecture beat another lecture I heard by him about women over a year ago in the most misogynist department. My heart actually breaks to know that there are men who think so badly of me and my sisters simply because we are women.
What breaks my heart even more are the women who fall for this. You know, there are so many sisters who attend Germantown Masjid. I’ve met some of them and they honestly think that this is what Allah (swt) wants for women. They think Allah (swt) wants us to be second class members of the ummah, that Allah wants us to be subservient to men. Speaking of Allah (swt), the speaker didn’t even mention the Qur’an. He didn’t mention any ahadeeth that speak kindly of women either. If this was the only Islam I knew, I would not be Muslim. I refuse to believe that God hates me and has given me a lower intellect and aptitude simply because I am a woman. If someone believes this then he is not speaking for God or speaking in the name of Islam, he is speaking for his own misogyny and insecurity.
