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The next time someone tries to talk to you about the misogyny behind the hijab, comparing it unfavorably to the freedom of Western fashion, please direct them to this link: Nina Ricci Fall 2009 Shoes

I need to go soak my feet in hot water just thinking about it.

photo courtesy of yasmine

[x-posted at HijabMan.com]

When HijabMan posted his entry on the murder of Aasiya Hassan yesterday, "On Giving Men a Free Pass," I was thankful. It was, I thought, another sign that the Muslim community is taking the issue of domestic violence seriously. In some cases the talk is coming from corners where the discussion is long overdue – there's no use pretending otherwise – but if there is any small good that can come out of this woman's brutal murder I hope that it will be in the form of more attention to violence against women, and the need for Muslim leaders, in particular, to address it.

Secular North American feminists have been at the forefront of this issue since the 1970s. In theory, they should be playing a leadership role as well. Instead, though, we get quotes like this from NOW-New York, attacking the use of the term "domestic violence" in Aasiya Hassan's case:

The ridiculous juxtaposition of "domestic" and "beheading" in the same journalistic breath points up the inherent weakness of the whole "domestic violence" lexicon… This was, apparently, a terroristic version of "honor killing," a murder rooted in cultural notions about women's subordination to men. Are we now so respectful of the Muslim's religion that we soft-peddle atrocities committed in it's
name?

I'm not sure what a "terroristic version" of an honor killing is, or how it's worse than the regular kind. But I do know that "cultural notions about women's subordination to men" are not limited to Muslim countries. And the thing is? Marcia Pappas, NOW-New York's president, should know that, too. I expect sensationalistic coverage from FOX News (who tell us divorce "is not permitted in their culture," and that such crimes will increase if left "unchecked by Western law"). But mainstream feminist groups like NOW keep doggedly insisting, year after year, that no, really, we speak for all women, not just white middle-class women. Really! We swear! And yet when something like this happens, they inevitably revert to the same tired script: When white men kill white women, they do it out of misogyny. But when brown men kill brown women, they do it because they're, well, brown.

Last year I attended a conference at UMass-Boston called "Engaging Islam," where Lila Abu-Lughod, a Palestinian-American feminist anthropologist who has done work in Egypt, gave a talk about honor killings. As she was researching this issue, she found that many cases of family-based violence in the Muslim world were labeled "honor crimes" but did not have the characteristics that would merit this label (i.e., a girl killed by male family members over real or imagined sexual indiscretions); for example, one case was that of a Palestinian father who likely killed his daughter because she was about to expose him as an informant. While family-based violence should be a serious issue in any circumstance, there was nothing uniquely Muslim about this case. This lack of distinction between forms of violence, she found, was typical of research on the subject; reported numbers of honor killings varied dramatically, from fourteen a year to four thousand a year, depending on how "honor killing" was defined.

She also asked how descriptions of these situations capture the flow of life-as-lived in areas where these acts are practiced. In her own fieldwork with the Awlad 'Ali Bedouin in Egypt, she said, the emphasis on honor and morality was true, but girls' lives could not be reduced to those factors – as in any community they were valued for their individual personalities, scolded for their mistakes, and so forth. And, as in all societies, there were violent husbands, brothers who committed incest, and other transgressions, but the perpetrators were considered as individuals, not men who were acting out their "culture." Finally, she said there is no evidence of honor crimes being on the increase (because the state of research on the subject is so inconsistent), but if this is true, it's more likely to be found in areas of rapidly changing social circumstances, rather than being an example of societies following an "ancient code of morality."

Was Aasiya Hassan's murder an honor killing? There's no evidence of that. We've only heard that she wanted a divorce. While that clearly infuriated her husband, there's nothing "Muslim" about such fury. It has been well-documented that one of the most dangerous times, for a woman who has been the victim of domestic violence, is when she finally decides to leave. The question, for feminists, is how to condemn honor crimes without playing into a wider discourse that depicts Muslim women as abject and "Other."

This is not the first time that a large, mainstream feminist organization that claims to speak for all women has made it clear that it only speaks for some. We should expect better.

Aliyah’s Choice: The LA Times’ Profile of a Lesbian Muslim:

The problem with articles on gay Muslims is that they often paint a distinct binary of the Muslim identity as constraining, conservative, and judgmental, and the gay identity as free, liberating, and natural. There’s a reality that developed this stereotype, but it’s not quite that simple. When a gay Muslim throws off her Muslim identity because it conflicts with her gayness (as some Muslims do), it’s not as though all the problems of being gay disappear and life is suddenly easy. And it’s certainly not as though families, if only they weren’t Muslim, would accept a gay child. It’s true that many Muslims and many immigrants don’t view homosexuality favorably, but it’s not a position that’s unique to these communities, even when it may be more prevalent in them.

Excellent (and succinct!) analysis of a popular media trope, from Muslimah Media Watch.

This wasn't me. Swear.

The article starts like this:

All happy book publications are alike — the book finally comes out. All unhappy book publications are unhappy in their own ways — except when they involve Islam. Then the story follows a familiar plot.

Yay! I thought. Someone is finally talking about the shoddy research that goes into mass market paperbacks about Islam!

But then I read it, and no, it's chastising territorial academics and those who cower in the face of terrorist threats and Muslims who make such "a fuss" about Muhammad. That familiar plot.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121824366910026293.html

I Didn't Kill 'The Jewel of Medina'
August 9, 2008; Page A10

Asra Q. Nomani's "You Still Can't Write About Muhammad" (op-ed, Aug. 6) falsely asserts that I am the "instigator" of the Random House Press decision not to publish a novel about the Prophet's wife titled, "The Jewel of Medina." I never had this power, nor did I single-handedly stop the book's publication. Random House made its final decision based on the advice of other scholars, conveniently not named in the article, and based ultimately on its determination of corporate interests.

As a historian invited to "comment" on the book by its Random House editor at the author's express request, I objected strenuously to the claim that "The Jewel of Medina" was "extensively researched," as stated on the book jacket. As an expert on Aisha's life, I felt it was my professional responsibility to counter this novel's fallacious representation of a very real woman's life. The author and the press brought me into a process, and I used my scholarly expertise to assess the novel. It was in that same professional capacity that I felt it my duty to warn the press of the novel's potential to provoke anger among some Muslims.

There is a long history of anti-Islamic polemic that uses sex and violence to attack the Prophet and his faith. This novel follows in that oft-trodden path, one first pioneered in medieval Christian writings. The novel provides no new reading of Aisha's life, but actually expands upon provocative themes regarding Muhammad's wives first found in an earlier novel by Salman Rushdie, "The Satanic Verses," which I teach. I do not espouse censorship of any kind, but I do value my right to critique those who abuse the past without regard for its richness or resonance in the present.

The combination of sex and violence sells novels. When combined with falsification of the Islamic past, it exploits Americans who know nothing about Aisha or her seventh-century world and counts on stirring up controversy to increase sales. If Ms. Nomani and readers of the Journal wish to allow literature to "move civilization forward," then they should read a novel that gets history right.

Note: This post got way more involved than I intended, which makes me feel like a dork, but I know I got overly into it because it involves two issues I care deeply about: how Muslim "offense" to something can be twisted into "prelude to terrorism" on extremely flimsy pretense, and how white Western non-Muslim women see themselves as the arbiters of feminism, sexuality, and the freedom of expression against brown/Muslim/Third World women's prudish backwardness.

===

shewhohashope alerted to me to this train wreck of a blog post [ETA: an update to it] about a book called The Jewel of Medina, a work of historical fiction about Muhammad's wife Aisha, written by Sherry Jones and set to be published by Random House. Publication was halted or delayed (reports vary) after Random House sent a review copy to Denise Spellberg, a professor of Islamic history at the University of Texas-Austin and herself the author of (an academic) biography of Aisha. Spellberg warned Random House the book might result in a backlash from Muslims so strong it would lead to riots and violence.

I think I've reported that accurately and fairly — meaning these are the facts that are not in dispute.

Here are some things that ARE in dispute:

1. The nature of the book, and what Muslims are supposed to be protesting in it. It has been described as a romance, a "bodice-ripper," and "soft porn." Asra Nomani, who was also sent a review copy and wrote about it in The Wall Street Journal, calls it "racy." The author, on her blog (which has all of 7 posts on it), takes issue with this characterization: All I did was try to portray A'isha, Muhammad's child bride (believed by most historians to have married Muhammad at age nine and consummated the marriage at age 11) in the context of her times.

Nomani quotes Spellberg as saying the novel describes Aisha's loss of virginity thusly: The pain of consummation soon melted away. Muhammad was so gentle. I hardly felt the scorpion's sting. To be in his arms, skin to skin, was the bliss I had longed for all my life. The author says the book has no sex scenes, but she says this in the context of refuting the book's characterization as "pornographic." It's not clear if the above quote was fabricated by Spellberg, mis-reported by Nomani, has been edited out since Spellberg received her review copy, or if Jones felt that was too tame to be considered a "sex scene."

Jones — in an attempt to counter those who accuse her of writing soft porn — said her book has "a 29-page bibliography," which she said she posted on her blog. I went to her blog. She cites 26 _sources_ (not pages of sources). They include 1,001 Nights, Alev Lytle Croutier's Harem — a book about Ottoman harems that would have little relevance to Aisha's life in the Arabian desert a thousand years earlier — and popular mass market books like Geraldine Brooks' Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women and Karen Armstrong's Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet. Nomani claims Jones learned Arabic in order to write this book, but there are no Arabic sources in her bibliography. (I also question her ability to learn classical Arabic fluently enough to research medieval Islamic history in the five years she said it took her to write this book, and am guessing by "learned Arabic" she is referring to the Saudi encyclopedia of Arabic terms, written in English, that she cites among her 26 sources.)

But none of that matters! Remember: whenever Muslims critique something, they do it because they are personally offended and unable to deal with ambiguity about faith (or depictions of sex), never because pop culture's treatment of Islam is just so … bad. Sloppy, poorly researched, poorly written.

2. Spellberg's agenda. Jones said she read Spellberg's work on Aisha and asked Random House to send her a review copy. Spellberg, obviously, didn't think much of it. But are her concerns literary, political, or territorial? I'm voting #3.

If she simply didn't like the book's literary tone (and if the passage quoted above is accurate, I'm with her), a simple "this is dreck" would have sufficed. But I think characterizing her as a shrill alarmist with fucked-up politics is probably inaccurate, too. It was her editor, not Spellberg herself, who sent an e-mail to Random House saying that Spellberg thought the book was 'a declaration of war . . . explosive stuff . . . a national security issue.' Thinks it will be far more controversial than the satanic verses and the Danish cartoons. Spellberg may have in fact said things of that nature, but to me that sounds more like the language of an editor looking for buzz than that of an academic in Islamic history. UT-Austin has one of the best Middle Eastern Studies programs in the country. If she's on faculty there, she's not going to be someone who confuses "Muslims" with "terrorists," or someone who thinks any minor insult to Islam will lead immediately and inevitably to Defcon 1.

What I can see, however, is that she read the book, predicted — probably accurately — that it would be controversial and unpopular with Muslims, and said so. And dollars to donuts she was more than a little irritated that scholarly work like her own never puts a dent in the political landscape or finds its way into the mainstream media but authors like Jones get a $100,000 advance to write something called The Jewel of Medina, drivel one step above Harlequin's Bedded By The Sheikh series or whatever it's called, and this, THIS, is what becomes part of the popular conversation about Islam in the United States. But can she say that out loud? No, that would be tacky, and smack of self-interest. She has her own book coming out from Knopf, an imprint of Random House, that in the relatively small world of "books about Islam" would compete, however peripherally, with this one. So when Random House freaks the fuck out and decides not to publish The Jewel of Medina for fear of inciting Muslim terrorism, well, she's not exactly throwing herself in front of the train to stop them.

That paragraph is pure conjecture. But it makes more sense than anything else I've read.

3. How and why Actual Muslims got involved in this. Before going to Random House and her editors, Spellberg contacted Shahed Amanullah, the editor of altmuslim.com and a guest speaker at one of her courses. Altmuslim.com is known for being a moderate-to-progressive web site, though I haven't seen that reported anywhere in this mess. In the blogosphere at least, Amanullah's name seems to be shorthand for "real Muslim guy; has Bin Laden on speed dial" and the e-mail he wrote to a mailing list mentioning being contacted about the book = "sending word to Muslims everywhere that they should start preparing the poison gas." Another Muslim guy re-posted that e-mail his blog, calling the book "a new attempt to slander the Prophet of Islam," and a third one "proposed a seven-point strategy to ensure 'the writer withdraws this book from the stores and apologise all the muslims across the world.'" That post now seems to be locked, but it included such violent suggestions as "find a volunteer to read this book and alert others of its content."

Negative reaction from a handful of Muslims: check.
JIHAD IN AMERICA IMMINENT IF THIS BOOK GETS PUBLISHED: I'm not seeing it…?

[ETA: Shahed Amanullah responds.]

4. The difference between words like "review," "critique," "boycott," "censor," "protest," "riot," and "terrorism." And while I'm here, "fatwa." shewhohashope, demonstrating extraordinary patience in the blog post linked above, attempted to explain that it was possible to not like a book without calling for the author's death, and be a Muslim at the same time. Really!

This went nowhere. Or rather, I do think many people started to understand, but she was also repeatedly told that if she didn't like something she didn't have to read it — again, as if her discomfort was the only problem, rather than Muslims' right to review a book and give it a negative critique (or does that not count under "freedom of speech"?). Not that this was even possible with this book, since it hasn't been released. But whose fault is that?

This is such a pet peeve of mine: the belief that "negative review" = "banning." It comes up everywhere but is especially prevalent when people are arguing religious topics. The fact that evangelical Christians HAVE, in fact, wanted to ban certain works of art does not therefore make "critique" synonymous with "censorship." It just doesn't.

p.s. "Fatwa" does not mean death sentence.

5. Why anyone cares. As shewhohashope and a few other Muslim commenters pointed out, a fictional depiction of the Prophet is considered inherently offensive to Muslims, even if the portrayal is positive. Many of the other commenters just didn't get this, and many others did but didn't care. That's fine. I understand that.

But to me there are other issues at stake with this book, which is an account of the famous story of Aisha becoming separated from her caravan after she loses her necklace, and subsequently being accused of adultery when it's discovered that she's missing. Jones's book is told from 14-year-old Aisha's perspective. In it — and I've only read the prologue, but I think I'm being fair to the tone — she is portrayed as a timid teenager, and adultery as something she considered but did not act upon. She turns to Muhammad to defend her, and he does. From there on out it purports to be a love story describing their relationship.

I am guessing that the reason the author keeps insisting that she's being sensitive to Muslims is because she's written a positive, romantic portrayal of a marriage that has often been vilified by those who paint Muhammad as a pedophile. (Aisha's actual ages at her engagement, marriage, and consummation are not known, but she was certainly very young.) I understand that, but it's not enough for me.

This is a portion of the comment I added, which is buried deep enough in the comment thread that I'll re-post here:

In the last twenty years (well, really the last hundred, but I’m talking very modern history) Muslim feminists have made extraordinary strides in part by using the Qur’an and the hadith to answer back to misogynist cultural (i.e. not religious) trends in Muslim countries, particularly the Middle East and Central Asia. When, for example, men argue that women have no right to work or participate in public space, Muslim women have been able to point to the example of Khadija, Muhammad’s first wife, a successful businesswoman who employed him as her assistant. There are many examples of this.

This line of thought, or ‘tactic’ if you will, of using religion to make a *progressive* argument might seem counterintuitive to those raised in countries where religion (Christianity) is generally regarded as more conservative than (secular) culture, but in Middle Eastern countries it is culture, not Islam, that is more conservative and misogynist. Not all feminists who are Muslim would consider themselves “Muslim feminists” and there are certainly secular activists here, too, but really, the women who have been able to convince the clerics to re-read their own holy books have been the ones to make the most strides in fighting FGM and other institutional abuses of women that have no basis in Islam.

With that in mind…

The central point to the story of Aisha’s necklace is the ban on slander, and it’s often raised in context of the discussion around honor killings. No, Mr. Suspicious Husband/Father/Brother, you may not lash out at women based on gossip and hearsay. The Prophet himself, the best of men, was tested in this same manner, and look what choice he made: he defended Aisha against those who gossiped about her, even if it meant the risk of losing face among the powerful members of the community. This is a very important story to those of us committed to fighting abuses of women emanating from suspicion and slander and then ignorantly and retroactively justified as “Islamic.” All you have to do is say “Aisha’s necklace…” and people will know right where you’re going with this.

Yes, Ms. Jones portrays Muhammad as defending his wife (at least from what I’ve read in the prologue), but to cast doubt on Aisha’s actions and/or intentions—and this seems to be central to the plot of her entire book—essentially ruins the story. The point here is that it was Aisha’s (truthful) story against those of men who weren’t there. Not knowing who to believe, Muhammad went to God, and God told him to believe Aisha. The deciding factor was not, as Ms. Jones seems to be saying, his romantic love for Aisha, but rather her right, even as a young girl, to be believed. This wasn’t something she had to earn; it was inherent, literally God-given. Her word trumped their suspicions, even though she had less power than they did. From my own feminist perspective, this is an important distinction.

Do I think Muslim clerics are going to pick up this English romance novel and completely change their minds about Aisha? Obviously, no.

Do I think the book should be banned? No, of course not, and I have a whole separate rant about how Muslims, who were barely even aware of this book’s existence, are being blamed for that.

But I bring this up because I keep reading versions of “don’t like it? don’t read it!” and I want to say that this isn’t just a matter of being _personally_ offended, a la The DaVinci Code or Temptation. This story isn’t just some random tale out of the Qur’an, on par with something out of 1,001 Nights. Its interpretation has had real world consequences for women.

I would also, for reasons I hope should be obvious if you’ve read this far, take issue with the idea that this author’s interpretation is more feminist than the original. And that’s fine, I defend people’s right to write whatever regardless of where it lands on my feminist meter. But I also feel like there’s a lot of you-go-grrrl, publish away, screw the fundies! in this discussion, positing sex against religion as if that’s the issue, that’s based on an inaccurate understanding of the original story and its place in Islamic tradition. Aisha is not a “forgotten” woman of Islam; she is tremendously important. Every Muslim knows who she is, and knows that she was a strong female. Muhammad joked with his followers that they “should get half of their religion” from her. Jones' book doesn’t increase Aisha’s feminist appeal—that needs no assistance—and she most certainly didn’t _discover_ it. If anything, she undermines it.

Again, not a reason for censoring the book. But not really a reason for celebrating it, either.

I've never been much of a comics fan, but I was much impressed with Broken Mystic's two-part blog series, "Female, Muslim, and Mutant: A Critique of Muslim Women in Comic Books."

The first entry talks about the portrayal of the X-Men's "Dust" character, an Afghan heroine introduced to the series in 2002. The second contrasts this with the portrayal of Muslim women in two comics by Muslim writers, especially "The 99," a series based on a fascinating time period in Islamic history, the attack on Baghdad's Bait al-Hikma (House of Wisdom) in the mid-13th century. I haven't read either series, but it looks like "The 99″ has a compelling plot with a much more diverse cast of female characters.

(Incidentally, there is a wonderful children's book called House of Wisdom, by Florence Parry Heide and Judith Heide Gilliland and illustrated by Mary GrandPre, that also deals with this time period. It appears to be out of print, but it's worth hunting down if you are interested in the role Baghdad played in dragging Europe out of the Dark Ages and kick-starting the Renaissance.)

I will not spend Ramadan arguing on the internet about honor killings.
I will not spend Ramadan arguing on the internet about honor killings.
I will not spend Ramadan arguing on the internet about honor killings.

- deep breath –

Just once, though, I would like to see a debate that goes something like this:

Person 1:
“The only country to use nuclear weapons is the United States.
Most Americans are Christian.
Therefore, using nuclear weapons is a Christian practice.
Therefore, if we want to calm the nuclear arms race, we must engage with these Christians by asking them to re-interpret the parts of the Bible that say ‘thou shalt bomb Japan.’ What is that, Leviticus? Whatever. Look it up. Anyway, I’m sure there are ways to do this that are sensitive to the other, less crazy parts of their religion.”

Person 2:
“But the fact that most Americans are Christians has nothing to do with Hiroshima and Nagasaki! There were political factors at play! Besides, Israel and Pakistan both have nukes, and they’re not Christian countries. And there are many Christian countries that don’t have them. It’s much more complex than that.”

Person 3:

“Are you saying the killing of thousands of people is ‘complex’? What’s complex about it? It’s mass murder! Wow, you’ve really gone off the deep end of moral relativism! Why are you always apologizing for these people?”

Person 2:

“No, I didn’t mean murder is complex, I meant the reasons for… ugh, never mind.”

- headdesk –

AS WE ALL KNOW, veiled women are a dowdy, dumpy bunch. They are women with no thoughts or opinions of their own, women who can't so much as shut the bedroom window if they're getting a draft without first consulting a man and asking his permission. Maybe, back when they were three or four years old, they dreamed of grander things from life, but now that they are adults they’ve been forced to wear the shroud, walk three feet behind their husbands, and stifle whatever hopes and feelings they used to call their own under the guise of being hapless helpmates to domineering men.

Right?

Then again, we ALSO know that unveiled women are wanton sluts, women who require nothing more than hearing a man call “hey, baby” on a street corner and suddenly they’re in the backseat of his car, throwing their legs in the air while shrieking whee, I love Satan!

At least that’s what we’ve been told. I heard it on television and read it on the internet, so it must be true.

Or wait, did I get it wrong? Perhaps it goes like this:

Bare-headed women are liberated and free, sure of themselves, comfortable with their sexuality, a page straight out of Cosmo. They are women whose lives are filled with meaning and purpose; above all, they are modern — unlike backwards veiled women, who wouldn’t recognize their own oppression if it hit them on the head with a slipper.

Or no, wait, what I meant to say was that veiled women are the true feminists, women who are secure enough in their sexuality that they don’t need to engage in some base attempt to advertise it — unlike their sell-out sisters, who are so desperate for attention that they will abandon every iota of self-respect in a sad attempt to grovel for male approval. (“Tee-hee-hee, have you seen my belly ring?”)

Right?

Well. Maybe not. To all of the above.

+ + +

A Saudi friend of mine once said that "the only thing more cliché than talking about the veil is apologizing for talking about the veil." She’s right; the subject’s boring, long-exhausted. Yet, for Muslim women, it’s one subject that won’t go away. Here’s an insider tip for my male Muslim friends, even the so-called progressive ones who say they don’t care whether women veil or not: the difference between you and me is that you’ve never had to make this decision. And as much as we love you — plural — for claiming that you don’t care what conclusion we come to, the fact is you will never have to be in this position. And that, right there, makes your experience of Islam different from ours.

This is especially true in the United States. Which might seem odd, because we have no laws about veiling here, but that’s part of the reason the issue is so contentious.

In Iran, because veiling is mandated by law, a woman must be especially progressive to wear it in a lax and casual manner (in public) or forgo it altogether (in private). Veiling is the norm, so she’s well aware of the statement she’s making when she rejects it.

On the flip side, in France or Turkey — where there are laws against veiling inside various public institutions – a woman is, presumably, especially religious if she decides to take it up. Since not-veiling is the default, for Muslim and non-Muslim women alike, going against the grain of public opinion requires a commitment to Islam that most observers would understand to be something over and above the mere coincidence of being born into a Muslim family.

In the United States, however, it is precisely the freedom of choice I so cherish that makes this such a complicated decision for the Muslim women who live here. The cultural norm – the “average American” woman – is unveiled, but the predominant image of a Muslim woman, even among non-Muslims, is that of a muhajabah. Therefore a muslimah who decides not to veil is seen as transgressing against her community and will have her commitment to Islam doubted, while the woman who does decide to veil is seen as rejecting everything about American life save for her religious practice. We can’t win; there is no middle ground. Being 51% one way or the other is seen as a complete rejection of the other side.

In case you weren’t listening the first time around, let me be clear: I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’m opposed to both the French ban on veiling and the Saudi mandate for it, and listening to the Dutch whine about the loss of their Pure Dutch Culture [sic] in the face of all these – gasp – immigrants is one of the few times I’m proud to be American, where multiculturalism is an established fact, however imperfectly it’s practiced.

But I also remember living in a country where the signifiers weren’t so strong. I’m told it’s different in Egypt now — that somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of Cairene women now veil — but when I was living there, in the early 1990s, it was closer to 50/50. I loved that. I loved, especially, that there was no great social divide between veiled and unveiled women; you’d see differences of opinion even within a single family. One of my sisters-in-law veiled, one did not, the third took it up for a few years and then changed her mind and took it off. None of this was a matter of any great controversy. It didn’t even merit much discussion.

This is not to downplay the choices Egyptian women had to make. One friend of mine at the university said her father never forced her to veil, but it was only after she decided to take it up that he allowed her study late at the library, walk home unattended, and otherwise participate in public space in ways he wouldn’t have permitted without her willingness to adopt the hijab and, accordingly, serve as walking symbolism for everything the hijab represented in the popular imagination. On the other side of that spectrum, there was another girl I knew, also Egyptian, who said she wanted to veil but worried it would interfere with her career as a journalist. She wanted to be a foreign correspondent, and she was afraid people would read so much into her scarf that they wouldn’t get around to reading her words.

Can the choice to veil or not veil in such a context truly be considered “free”? I don’t know. Then again, I know plenty of American women who will tell you no one forced them to diet, but they believed that being thin facilitated their right to speak with authority in a manner they’d have lost if they had to confront the bias against fat women in a country where being heavy is equated with a loss of self-control and a where a loss of self-control is considered shameful, if not downright sinful. My point here is not to excuse the former because of the existence of the latter: only to argue that there is nothing uniquely “Islamic” about a woman negotiating with the patriarchy, nothing specifically “Muslim” about a woman who trades in Her Personal Ideal in favor of getting what privileges she can with a minimal amount of compromise. We ladies, the world over and religion notwithstanding, have been doing that for thousands of years.

I wonder, though, if our notions of “Islamic dress” had evolved in such a way that the turban (for example) was considered as mandatory for men as the hijab is for women in some circles, would Muslim men in the West expound on the subject with the same confident manner they do now, one that is as flippant as it is self-assured? I’m sure 10% of men would wear it everywhere without a second thought, and another 10% would scoff at the mere idea of it. But for the majority, those in the middle, it would (I would hope) elicit a little more reflection. Do you risk community censure for being one of those “non-turban guys,” knowing that – before you even open your mouth – your bare head will be considered, by some, proof that you eat pork, drink alcohol, never pray, love capitalism, support colonialism and the war in Iraq, neglect your children, and cheat on your wife? Or do you take it up, knowing that, in different spheres, it will brand you as ignorant, ascetic, oppressed, and/or radical? Be careful! Remember, you don’t get to choose how you want to be seen at this event, or with that crowd of people: the choice you make has to be applicable for all times and circumstances. No fair picking one option for a family reunion or protest march, and another for your first nervous job interview at Chase Manhattan.

For a while, in Cairo, I lived across the street from a girls’ high school and would watch these young scholars stream out of class after the final bell. There would be the same roar of high-pitched laughter I recognize in teenage girls anywhere, in any country, as they coagulated in groups in the garden, or at the front gate: veiled girls interlinking their arms with girls who wore their hair uncovered, occasionally leaning over to whisper some secret that necessitated pushing back a girlfriend’s headscarf or ponytail, depending, in order to have access to her ear. The intimacy of girls that age is always charming to me, but it seems even more endearing in retrospect, knowing that they were doing something that, in so many parts of the world, would be considered a radical act: ignoring the politics of the veiled/unveiled split in favor of interacting with the human being inside.

The first time I saw the cover of Asra Nomani's book I was in the Harvard bookstore with Hijabman. "Why is she veiled?" I asked him.

He knows Asra; I'd met her at least once. We both knew she didn't wear hijab. In fact she's one of the few women who sometimes goes unveiled even in the mosque, which is almost unheard of, even among women who don't otherwise veil, even among non-Muslim tourists. In the fury over the woman-led prayer in New York City last year, much of the controversy centered around the fact that Asra Nomani was in attendance and she didn't veil. Gasp.

This isn't something you just forget to do. It's something you do to make a point. So why was she veiled on the cover of her own book, a book that deals with this very subject?

"I don't think she had much control over cover art," he said.

A lot of writers make that complaint. It still bugged me, though. This wasn't a matter of different aesthetics. Using the veil in this way is not only cliched as all hell, it's actively playing into the stereotypes the book itself is trying to undermine. Plus, she appears unveiled on the back cover, which made the whole thing seem silly and costume-y on top of everything else.

Last month she wrote about her war over cover art: Why do Western publishers have a veil fetish? ("this is my mea culpa"). Her publishers eventually relented, and she appears unveiled on the paperback edition.

Good, I guess. But why was there a need to put her picture, or that of any woman, on either of the covers in the first place? Is it really so hard to sell this kind of book unless a) it's got a pretty girl on the front, or b) it's promising a trip inside the harem? That's it, them's the choices?

I'm not opposed to veiling. I'm not opposed to not veiling. I am opposed to reducing everything a Muslim woman says or does or writes or thinks to what she does or doesn't wear on her head. Look at those two covers side-by-side, and it's hard to believe the same book is contained between them. Notably, when they let her take off her veil they also stripped off the word "Mecca," presumably because that word's connotations don't sit right next to a picture of a woman, sans hijab, looking confident, happy, and self-assured (even though neither of the photos were taken IN Mecca — one was a photo shoot; the second was on the street). She's right when she quotes Mohja Kahf, in the piece linked above, who says the image forces Muslim women into "a Victim or Escapee package." In the first picture she looks trapped — not only because of the scarf, but because of the lighting, her head tilted down, the word MECCA as large as her face beneath her. In the second picture her scarf's around her neck instead of her head (just like those French libertines!), the light's on her face (did someone allow her to go outside without a male chaperone?), her smile is broader, and she's no longer Standing Alone in Mecca (how lonely), she's simply Standing Alone (what independence, what strength!). It's like she earned political asylum in the time it took the paperback to come out.

But her book isn't about suffering within Islam, nor about joyfully leaving it behind. It's about embracing it and reclaiming it. Neither of those images convey that.

I read Ayaan Hirsi Ali's book yesterday. I bought it prepared to hate it. After seeing her film and then all the publicity around the Theo Van Gogh stabbing, my first impression was that she was an attention-seeker lapping up the post-9/11 obsession with women's rights in Muslim countries. But I decided to give her a chance.

I didn't hate it. I didn't love it, either. I thought the sections detailing the abuse of women in immigrant communities were good. I thought her open letter to a Muslim woman wanting to leave her marriage was good, perhaps more as an eye-opener to non-Muslims who, as Ali repeatedly says, often mistake an immigrant woman's lack of options with "happiness with her place." I thought she had a valid point when she said the multiculturalism of the left can be condescending (i.e. it's okay to criticize Israel because they're "white like us," they're Western, they're a real state, but criticizing the Palestinians isn't fair because that's like making fun of the retarded) (I'm paraphrasing). Absent ANY discussion of economics, however, that view seems a little too easy. There is a real, concrete power difference between Israel and Palestine, in the form of money and tanks; the imbalance isn't all in our [racist] heads. (Someone needs to memo Tom Friedman about that, too, btw.)

Where I had trouble, though, was with her description of her own upbringing. I am all about drawing the political out of the personal, and I have no problem with her writing about her childhood as an entry point into the rest of the book. I like that stuff; it's like reality TV for anthropology students. The problem is that 1) she's very deliberately writing for a layman's audience of non-Muslim Westerners, 2) her experience was quite frightful, and 3) she paints it as The Universal Muslim Experience.

#1, alone, is great. I think there should be more of that kind of writing, by Muslim writers, especially women. Most of the popular political stuff is written by white dudes.

#2 is also valid. See Running With Scissors, Dry, Smashed, Wife Swap, whatever. I'm being glib here but I don't mean to trivialize her background: my point is that I don't have an aversion to memoir or personal narratives in general, even if those narratives don't necessarily reveal some Universal Truth. For one thing, I enjoy the reading. For another, I think there's something useful about throwing another story onto the pile of human experience, and as depressing as her story is it's refreshing, if I can use that word in this context, to read about a woman my age who spent the '70s and '80s dealing with real shit, where "coming to terms with my sexuality" didn't mean struggling with the spit-vs.-swallow dilemma at age 15 while Bon Jovi blared in the background — it meant evading an honor killing, or having your clit sliced off with a piece of broken glass. I'm not against sex-positive discussions in an American context, but I get pissy when that American context isn't acknowledged — when American writers place themselves on some kind of repression-to-freedom timeline with no recognition of America's image as backwards and puritan among many Europeans, or the fact that women in many parts of the world have problems bigger than "guilt" when it comes to being open about their sex lives. To that end I think writers like Ali, who write about sex without a shred of whimsy, are useful.

But #3 is where things get tricky. Speaking as someone who has been both thanked and derided for pulling too much general out of the specific, especially when it comes to "culture" (whatever that is), I recognize what she's doing and I don't fault her the attempt. I also think she's right to place her struggles on Islam, as she experienced it — in other words I don't think her father was insane or uniquely dictatorial; his actions were influenced by his culture's interpretation of his religion as he understood it. If she's going to write a book that is even partially a memoir, Islam needs to take center stage.

But add 1, 2, and 3 together and you've got a Not Without My Daughter sort of problem. It's not that Betty Mahmoody wasn't really abused by her Iranian husband, nor is it her fault that her story appeals to a Western audience more than would a broader, academic treatment of the same subject. But does the writer bear NO responsibility when it just so happens that her unique personal story plays right into the racist misconceptions of the very audience she seeks to educate?

Ali addresses this directly (and I give her credit for that, too) — she says no. The audience's racism is their problem; she's not going to alter her story or bend over backwards saying not all Muslims are like this in order to placate the assholes. In at least two places she does, in fact, talk about progressive vs. mainstream vs. fundamentalist (her term, not mine) Muslims, but those sections have a footnote feel about them when the majority of her book indicts the whole of Islam (the Qur'an, Sunna, Mohammed, and one billion believers — I'm not exaggerating here) for the form of sexism she, specifically, endured as a child and as a young woman.

So which version of Islamic family life is the "right" one? How is her life not-the-norm, where did she get it wrong? I know the easy answer here is to say there is no norm. At least that's what I fell back on whenever I was writing papers in college, and I always got good marks for saying that. *pats self on back, preens for professors* But I also think it's a cop-out. She's not wrong to say Muslims, as a group, have a history of over-policing female sexuality (especially pre-marital sexuality), that this has ruined the lives of countless girls, and noting that The Worst Case Scenarios commonly associated with Islam (honor killings, FGM, the stoning of rape victims) are not and have never been Islamic practices doesn't magically make it unacceptable to talk about the damage done when a family places the whole of its energy on preserving the honor of its daughters. The world needs more people who will advocate on those girls' behalf, even if it means enduring death threats, and for that she wins all kinds of awards with me.

What she doesn't talk about, however, is the way this plays out in Muslim families less draconian than her own. And I think that's the single, serious failing of her book. I don't know enough about Somalia to know if her experience was an aberration, but I do know it's not representative of the Muslim families I have known. She doesn't address the way class and culture have influenced Islamic practice over the last 1,400 years: she pins all problems on Mohammed, that sexist dick, and in so doing plays right into the clash-of-civilizations trope popularized by Western male writers with motives far less noble than hers. Nor does she address the military and economic imbalance between the West and Islamic countries, and/or/therefore why disempowered people might turn to Islam as an overarching signature of shared cultural identity in order to unite otherwise disparate groups and interests. To withhold that information is to leave the reader (and remember, "the reader" here refers to Average Joe, or in this case maybe Average Hans, the one who came to this book because OMG someone stabbed Van Gogh's nephew, whoa holy shit: this being her target audience) with the impression that Islam, the religion, and Muslims, the people, are, almost by definition, invested in the sexist control of their daughters just for the fucking hell of it, "because God told me to." What assholes. Let's bomb them.

In short, I guess, I admire her dedication to saving girls from abusive families, and for taking on Western discourses and institutions that seek to call that sort of rescue unnecessary, if not racist, or at least "culturally insensitive." But isn't the point to work to eliminate such abuse in the first place? I'm impressed with her commitment to human rights, but how do play savior with your left hand when your right hand is inflaming the problem?

The Missionary Position

A long, critical review of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Irshad Manji.

These days, being a Muslim woman means being saddled with what can only be referred to as the "burden of pity." The feelings of compassion that we Muslim women seem to inspire emanate from very distinct and radically opposed currents: religious extremists of our own faith, and evangelical and secular supporters of empire in the West…

I'm trying to sort out how I would have felt about the prayer on Friday if I'd come to it cold: if I'd not met Amina Wadud in another context before the event, if I'd not read her book, if I hadn't followed MuslimWakeUp! for the past couple years, if I'd grown up without the everyday example of female pastors and ministers (i.e. if men leading prayer was "just the way it is" and "just the way it always has been" for me personally), if the press had covered the event differently or not at all, and if world events had transpired differently over the past few years. But context is everything and as it is there are several issues I need to unpack before I can think about this.

The fatwa-fest

Last week Nevin Reda made the Islamic case for women leading mixed-gender prayer, and Hina Azam wrote a critique of the piece on AltMuslim. A number of Islamic scholars came out against the practice, including Tantawi of Al-Azhar, though Egypt's Grand Mufti issued a fatwa saying it's permissible as long as the congregation agrees to it. There's general agreement that the Qur'an (the highest source of Islamic jurisprudence) says nothing about the matter. The relevant hadith (part of the tradition of the Prophet, the second highest source of jurisprudence) are contradictory and subject to debate. A quick google search will tell you there is no clear consensus (ijma – third source), and reasoning by analogy (fourth source) is, predictably, producing different results depending who you talk to. The whole conversation reminds me of an old line from LA Law: "There's reasonable doubt all over the place."

I don't have the Islamic background to evaluate one hadith from another, so I won't try to. But all my feminism aside, the fact that this debate is playing out the way it is is actually one thing that I like about Islam. Recently a friend of mine said that he couldn't deal with the homophobia in Catholicism, but he was still attracted to it because "that's real religion." I laughed when I read it, but I know what he means. It's part of my attraction to Islam, over and above some general sense of "spirituality," communion with nature, respect for the divine, whatever. There's something inside me that longs for real religion.

When fully one-fifth of the planet is Muslim, there will of course be diversity and variation of practice. But the core of Islam transcends culture and history and I don't blame modern Muslims for displaying a certain conservatism toward innovation in something as fundamental as salat; I think the fact that this one small prayer in New York City is being taken so seriously all over the world speaks well of everyone considering it, even those with whom I disagree most strongly. I grew up in a Midwestern Protestant environment where, if you disagree with your minister or other members of your church, all you have to do is split off, write 'cherself some by-laws, and boom, you're legitimate among your handful of followers and illegitimate among those who disagree. There were no established parameters to theological debates and thus little need to engage with historical practice or foundational texts, much less go to the trouble of compromising with your neighbor.

I've seen Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) criticized as oppressive, hostile to emotion and human dignity, and ultimately divisive (since its application varies depending on one's madhab). I understand that, too. I'll read a piece like this one, which goes to the core of a woman's relationship with God, knits prayer so tightly to her understanding of herself as a woman and as a human being, and suddenly all the hadith-wrangling scholars seem small and petty. And yet she's not rejecting fiqh, either. She's arguing with Islamic tradition, not Islam itself, which is a point much of the non-Muslim press has missed. This action is seen by the outside world as going against the Qur'an, out of necessity and personal whim (because "times are changing"), rather than a return to the Qur'an's egalitarian roots and an embodiment of the ideals espoused by a small group of people in the Arabian desert a thousand years before the Enlightenment.

The fact that Islam supports independence from any central body (i.e. the absence of an "Islamic pope") but Muslims everywhere generally respect and abide by the same rules of engagement, so to speak, returning to the same sources and prioritizing them in a similar fashion regardless of time or place, theoretically helps unify the ummah without creating undue hardship on any one community. (I say "theoretically" because civil laws in various nations restrict individuals' access to such debate.)

That last parenthetical statement is significant, of course, and I understand why this event had to take place in New York City. (Bear with me.) K and I arrived right at 1:00, just as a man — a white convert, I assume — was being dragged out of the church by two security guards. He had a pretty good beard going on and was damning us all to hell ("liquid hellfire" specifically, Hijabman pointed out). My daughter, who's 11, was immediately impressed with this. She's been to demonstrations before and has no knee-jerk opposition to the act of protest for its own sake, but was aghast that someone would take it upon himself to "play the part of Allah" by deciding who is and isn't going to hell. For the past few days she'd been ambivalent about where this event sat on the halal/haram continuum, but seeing this man damning her to hell ("liquid hellfire") cemented the permissibility of it in her mind. I'd told her she could go, not go, and if she wanted to go, she could either pray or just watch, it was up to her. After she saw this spectacle, she said right away that she wanted to pray with everyone else.

But first we had to make it through the armed security guards outside the fence, then have our bags searched, then have someone go over us with a wand, then give our names, addresses, phone numbers, and passport numbers to those inside. I would ordinarily raise a fuss about this, but the venue had already been moved because of a bomb threat and it was my choice if I wanted to subject myself to any of the security measures — nothing was being collected clandestinely — so with that we moved into the main room.

Where the press-to-Muslim ratio was approximately 1:1.

I'd really never seen anything like it, and this is after years of organizing and attending events, marches, protests, and rallies, some designed with the sole intent of attracting media attention. I know what it is to send out 20 or 30 press releases and hope 4 or 5 show up. This was unreal. PBS was there. BBC was there. The New York Times, Associated Press, Christian Science Monitor, VOA, some Catholic paper in France (reporter: "the Paris office sent me"), Women's E-News, The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer, CNN, Al-Jazeera… Hijabman posted a link to the 300+ stories that came up in a google news search.

Inter-ummah colonization, or who owns Islam?

A couple of things concern me here. The first was that the atmosphere was anything but sacred. The thrust of the critics' case against mixed-gender prayer is that the presence of one gender in close proximity to the other will be a distraction to both when the focus should be on god alone, but on Friday I was far more distracted by the presence of cameras in my face than I was by the presence of men. Why doesn't someone issue a fatwa against that?

I don't think the organizers were aware that the story would be picked up by quite so many media outlets, and I don't think they anticipated the environment it would create. We took our place in the center of the room and I told Hijabman I felt like an animal in a zoo. Shh! Look at the Muslims. Be quiet; maybe they'll do something funny. Of course this has been the Western media's relationship with Islam all along, but it was odd to feel it so starkly, the whole history of ethnic and religious colonialism encapsulated in one room: there we were, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder, without shoes, literally practicing the submission that serves as the root of the word islam, while the members of the press stood tall around us, cameras rolling, pens poised, shoes on, authoritative. Edward Said, rest his soul, would have had a field day.

Which ties into my second concern. On Friday, Farid Esack wrote to the PMU mailing list and pointed out that female-led prayers were common in South Africa in the early '90s and said he "hopes that [the publicity around Friday's event] is not another case of the history of the colonized world being of no consequence unless it is scripted or recognized by the powerful." First he was accused of "raining on the parade"; then a few others stepped in and gave credit where credit was due and said they hoped the South African precedent would help bolster the cause. The colonization charge wasn't seriously addressed, however, which is unfortunate because judging from what I'm reading online it certainly underlies the way this event is being discussed in the foreign press.

Meanwhile, in the Western press, there is the typical assumption that Americans — American Muslims, okay, honorable mention, but Americans nonetheless — are stridently leading the way as they always have, shaking the globe to its foundations with their radical notion of this thing called "equality," as if such a concept is unfamiliar in a place like, say, SOUTH AFRICA.

An earlier version of me might have dismissed the whole event for fear of this sort of media attention, and with it the inevitable backlash that mixes sexism and anti-colonialism into one big can of paint and stirs so thoroughly that it becomes impossible to separate red from blue anymore; the whole issue would turn violet and I would accordingly drop my feminist complaint because I'd be too afraid of painting with a brush tainted by imperialism.

Over the years I have stopped thinking of this as "respectful distance" and started thinking of it as a cop-out. It's perfectly safe for someone like me — protected by white skin, two Western passports, a college education, and a middle-class family supportive of my political, religious, and lifestyle choices — to file the oppression of women in other countries under the umbrella of cultural relativism. It even adds to my cache of privilege: now, on top of everything else, I'm also seen as open-minded, internationally aware, racially sensitive, the very opposite of shrill. I lose nothing in this equation. I can occasionally point to analogous mistakes and atrocities of white people ("FGM? look at anorexia nervosa!" "selling Nepali girls into prostitution? what about domestic violence here at home!") and sit around fat with the knowledge that I've risked nothing. I refuse to do that anymore.

This is where I see the logic behind holding it in New York City. As with all the progressive Muslim events I've attended, this one was racially and ethnically diverse, but one commonality all participants shared was the knowledge that there would be no state-sanctioned repercussions for their attendance. The United States is not the only country that offers this brand of religious protection, of course, but it's one of the bigger hurdles you have to cross before you can plan anything of this nature. Not only did Amina Wadud have the freedom to do this, but the city gave her police protection for it. And here you can ask some sticky questions, like would the NYPD give the same protection to a sheikh who received death threats for preaching anti-Americanism, but my base point is that America is not the site of this sort of reform because Americans are so much more enlightened than the rest of the world — as the American media like to tell it — but because American laws regarding religious expression, designed to protect Christians from those scary Jews and atheists, and more probably each other, just happen to protect everybody else, too. This is pragmatic fact.

The muezzin was a woman

Of course no gathering of Muslim women can take place without a great deal of outside attention to their fashion choices, and I knew that going in. I asked one of the organizers about it, and she said right away that there would be no dress code at the door; "our only concern is that you have a wonderful spiritual experience." This was comforting, and also no help.

My daughter, however, had no indecision here at all. She would wear her favorite jeans, her purple top, and the prayer shawl her grandmother made her. I told her she didn't need to cover her head if she didn't want to. She didn't even entertain this. She loves that shawl; it connects her to her father's family as much as it connects her to Islam, two concepts that are intertwined in her mind, and prayer is the only time she has an excuse to wear it. I, dress code or no, did not want to be the bare-headed blonde outlier responsible for the downfall of the faith at an event that was already so charged with controversy, but I also felt like I could dress like myself for once, rather than in the flowing-skirt-and-full-veil uniform I usually wear if I'm going to a mosque. Compromise: I brought a hijab I normally wear as a scarf and pulled it over my head before I took my place on the floor. Later Al-Jazeera reported that "Many of the women in attendance were modestly dressed and, in accordance with Islamic tradition, covered their hair with the hijab, or headscarf. But others shunned the scarf and wore form-fitting jeans or pants." Sigh.

Suehyla El-Attar led the adhan. Her grandfather, I read later, had been a muezzin in Cairo.

Amina Wadud finally stepped forward, dressed in dark purple and looking dignified. I met her two years ago at the progressive Islam conference in Washington, D.C. On Friday she was, as she had been then, precise and careful with her speech; she read mostly from notes but was best when she left them behind and talked directly about gender inequity. She alternatively referred to Allah as he, she, and it, arguing that god cannot be reduced to a gender. Her sermon lasted over an hour, and in that time I was (mostly) able to get used to the glaring presence of the media and concentrate.

Zero-sum game?

Considering the level of press attention, I suppose cynics can't be faulted for viewing the event as a publicity stunt. Asra Nomani has come under especially heavy fire, even among supporters, who accuse her of using the event to promote her latest book. A number of critics, including Aslam Abdullah, have asked if woman-led prayers don't distract from other issues: Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, racism, illiteracy, the homeless, the tsunami, anything, to which Sarah Eltantawi responded very frankly with "No, We Don't Have More Important Issues".

The tsunami reference is particularly specious, since MuslimWakeUp! has a special section for tsunami relief with links to 22 organizations where readers can donate. I also feel no particular personal guilt in the face of these charges; I've devoted one week to the issue of woman-led prayer and four years to tutoring children in underfunded schools. The fact that the media finds more interest in the first issue than the second is not my doing. It's also worth noting that, in those four years, I've only had one Muslim co-worker willing to live and work in this neighborhood in spite of the other options available to her (an African-American woman, unveiled natch, that heathen slut). Most of the first-generation Muslim men with letters after their names — that is, those most likely to be the commentators and bloggers I see so upset about this issue — have purchased homes in the suburbs with an eye toward the quality of the school districts their own children will be attending. So forgive me if I find their where-are-your-priorities argument to be a red herring, and not a little hypocritical. Certainly Amina Wadud, whose presence on Friday was the culmination of a life's work toward gender, race, and religious justice, cannot be accused of being a single-issue johnny-come-lately only interested in her fifteen minutes.

But this leads me to ask: why is this important to me? I didn't grow up in a majority-Muslim country, wasn't raised by a Muslim family, don't, in general, feel oppressed by Islam, either as a woman or for any other reason. Every mosque I've attended has allowed me to enter through the front door, and I've always felt welcome there, if a bit of a curiosity because of my skin color. I've never been sent to the back of the mosque and I've never been bothered by the presence of children in the women's section — if anything I like that, because I find children are so unwelcome in most public spaces in the U.S. Either way, I don't go to the mosque often enough to see this as a dominant area of concern, at least in my own life, though I recognize why other women see it as a pragmatic priority, all theory and religious justification notwithstanding.

The core issue for me is that I don't like having gender, and thus my humanity, being used as a punching bag for other debates. The argument that if it was good enough for Aisha, it should be good enough for everyone doesn't work for me. Aisha also didn't use a cell phone or a laptop, didn't watch television and didn't fly in airplanes, and yet all these things have been adopted unproblematically by Muslims all over the world. We can accept that slavery is allowed in the Qur'an, but its abolition was clearly the ideal. Why, then, do gender issues alone occupy a hardened space in our historical imagination?

Women's relationship to Islam has changed over the centuries (not always for the better, in spite of our desire to see history as a straightforward march toward "progress"), and of course their status varies according to culture and country. But colonialism left its mark. In most majority-Muslim countries, indigenous laws were stripped away whenever they affected trade, profit, criminal justice and the practice of warfare, but family law remained largely intact, since the position of women had little impact on the colonizers' financial interest in Asia and the Middle East. Over time women's seclusion became associated with the true expression of Islamic identity, while many other practices ascribed to Islam were subsumed or forgotten under the doctrine of necessity. I understand the evolution of this process, but it is inaccurate and not a little bizarre to take the most draconian implementation of so-called "Islamic law" — women under the Taliban, for example — and call that the "authentic," historically accurate role of Muslim women, and assume everyone who argues otherwise is some kind of MTV-addled tool of the decadent West. If anything the opposite is true; Western influence stunted the rich tradition of growth and change within Islam. It is equally misguided to use historical precedent in the absence of all other arguments as a justification for any given practice within Islam; fiqh has evolved precisely to accommodate changing circumstances while staying true to the principles outlined in the Qur'an.

As the khutba finished and the prayer began, the congregants rearranged themselves to accommodate for the space a Muslim prayer requires. Most of the women were on the right, most of the men on the left, though the line between was fuzzy and latecomers like K and myself ended up with whatever space we could find. Hijabman and a couple other men moved into line, and I tried to find space behind them, closer to the women, but that would have landed us in the press pool. So we stepped forward into the space available. We made space for another woman to move between us, which effectively placed Hijabman in the woman's section and K and I in the men's section. Hijabman shrugged and I shrugged back; the woman between us smiled and shrugged at both of us. It was a casual, forgettable moment completely devoid of the obsession over fitnah, chaos, the mathematical computation of sin, the stirring of desire, and all the other prurient fixations shared by both the mullahs and the Western media whenever "gender" and "Islam" appear in the same sentence. We were just four people, two women a man and a child, lined up to pray behind a Qur'anic scholar we respected.

My daughter and I went to New York on Friday. I'll write about it once I sort out my thoughts, but in the meantime, have some links. (The media depiction of Islam continues to interest me. The headlines themselves are an interesting study in bias/perspective.)

Woman Leads Muslim Prayers in New York, Sparking Worldwide Controversy [VOA]
Muslim Group Is Urging Women to Lead Prayers & Woman Leads Muslim Prayer Service in New York [New York Times]
Woman leads US Muslims to prayer [BBC]
Woman Imam Raises Mixed Emotions [Arab News]
Muslim Woman's Prayer Causes Stir [AP]
Muslims Howl At Woman-Led Service [AP]
Muslim woman leads N.Y. prayer [The Asian Age]
Woman leads Islamic prayer service [Newsday - more photos]
Woman leads controversial US prayer [Al Jazeera]
With prayer, a call for equality [Philadelphia Inquirer/Knight Ridder]
Woman-led Muslim service sparks controversy in NYC [New Zealand]
Mixed Islamic prayer In New York [Pakistan]
A Prayer Toward Equality [Washington Post]
MWL's Response to Woman-Led Friday Prayer [Muslim Women's League]
What Would The Prophet Do? The Islamic Basis For Female-Led Prayer [MuslimWakeUp!]
A Critique Of The Argument For Woman-Led Friday Prayers [AltMuslim]
Do Female Prayer Protests Miss The Point? [AltMuslim]
No, We Don’t Have More Important Issues: In Support of Women-Led Prayer [MuslimWakeUp!]
A woman's battle for the soul of Islam [Salon]
more links… [The American Muslim]