June 2013
14 posts
“Wearing a hijab isn’t inherently liberating – but neither is baring one’s breasts. What is liberating is being able to choose either of these things. It’s pretty ludicrous to think that oppression is somehow proportional to how covered or uncovered someone’s body is. Both sides of this argument present a shallow understanding of women’s empowerment, which only drowns out the substantive challenges facing all women – issues that cannot be encapsulated in a debate about a piece of fabric.”
—Sara Yasin, Is the Hijab Worth Fighting Over?
(via rcabbasi)
“The Muslim woman is the object of imperial rescue, justification for imperial warfare, Orientalist cipher, target of jihadist violence, and, increasingly, the discursive site upon which the central preoccupation of our time—how do you free yourself from freedom?—is worked out.”
—Sadia Abbas (via kawrage)
“Nomani’s complaints about her Muslim ex-husband are indeed cringeworthy: he is cold, withdrawn, childish, and sexually worse than useless. But this litany of failings is not limited to Muslim men–not by a long shot. The story of a passionate woman in a stale marriage is as old as Helen of Troy. The theme is so perennial that without the specter of Islam to dress it up, it’s almost boring. This is a case of cultural amnesia: as soon as a Muslim man enters the picture, women everywhere forget about Thelma and Louise, The Good Girl and The Divorcee, and pretend that sullen oafish husbands are an Islamic phenomenon. If this was really true, poor Shakespeare–along with hundreds of thousands of modern divorce lawyers–would have been out of a career.”
—G. Willow Wilson (via tmihijabi)
“At the end of the day, it isn’t where I came from. Maybe home is somewhere I’m going and never have been before.”
—Warsan Shire (via diasporicdecay)
Meet the first all-Emirati, all-girl rock band - The National →
thenational.ae
Five students from HCT in Al Ain formed Random Stars only a year ago, but already they
“When the white knight knows so little about his damsel in distress, how does he expect to rescue her? When she turns around and tells him to call her “Ms.” and to stop telling her what to do, will he be outraged at her ingratitude? When she says she’s quite happy wearing a traditional outfit, thank you, but could she please get maternity leave, will he snort in disgust at his charge? When she wraps her head in a veil and stands up for her Islamic prayer, will he throw up his hands at her inability to throw off Islamic slavery? When she says why thank you for your help, but I need my husband out of Guantanamo and my son out of /your/ Musharraf’s jail, and then I’d like to open a Qur’an school for girls—what will he say then? When she says she’s got her own ways of effecting the revolution, and it doesn’t involve selling out brown men to America, will he decide against trying to rescue her after all?”
—Shabana Mir, How Not to Rescue Muslim Women (via eibmorb)
Empowerment or Estrangement? Liberal Feminism's Vision of the 'Progress' of Muslim Women →
papers.ssrn.com
This paper presents some thoughts on the progress of Muslim women towards gender justice. It argues that Liberal Legal feminism shares a common understanding of history and progress with those Liberal political theories that justified the British Empire. Because of this genealogy, Liberal feminism seeks to reform cultures and societies that do not comport with a particular Liberal teleology that forecloses the expression of alternative ideas of history, progress, and human flourishing. It further argues that Muslim women’s organizations that partner with Northern organizations sometimes seek to fulfill Liberal expectations of victimhood at the hands of their culture. The consequence is that they often reap estrangement rather than empowerment. Finally, the paper raises some concerns about the feminist engagement with the state and with the international as a way of promoting women’s progress.
April 2013
17 posts
“Essentially, if our secrets are secrets because we are told to be ashamed, then we must share them. There is no shame in being sad or struggling or trying to heal. We are all desperate, depraved and sacred. We are all terrible and brillIant. I can list all the things that can make a girl want to escape her own body (re: patriarchy). But I’d rather list all the things that make me want to stay in my body, and adorn it like a home, rub oils into my skin, tell it how sorry I am for trying to leave, for trying to hurt it into submission.”
— Warsan Shire (via cannibalesqueappetite)
انا قلبي مساكن شعبية: oppressed(?) hair →
theuncolonizedmind.tumblr.com
the moon was full of himself today: stingy with his allure
hemisphere transparent in the maghreb sky
a silken hijab scarcely encrusted with flickering stars
over a vista of calm greed—
they say that I must surely miss
the breeze on my faint scalp
or through my writhing…
“Not everyone is okay with living like an open wound. But the thing about open wounds is that, well, you aren’t ignoring it. You’re healing; the fresh air can get to it. It’s honest. You aren’t hiding who you are. You aren’t rotting. People can give you advice on how to heal without scarring badly. But on the other hand there are some people who’ll feel uncomfortable around you. Some will even point and laugh. But we all have wounds.”
—Warsan Shire (via laughterandhope)
“I am against [it]. Every[one] will think that I encouraged their actions. They have insulted all Muslims everywhere and it’s not acceptable.”
—
Amina Tyler, a woman from Tunisia who received threats after posting topless images of herself, responds to FEMEN’s recent actions, which included protesting topless outside mosques
Their leader Inna Shevchenko earlier responded to heavy criticism from Muslims, saying:
[Muslim Women Against FEMEN] write on their posters that they don’t need liberation but in their eyes it’s written ‘help me’
(via eastlondoner)
what the fuck does that even mean? “In their eyes it’s written help me.”
(via doyayoda)
“You can’t make homes out of human beings. Someone should have already told you that.”
— Warsan Shire (via arabarabarab)
March 2013
27 posts
“
In a war justified at least partly to “liberate” Muslim women, the fact that rapes and murders of women in Afghanistan have increased exponentially since the US occupation goes mostly unreported and thus veiled in the mainstream global media. This disastrous back-story is always missing, always veiled in a setting that facilitates insistent and cultivated amnesia. I hope it is now clear why the prima facie innocent “What do Muslim women want?” is as or more irksome than “What do women want?” especially when the debate obsessively and facetiously revolves around the veil or the sexuality “obscured” or “revealed” beneath the veil. The question betrays a lack of bona fide intentions at its very core. In the set of multiple choice responses “generously” and “liberally” made available to us, one choice is conspicuous in its absence:
End all wars and occupations right now, and offer reparations and justice to the ones whose countries have been destroyed, who have been wronged and have survived genocidal wars.
” —From “Veil in the Time of War” or “Veilin’ the Time of War”
Yes, yes, YES! Now read the essay
(via kawrage)
“One of my key arguments in this book is that we need to be vigilant against cultural explanations because of the way they are distributed unequally in the world. If I had to think of one “culture” to blame for the violence affecting women in the parts of the world that we think of as Muslim, it would be that of armed conflict and militarism. We don’t normally call militarism a culture or tradition, or relate it to specific religions like Judaism or Christianity, though in the contemporary world—in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Israel/Palestine—it could look like that. We call it politics, connected to economics.
But it’s not only in conflict zones that local culture, tradition, or religion is a screen that camouflages the structures of violence that are global in nature.” —LILA ABU-LUGHOD IS WRITING A BOOK CALLED ‘SAVING MUSLIM WOMEN’ (she revealed in an interview)
But it’s not only in conflict zones that local culture, tradition, or religion is a screen that camouflages the structures of violence that are global in nature.” —LILA ABU-LUGHOD IS WRITING A BOOK CALLED ‘SAVING MUSLIM WOMEN’ (she revealed in an interview)
Smoke & Mirrors: Attacking the Muslim Brotherhood Using Women’s Rights →
muftah.org
Over at Muftah, the brilliant Sara Salem has a piece up on the critique directed towards the Muslim Brotherhood for their policies on women’s rights being decontextualised, dehistorisised and exploitative.
If the aim is to understand the situation of women in Egypt, how is it possible that so many analyses focus on religious and cultural problems (which are blamed on the Muslim Brotherhood or general “Islamic conservatism”) and ignore the role of neoliberal economic policies? It is impossible to discuss the role of women and poverty without addressing the effects capitalism and neoliberalism have had on the Egyptian economy. In times of economic crisis, it is often women who suffer the most. Alleviating economic inequality is rarely discussed, even though it would contribute largely to alleviating women’s suffering.
Selective outrage for the sake of personal or political motives is not going to help Egyptian women or the Egyptian women’s struggle. What is important is to understand the complex dynamics of how and why Egyptian women are suffering; not to make blanket statements about ideology. It is not enough to say that the Islamists are oppressing women without also explaining how, why and in what specific instances this is occurring.
In short, women’s bodies as battlegrounds, women’s rights as rhetoric and women’s empowerment as a political ploy.
And in many authoritarian regimes, gender rights were framed as gifts, bestowed by the benevolent father figure that is the head of state. Except these gifts can be granted or withdrawn, in accordance with the political climate.
Highly recommneded read!
“Islamic feminism on the whole is more radical than Muslims’ secular feminisms have been. Islamic feminism insists on full equality of women and men across the public/private spectrum (secular feminists historically accepted the idea of equality in the public sphere and the notion of complementarianism in the private sphere).”
—
From “Islamic Feminism: What’s in a Name?” by Margot Badran
Badran’s article was my introduction to the Islamic feminist movement back in 2002 and I have pretty much been obsessed ever since
(via kawrage)
“
By persisting in advocating secular feminist arguments that are intolerant of important religious values, secular feminists run the risk of turning patriarchal. At its most abstract level, I define patriarchy as a hierarchical system in which control flows from the top. Thus, in a patriarchal system, men oppress other men and not only women. Furthermore, the top of the pyramid in a patriarchal system could be filled with either men or women (witness Margaret Thatcher) without its patriarchal nature being changed.
If a western feminists are now vying for control of the lives of immigrant women by justifying coercive state action, then these women have not learned the lesson of history, be it colonialism, imperialism or even fascism. After all, such feminists “think that the best community is one in which all but their preferred…[gender] practices are outlawed”
” —From “Is Western Patriarchal Feminism Good For Third World/Minority Women?” By Azizah Al-Hibri
Repeating for emphasis:
By persisting in advocating secular feminist arguments that are intolerant of important religious values, secular feminists run the risk of turning patriarchal.
(via kawrage)
