http://www.muslim-refusenik.com/news/ft-04-07-09.html
Financial Times Review of The Trouble with Islam July 9 2004 By Geraldine Brooks Double jeopardy When Jacques Chirac led the recent campaign to ban Muslim headscarves from French schoolrooms, he could hardly have realised how much in common he had with Ayatollah Khomeini. Both leaders found their society falling short of certain cherished ideals. In France, the secular national identity had fractured under the strain of an immigrant wave for which France had provided neither economic nor social integration. In Iran, Khomeini had inherited an economy that did not run according to Islamic writ. But it is hard to eradicate interest payments from a modern banking system, and expensive to "de-ghettoise" one's cities. So both men turned to women's bodies, creating a visible symbol of change without troubling to effect the thing itself. Khomeini, by ordering women into the veil, got an instantly Islamic-looking republic. Chirac, by ordering them out of it, gets a secular-looking school system. Muslim women, it seems, can't win. In Islamic countries they may be flogged for taking off the veil; in the west they can be denied a public education or harassed in the street for putting it on. Since September 11, the simple headscarf that Muslim women wear for any number of reasons - a belief that it is an obligation of the faith, the demands of family, a self-elected act of modesty or a statement repudiating the west's commodification of female beauty - has become a segregating dress as stigmatising as the peyes and gabardines of an earlier generation's persecuted religious minority. Perhaps because they have been forced into the frontline by their visibility, or perhaps because the most onerous burdens of Islam's extremists have fallen on their shoulders, Muslim women are emerging as the faith's most passionate polemicists. Fatima Mernissi, the prolific Moroccan writer, and Egypt's Nawal El Saadawi were the trailblazers, but fresh, young voices are emerging in the west, where the experience of growing up in noisy democracies such as the US and Canada is emboldening a new generation of Muslim women writers. Two recent slim volumes provide an interesting contrast of approach: Irshad Manji's The Trouble With Islam is a high-decibel rant, demanding reform from those within the faith. Asma Gull Hasan's Why I Am A Muslim is a decorous, rather Pollyanna-esque plea for greater understanding from those without. Neither book is particularly stringent in its scholarship, and perhaps that's a blessing. Just after 9/11, I witnessed Americans staggering out of bookstores under the weight of translated Korans and tomes by the likes of Bernard Lewis, embarking, I suppose, on a bit of DIY Islam. What was immediately available back then was a choice between weighty academic rigour and highly questionable sensationalism (of the Not Without My Daughter genre) and very little in between. Both Manji's and Hasan's books are succinct and accessible, each leavened by the author's personal story of growing up a Muslim in a modern, middle-class western context. Living in a successful family of South Asian immigrants in Pueblo, Colorado, the dark-haired, dark-eyed Hasan was often mistaken for a Hispanic, and learned to speak Spanish early, at her physician father's insistence. Manji's family, expelled from Idi Amin's Uganda when she was four years old, settled in the suburbs of Vancouver, British Columbia. To understand the circumstances of a North American Muslim childhood, it is necessary to keep in mind that, while Britain's Muslim population is overwhelmingly South Asian in origin, North America's is far more diverse. The large mosque near my home in Virginia reflects a demographic in which an American-born Muslim is now twice as likely to be African-American as Arab. And, while there are members with roots in most Arab countries, there are also immigrants from Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan and Afghanistan. This diversity is leading to the emergence of what I have come to think of as American-style Islam. In the search for a faith that all can practise, cultural accretions - the customs that are often the worst of the anti-women practices associated with the faith, such as female genital mutilation, face veiling and denial of the right to a life outside the home - are eroded in the quest for the essentials of a faith that all can agree upon. At the Virginia mosque, that means women and men sit at separate tables for the monthly potluck, but not everyone at the women's table is veiled. Some, in fact, are pierced. As the mother of one nose-ringed, tongue-studded teenager explained to me: "People in this society are going to have to recognise that a Muslim woman with a nose ring can be just as Muslim as a woman with a headscarf." When meetings are held to discuss, for example, greater participation in the public schools, or the problem of domestic violence, women generally have more to say than the men. For the immigrant generation, who often grew up in repressive, if not tyrannical, societies, the idea of putting one's head above the parapet and participating in public political discourse can come hard, but this is not so for the American-born, whose background noise has been the in-your-face debating style of Fox News shows and the discourteous demands of rap lyrics. Manji's book is subtitled "A Wake-Up Call for Honesty and Change", and at times the call is one very angry shout indeed. Manji did not care for her madrasa, the Islamic equivalent of Sunday school, where questions were stonewalled and the library virtually off-limits to a would-be female browser (because it meant the men had to clear off while she used it). Instead, she embarked on her own search, which included a journey into Islamic history and even a trip to Israel. The book really hits its stride when Manji analyses, in one of the fairest accounts I have seen, the competing wrongs of the Israel-Palestine issue, and then goes on to apportion responsibility for the sorry state of most of the Islamic world. The usual suspects - colonial powers in general and the US in particular - get a fair bagging, but the most culpable, in Manji's view, are the "foundamentalists" - the Saudis and the followers their oil money has bought - who insist that the only true Islam is their own arid, tribal, 7th-century Arabian version. Their "mullah-mauled schools" in Pakistan and elsewhere, she writes, "continue breeding imbeciles". Manji wants to see a reopening of "ijtihad" - the interpretation of Islamic thought and scripture that flourished until the 10th century. She also has practical advice: support micro-financing charities (such as Trickle Up or the Grameen Bank) that provide small loans to women, because when women have financial independence, they also have a degree of autonomy from the men who would oppress them. After Manji's bracing diatribe, picking up Hasan's polite book is a bit like stepping into a soundproofed room. Hasan wants her readers to see Islam as she practises it: a Sufi-infused religion of tolerance and love that is entirely compatible with life as a modern, patriotic American woman. Alas, in her enthusiasm to balance the picture of her faith, she herself overbalances, averting her eyes, and her argument, from the knotty bits. For example, when she tells us that Islam is a faith that requires a direct, individual connection with God, needing no intervening clergy, she explains that in many mosques the role of prayer leader is rotated through the congregation, with even children, in some cases, taking a turn. Unconscionably, she leaves the subject without mentioning that this wonderful egalitarian role-sharing must never include a woman when men are also present, as women's voices are considered enticing and are not supposed to be heard at prayer. Hasan wishes, she writes, that we didn't have to have all the "hype" of arguments about veiling, and "the fiendish interest in the oppression of Muslim women". An odd choice, the word "fiendish". Surely it's the oppression of so many Muslim women that is fiendish, not the interest in exposing it. Still, these books are a valuable addition to a growing body of work that might change the way the maturing generation of Muslims, particularly women, perceive their faith and their own role within it. To anyone who has spent significant time in Islamic countries, it is clear that the efforts of non-Muslims to improve women's lives by criticism or sanction are rarely fruitful. (In Sudan, for example, British efforts to curb genital mutilation had negligible effect. The slow change that has come has been the result of a few Muslims willing to expose the practice as entirely un-Islamic.) At international Islamic conferences, North American Muslim delegates have successfully lobbied for condemnation of regimes that limit women's education. They are able to do so precisely because, when the conference ends, they can go home to a democracy in which being outspoken doesn't carry a death sentence. It will be a delicious irony if the reforms required to reverse the stagnation and decline of Islamic societies are led, or at least inspired, by a generation of Muslims nurtured in the bosom of the Great Satan. Geraldine Brooks, a former news correspondent, is the author of "Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women". [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Yahoo! Domains - Claim yours for only $14.70 http://us.click.yahoo.com/Z1wmxD/DREIAA/yQLSAA/BRUplB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> *************************************************************************** Berdikusi dg Santun & Elegan, dg Semangat Persahabatan. 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