PostSecret: burka and bikini

Related: The Burka and the Bikini at City of Brass (Beliefnet)

western feminism and Islamic values

Kudos to Jill at Feministe for raising the issue of how oppressive head-scarf bans are - just as oppressive in their own way as mandatory burqas. She quotes extensively from an article in the NYT written by a Turkish woman detailing her experiences with the ban at Turkish universities. I found this particularly cogent:

Ms. Benli was the first person in her family to get a college education. She earned her law degree before the state began to enforce the ban in the late 1990s. But her two years of additional graduate work was stopped by the restriction, an interpretation of an earlier court ruling. A 300-page master’s thesis at Istanbul University law school had to be orally defended on campus. Her mother, also covered, pressed her to remove her scarf, to no avail.

“I just couldn’t do it,” Ms. Benli said in an interview in her small law office this week. “I left the room crying. They marked me absent.”

She says the reasons, deeply personal and hard to put into words, are a combination of her relationship to God and her aversion to accepting what she sees as misplaced authority.

“This is related to my private life,” she said. “It’s my personality. My wholeness.”

In one particularly traumatic example, as told to Ms. Benli by several of her clients, a university rector forced several women to uncover their heads in front of him, in order to obtain his signature to allow them to transfer out of the college he was taking over and no longer allowing them to attend.

The state, she said, was saying, “No matter what you think, I can make you do what I want,” an attitude which, if obeyed, made one feel “degraded.”

An analogy might be if the Dean of a college required women to strip to their underwear before receiving their diploma. It might be more cloth than the woman wears the next day at the beach, but whether the cloth is imposed upon or forbidden from, it is the woman's sense of self-modesty that is violated.

Unfortunately, many feminists argue that "less is more" with respect to clothing and that taking clothing off equals empowerment. My classic essay on the Burka and the Bikini drew much criticism from feminists because they could not accept that a bikini could also be oppressive. This mindset manifests immediately in comments to the post at Feministe:

I don’t agree with headscarves/burqas, in that they’re clearly tools designed to supress female freedom/identity. Yet at the same time I obviously hope everyone has the freedom to wear what they damned please, and some women clearly want to cover themselves in this (to my, western eyes) demeaning fashion- and they should have the freedom to do so, and go where they please when they do. Yet some women are clearly forced to wear these things against thier will (or, worse still, have lost sight of even the concept of having a choice in the matter at all).

Note how the commentor is compelled to raise the issue of forced-veiling and is much more comfortable with denouncing that aspect of control, whereas the right to veil is treated with dripping condescension, "clearly" demeaning. It's essentially impossible to communicate with people of this mindset, the best you can do is register your dissent and hope that a reader coming across it will understand our point of view.

The danger in allying western muslim political identity to the Left should be clear. Muslims must remain an independent entity from the greater Left, because the secular divide is simply impossible to cross. At best we can be allied against external threats but we must be wary - a headscarf ban is not outside the realm of the possible here in the United States, should Progressivism grow ascendant. The greatest bulwark against it woudl be to articulate our own liberal, Islamic sense of feminism in which we fully embrace the right of a woman to choose her expression of faith and reject any a-priori assumptions about how much cloth - too much, or too little - is intrinsically oppressive.

UPDATE: I cross-posted this at DailyKos and the resulting debate was quite vigorous. I think the comment by Jerome a Paris, one of DK's better-known voices, is instructive of the secular divide to which I refer.

Kalpana Chawla, 1961-2003

Five years ago, Shuttle mission STS-107 was lost over the skies of Texas. I remember that morning clear as day. I've got a memoriam post at my geekblog for the mission as a whole, but I wanted to also make special note here of Indian astronaut Kalpana Chawla, who also perished aboard Columbia as a member of the crew and India's first female in space.

Wikipedia notes that Kalpana in Sanskrit means "imagination of the mind" and thus also "creation".

Why I won't raise my daughters in Pakistan, either

Zack does the legwork and provides possibly the best summary of women's status in Pakistan relative to other countries in the West, the Subcontinent, and the Middle East that I have ever seen. He uses the invaluable Pew Global Attitudes Survey (PDF) as is source. The results paint a grim picture of Pakistan as generally falling far behind other countries in the comparison, such as Bangladesh and Egypt, on attitudes about whether women should be educated or have a say in their marriage options. Zack also looks at the Global Gender Gap Report 2007 and finds Pakistan ranking near the bottom:

Pakistan seems to be really bad for women in terms of economic participation and opportunity (a measure which includes labor force participation, wage equality for similar work, income, legislators, senior officials and managers, and professional and technical workers), educational attainment (literacy rate, and enrollment in primary, secondary and tertiary education), and health and survival (sex ratio at birth and healthy life expectancy).

This is grim indeed. The question that comes to my mind though is why does Pakistan fare so poorly? The data shows that there are numerous Islamic countries far ahead of Pakistan, and there are countries poorer than Pakistan which also are better. So easy answers like "It's because of religion" or "it's because of economics" don't really apply.

Out of curiosity I checked to see how Pakistan ranks in per-capita GDP compared to some of the other countries on the list. Fareed Zakaria argues in his book, The Future of Freedom, that liberal rights should be correlated with this measure (among other things - the book is highly recommended). Wikipedia has a list of countries ranked by per-capita GDP (normalized for "purchasing power" to even out currencies) using data from the International Monetary Fund, and we see that Pakistan is pretty low on the list:

Rank	Country	per-capita GDP
4	United States	$43,223
70	Turkey	$9,240
110	Egypt	$4,895
118	India	$3,802
132	Pakistan	$2,744
144	Bangladesh	$2,130
163	Afghanistan	$1348
170	Yemen	$984

Note that Yemen and Afghanistan do rank below Pakistan here, but they were not included in the Pew survey. Almost all of Africa ranks below Pakistan, but the African countries surveyed still fare better on the Pew questions (particularly the marriage choice issue). I haven't made the effort to see where the African countries fall on the Gender Gap Report, as that is as much a function of poverty and war and hence my assumption is that the African countries will fare worse overall.

So what is going on here? Though I have no doubt it will be spun otherwise by the jafisphere, Islam is clearly not the causative factor. Additional evidence is in the surprising result from Pew on the question of whether a woman has the right to decide whether to wear the veil or not (see chart below - click to enlarge). Pakistan is fairly moderate and has become even more so in the past five years, whereas countries in the middle east have actually regressed. So the attitudes towards women are at least partially separable from attitudes about religion.



The answer probably lies in tribal attitudes. As far as I am aware, Afghanistan and Pakistan have stronger tribal identities than in most of the rest of the world, and given how much of these states are still frontier, the ability of the government to ameliorate and dilute tribal allegiances and values is close to nonexistent. Much of the region exists in a pre-Westphalian condition, which is also why it remains a natural haven for Al Qaeda. In that sense, the situation for women is probably going to remain unchanged until the attending situations of stability, law and order, and liberal rights and freedom are addressed first.

mob justice, sadly thwarted

This man, Afazuddin Ali, is a coward, a blasphemer, and a pervert:

Afazuddin Ali, 36, has five children - three of them daughters.

A few months ago Ali married his eldest daughter, telling his wife Sakina that Allah had ordained him to do so.
[...]
"He is a deeply religious man and will never lie in the name of Allah," Sakina told a court in the northern district of Jalpaiguri.

"I agreed to his marriage with our eldest daughter when he invoked divine sanction," she said.

Let's also add that his wife is an ignorant buffoon. His neighbors, also muslim (as it should have been noted in the article), were not impressed by this "deeply religious" man's sudden communion with the divine:

"We didn't know she was married so when we confronted his wife, she told us about the bizarre marriage six months ago," Sheikh Ramzan, a village leader at Kasiajhiora, said.

"We wanted to smash his head, we were so angry."
[...]
Ali and his wife have not returned home because they fear a fresh attack from angry villagers.

If Allah wills the man to marry his daughter, surely Allah would provide protection from the mob? Oh ye of little faith!

to Baraka

As an article of faith, God burdens no soul more than it can bear - this we are told in the Qur'an. So by that measure, Baraka must be a strong, strong soul indeed. Keep her in your prayers.

Why I wear the ridah

This essay was written by an 18-year old Bohra woman in Toronto, Tasneem bhen Yahya. It was originally published in the Young People's Press and the Halifax Chronicle Herald in 2003.

Contrary to popular misconceptions, the ridah or veil is liberating. It forces people to focus on the person, rather than the clothes they are wearing.

Designer jeans and tube tops don't have to be what defines a person. Success shouldn't be determined by how much skin is revealed, but by intelligence and personality. The ridah helps emphasize these attributes by covering a woman's body.

The ridah is also beautiful.

It comes in colours ranging from pretty pastels to rich shades of indigo, emerald, and crimson. The materials used vary from simple cottons to rich satins and chikan (embroidered cloth).

Usually ridahs are adorned with lace, embroidery and flowery appliques. Pre-designed ridah material is readily available in Pakistani and Indian street markets, but you still have to get them stitched by a tailor.

I look forward to trips to Pakistan where I can purchase my own material and accessories to fit my taste. I pick vividly printed cloth and intricately crocheted laces that are unusual.

I figured wearing a ridah to school would alienate me from my friends. Instead, all my friends from various backgrounds - Irish, Italian, British, Guyanese, Pakistani - encouraged me to wear it.

One of my friends asked questions about wearing it. She asked me where it came from, and whether it was mandatory for women to be veiled.

I explained to her it's my choice to wear it. It's a true reflection of my faith.

The ridah is an expression of faith similar to crosses for Christians and yarmulkes for Jewish men. For me, the ridah is a way to tell others I'm a practicing Muslim. I follow Islam and everything it teaches me about how to live my life and be a better person.

My friend then asked, "Aren't veiled women a product of fundamentalist Islamic regimes run by men?"

I was shocked she was so misinformed. But I couldn't blame her.

The only images I've seen of veiled women on television were from CNN's coverage of the "War on Terrorism." I saw women who were starving, uneducated and oppressed. Everything I'm not.

I'm skirting the edge of copyright by excerpting so much; the piece is worth reading in full.

Also related: my old essay, the Burka and the Bikini (altMuslim.com)

the muslima book: a call for essays

My sister and another close friend are putting together a collection of essays by Muslim American women, to be published in a book by the end of this year. They have asked me to help them publicize a call for essays to be published in this book. The details are as follows:

Each essay must be written by a practicing Muslim American woman, either born and/or predominantly raised in the U.S. We are looking for contributors between the ages of 22 and 35 who are born into a Muslim family and claim Islam as their faith.

Please write articulately about a personal aspect of your life with regards to being a Muslim American woman. The essay should express in some way how your Muslim-ness and American-ness affect your life. This need not be overt but the essay should come from that perspective.

Essays should be no longer than 1000 words and will be edited for clarity. All submissions may not be accepted, but every submission will be considered. Please include name, age, birthplace, sect of Islam, profession/field, and anything else about yourself that might be useful for us to know (short bios are fine).

This is a project that, Inshallah, will appear across a variety of platforms, both national and international.

Please send all entries via email to: muslimabook@gmail.com