A Response to Mojha Kahf

Written by Farah B for Nuseiba

A couple of weeks ago The Washington Post featured a piece written by Mojha Kahf entitled “Spare Me the Sermon on Muslim Women”. Sobia from Muslimah Media Watch posted (a mostly positive) response here, MMW then featured a more negative analysis from Muse here (which has since been retracted) and another response from Crypto-Muslim here. While a fourth response could be seen as over-kill, there are two major issues that the writers did not address in great detail.

Admittedly, I’d never heard of Kahf prior to reading the article. From what I’ve now read she’s published some books, written about women and sexuality and lives in the US. Looking at the article in detail, it is written extremely informally in a style more akin to spoken English which doesn’t really help for clarity. Nevertheless, her main argument is quite clear; Muslim women are not oppressed or exploited. Islam grants women a number of rights whose collary are not found in Christianity.

There are two major problems I have with Kahf’s piece; firstly her one dimensional portrayal of Muslim women, and secondly her lack of analysis of the relationship between the rights Islam grants us and whether or not women actually enjoy those rights.

Firstly, her portrayal of Muslim women. She talks extensively about “Muslim” women having access to mahr, “Muslim” women having a legal right to orgasm, “Muslim” women having access to abortion. Now, I don’t have any problem with any of the sentiments raised. Similarly, I am not rejecting the idea that Muslims can claim a broader Muslim identity, or that such a collective experience can’t be constructed. My main issue here is that a Muslim identity is not the only identity she inhabits and yet, she repeatedly reduces her experiences to those of just being Muslim. The reality is that communities from Islamic cultures, while originating in countries dominated by Islamic laws and religious practices, are extremely varied in their experiences, social relations, values and world views. I find myself at odds with representations of Muslim-majority countries that frequently depict Islam as the sole engine of those countries. Consequently, diasporas and immigrants living in other countries are thus no longer Pakistani or Malay but rather treated as “Muslim”. Women are then reduced to being solely “Muslim” women in search of a “Muslim woman’s identity”. Like I said, I am all for searching for a common Muslim women’s identity. However, such an undertaking must be done by acknowledging our differences as well as our commonalities. Kahf’s failure to highlight the nexus between religion and ethnicity really undermines the sentiment of the article.

The second major issue that I have with her article is that (aside from one or two throw away comments) she does not identify that the rights she describes are far from being enjoyed by Muslim women everywhere. In one paragraph she discusses at length her own marriage and the marriage of her friends. They had to sign their consent; otherwise the contract would be invalid under law. They chose their own husbands. However, the reality is that the large majority of women are powerless to actually claim those rights, especially woman from a lower socio-economic background. Indeed, the freedom she enjoyed could probably be attributed to the fact that she came from a middle-class background and enjoyed a certain level of social mobility which meant that she could claim those rights. Nevertheless, she does at one point state that “if patriarchal customs have overridden Islam and whittled away this blessing in many Muslim locales, it’s still there, available, in the law.” The way she’s phrased the sentence suggests that the laws are still there, it’s just that women don’t claim them. To a certain extent she is correct; those laws are in Islam. However it becomes less about what is available at law and more about that the laws should be available to women in all in countries who have sharia legal systems; systems that have been erroneously interpreted by political and religious elites. Similar criticisms can be levelled at her discussion about Islam’s position on openness towards sexuality and the relationship between husband and wife. Interpretations of sexuality are necessarily bound up within dominate sexual discourses in specific countries. Without any discussion of such discourses and interpretations, any mention in her article to sexuality is ineffective to really explore and discuss at length the role of sexuality within Islam.

In her final paragraph Kahf mentions a number of Muslim-majority countries who have elected women leaders, citing it as a triumph over Western countries. While the election of female leaders is indeed praise worthy, the reality is much more complicated. I don’t know the internal politics of Bangladesh, Turkey or Pakistan. She does mention Indonesia though as a country where a female leader (Megawati Sukarnoputri) was elected “democratically”. At this point her lack of research is glaringly obvious to anyone with even a basic knowledge of politics in Indonesia. Presidents in Indonesia are voted into office by the People’s Consultative Assembly (MPR), the legislative branch of the Indonesian government not the general population (unlike the USA). Now, being democratically elected by proxy doesn’t diminish the fact that a woman in a Muslim majority country was able to gain majority support within the MPR to successfully become President. However, it must be highlight that it was only after Megawati’s second bid at the Presidential position that she succeeded in gaining office. Her first bid was defeated largely by Islamic political parties in the MPR who supported Abdurrahman Wahid. They maintained that the rejection of Megawati was based on Islamic teachings that a woman should not lead men. For months there was controversy, and Wahid was defeated because of the wide spread inefficacies of his term. Unfortunately, therefore, her examples do not give her argument the “final punch” that Sobia claims that it does.

Such examples, and actually, the whole article, shows that Kahf provides what can only be described as a superficial discussion on the wonders of being a Muslim woman. Above all that however, what really doesn’t make any sense at all, is that in the introduction to her book “Western Representations of the Muslim Women” (Introduction available here via Google scholar); she mentions both of my criticism above, namely, the problems with reducing Muslim to just being “Muslim” (page 3), and acknowledging that the study of the social condition of Muslim women is a “serious and complex topic” (page 2). What I find even more irritating than the unnecessary use of an informal writing style in a formal context, are people who change their minds and write something that, given their earlier statements, they would obviously criticise as being too narrow.