Culture, identity, and our mongrel selves

Written by Farah B for Nuseiba

Recently I finished reading In Search of Fatima by Ghada Karmi. I don’t usually read memoirs but this comes recommended by Edward Said so I thought, why not. If the book’s bad I’ll just stop reading it. Karmi is Palestinian. One of the strongest threads running through her story was her discussion of her displacement from Palestine, and the difficulties she faced in England negotiating her disparate aspects of identity as a woman, as a Muslim, as a Palestinian and a new emerging elements of self in conflict with the old. Her story strongly resonated with me largely for two reasons.

Firstly, my family comes from Kashmir. Living in a territorial dispute since Partition in 1947 between Pakistan, China and India, means that Kashmiris experiences the same displacement and denial of cultural experience like Karmi describes in her book of Palestinians. Those who migrate elsewhere also experience the same struggles with maintaining a culture across a diaspora and the challenges to that minority culture from the majority population in the adopted country. Secondly, and this is something the majority of first/second generation immigrants face, we all exist (to adopt Stuart Hall’s language) as “products of cultural hybridity”. As a female, first generation, Kashmiri Muslim living in Australia I face a struggle between my different senses of self, and must continually reconcile these disparate elements like Karmi discusses when she grows up in England. She describes having to find an accommodation between her Palestinian origins and the new society they had joined; between her identity as an Arab Muslim and that of the European, Christian-dominated country around them. While growing up she was “forced to feel [her] way forward uncertainly, trying to make sense of these contradictions and resolving them in [her] own different ways.”

Pierre Bordieu’s concept of ‘habitus’ highlights the social constructedness of our subjectivities and identities. He argues that the habitus produces individual and collective practices. It ensures the active presence of past experiences, which are deposited in each subject in the form of schemes of perception, thought and action. For Karmi her habitus was as a Palestine Muslim; for me it is as a Kashmir Muslim. However, the culture of Kashmir and the interpretation of my religion is something which I have had to construct for myself, affected by living in Australia for over 20 years. Karmi discusses in detail her struggle to reconcile her identities. She asks specifically “Was I Arab or English or a hybrid?” Her solution was to deny her Palestinian culture and religious identity. For Karmi Palestine was no longer ‘home’; though she had specific memories of home and her old life, after being displaced for so long her associations and identity had shifted and changed. Similarly for me (and my family) while Kashmir is referred to as ‘home’, it can never exist as home as it once was. Our memories of ‘home’ are memories of the past lived by the body, but the body has moved on, it has been relocated, reinscribed, and the habitus that was once lived is lived now only through the mediation of subsequent layers of material hybridity.

Later in the book Karmi subsequently returns to Damascus to rediscover her identity and heritage; however it does not provide reconciliation. She was an ‘alien’; looking and sounding Arab, but “in myself I was not [Arab], and they sensed it.” Karmi also has to deal with the number of men who assume that because she had grown up in the West, she was promiscuous and becomes the subject of a number of sexual advances (and one she describes would probably constitute sexual assault.) In the last chapter Karmi goes back to her old house (now lived in by Israeli Jews) to try and reconcile her sense of self and rediscover her ‘habitus’. However, she doesn’t find the reconciliation she hopes she will. The habitus has changed and evolved. It can no longer represent what it once did. Her house is no longer her own; the symbols have shifted meaning since her time there. Both the self and the habitus have been displaced.

Karmi largely focuses her story on the problems she faced with identity construction. However, she does raise some pertinent issues regarding the role of gender and changed habitus. Karmi talks a lot about her impressions and perceptions of her mother and sister’s reactions to English society. She notes that living in exile meant that her mother never really accepted England as her family’s new home. Her mother wants to move back to the Middle East; however her appeals to go back lessen the longer they stay in England. Karmi attributes this to the fact that her mother would be unsure of her role as a woman if they were to return. Living in England for so long did affect Karmi’s mother; her role as a mother and as a woman had changed. Her social circle opened up, she had a strong role within the Arab community as a matriarchal figure. Going back to live in the Middle East meant this role would have changed and in all likelihood been constricted. Similarly, at a later point Karmi discusses her sister’s marriage and intent to move back to Damascus. She wonders how her sister (Siham) will live in Syria considering Siham has too been affected by her life in England. Now, I don’t want to suggest that the West represents liberation for the oppressed Middle Eastern woman because the reality is a lot more complex. Indeed, by Karmi’s own account her family had a lower middle class life in Jerusalem and as such already enjoyed a certain level of social mobility and freedom. When in England her father encourages her and her older sister to study medicine. And to be fair, her discussion is based on what she perceives as her mother and sister’s struggle. However, her discussion here mirrors what I can see in my own mother. She is not unaffected by living in Australia for so long and has constructed her own sense of self in reference to her lived experiences (even if she will not admit the change). Though wanting to return to Kashmir, denying any affect Australia has had would be imprudent. Yet, the question remains: is it totally fair for Karmi and myself to assume that our mother’s roles would be more restricted if they were to subsequently return to their habitus? Women in Kashmir do not occupy the same role as they once did, and (admittedly presumably) neither do women in Damascus. The habitus and self move on. Both sides of my family in Kashmir are also fairly middle class and yet, even without that economic and social mobility all of my aunts would probably be (and are) some of the strongest women I know. However, Kashmir is still largely a patriarchal culture. The current struggle therefore for women is to negotiate gender as another aspect of identity and challenge discourses surrounding power, behaviour, action and interpretation.

She ends her book stating her exile was “undefined by space or time, and from where I was, there would be no return.” Maybe for all of us as “products of cultural hybridity” there can never be any meaningful reconciliation. No one can ever truly maintain that specific juncture in time and space; it exists only in memory and in the past. The habitus and self are constantly in a state of flux. The relationship between these competing aspects of culture, religion and gender is necessarily a constant power struggles between lived subjectivities. As women we must inhabit multiple identities, to speak a number of cultural languages, to negotiate and translate between them. We must continually construct and re-construct a hybridized, plural identity, creating dialectics between the past lived cultural experience and our new senses of self. We must be members of several cultural communities and negotiate on the edges of the borderlines, and to end with Stuart Hall, “the negotiations between and across these complex ‘borderlines’ are characteristic of modernity itself.”

The ‘oppressed Afghan woman’

For a Western audience, the very mention of acid-throwing as a form of intimidation immediately conjures up images of the ‘oppressed Afghan woman’. The media has developed a fetish for reporting these events in Afghanistan (and broader Muslim world for that matter). So we hear countless horror stories of acid throwing, or Afghan women killed in some honour killing to ‘punish’ them for their audacious attempt to attend school, go to work, to fall in love with the wrong person. We are made to believe this is the doing of the brutal Taliban regime and their twisted version of Islam– which the ‘alien’ visibility of the Burqa helps to convey and validate the very oppression these women are experiencing. This trend of reporting marks the new found interest in Afghan women’s discrimination which conveniently began in 2001, in which saw the assault on Afghanistan—one of the top five poorest countries in the world—by a U.S. led force. Their ‘Western sisters’, Laura Bush and Cherrie Booth Blair appropriated Western feminist language in defense of Afghan women, disseminated and absorbed by gullible Western media consumers. Of course, these ‘Western feminists’ happen to conveniently forget the equally draconian measures that discriminate against women in other countries like Saudi Arabia, a key ally of the U.S. Ironically, Western feminists who supported and continue to support the invasion of Afghanistan did a great disservice to their cause. Not only did they deny the agency of Afghan women, they helped to construct a West that was the ‘saviour’ of women; in doing so, they silenced their own voices in the West by producing the erroneous understanding Western women have been already liberated.

The dichotomy of the Western saviour of women (Other) versus an oriental Islam symbolized by the Taliban was once again resuscitated for imperialist endeavors. Like the colonisers of the past, white men were called upon to save brown women from brown men. Within this neo-colonialist framework, the West was constructed as the beacon of civilisation and Afghanistan was constructed a land of barbarism and darkness—where the ‘evils’ of Islam reigned supreme and women were left at its mercy. Thus, the Afghan woman had to be ‘protected’. In IR theoretical understanding, Afghanistan was the feminised other;–penetrable territory that needed to be protected from the predatory advances of a constructed enemy: Islam.

Within this reductive framework, the complexities of Afghan culture and history are removed. The 26 year period of war in which the current disaster unfolding in the country has become irrelevant. The ugly reality of the U.S. contributing to the very abuses against women in the country; a non-issue. In reality, the U.S. funded the very men who later became part of the Northern Alliance and the Taliban. (Most of us know this. We know that the Northern Alliance committed acts that were criminal if not more against women and the entire Afghan people for that matter.—which was conveniently ignored). In other words, the U.S. fomented the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the region. After pushing the Soviets into Afghanistan and using the Afghans to fight a proxy war, and leaving the entire country absolutely destroyed—the U.S left with their money and their support. American promises of rebuilding the country were left broken. What occurs when civil society has been destroyed and a power vacuum has been left: of course a civil war—which occurred between warring Mujahideen factions who had been armed to the teeth by the Americans. The civil war ended with the advent of the Taliban.

As Carol A. Stabile and Deepa Kumal rightly point out, this crucial historical context has been denied, and by doing so, it has put the blame on Afghan society itself. That the acid-throwing, the honour killings and the brutal oppression of women become the product of Islamic and cultural barbarism. That this is just something that occurs in these societies and the enlighten West’s intervention is probably a good thing for these people.  Not only is the correct historical and political context removed, but a particular construction of the ‘Afghan woman’ is deployed in order to reinforce this deep division of ‘us’ and ‘them’. In reality, the experiences of Afghan women differ vastly–especially rural and urban experiences of women. Of course, there are those who are subjected to revolting acts of repression. Which society hasn’t experienced these? It is true, generally, Afghan culture is patriarchal and this has been accentuated in the current climate, but this has not meant women in the past have not been successful or lacked agency. Women’s organisations like RAWA didn’t just appear after 2001. Such organisations have existed since the 1970s. I look at my own family as an example, where Aunts and other female relatives were teachers, doctors, nurses, journalists as well as mothers and wives.  However, the wars that have raged for decades, both international and civil, have played a significant role in destroying the country, creating an environment of extremism, poverty and political exploitation by international actors like the U.S. and corporations. Sultan Barakat and Gareth Wardell’s interesting essay on Afghan women’s experience in the past 30 years conclude that Afghan women should not be assumed as passive or powerless women, because they have developed new roles and opportunities in their new environments as community leaders, mobilizing the family and community, have key roles in the economy, brokering peace deals, and fighting. Why aren’t these women ever shown in the media? Is it because they rupture the static construction of the ‘passive and oppressed Afghan (Muslim) woman’ who lacks agency of her own?

My intention here isn’t to undermine the harrowing experiences of those women of Afghanistan who are suffering—indeed, it’s a gruesome reality; rather, Afghan women’s experiences–whether inspiring or oppressive—not only should be represented proportionately, but also cannot be understood nor represented in a historical, religious and cultural terms alone. The fault lies both with cultural tribalism and the politics of Western countries. Acknowledging and understanding the complexity of historical and political events and experiences in the country is more useful to Afghan women than the superficial removal of burqas or wholesale condemnation of the Taliban.

-Sahar

Third International Congress on Islamic Feminism

The third International Congress on Islamic feminism is underway in Barcelona. Muslim women from around the world have gathered to discuss the pressing issue of women in Islam and the Muslim world. Events like these and the debate which ensues – both from women and men–can often be heated and emotional. Just the very mention of Islamic feminism seems to arouse criticism. Too often there is a tendency to discredit women’s activism in the Muslim community simply because these women choose to label themselves as ‘Islamic feminists’.

Rather than getting into the various currents of Islamic feminism-which many of its critics tend to forget, I’d rather discuss the antagonistic and emotional reaction by many critics in the Muslim community. Why there is so much hysteria around the issue of women in Islamic discourse. Sometimes I wonder if the label ‘feminist’ is worth even using because too often it serves more of a hindrance than progress. This is perhaps because it is conflated with feminism’s role in the colonial period, and where it was used to legitimise the project of the colonial power. Further, it is also because it has been associated with the mimetic modernizing projects by bourgeois nationalists in countries like Egypt, Tunisia, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan etc. On the contrary, the reality being, neither the colonialist nor the nationalist ever genuinely pursued the ‘emancipation’ of women. Merely, the issue of women, in particular their body, were used as a battleground for conflicting ideologies. For instance in Tunisia, the Tunisian woman was ‘modern’ (unveiled) in the physical sense, but expected to maintain the traditional role as the ‘mother of the nation’ who produces modern Tunisian citizens. That was her primary role. My point here being both colonialists and modern nationalists never sought to emancipate women (assuming here many needed it in the first place) but instead infused the image of the ‘Muslim woman’ as a reflection of nationalist ideology-whether modern or Islamic. This historical background provides a clearer insight into why there has been such hysteria behind issues of women in the Muslim world. In modern history, she has been relegated into a position of producing culture and the nation. That is why in Iran, the image of the chador-wearing Iranian woman is emphasized to the degree that it does, because it has both a political nationalist and religious meaning of resistance: She symbolizes the Iranian revolution and the defiance of Iran. Or in the opposite case, the unveiled Turkish woman is the symbol of Attaturk’s efforts to bring Turkey out of ignorance and stagnation.

Considering the historical tradition, it’s not surprising that the word ‘feminism’ arouses such opposition and emotions. The situation of Muslim women today is far more harrowing as a result of these experiences. The fanatical discourses around her have made it very difficult for any Muslim woman (or mEn for that matter) to point out injustices to even discuss the rights given to us in our very religion. It’s a time of crisis for the Muslim community if downloading the rights of women in Islam is threatened with a death sentence or imprisonment– which recently occurred in Afghanistan. Moreover, this is all justified under the feeble effort to ‘preserve’ some sort of a constructed authenticity which has mummified our discourse to the point where voices have been smothered because we’re led to believe everything is a threat. These include the voices of Islamic feminists.

I don’t agree with all Islamic feminists, and understand the discomfort of the label ‘feminist’ sometimes. Single standpoint feminism has done a great disservice with its monological approach. But we should forget about the stress on terms and labels, and focus on the actual issues. Forget about the ideological background some of these women may be inspired by. Is not the reality of the continued marginalization of over half of our community more important? I’m writing this soon after I read a report on an increase of self-immolation in Afghanistan. Indeed, such an act should be contextualized within the experiences of war, but as local Afghan human rights groups have reported, they are the result of women who come from abusive marriages and feel they have nowhere to turn. As an Afghan woman who has witnessed the disgusting chauvinism the culture has a tendency to express (clearly not always), I believe the evidence of self-immolation and other equally appalling acts throughout the country are symptoms of a deeper problem. The Congress is therefore addressing these issues and doing what the broader Muslim community has failed to do: Openly discussing women-related issues in our community-and they’re doing it within an Islamic framework. Encouraging the education of Muslim women, denouncing honour killings, forced and child marriages and other practices plaguing the lives of many Muslim women are often key issues raised in these discussions.

The broader Muslim community can decry the treatment of Muslim women in the West (example France or the Netherlands regarding the Hijab), however, we’ve failed to voice the wrongs against them within our own community. The attitude from many Muslims has been to not shed light on these problems because it gives Western critics further reason to demonise Muslims and Islam. Ironically, by ignoring the suffering of these members of the Muslim community, we are doing just that. In fact, we’re allowing these victims to equate their suffering with Islam, and helping them to turn away from it. Whether one agrees with the methodology and interpretations being employed by those who advocate for the rights of women in the Muslim world, it’s appalling to reject and deny the need to incorporate informed women’s voices in today’s Islamic discourse–which criticism of such gatherings shamefully suggests.

 -Sahar