Why feminists need to start lovin’ the hijab

So I was reading the news this morning and I chanced upon this. It seems the hijab has set off a national controversy in Norway. It all started when a Muslim woman petitioned to wear her hijab with her police uniform. And from there things pretty much went downhill when another Muslim woman set fire to a hijab on International Women’s Day. Oh, don’t you just love these gliberal feminists! They are quick to flutter their hankies on behalf of feminism, but rather see a Muslim woman’s brains splattered to the walls of her house than see her trapped in a hijab!

Anyway, my annoyance this morning was short-lived for I read another article. Gauri van Gulik from Human Rights Watch explains why attacking hijab-wearing women are counterproductive to the cause of gender equality. Here are a few choice snippets worth repeating:

“Some feminists seek these bans in the name of helping Muslim women, whom they often see as uniformly oppressed. Anti-immigration politicians seek these policies because they see people who refuse to “fit in” as a threat to western society. But these arguments are detrimental both to women’s rights and to peaceful integration, and the women most likely to be affected are rarely consulted.”

“Some supporters of these bans maintain that wearing a headscarf is inherently demeaning. They contend that a headscarf-wearing teacher is unable to promote gender equality and freedom of choice among her students. But these well-meaning arguments run counter to the very tenet of gender equality: women’s ability to make decisions about their lives without interference from the state or others.”

“The argument to ban the headscarf in the name of “cultural integration,” is at times expressed as open hostility toward non-white, or non-Judeo-Christian, immigrants.”

“But banning the headscarf is the worst possible policy response to the need to bring people into mainstream society. Our research showed that the ban serves to exclude, rather than include.”

“Gender equality and peaceful integration should be prime objectives for anyone concerned with public policy. These objectives are not met by excluding women who make a choice to cover their hair.”

Naturally I now want to bake van Gulik a cake.

-F

Thanks, but no thanks, ‘sister’

F

I recently read two very interesting articles. First article wonders why today’s women are feeling utterly useless and provides several insights I thought were interesting. It seems despite having a flourishing career, a doting husband and cute-as-hell kids, and being a well-traveled jet-setter, women still feel unworthy and can’t help but compare themselves with other similarly successful women. It appears “having it all” is no longer enough to keep a woman happy.

The second article is excellent. I love an honest feminist and Zoe Lewis is exactly that. She bravely admits that she “should have ditched feminism for love, children and baking”. I’m sure her article has earned the ire of fellow feminists everywhere, which is a shame really because they are missing out on an important realization: “I was led to believe that women could “have it all” and, more to the point, that we wanted it all. To that end I have spent 20 years ruthlessly pursuing my dreams – to be a successful playwright. I have sacrificed all my womanly duties and laid it all at the altar of a career. And was it worth it? The answer has to be a resounding no.” God, the raw honesty! Doesn’t it make you wanna bake her a cake or something?

Reading these two articles made me realize two things:

1. Women can’t be friends under capitalism.
It appears that women are quite the obedient little capitalists: “You want it all, you can have it all!” Who cares about sisterhood and solidarity when there are better things on offer… like shoes, gossip mags, rampant rabbits that lasts all night long unlike men, chick flicks, clothes-induced credit card debt and a new hair style to compliment it, and CHOCOLATE! You go, girl! The world is completely yours for the taking…

It’s tragic. There’s no neutrality. No real affection. No real sisterhood. You either bitch about other women or you fuck them. And what’s worse is the constant judgment… What is she wearing? She’s a total slut! She doesn’t deserve that promotion even if she’s totally qualified! Stop talking to my boyfriend! Who does she think she is?… and my personal favourite is from the movie ‘Spanglish’, when Tea Leoni says to her new Spanish maid “You are GORGEOUS!”, her mother adds, “She didn’t mean that as a compliment, she meant it as an accusation.” It’s never-ending and it’s everywhere.

2. Apart from a vagina, women of colour feminists don’t have anything in common with white feminists.
I don’t particularly care for white feminists. What they have on offer is nothing more than a feminist-brand that’s predominantly consumed by white women… and women of colour who have forgotten the colour they were born with. Thanks, but no thank, ‘sister’. White Feminism is devoid of any real substance precisely because its ideology is essentially capitalist, and therefore patriarchal. It gives the illusion of choice to its consumer, but there is no real choice available. This point is a recurring theme in the coffee-bland neurosis that is Sex & the City. Through out the series we see Carrie’s perpetual indecision regarding shoes (“Should I buy this shoe or that one…they are both nice…) and the men in her life (“Is he the one?”). And Samantha’s depart from men into the arms of her lesbian lover is described as “It’s like ten dicks!” … Yes, you can indeed have it all because you are, uh, worth it, but it’s better to be in the anxiety of choice than to actually choose.

In the meantime, while we wait for white feminists to make up their mind, sisterhood meets its demise and the lack of solidarity further divides common interests and weakens the unity of all women, whatever the colour and religion. And on a radio somewhere Katie Perry sings a lyrics heavy with accusation: You change your mind/Like a girl changes clothes/Yeah you, PMS/Like a bitch/I would know/Cause you’re hot then you’re cold/You’re yes then you’re no/You’re in then you’re out/You’re up then you’re down/You’re wrong when it’s right/It’s black and it’s white/We fight, we break up/We kiss, we make up…

‘Saved’ Sect? I don’t need saving.

“If we are surprised by anything, that this criminal molested you at the age of 16, because this is an age at which one is big and able to shout and defend oneself, especially as that happened a number of times. You could also have stopped him by telling your family. No matter how cut off the family members may be from one another, they would not take such incidents lightly.”

From Islam-qa.com, Fatwa no. 87865

- F

Wonder Woman, Suicide Bombers & Gliberal Feminists

Second World War is generally understood as the most liberating and empowering period for western women. While men were away war fighting, women were fighting a different kind of war at home. Rosie the Riveter, Wendy the Welder and Josephine the Plumber became the new faces of a working class previously dominated by men. It was here, amidst women who were popping rivets on the West Coast, making bombers and fighters for aeronautical companies like Boeing, that Wonder Woman was born. Her creator William Moulton Marston, a psychologist by profession and the inventor of the polygraph, designed her to represent a particular form of feminism that believed women had the potential to be superior to men.

“Not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, and power. Not wanting to be girls, they don’t want to be tender, submissive, peace-loving as good women are. Women’s strong qualities have become despised because of their weakness. The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman.”

Essentially, what he succeeded in creating was exactly the inverse of an empowered woman. The comic’s relentless message was appallingly male-centered: an overtly sensual Amazonian warrior who was as “beautiful as Aphrodite, wise as Athena, swifter than Hermes, and stronger than Hercules” sent as an ambassador to “Man’s World” or “Patriarch’s World” ( i.e. America, described as “the last citadel of democracy” and thus “America, liberty and freedom must be preserved!”). Aphrodite, in Greek history, is the goddess of love, lust, beauty, prostitution and sexual reproduction. Athena is exactly the opposite, her austere observance of sexual modesty gaining her the name “Athena Parthenos” (Virgin Athena). Isn’t this Athenian (her civilian identity as Diana Prince the secretary) yet Amazonian (Wonder Woman) portrayal precisely the stuff of male fantasy, a prelude to sex? Does it not act as a fantasmatic supplement feeding the predominantly male audience’s sexuality- nay, pornosexuality? I say pornosexuality because in reality men would prefer an Athenian woman – in this case a quiet, diligent secretary – for marriage and bearing children. A brazen Amazonian hussy would strictly be confined to fantasies, most of them ending with the man, the true alpha, successfully taming the wild vixen. Testament to this are the numerous scenes where Wonder Woman is tied up and drawn in provocative positions. In one issue when her wrist bracelets (symbol of bondage?) get broken, she loses total control and shatters into absolute madness. “Power without self-control tears a girl to pieces,” she sighs.

So the comic’s supposed ‘feminism’ was of course anything but. Curiously this doesn’t seem to upset western feminists. In fact, they embrace Wonder Woman as a super-hero and are proud of the fact she kicks ass better than a man does. And even more curiously, while heroes like Wonder Woman, Sheena, She-Ra and Elektra are widely praised as strong, beautiful, competent and altruistic, veiled Muslim women with guns blazing, bombs in hands, ready to take on any villain in order to save their families and people are usually described in terms of “economical necessity”, “jilted love”, “failed marriages”, “personal despair” and “moral transgressions needing redemption through a martyr’s death”. It never occurs to the gliberal feminists that these women could actually be politically driven and that politics alone can sufficiently describe their actions. The idea that a Muslim woman would be interested in preserving her country, liberty and freedom is utterly unconceivable. That she doesn’t need to be saved from the libidinal economics of uncivilized, gynophobic Muslim men is met with absolute disbelief.

Perhaps this is because western feminists are increasingly realizing that they are the ones in need of rescuing. “The sexuality that has been freed is male (porno)sexuality,” Germaine Greer bravely acknowledges. Gender revolution and sexual liberation has actually harmed women more than the vast majority of feminists care to acknowledge. The female sexuality has been stringently neutralized- what Irigaray calls “a genocide more radical than any form of destruction there has ever been in History”. She believes men and women cannot be equal and any attempts to do so would be futile. She gives an example from the workplace: “I fail to see how a woman can pass for a man at work. She can, of course, dress like a man, stop making love or doing the housework, no longer have children, change her voice, etc. Something of this sort occurs from time to time as a symptom of the neutralization of the sexes in modern times. What should be asked is whether this is due to the choice of particular women or to the necessities of a world men construct, a world women do not choose but tolerate. They do not become women; they become men. This is what the male world demands of them by failing to recognize female identity.”

And so Wonder Woman is not really a woman. In fact, the veiled suicide bomber is more woman precisely because she denies the hetero-normative gender in its usual construction. This probably scares the hell out of feminists.

-F

Kill the Poor

In capitalist ideology poverty is thought of as an ethnic trait rather than social or economic. For instance, the disgusting term “welfare queens” is always associated with African-American single mothers. And what about Katrina? Remember how people were accusing the power elites for using Katrina as a cover to get rid of the poor? Perhaps they were on to something there.

The desire to eliminate poverty is one of the fundamental fantasies of capitalism. This desire, however, inevitably becomes the desire to get rid of the poor. Naturally, this desire is also disingenuous because the poor cannot be eliminated or gotten rid of. This, of course, can never be admitted. To do so would be to give up the fantasy of creating an utopia of a capitalism beyond capitalism where today’s underclass ‘exceptions’ – the homeless, the ghettoized, the permanently underemployed – doesn’t exist. So the poor are airbrushed out of the picture or carefully tucked away in sweatshops, hidden from the law and public. Well, at least they used to be.

This photo is from the August 2008 issue of Indian Vogue. The man, toothless and barefooted, is holding a Burberry umbrella worth $200 (it’s just an umbrella for fuck’s sake!). Other photos in the series are of similar nature. They are shamelessly made to display how unbelievably exploited they are. There’s an added bonus, too. Nameless and poor means way cheaper than hiring Kate Moss. Also, ever notice how big fashion magazines lavishly use backdrops from ‘exotic’ third world countries? Nearly always a typically white model is seen wearing ridiculously expensive clothing while the poor ‘natives’ are strategically posed in the best angle possible to capture a gorgeous picture that will be viewed by an audience who also tucks away their Mexican or Filipino maids in abusive households. It’s all there, the blatant exploitation, for all to see. There is no shame. None whatsoever. Not particularly useful to capitalism, you see. And the fact that these photos do not conform to the usual practice of airbrushing is precisely why they are shocking. The message is clear: these people are genetically destined to fail, so might as well squeeze whatever we can get out of them. Or in the case of Africa and Iraq, kill them off. Literally kill.

In 1968, environmentalist Dr. Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, which sold about 20 million copies and greatly influenced policy makers. According to him immediate radical action was required to deal with the problem of global overpopulation.

Our position requires that we take immediate action at home and promote effective action worldwide. We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail. We can no longer afford merely to treat the symptoms of the cancer of population growth; the cancer itself must be cut out.

He goes on to say that compulsory birth control could be imposed by governments by means of “temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple food”.

Any moral human being would be horrified by these methods of depopulation advocated by Ehrlich. But not the US government.

In December 1974, the US National Security Council completed a classified 200 page study called “National Security Study Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for US Security and Overseas Interests (NSSM)”. This study explained that the US needed to control populations in third world countries in order to maintain access to certain resources:

The location of known reserves of higher-grade ores of most minerals favors increasing dependence of all industrialized regions on imports from less-developed countries. The US economy will require large and increasing amounts of minerals from abroad, especially from less-developed countries. That fact gives the US enhanced interest in the political, economic, and social stability of the supplying countries. Wherever a lessening of population pressures through reduced birth rates can increase the prospects for such stability, population policy becomes relevant to resource supplies and to the economic interests of the United States.

In 1988 the Pentagon released a report entitled “Global Demographic Trends to the Year 2010: Implications for US Security” which stressed that “population planning be given the status of weapons development”.

Another report reprinted in the 1991 edition of Foreign Affairs as “Population Change and National Security,” warned that current population trends could create an “international environment even more menacing to the security prospects of the Western alliance than was the Cold War for the past generation”.

Faced with global population growth posing as a national security threat, the US government decided that the only viable solution was forced depopulation- in other words, genocide.

So AIDS was introduced to Africa. The cure, they were told, was sex with a virgin. Thousands of women, infants and little girls are raped as a result of deliberate misinformation. And throughout Africa, in war zones, nursing mothers had their breasts cut off and pregnant women had their abdomen cut open, the fetuses yanked out and kicked like footballs before slaughtering them. The idea was that without women and children, a certain race will cease to be. This is still common practice today in places like Darfur.

Similarly, the genocide unfolding before our eyes in Iraq has been carefully engineered for years. Between 1991 and 1998, half a million Iraqi children under the age of five died as a result of the sanctions. If the years between 1999-2003 are included in, the number would likely be closer to 1 million. Also, since the 2003 invasion, the US hasn’t done much to rebuild Iraq’s civilian infrastructure. In July 2004, the White House released a report stating that the US government has spent only 2% of an $18.4 billion aid package that Congress approved in October 2003! Even then nothing from the package has been spent on health care, sanitation, human rights, education, construction and water projects. And lets not forget the the effects of DU munitions, which has a half-life of 4.5 billion years. Essentially the US has eliminated Iraqis from the healthy human gene pool. Gives a whole different meaning to genetically destined to fail, doesn’t it?

-F

Oil: The root of all evil?

I’m reading an extremely interesting and thought-provoking paper called Oil, Women and Islam by Michael Ross. I’m sure the title itself is self-explanatory, but here’s an introduction nevertheless:

“Women have made less progress toward gender equality in the Middle East than in any other region. Many observers claim this is due to the region’s Islamic traditions. I suggest that oil, not Islam, is at fault; and that oil production also explains why women lag behind in many other countries. Oil production reduces the number of women in the labor force, which in turn reduces their political influence. As a result, oil-producing states are left with atypically strong patriarchal norms, laws, and political institutions. I support this argument with global data on oil production, female work patterns, and female political representation, and by comparing oil-rich Algeria to oil-poor Morocco and Tunisia. This argument has implications for the study of the Middle East, Islamic culture, and the resource curse.”

You can read it here.

-F

Decoy Politics

This is ridiculous. And the fact that Anni agreed to waver his initial choice in favour of a male candidate is even more ridiculous. Majority wins, right? Sorry but no. No to democracy and democratizing the Maldives. No to patriarchal interpretations that’s central to fanaticism. I want nothing to do with a movement, be it a majority or a minority, which treats women as an optional extra.

We didn’t use to be a male-only nation. We were once a kingdom ruled by queens, both before and after the (forced) conversion to Islam. Our women weren’t a meek, submissive lot who allowed the honour of men to be founded upon the degradation of women. In fact, the infamous Arab traveler Ibn Battuta wrote: “It is a strange thing about these islands that their ruler is a woman, Khadija. Her army comprises about a thousand men, recruited from abroad, though some are natives. They are paid in rice monthly.” He also wrote how the “womenfolk do not cover their heads, not even their queen does so, and they comb their hair and gather it at one side. Most of them wear only an apron from their waists to the ground, the rest of their bodies being uncovered. When I held the qadiship there, I tried to put an end to this practice and ordered them to wear clothes, but I met with no success.” Another traveler Al-Idrisi wrote: “All these islands have a chief (ra’ïs), who unites them, protects and defends them, and makes truce according to his ability. His wife enacts as an arbitrator among the people and does not veil herself from them. When she issues her orders, her husband, the chief, though he is present, does not interfere with any of her ordinances. It has always been a custom with them that a woman arbitrates, a custom which they not depart.”

Today it’s an entirely different story. Within the past five years extremists have succeeded in doing what even Ibn Battuta could not. Everywhere you look you see women garbed completely in black from head to toe. These women do not work, do not bother with education, do not concern themselves with politics/economy, and do not believe in contraception or vaccination. Their entire world is behind the closed doors of their homes- the ‘natural’ boundary drawn for them by men who make Kaiser Wilhelm look like a liberal. Where did we go wrong?

The increasingly popular acceptance of this extremist muck as the norm, as the part and parcel of Islamic tradition, is a symptom. It signifies our unstable politics and economical insecurities and how they affect each island-state. In the face of poverty, 2004 tsunami disaster (some island populations still remain displaced in temporary refuges), low income (unless one is a parliament member), limited educational opportunities, increasing domestic violence and drug trafficking, one can easily understand what attracts a man or a woman to become a raging zealot. Amidst alienation, despair, hopelessness and feelings of being abandoned by a God who is not supposed to let His believers down, Wahhabism offers a new interpretation to the purpose of life and shows a way of feeling empowered. This ultra-extremist doctrine, which was founded by the 19th century evangelist Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, persuades the zealot that individual trials and tribulations are trivial when compared to the state of the Islamic World (Palestine, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Iraq et al). And the only way to revive the ummah’s honour and dignity is to follow Abd al-Wahab’s example and rid Islam of the corruptions (capitalism, feminism, intellectualism, sectarian divisions, mysticism etc) that has crept into religion. In his book ‘The Place of Tolerance in Islam’ Khalid Abou el Fadl writes: “According to the Wahhabi creed, it was imperative to return to a presumed pristine, simple, straightforward Islam, which could be entirely reclaimed by literal implementation of the commands of the Prophet, and by strict adherence to correct ritual practice. Importantly, Wahhabism rejected any attempt to interpret the divine law historically or contextually, with attendant possibilities of reinterpretation under changed circumstances. It treated the vast majority of Islamic history as corruption of true and authentic Islam.”

Wahhabism was, and is, essentially a political movement that was globalized with the sword. This is evident in the history of Saudi Arabia. According to El Fadl, “in the late 18th century the Al Saud family united with the Wahhabi movement, and rebelled against Ottoman rule in Arabia. The rebellions were very bloody and the Wahhabis indiscriminately slaughtered and terrorized Muslims and non-Muslims alike. In 1818, Egyptian forced under the leadership of Muhammad Ali defeated this rebellion and Wahhabism seemed destined to become another fringe historical experience with no lasting impact on Islamic theology. But the Wahhabi creed was resuscitated in the early 20th century under the leadership of Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud, who allied himself with Wahhabi militant rebels know as the Ikhwan, in the beginnings of what would become Saudi Arabia. Even with the formation of the Saudi state, Wahhabism remained a creed of limited influence until the mid 1970s when the sharp rise in oil prices, together with aggressive Saudi proselytizing, dramatically contributed to its wide dissemination in the Muslim world. Wahhabism did not propagate itself as one school of thought or a particular orientation within Islam. Rather it asserted itself as the orthodox ’straight path’ of Islam. Moreover the proponents of Wahhabism refused to be labeled or categorized as followers of any particular figure including Abd al-Wahhab himself. Its proponents insisted that they were simply abiding by the dictates of al-salaf al-salih (the rightly guided predecessors, namely the Prophet and his companions), and in doing so, Wahhabis were able to appropriate the symbolism and categories of Salafism. Ironically, Salafism was founded in the early 20th century by al-Afghani, Muhammad Abduh, and Rashid Ridaas a liberal theological orientation. To respond to the demands of modernity, they argued, Muslims needed to return to the original sources of the Quran and Sunnah, and engage in de novo interpretations of the text. By the 1970s however, Wahhabism had succeeded in transforming Salafism from a liberal modernist orientation to a literalist, puritan, and conservative theology. The sharp rises in oil prices in 1975 enabled Saudi Arabia, the main proponent of Wahhabism, to disseminate the Wahhabi creed under a Salafi guise, which purported to revert back to the accretions of historical practice. In reality, however, Saudi Arabia projected its own fairly conservative cultural practices onto the textual sources of Islam ad went on to proselytize these projections as the embodiment of Islamic orthodoxy.”

This is where we went wrong- when we adopted Wahhabism as the solution to the Maldivian problem when it should have been treated as a symptom, a warning. Democracy came a bit too late. If anything, democracy, at this stage, is nothing more than necessary fiction. MDP may have members like Mariya Ahmed Didi and Dr. Aminath Jameel who speak for women and their rights. But they are nothing more than decoys. They play a role of deception, to lure us into fantasy of gender equity rather than depravity. Their biological sex might be female, but the cultural construct of their gender is not. And this is precisely why I want no part of this decoy politics.

-F

White men saving brown women from brown men

Oh, this is just incredible. This, too. And this.

According to the articles, women are blowing themselves up because the big bad Muslim men are forcing them into it by brainwashing them into avenging their dead husbands/children or by raping them (“this would leave her with no choice but to end her life”) or by threatening to kill their husbands/children unless they become suicide bombers. They are treated merely as weapons, a means to an end, and nothing more. So, naturally the US has taken upon itself to ’save’ these helpless women (sound familiar?). And I just love how they are going about it- y’know, being all respectful of Islam and tolerant of Muslim cultural sensibilities. It’s hypocritical and this selective arrogation of feminism and concern for Muslim women (a commonality in imperialistic discourses) sickens me.

- F