A Quiet Revolution (32 page)

This decade, inaugurated by the violence of
9
/
11
, and threaded

throughout with the intermittently rising and falling levels of violence of American-led wars in Muslim-majority countries, would be in these and many more ways an extraordinary and disturbing decade for many, Muslim and non-Muslim alike.

For those of us who had been working on the subject of women and Islam for many years in the pre-
9
/
11
era, there was one feature of the new public conversation emerging in America and the West that was particularly startling. This was the way in which the subject of women in

Islam, and in particular women’s oppression and the emblems of that oppression, such as the veil and the burka, became recurring themes in the broad public conversation in America and elsewhere in the West.

Beginning soon after
9
/
11
and increasing steadily ever since, the sub-

ject would be repeatedly invoked by politicians and the media, including by people at the highest levels of government, often as if it were a mat- ter of profound political import to the West and its democratic projects and commitments (including, for example, in relation to bringing democ-

racy to Iraq), and as a matter that was pertinent even to American and Western national security. It was at this point, as I noted in the Intro- duction, that First Lady Laura Bush would declare in a radio address on November
17
,
2001
, that “civilized people throughout the world are speaking out in horror—not only because our hearts break for the women and children of Afghanistan, but also because in Afghanistan we see the world the terrorists would like to impose on the rest of us. . . . The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of

women.”
2
And just two days later, as I noted, Cherie Blair would issue a similar statement in London. These views were echoed and disseminated in the media, which—with numerous images of and references to veils and burkas and the Taliban’s horrifying treatment of women—por- trayed the war as righteous by virtue of American and Western concern to save the women. As the British journalist Polly Toynbee wrote, the “burka” was now the “battle flag” and “shorthand moral justification” for the war in Afghanistan.
3

Inaugurated in this way at the highest level of state as a subject of deep political import to the West and to “civilization,” and as moral jus- tification for war, the subject of women and Islam under one guise or another (often encapsulated by controversies around the hijab and burka) emerged as the flashpoint of conflicts and tensions around issues of “Islam and the West”—be it in relation to immigrant minorities or to wars abroad.

These tensions have remained high throughout this decade and concomitantly—repeating a pattern played out many times in history when women, Islam, and the veil emerged into the foreground as em- blems of civilizational tensions (in the Cromer era in Egypt, for example,

and in Iran after the revolution of
1979
)—the topics of women, Islam,

and the veil have remained through the decade in the stratosphere of po- litical, media, and public interest in the West. Whereas once working on this subject had meant burying myself in libraries and reading obscure articles, now I followed the most significant events and publications on the topic by following the news. I learned first from newspapers and tel- evision and radio broadcasts what the latest debates and controversies were in the West about women and Islam, and about the events and the books and individuals who were sparking these. It is from the media also

that I learn of the latest outbreaks of debates around veils or burkas and the call to ban one or the other, topics repeatedly flaring into the news in Western countries, where they often now figure as matters of import to the state. Of course, issues surrounding the veil have been matters of state in Muslim-majority countries for a long time—be it banning it, as in Turkey (and also in Egypt, as I described earlier) or enforcing it, as in Saudi Arabia and Iran. But now hijabs and burkas were emerging as mat- ters of state also for Western nations.
‌

In keeping with the suddenly intense media and public interest in the subject, a raft of books addressing the topic of women in Islam now appeared in quick succession and became instant best sellers. Among these most notably was Azar Nafisi’s
Reading Lolita in Tehran
(
2003
), Ir- shad Manji’s
Trouble with Islam
(
2004
), and Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s
Caged Vir- gin
(
2006
). These and other such books, nearly all of them written by women of Muslim background whose relationship with Islam was at best ambiguous, both captured a huge readership in Europe and America and, simultaneously, triggered angry responses and sharply critical analy- ses from academics. Hamid Dabashi, for example, of Columbia Univer-

sity, declared that
Reading Lolita in Tehran
was in essence deploying concerns “about the plight of Muslim women” in the service “of U.S. ideological warmongering.”
4
Others, too, as I discuss in Chapter
9
, wrote of such books in similar vein.

Against this backdrop of intense national and international (and pri- marily Western) interest, the subject of women and Islam also took on now a new burst of liveliness among religiously committed Muslim Amer- ican feminists, giving rise to a new level of Muslim feminist activism—a level unprecedented in my own lifetime in America. This activism was often followed and reported on in the national and international media. The story of Professor Aminah Wadud’s woman-led congregational Fri- day prayer, for example, held in a rented chapel in New York, was covered by such major news organizations as the
New York Times
and the BBC (indeed, reporters at the event, as I saw, seemed almost to outnumber the congregation), and images of it were beamed across the world. Through this decade many women who were committed Muslims would emerge, as I describe in the following chapters, as activists and writers who were deeply committed too to pursuing the goal of women’s rights.

Such is the lively, volatile, fraught, and complicated ground mak- ing up the subject of women, Islam, and the West, and specifically Amer- ica, in this eventful first decade of the twenty-first century, and this therefore is the territory that I set out to describe in the following chap- ters. The core of my account is always the subject of women and Islam in the West in these times. But of course that subject is inextricably en- tangled in and formed by the broader context shaping the environment in relation to issues of Islam and Muslims and the West.

Having been drawn into researching this subject in the first place by the growing presence of the hijab in America, and by my desire to un- derstand what its presence meant, along with that of Islamism, and what their trajectories might be in America and the West, it is Islamists in par- ticular (and not secular or non-Islamist Muslims who actually make up the majority of American Muslims) who receive our primary attention. I felt that it was essential to try to convey something of the com- plexity and packed eventfulness of these times with regard to Islam and Muslims in America, and in regard to the very issue of women and Islam as this topic surfaced and resurfaced in public discourse. It was impor- tant, for instance, to both take note of the public conversation on women and Islam with its concern over the oppression of Muslim women and register the fact that, even as these ideas were in common circulation in the public conversation, women in hijab were actually being attacked on the streets of America. These and other such details bearing at one level on the larger conversation on Muslim women in this country, and di- rectly affecting on another level the daily lives of Muslim women in this same society—all of these together shape the environment in which Is- lamism has been evolving in this decade as regards Islam and women, and all therefore must be at least briefly taken note of in that they all have their part in affecting the broad environment and consequently the di-

rection of Islam’s development.

Chapter
9
takes as its starting point the first days and months after
9
/
11
. My aim in this chapter was first to describe the impact and effects of that event on the social, political, and cultural environment in Amer- ican society as regards Islam, and Islam and women, and the impact and consequences of these for Muslim women as well as men. Second, I was concerned to describe and analyze dominant themes and elements in the

public conversation on women in Islam: obviously an important com- ponent shaping the cultural and political environment in which Muslim American women—and indeed all of us—live. In particular I am con- cerned to analyze and reflect on the ways in which this broad public con- versation of proclaimed concern for the plight of Muslim women in fact plays out, intertwines and interacts with the actual lives of Muslim women, be this American Muslim women—such as Debbie Almontaser and Nadia Abu El-Haj—who live in the United States, or women who live abroad and whose lives are directly affected by American views and foreign policies.

In Chapter
10
I describe the impact of
9
/
11
on Muslim American

organizations and in particular on ISNA. Drawing on my own observa- tions of the evolving scene at their conventions through the post-
9
/
11
years, I begin with a descriptive overview of the broad trends of devel- opment under way at these meetings. I focus in particular on develop- ments affecting the subject of women and Islam, and I conclude with thumbnail sketches of the lives and activism of some notable ISNA women.

In Chapter
11
, the book’s final chapter, I set out to give an overview of the main trends of American Muslim women’s activism today and through the first decade of the century. I conclude with reflections on and an overview and assessment of the broad direction in which Is- lamism appears to be evolving today as regards women within this West- ern, democratic, American context.

•
9
•
‌
‌

Backlash

The Veil, the Burka, and the Clamor of War

O

n September
18
,
2001
, President George W. Bush paid a visit to the mosque at the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., from which he spoke, as the
Washington Post
reported, to “admonish the nation not to avenge last week’s terrorist at-

tacks on innocent American Arabs and Muslims.”
1

The president’s visit had been prompted by a wave of hate crimes reported in the
Post
. Two men had been killed, one a Muslim Pakistani store owner who had been shot in Dallas on September
15
, and the other the Sikh owner of a gas station in Mesa, Arizona, shot on the same day. Sikhs (the paper explained) are not Muslims, but because they wear beards and turbans the killer took the man for a Muslim. The FBI, the ar- ticle also stated, had “initiated
40
hate crime investigations involving re- ported attacks on Arab American citizens and institutions.” CAIR had also received reports “of more than
350
attacks against Arab Americans around the country, ranging from verbal abuse to physical assault. It also received reports of dozens of mosques being firebombed or vandalized.” Among the reports the police were investigating was a case of “two Mus- lim girls” who were beaten at Moraine Valley College, in Palos Hills, Illi- nois.

President Bush’s visit, which had “surprised and gratified Islamic leaders,” the
Post
said, was one among a number of efforts on the part of

the Bush administration to prevent hate crimes against the “nearly
10
million American Arabs and Muslims”—efforts, the paper noted, that had included inviting Muzzamil H. Siddiqui to the memorial service held at the national cathedral on September
14
. Siddiqui, who had been pres- ident of ISNA (
1997
–
2001
), attended the service, reciting verses from the Quran as part of the ceremony.
2

In addition to preventing an escalation in hate crimes, the presi- dent’s visit to a mosque, as Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley explained, might help “convince would-be partners overseas that the U.S. effort is not anti-Arab or anti-Islam but anti-terrorist.” The visit also “buttressed Bush’s image as a ‘compassionate conservative.’” Such goals were all “intertwined,” a White House official had explained.

President Bush’s address at the mosque included the remarks that the “face of terror is not the true face of Islam” and that “Islam is peace.” In addition, the president made special mention of the attacks on Mus- lim women who wore hijab. “Women who cover their heads should not fear leaving their homes,” he said. “That’s not the America I know,” he went on. “That should not and that will not stand in America.”
3

“The initial impact of
9
/
11
on the Muslim community,” observed

Yvonne Haddad, a longtime scholar of Islam in America, “was one of deep shock and fear of potential backlash.”
4
Indeed, it was not only Mus- lims who were afraid and uncertain in these initial days as to what might transpire next and whether the early instances of violence were auguries of worse to come. One of my friends, a practicing Jew of European back- ground, advised me to remove my name from the front door, as “one simply never knew” how things might go, and another, of Christian background, invited me to come stay until things were more settled. There were many anecdotal reports of such kindly advice and offers of help that Muslims all over the country reportedly received from friends and neighbors—advice and offers indicating that it was not only Mus- lims who feared a backlash.