A Quiet Revolution (50 page)

Being Muslim by heritage, secular or not, seems to have a place in this larger group’s professional and public lives that is perhaps compa- rable to the place which, as Drew Faust’s above-quoted words suggest, being woman has in Faust’s public and professional life.
57
Following out

how non-Islamist people of Muslim heritage are relating to their Islamic heritage as they become part of the fabric of North America is a whole other field of enquiry and one that awaits exploration. In this book I set out to understand the significance of the appearance of Islamism and the veiling trend in the United States and how these currents would evolve in the context of a Western democratic nation.

Following out this story and focusing in particular in the last chap- ters on American Muslim women’s activism in relation to gender and women’s rights has brought me to the astonishing conclusion that it is after all Islamists and the children of Islamists—the very people whose presence in this country had initially alarmed me—who were now in the vanguard of those who were most fully and rapidly assimilating into the distinctively American tradition of activism in pursuit of justice and who now essentially made up the vanguard of those who are struggling for women’s rights in Islam.

The conclusion that I find myself arriving at is clearly a far happier and more optimistic one than I had ever imagined I would find myself arriving at. Still, optimistic though my overall conclusion is, as I just sug- gested it would be a mistake to imagine that Islamists and Muslim Amer- icans who are staunch believers in God-given gender hierarchy are now perhaps a vanishing species. Just as it would be a mistake for researchers focused, for example, on following out the story of American feminism

in the
1960
s and
1970
s to conclude, as they chronicle the extraordinary

successes and liveliness of that movement in that era, that American women and men who believed in or practiced notions of male domi- nance must now be a vanishing species.

As it turned out, this first decade of the twenty-first century has proved to be one of tremendous liveliness and activism among Ameri- can Muslim women in relation to issues of women and gender. It is this

activism that occupies the foreground of the last chapters of this book, just as, were this a book about American feminism in the
1960
s, it would be the ideas and activism of those feminists that the book would be fol- lowing out—and not the positions and perspectives of members of the

broader society whose views the feminists were challenging and resisting. It would be quite untrue, for example, if I were to claim that I never heard androcentric and patriarchal views expressed, say, at ISNA. Such

elements were certainly present in the background to the women’s ac- tivism and the women-affirming themes and concerns that I was focused on observing.

It is important, too, to take note of a number of features and char- acteristics of our times pertinent to and affecting the developments that have occupied the forefront of my attention. Thus in the first place it is important to emphatically underscore the fact that the very conditions

of our post-
9
/
11
era, which favor the emergence of voices critical of con-

servative Islam, were conditions which conversely would have no doubt caused conservative, firmly patriarchal voices to retreat into silence. In a time when the “oppression of women in Islam” was on the front burner in the broad American conversation and when conservative as well as militant Islam was on the defensive in American public space, Muslim supporters of gender hierarchy and male precedence were surely unlikely to openly air their views. When even speeches as innocuous as Yasin’s were capable of stirring intense hostility and suspicion and even of pro- voking death threats, as well as of precipitating a public grilling in the media, it was surely unlikely that people who believed in a God-given gender hierarchy or, say, in men’s inviolable Quranic right to beat wives would come out and say so. And as we saw, the suggestion by an ISNA official that the Bakhtiar translation of the Quran should be banned from ISNA’s bookstores—a suggestion that quite possibly might have won support at ISNA in the climate of a few years earlier—now drew swift re- buke from the organization’s president.

It may be that there are entrenched American Muslim patriarchs who are quietly biding their time and planning, perhaps, in private meetings, for a time when they will institute rules at ISNA forbidding women from serv- ing as presidents, and when they will ban translations such as Bakhtiar’s from the stalls of ISNA and other Muslim American organizations, and exclude voices such as Nomani’s from such gatherings. But if such meet- ings and plans are under way they are occurring behind the scenes. The story I tell in these pages is based entirely on publicly available materials and information. It is based on published books and articles, and on ac- tivism carried out in the public domain and reported on in the media. And it is based on my own observations and on speeches delivered at American Muslim conventions that are open to journalists and other observers.

It may well be that there are Islamists here (and even more proba-

bly back in the home countries of Islamism) who respond with rage and revulsion to the emergence of the hated spectacle of feminism (or of the demand, at any rate, for justice for women) among Islamist women in America and Western countries, and even among young Islamist men

—as well as to the emergence of supporters of equal rights for gays.

It may well be that there are Islamists in America and around the globe who are now ruing the day when the Islamist movement and male leadership expanded the sweep of their recruitment and activism to reach out to, draw in, and include women as activists and leaders (even if not formally). For above all, perhaps, the story of the activist involvement of women in Islamism that I have followed out in these pages, from its beginnings in the early
1970
s in Egypt to America in the post-
9
/
11
world, is the story also of the expansion of the understanding and interpretation of religious texts that occurs, and similarly of the rethinking and trans- formation of the notion of justice that begins to take place when the work of interpretation is democratized and women are able to enter and par- ticipate in the broad arenas of social and religious movements and of public life as activists, teachers, and leaders, and as people proactively engaged in defining the public good and the meaning of justice and the meanings also of sacred scriptures.

I can certainly imagine that the findings that I put forward here and that are for me grounds for optimism might well cause some Is- lamists to feel outrage at what is happening to Islam in America and cause them to desperately begin to seek to figure out a way to, some day, put the genie back in the bottle.

Some fifty or more years ago Albert Hourani, surveying the trends under way in that era, confidently predicted that the veil would soon be a thing of the past. And in fact, the evidence of the day incontrovertibly pointed to the steady ascendancy of the unveiling trend among the dominant classes across most of the Arab and Muslim world, and his predictions therefore were entirely well grounded. Today we live in a world where it is the veiling trend, steadily gaining ground across the globe, that is now no less incontrovertibly in the ascendant.

The quest for women’s equality is not a new quest in relation to women in Islam, and the activism of today among American Muslim women

represents the most recent and now, for the first time, distinctly Western and specifically American turn in a history of struggle for women’s rights in Islam—a struggle that stretches back for more than a century. In many Muslim-majority countries women have already attained considerable achievements. Women have had the right to vote in many Muslim coun- tries for more than half a century (Turkey
1930
, Pakistan
1947
, Indone- sia
1947
, Iraq and Syria
1948
, Egypt
1956
, Afghanistan
1963
—in the subsequent turbulent history of Afghanistan women also lost that right for a time). Several Muslim countries too have had women heads of state

—among them Turkey, Pakistan, and Indonesia—something we have yet to achieve in America.

There are particular features in the “feminist” currents emerging today that seem to mark them as specifically American. Among these most particularly is the forthright challenge to core scriptural and inter- pretative texts being pursued here today by religiously committed Mus- lims. Challenge to core religious texts is not in itself new for Muslim women—for secular Muslim women, and most notably among them

Nawal el-Saadawi, have issued such challenges going back to the
1960
s.

What is new in this moment in America is that these challenges are com- ing now from committed, believing Muslims. Second, another new move specific to America today is the emergence of the demand for equal space physically within Muslim religious institutions, and the beginnings of a demand for equal rights to leadership in religious institutions.

These represent the first stirrings of a new era in the history of Islam in the West, and most particularly in America. The history and prehis- tory of the present that I have described in these pages attest to the ex- traordinary transformations that religions—in this case Islam—undergo as to the ways that they are lived, practiced, understood, and interpreted, as one era gives way to another and one strain of belief and practice gains ascendancy while another (to the astonishment and near-disbelief of contemporaries caught up in the throes of such turbulence) is thrust aside or falls into abeyance. This history attests to the ways in which re- ligious movements can evolve as they cross frontiers and take root in en- vironments where new social and political conditions open up new possibilities of belief, practice, and interpretation for the rising generations. We stand poised to observe the newest turns in these evolving sto- ries: the newest turns in the stories of Islam and of America and the West.

Notes
‌
‌

Introduction

1. Jane I. Smith,
   Islam in America
   (New York: Columbia University Press,
   1999
   ),
   46
   ,
   169
   .
   

2. These are and continue to be very lively questions often asked most sharply in relation to Europe. See, for example, Christopher Caldwell,
   Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West
   (New York: Doubleday,
   2009
   ). Other works addressing this topic, often more extreme and sensational, include Oriana Fallaci’s
   The Rage and the Pride
   (New York: Rizzoli,
   2002
   ); Bruce Bawer,
   While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Destroyed the West from Within
   (New York: Doubleday,
   2006
   ); Brigitte Gabriel,
   They Must Be Stopped: Why We Must Defeat Radical Islam and How We Can Do It
   (New York: St. Martin’s,
   2008
   ); and Mark Steyn,
   America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It
   (Washington, D.C.: Regnery,
   2006
   ). For a discussion of some of these and other such works see Laila Lalami, “The New Inquisition,”
   Nation,
   November
   24
   ,
   2009
   , and John R. Bowen, “Nothing to Fear Misreading Muslim Immigration in Europe,”
   Boston Review,
   January–February
   2010
   . See also on this general subject Bowen’s
   Can Islam Be French? Pluralism and Pragmatism in a Secular State
   (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
   2010
   ).
   

3. Their views seemed consonant with those I had heard conservative women of other religious traditions (for example, Blu Greenberg, co-founder of the Jewish Ortho- dox Feminist Alliance) express at the Pluralism Project conferences, hosted by Professor Diana Eck, which I attended at Harvard University—among them, for instance, the con-
   

   ference on “Women, Religion and Social Change” held at Harvard in April–May
   2003
   ;
   

   and “Harvard University Consultation on Women’s Networks in Multi-Religious Amer- ica,” held at Harvard April
   27
   –
   29
   ,
   2002
   .
   

4. My notes of interviews conducted
   2002
   –
   3
   .
   

5. Fawaz A. Gerges,
   The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global
   (New York: Cam- bridge University Press,
   2005
   ),
   2
   . See also John L. Esposito,
   The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality?
   (New York: Oxford University Press,
   1995
   ), where the author notes the key role of the Muslim Brotherhood, along with the Jamaat-i Islami of Pakistan, in spurring the spread of the Islamic Resurgence (
   128
   –
   29
   ).
   

6. See Azza Karam, ed.,
   Transnational Political Islam: Religion, Ideology and Power,
   foreword by John Esposito (London: Pluto,
   2004
   ),
   5
   –
   7
   . See also “Islamism,” William E. Shepard, François Burgat, James Piscatori, and Armando Salvatore, in
   The Oxford En- cyclopedia of the Islamic World,
   Oxford Islamic Studies Online. http://www.oxfordislamic studies.com/article/opr/t
   236
   /e
   0888
   . Accessed November
   14
   ,
   2009
   .
   

7. Karam,
   Transnational Political Islam,
   5
   –
   6
   .
   

8. Roxanne L. Euben and Muhammad Qasim Zaman, eds.,
   Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought: Texts and Contexts from al-Banna to Bin Laden
   (Princeton, N.J.: Prince- ton University Press,
   2009
   ),
   275
   .
   

9. See Nilufer Gole,
   The Forbidden Modern Civilization and Veiling
   (Ann Arbor:
   

   University of Michigan Press,
   1996
   ); Jenny B. White,
   Islamic Mobilization in Turkey: A Study in Vernacular Politics,
   Studies in Modernity and National Identity (Seattle: Uni- versity of Washington Press,
   2002
   ). Other important works analyzing the veil, in partic- ular in relation to France and the internal politics of France, include Joan Wallach Scott,
   The Politics of the Veil
   (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
   2007
   ), and John R. Bowen,
   Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves: Islam, the State, and Public Space
   (Prince- ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
   2006
   ).
   

10. Gerges,
    Far Enemy,
    3
    .
    

11. This is the question at the heart of several books on Islam in the West—such as those cited in note
    2
    .
    

12. “Brutality Against Women and Children,” Radio Address by Laura Bush, No- vember
    17
    ,
    2001
    . George Bush White House Archives, georgewbush-whitehouse.archives
    

    .gov/. Accessed April
    10
    ,
    2010
    .
    

13. Scoop, Independent News, “Cherie Blair Press Conference on Taliban and Women,” November
    20
    ,
    2001
    , press release, U.K. Government. http://www.scoop.co.nz
    

    /stories/WO
    0111
    /S
    00149
    .htm. Accessed April
    10
    ,
    2010
    .
    

14. Polly Toynbee, “Was It Worth It?”
    Guardian,
    November
    13
    ,
    2002
    .