Inside the Gender Jihad: Women's Reform in Islam (45 page)

On September 11, like most people, I was shocked, confused, and totally unable to believe the breaking news. This was followed by horror and dismay. As an Islamic Studies professor, I could only get random glimpses of the news from campus media sources that day. In my class, I read an official statement issued by the Center for American–Islamic Relations (C.A.I.R.). They declared total disapproval of such terrorist acts, whoever the culp- rit. Not clear on the extent of the catastrophe, but aware that it had been linked to extremist Muslim factions, I still assumed that my responsibility was to maintain things as normal. After my first class I was walking through campus to return to my office. Suddenly a car horn blared beside me. I work in a city, so at first I thought nothing of it. When it was repeated, I looked up to notice that there were no traffic problems. In fact, no other cars or pedestrians were in proximity to this vehicle. Although I was dressed in the traditional Islamic
hijab
, it never occurred to me at the time that this car horn had anything to do with me.

However, when I arrived at my office, the secretary hurried up to me with several phone messages including two from my daughter in another state. There were several more on my voice mail, all voicing concern for my safety and well-being. The secretary had been watching the news on a personal portable television in her office. She was worried for me too, and suggested I wear a hat or something instead of my
hijab
when I left the office. I found the suggestion preposterous at the time. Then the university president canceled classes for the rest of the day. As I drove home, I did become frightened. I slipped my scarf off my head and wore it draped over my shoulders. I could not be sure what an angry driver might do to me in the state of heightened panic and loss of control. That was my first erasure – the loss of choice.

As an individual, I lost my feelings of safety in making decisions about my own dress. As a Muslim woman, and human rights activist, I advocate a woman’s right to choose whether to cover or not. As discussed above, I do not see
hijab
as a religious mandate or a significant indicator of faith. As an African-American Muslim woman, I had chosen a form of cover most

226 inside the gender jihad

recognized as a symbol of Islamic identity to express my camaraderie with Muslim women worldwide.

When gripped by fear for my personal safety on 9/11, I was also stripped of my agency to choose and, like my slave foremothers, stripped of my garments of self-integrity in order to survive. I drove past the expressions of animosity by drivers with American flags on the front and Confederate flags on the back of their vehicles. One sticker on an S.U.V. praised the N.Y.P.D. and F.D.N.Y. while promising to
“
get even.
”
I prayed that I would not be the target of that promise at the moment my vehicle drove past. American flags proliferated, with or without “God bless America” stickers, and labels took on the ominous meaning that God could bless only America and Am- erican interests, with no regard for blessing anyone else in the world.

When I got home on September 11, more messages of concern for my safety awaited me. The next day C.A.I.R. warned women in
hijab
to be careful and advised us not to go out if avoidable. I took personal leave from classes. Forget maintaining things as normal – a new norm of extreme risk for being noticed as Muslim was being acted out. When I did go out, I tied a scarf short around my head, avoiding the distinctive
hijab
and its “Islamic” association. All of Islam was under fire. All Muslims had been associated with this one extreme and violent action. All Muslims were fair game for the required revenge.

By Friday that first week, this first erasure was beginning to impinge upon my self-confidence and the integrity of my chosen identity. This was erasure for being Muslim – coincidentally female in
hijab
. To start reclaiming my wholeness I also needed to reaffirm this symbol in my own Islamic right of choice. I moved out of that erasure by selecting to attend spiritual ceremonies and interfaith-based activities focused on healing the whole of humanity. Still I felt ambivalent about this overt symbolic expression exposing my Muslim identity in an Islamophobic context.

The period of mourning was followed by weeks of responding to public and professional service calls. One call came from the internet women’s newsgroup called E-news.
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Their web page describes their mission:

The mainstream media too often neglect the public policy stories that concern women and that impact our lives. They too often overlook women as sources and experts for news. And when the media do cover women’s issues, the stories are too often stereotypical and simplistic or answer the wrong questions. Women’s E-news fills that void by offering solid, serious, well-researched news about and for women. Women’s

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E-news asks the intelligent questions that women want answered. We probe the implications for women of events, policies and practices.

The contact person confirmed that “all we hear are men’s responses” to the crisis. She later quoted my assertion that men perpetrated these events in response to actions men exclusively had decided upon, planned, and orchestrated. Indeed, “men make war while women and children are victims as well as other men. Yet, we do not hear women’s voices with regard to these events.” This E-news interview included some of the details I have described here about my experience on September 11.

For several reasons, this interview caught the interest of someone from the Public Broadcasting Service (P.B.S.). “We are so keen to bring you to New York for a special program about the September 11 events and Muslim women. Your comments were so insightful.” Ah, here was a “fresh angle” for the media to exploit. Somewhere in this conversation I informed her that I am African-American. Within 24 hours, I was erased. I was Muslim enough to be harassed, woman enough to have insights on col- lective female marginalization, but since I was
not
Middle Eastern I could not speak as either Muslim or woman for P.B.S.

Although other reasons were feigned in the next telephone conversation when the invitation was withdrawn, I intentionally followed the logistics. When asked if I could help fulfill their request by naming other Muslim women, they made inquiries into their ethnic origins. This would eventually clarify their parameters for who was deemed appropriately Muslim – exclu- sively Middle Eastern women. This erasure was humiliating. I could be threatened
as a Muslim
, but I could not have a legitimate voice as a Muslim. I had insights
as a woman
but I could not provide a female voice. More importantly, someone outside Islam was determining my place inside Islam. I began to observe in earnest the post-9/11 politics of representation of Islam in American media. African-Americans form the largest single ethnic group of Muslims in America, yet their voices were the least represented. Women, one-half of the Muslim population, would form none of the major spokespersons. Yet women remained the most easily identifiable and most vulnerable for random acts of retaliation in the aftermath. Erasures from outside the community of believers might be dismissed as part of the larger agenda to erase Islam. The internal erasures on the other hand were equally

problematic and more disconcerting.

Later that month C.A.I.R. confirmed that women in
hijab
had been increasingly subjected to harassment. The spokesperson for this announce- ment and its detailed implications was male. Were we to believe that no

228 inside the gender jihad

woman was available to comment? Or is it simply that no woman could represent this concern as well as one who never had and never will wear a
hijab
himself? When the television program
60 Minutes
dedicated one segment of its program to “representatives” of the American Muslim community, four Muslim brothers were present: one white American, one African-American (who remained nearly silent throughout the program), and two transnational brothers, one a long-time immigrant to the U.S.A., but the fourth member was a South African academic, who, despite having visited the U.S.A. before, on this occasion had only been here for six weeks. Yet the program organizers considered him more eligible to represent Islam in America than the selection of at least a single woman for the program.

Despite the blatant ethnic reductionism of Muslim voices after 9/11, the silence of the female voice continued to recast the patriarchal perpetuation of destructive actions, but also revealed the privilege of their perspective on human events – only enhancing the negative consequences for all humankind. It cannot be said to have divine sanction. I think about this whenever I present a talk about Mary, mother of Jesus, as explicitly reflect- ing the gynocentric voice in the Qur’an. The voice of Allah, the originator of revelation, speaks through Mary at a most womanly moment – the labor pains of childbirth. All else is eclipsed for the sake of her care-taking. If that voice was present in the planning of conflict resolution we would surely be less likely to conclude the matter by choosing war, terror, violence, and retaliation.

Before she died, Olive Schreiner of South Africa wrote,

There is perhaps no woman . . . who could look down upon a battle field covered with slain, but the thought would rise in her “So many mothers’ sons” . . . No woman who is woman says of a human body, “It is nothing!” On the day when the woman takes her place beside the man in governance and arrangement of external affairs of her race will also be the day that heralds the death of war as a means of arranging human difference.

It is not because of woman’s cowardice, incapacity nor, above all, because of her general superior virtue, that she will end war when her voice is finally, fully and clearly heard. Rather her voice speaks from the center of her reality, and that reality brings forth life, so it cannot promote the destruction of life as the objective for a humane and dignified future. It is past time to include the voices of women in all matters public and private to bring about greater truth and harmony in organizing the affairs of humankind.

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THREE PUBLIC CONTROVERSIES IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM

Having a public role resulted from taking a stance on issues of concern to my goal of growth and development as a private individual struggling to establish my identity as a Muslim woman, a member of the collective community, and within ongoing historical traditions. This public conse- quence of my primary goal was never my intention, and I continue to feel ambivalent about it, often resorting to long periods of isolation and retreat to try to maintain personal balance and spiritual equilibrium. Once it was established, however, I neither lost my goal of personal and spiritual iden- tity development nor refused the consequences of and responsibility for the public role.

I have been accused of seeking the public role that has been thrust upon me only by those who do not know me and hence do not recognize my own priorities. Such responses have also allowed my primary goals to be reduced to particular statements or to certain selective sensationalized events. Thus others, who do not know me, who have never read my works, or do not consider my decades of involve- ment in the gender
jihad
, concoct judgments on the basis of the reductions that best suit their own opportunism to justify their opposing views.

In effect,

all of Islam, including my

participation

and

aspirations,

is focused on a false presumption that defending particular interpret- ations openly opposing those who express other interpretations is a requirement for being inside the Muslim
ummah
. As one essay de- scribes it:

If a stone’s dropping into a pool of water represents revelation, and the

subsequent concentric waves that radiate

from

the

point

of entry

represent tradition, then modernism could be visualized as a ring floating above (or below) the farthest periphery of the waves that is disconnected

both horizontally from the water and vertically from the trajectory of the stone.
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I do not agree that all modernism as so graphically described is “dis- connected” from Islam and Islamic tradition. Its real position as a continuation of the concentric circles from the divine center must be properly acknowledged. This is recognized with only a minimum amount of insight. In the future, it will surely become the charac- terization of today’s diverse Islamic expressions, which are part of the

230 inside the gender jihad

Islamic intellectual continuum. Muslims have always grappled with their current contexts, as agents building upon the principles of revelation vis-
à
-vis the universal potential of those principles in explicit application to diverse contexts. There is an even greater need for this continued grappling with our tradition in our present circumstances. Otherwise, the move of the concentric circle will enter rigor mortis.

Certain particular public events have been enshrouded with aspects of misrepresentation that unfortunately might never be corrected. As modern media has proven, people seek the sensational. The following treatments in response to three particular public events are provided in order to satisfy those who may have questions about the events, despite the way they were sensationalized, used for demonization, or reported by other sources most often without my input. Nothing is recanted or denied about my participation in the events, my approach to the issues, or to other people’s opportunism. This book elaborates my perspectives on a wide range of issues. These summaries are provided only to locate them both within their particular time and place of occurrence and within my primary goals, the principles underlying them, and as part of my personal and spiritual identity intimately connected to interpretations and implementations of Islam. They will be presented in chronological order.