Elle magazine spread of Halima Aden

"halima-aden-is-the-role-model-we-need"

Things Not To Say To Someone Who Wears A Burqa

The Portrayal of Muslim Love in HBO’s Ramy - Fatma Elsayed

In Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, Lila Abu Lughod’s piece on “The Marriage of Feminism and Islamism in Egypt '' considerably explores the portrayal of women in Egyptian media. Abu Lughod uses examples like Usama Anwar ‘Ukasha’s Hilmiyya Nights, a television series that aired during the 1980s and early 1990s about struggles of looking for love and marriage, and She and the Impossible by Fathiyya al- ‘Assal about the value of education for women. It was interesting to find how, despite both creators sharing a similar strand of progressive and liberal views on feminism and women in the workplace, there were still differences in how that intersected with marriage and love.  For example in Hilmiyya Nights, Zohra marries her boss at work who seduces her as Ali frustrates her and in She and the Impossible, the female lead goes from illiterate to educated and raising a son alone after being rejected by her lover. In both pieces, there is a similar sense of autonomy but portrayed in different ways Zohra chooses to marry her boss and the female lead chooses to educate herself and raise her son alone.

Reading Abu-Lughod’s piece made me think about the HBO show Ramy which recently won an Oscar for Ramy Youssef as Best Actor in a TV Comedy. The show itself is a modern, comedic portrayal of a Muslim, Egyptian in America that follows their struggles and challenges with merging their Muslim faith and Egyptian culture with American life. The show deals with standard topics such as growing older and building a career, but also emotional ones like love, marriage, and sacrifice. 

I enjoyed the show, and I had previously watched clips by Ramy Youssef who’s comedy was an entertaining yet relatable expression of being Muslim in America. However, I know female Muslim friends who absolutely despised the show, criticizing it’s negative portrayal of Muslim women as objects and appealing to the western eye. Having a back-and-forth with these friends about the show was very conflicting because I usually agreed with these friends on many other things but this case seemed to be an exception. I was fully a fan of Ramy for how hilarious it was, but also for how I felt like it painted a relatable portrayal of the spectrum of Muslims and piety in western societies, and how challenging it can be to find an appropriate partner in the midst of this diversity. However, my friends mentioned plots such as the hijabi Muslim woman who sleeps with Ramy and cheats on her husband as an offensively sexualizing portrayal of Muslim women. 

Conversations and disagreements like these make me wonder if we can ever portray Muslim women in all their diverse lifestyles and piousness without degrading the Muslim woman herself? Additionally, what responsibility do Muslim creators have in upholding or molding the perception of Islam and Muslims? Do we hold them accountable if we do not like their vision?

Angela Davis, "I'm not a femenist... I'm a Black revolutionary"

A little over a month ago, on January 16th, 2020, Yale University invited famous activist and scholar Angela Davis to speak to commence Yale's week long celebration of Martin Luther King. I had been a fan of Angela Davis' academic work which always emphasized an intersectional approach to not only feminism, but all global struggles for equality, justice and rights. The phrase may be on its way to buzzword status, but intersectionalism is the heart of what Chandra Mohanty is discussing in her essay, "Under Western Eyes." Feminism is not a homogeneous category, and not is that of "The Woman." In particular, Mohanty critiques the existence of the Third World Woman as a ready made category that exists before an individual becomes any specific "type" of woman by entering a given relationship.

I am reminded of a commen Davis once made about her initial reaction when she was being referred to as a feminist for her scholarship on gender and race. She recounts in this speech here how her immediate reaction was "I'm not a Feminist... I'm a Black revolutionary!" Though she later admits that this was the result of her perhaps only narrowly understanding the meaning of Feminism, she made a very important point that underlies much of this course: there isn't any one kind of any one thing when we talk about isms or ideas. She clarifies in her speech that she didn't realize she was critiquing "Bourgeois Feminism". It is thanks to the academic labor performed by those like Davis herself that we can take intersectional feminism for granted, if even as a buzzword.

It's interesting how during last election cycle with Hillary's nomination to the democratic party and now again this cycle with a refreshing number of women vying for party nominations, the language of "glass-ceiling feminism" circulated as the reasons for supporting this or that candidate. I don't reject the legitimate symbolic meaning of a women president, and I in fact do value the emphasis placed on electing female leaders. However, particularly with Hillary's election, so many people specifically wanted to "break the glass ceiling." In this same video, Davis mentioned how this goal is not one she is interested in; anyone already close enough to break the glass ceiling is benefiting from privileges and hierarchies that come at the expense of poorer and working class women. The way each class navigates the world is radically different. They are not all a ready made category of "women" with equal needs and experiences.

Posting on behalf of Fatma

Loving without the “Liberation” - Fatma Elsayed

After reading Lila Abu-Lughod’s piece titled “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others”, I was left with a lot of feelings about being a Muslim woman in the west and how my Muslim-ness effects the way I think about love and dating. Alongside a detailed commentary on cultural relativism as it relates to post-Taliban Afghanistan, Abu-Lughod taps into a larger discussion of how Western audiences percieve both Muslim women’s feminism and sexuality as a deviation from their own feminist structures.

In her piece, Abu-Lughod poses the interesting question, “Can we only free Afghan women to be like us or might we have to recognize that even after “liberation” from the Taliban, they might want different things than we would want for them?”(5) This question reminds of my own personal relationships with friends, who although care for me deeply, can also dip into this savior-istic tendencies to encourage me to explore dating and love in ways that aren’t always feasible. I was raised in a black, Sudanese, Muslim household where I was taught to always maintain a modest distance from men. This meant no going to guys houses, no boyfriends, no premarital relationships, etc - however, this does not mean that I was repressed. Although I do not explore love and dating the same way that my friends from Western and non-Muslim backgrounds do, I still love and want to be loved. 

Abu-Lughod’s piece resonates with the larger, complex experience of being a Muslim girl in Western spaces where your modesty and “veil”, whether it be literal with a hijab or abstract in the divisions between yourself and other men, is constantly examined by peers. Reconciling my desire to be in love and explore the dating scene with the need to also maintain a “veil” in college is challenging, but this “struggle” doesn’t necessarily mean that I am particularly repressed. I put these limits and expectations on myself from a source of love and dedication for my religion, Islam, and navigating dating is just a natural challenge that comes with that. 

However, when we, as women, talk about feminism being about sexual liberation for all and sex as a means to reclaiming our femininity, that is not inclusive of women like me. I believe in the right to a woman owning her body and her sexuality, but to universalize the way we explore our sexualities within a western contexts erases the sexual liberation Muslim women, specifically those who believe in modesty, express. 

This connects with an interesting point Abu-Lughod makes about this spectrum of feminisms by stating that “One of the things we have to be most careful about in thinking about Third World feminisms, and feminism in different parts of the Muslim world, is how not to fall into polarizations that place feminism on the side of the West.”(6)  Even though I may not own my body the same way other western feminists do, it does not make my feminism any less radical. It also does not make my exploration of love any less meaningful because no one entity or region has a monopoly over what feminism is and what love looks like.

after mahmood: empowerment and rkot

After two highly dense and thought-provoking chapters from Saba Mahmood, I found myself scrolling through the “Rich Kids of Tehran” Instagram page and the UN Women website. Let me start with the latter.

According to their own definition, “UN Women is the UN organization dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women”. They have regional chapters all around the world, including Cairo. I don’t feel qualified enough to comment on the specifics of the work they do, but I want to stop and think about “empowerment” for a while, a word that is all over UN’s website and frequently repeated in other Western feminist discourse.

Here is a definition (literally the first image when one searches for it):

(wow!)

I want to think about this seemingly universal goal of empowerment related to two of the women Mahmood writes about, Sana and Abir. Sana’s belief in self-esteem and how it can form through making decisions according to who you really are, what you really want fits well within what empowerment aims to do. When it comes to Abir’s case, things are not that simple (for the already “modernized” brain). From a Western perspective, by becoming pious, Abir gives up many choices and freedom. Yet as Mahmood points out, it is her commitment to Islamic norms (not a break from them) that makes her “empowered” towards her husband.

Furthermore, Mahmood explains how women in piety don’t necessarily take actions according to their natural feelings but an opposite relationship is present where feelings form according to actions. This way of thinking is very unfamiliar to Western feminist standards as it can easily be seen in such a definition of empowerment.

I am confused, angry, and a bit tired after realizing even a phrase like “promoting gender equality” has so many presumptions and history behind it. Ah.

Moving to the rich kids of Tehran, it is basically an Instagram page that has pictures of a lot of, well, “rich kids” (smiling attractive young people in luxury apparel), expensive cars, trips abroad—and there are also the occasional posts of people making art and a sign reading “give peace a chance” or “nice day for a revolution”.

You probably got the idea, still:

https://www.instagram.com/therichkidsoftehran/?hl=en

I think it is a really striking example of Mahmood’s analysis regarding how “resistance” can mean reinscribing to alternative forms of power. It is possible to view what this account is doing as “resisting” the norms of the Iranian society, mainly the Islamic principle of modesty that was thoroughly discussed in the reading. What they think they are doing is aligned with this, as it can be understood from their bio: “Stuff ‘They’ Don't Want You To See About Iran”. The “stuff” apparently is the Western neoliberal ideal of a desirable life that exists for an elite portion of Iranians. What seems to be romanticized and presented to be rebellious freedom is thus capitalist consumerism (mixed with bits of neoliberalism), which is arguably one of the largest forms of power today. Though this is a pretty obnoxious example, it is not the only place where “resistance” and the status of economic strength go hand in hand.

Week 5: Mohanty/Abu-Lughod/Williams -- The New York Time

This week we read three scholars who critique Western feminisms. Chandra Mohanty (1988) critiques the slippage of Western feminists between Woman as a homogenized, analytical category and women as diversely positioned people in the world. Mohanty is concerned with how Western feminists frame women as a primordial social category wherein all women experience a common, shared oppression (65). This universal “sexual difference” is observed by Western feminists in the “Third World” as especially pronounced because of the “third-world difference,” which reinforces Western cultural imperialism and allegations of Oriental backwardness (80). Mohanty concludes the essay by meditating that while Western feminists are not the only participants in the production of Western cultural hegemony, but their contribution of the “monolithic ‘third-world woman’” may be useful in ongoing projects of “latent economic and cultural colonization of the 'non-western' world” (82). 

Lila Abu-Lughod (2005), writing almost three decades later, takes Mohanty’s warnings of the political utility of the “third-world woman” as her launching point. Abu-Lughod shows how analytical strategy descibed by Mohanty of the homogenization of third-world women has enabled justifications for interventions in the Middle East on the grounds of Muslim women who are universally oppressed and all “need saving.” Abu-Lughod argues that to move past an agenda of “saving” women, academics must work towards “recognizing and respecting differences -- precisely as products of different histories, as expressions of different circumstances, and as manifestations of differently structured desires” (787).

Juliet A. Williams (2009) offers one way of doing this kind of thinking, which she calls “double critique.” Williams studies the Orientalist news coverage of temporary marriages to make “orientalist representations themselves the object of the inquiry rather than treating (mis)representation as a problem somehow to be gotten around” (617). This kind of “double critique” is powerful because “Instead of denying the inherent partiality of perspective, double critique mobilizes partiality as a fulcrum with which to bring into view that which is obscured when there is no critical outside” (629). Williams offers a way out of passive cultural relativism or ethnocentrism so as to recognize historically constituted differences. Ultimately, this mode of thinking might allow Western feminists to consider the conditions of third-world women without reinforcing Western hegemony, by always critiquing Western methodological limitations in studying the third-world in a way that can ever be omniscient. Acknowledging this limitation reduces the risk of producing Mohanty’s monolithic “third-world women.” 

***

I subscribe to a weekly email newsletter from the New York Times called In Her Words, which highlights a few important headlines relevant to gender politics from that week. A few weeks ago, on January 23rd, 2020, I received a story about a report on gendered wealth inequality that emerged from the Davos World Economic Forum. The report in some ways moves past the shortfalls of “saving women” from culture in that the report recognizes structural factors as the origin of gendered oppression. Women hold less wealth because, as the policy director at Oxfam says, “there’s something deeply sick about the economy.” 

Yet, even in a structural approach, the report relies on the existing notions of cultural others and homogenized womanhood. In one part of the NYT’s summary, they write that “nowhere in the world do men do as much unpaid work as women. In Norway, a country often hailed as a gender equal utopia, women spend about an hour more on unpaid work than men ...  But in India, women spend almost six hours on unpaid labor and men spend less than an hour.” NYT does not explain why they choose these two countries to compare. It does not indicate if India had the worst metrics of those measured. NYT draws upon the common-sense ideology of “third-world difference” described by Mohanty as “that stable, ahistorical something that apparently oppresses most if not all the women in these countries” (63). Without explanation for invoking India, the NYT readers understand that India is not like Norway because of this third-world difference that manifestly makes women more oppressed in India.

NYT also homogenizes women as Mohanty warns. The NYT explains the mechanism of this wealth inequality as follows:

“Because women tend to earn less than men, they have more of an economic incentive to give up their job and focus on work at home while the higher earner goes to work. But because they have so much to look after at home, they often can’t take on a higher-paid job that might require more commitment, creating a vicious cycle that traps women at the bottom of the economic pyramid, perpetuating the gender pay gap.”

This hyper-generalization lumps together every household on the globe and elides the infinite differences that exist between households. It, among many other things, presumes a nuclear family, presumes maternal caretaking, presumes universal gender wage gaps, all of which are true in some contexts but false in many others. This flattening of the nature of oppression to one form forecloses opportunities to explore how gendered oppression operates in decentralized ways, and thus, forecloses the generation of successful anti-oppression efforts. 

The organizations involved in the report -- including Oxfam, IMF, and the Gates Foundation -- all hire alumni of institutions like Yale, many of whom likely studied Western feminism in some form during their education. In a world that is increasingly attentive to “global patriarchy,” the ways we as students and academics study women and feminism have serious consequences for reports like these.

https://messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com/template/oakv2?uri=nyt://newsletter/49fdf877-946e-43ec-9ca3-d60a7eddc1f8&te=1&nl=in-her%20words&emc=edit_gn_20200123?campaign_id=10&instance_id=15395&segment_id=20585&user_id=fbaa2c635eb11cc27ff849e79fe6088b&regi_id=75294619_gn_20200123


***

Questions I would like to discuss more:

1. Abu-Lughod articulates a need for something that is neither ethnocentric or culturally relativist, and argues that we need a politics that recognizes and respects difference precisely as a product of history. What does this mean in practice relative to interventionism? What types of material responses might this produce?

2. Is "double critique" a viable anti-imperialist mode of study? Does Williams essay still reinforce a belief that third world women need to be represented by people lodged in the West? Why or why not?

Blog 1: Triple Talaq and Hindu Nationalism

I first heard of triple talaq last summer. My interpreter and I had just caught a rickshaw on the edge of a majority Muslim slum in Pune, India. We were discussing the interview we had just conducted with a Muslim woman who ran a tiffin, or lunchbox, business from inside her home in the slum. My interpreter, a 30-year-old Hindu (Brahmin) man, started making comments about Muslims in general. “Did you see the way her husband kept interrupting her? That’s so typical of Muslim men.” And, “Muslims don’t treat their women right.” And, finally, with energy: “Did you know a Muslim man only has to say the word talaq three times in a row to divorce his wife? It’s called triple talaq. But now that’s changing in India; men can’t do that anymore.” I had no context to understand what he had just said and did not think much of it until a few weeks later, right before I left the country, when he brought up triple talaq again. “You remember that triple talaq that I told you about? The government just made it illegal!”

I now know that triple talaq was ruled unconstitutional in 2017 by the Supreme Court of India but not made illegal until the controversial passage of the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Bill of 2019 in July (more information can be found here: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/08/india-triple-talaq/595414/). I am a feminist who supports full equality of men and women. Yet there is a part of me that questions the virtue of this bill. Shortly after its passage, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led Parliament revoked the special status of Muslim-majority state Jammu and Kashmir, and has since passed the Citizenship Amendment Bill, which excludes Muslim asylum-seekers from certain asylum rights guaranteed to people belonging to many other major religions (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/12/13/indias-new-law-may-leave-millions-muslims-without-citizenship/). With these major changes, driven by Hindu nationalism, in mind, I wonder whether the triple talaq bill was meant to protect Muslim women, or politically motivated, or both. Probably both.

I gained a lot more context about triple talaq, and talaq in general, from Kecia Ali’s "Lesser Evils: Divorce in Islamic Ethics"—but I am still not sure how I feel about the triple talaq bill. Certainly, not all Muslims observe triple talaq, and Ali notes multiple times that those who do observe it look down upon it while still recognizing its validity (26). Given that Islamic tradition, no matter the school of thought being considered (and some, like the Maliki school, are much more lenient than others, like the Hanafi), does not give women the same rights to divorce as men, penalizing men for taking advantage of a tradition that severely limits women’s rights must be a victory for women, and a step towards recognizing their equality in marriage (27). But as Ali notes, progress of legal reforms, such as India’s triple talaq bill, “has been hampered by continual struggles over ‘authenticity’ and the self-aggrandizing tendencies of the modern nation-state to work to bring everything under its control” (29). How do we weigh religious tradition alongside women’s rights? Ali offers several possible answers to this question, but she concludes the chapter vaguely, calling for a “reform in the basic structure of Muslim marriage itself” (36). Can a country controlled by a non-Muslim majority government objectively outlaw a Muslim practice? Does the triple talaq bill have to be motivated only by the advancement of women—can it be supported by both women’s rights advocates and Hindu nationalists, but for different reasons? I am interested in discussing more in class the differences between legal and religious law, and how we can interpret these differences in practice today.

x

Yoni - Blog 1

In her piece, Ziba Mir-Hossini writes about her debates with the clerics of payam-e zan with whom she discusses sex inequality in Iran. Their discussions were mainly focused on whether sex equality can be achieved within the framework of feqh (Islamic legal theory). The ground for this discussion is established with the first question—can feqh provide justice? The clerics believe that justice is already achieved within feqh, since women have their own duties and rights just as men have their own duties and rights based on their different natures. Mir-Hossini accepts that physical differences exist between sexes but does not accept that duties and rights are intrinsic at birth or related to one’s sex. Mir-Hossini raises the possibility of the benefit that experts from fields of psychology, sociology etc., could have on justice in marital ruling. The clerics agree that indeed religious ruling has its limitations, yet they also see religion as a science, and therefore see no reason to turn to non-religious scholarship for answers. So, it seems that there is a fundamental disagreement regarding the separation between science and religion. Though it may appear that Mir-Hossini and the clerics had relatively open discussions, parts of the debates were omitted and edited by the clerics. This demonstrates that the clerics assessed her opinions as external and her questions as “intrusive”, this is also an act of censorship, which should not be necessary in a respectful conversation regarding matters of rulings that effect many people.  

Kecia Ali also touches on the point of gender inequality of marital laws in Islamic ruling. First, Ali points out that in countries that do not follow Islamic law, dowry is not enforced legally, leaving the decision to pay or not to pay, to men. This is only an issue when divorce laws are inequal, if woman got half the fortune that the couple have together, they would not have to depend on a dowry. Second, the idea of a dowry is that a man buys the right to a women’s virginity, this in and of itself is incredibly objectifying, and creates a measurable worth for each woman, which is her virginity. The problems of dowry that is enforced by the state is shown in Divorce, Iranian Style. As depicted women, even if legally can demand their dowry upon divorce, end up forsaking this right just to finish the legal process that is made wretched for them. It was remarkable for me to see in this movie how the state is involved in the intimacy of couples and in their relationships. To the point where arguments of sexual satisfaction come to be the main point of a case. 

Iran is not the only state where religious tradition dictates martial status. In Israel for example, for Jewish citizens, the rabbinical institution mediates divorce cases on the bases of Jewish law (Muslims and Christians have their own religious justice system). The rabbinical institution also dictates a male-divorce-superiority where a divorce can be attained only thorough the acceptance of the man. An Israeli movie ‘Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem' critically examines an individual divorce case. In this movie, one can get a glimpse of the process and the consequence of the clash between religion and state.  

A short review of the movie ‘Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem' and its official trailer can be found here - https://www.haaretz.com/life/television/gett-wins-big-at-hamptons-film-fest-1.5315365