Happy birthday, Pakistan.
Congratulations. We’ve come a long way in spite of our politicians. And we’ll keep pushing forward!
My latest blog post at Religion Dispatches: “The deadly burqini.”
I bet people get tired of hearing about veils and clothing from me. but what am I to do? Yet again, the issue has arisen.
A swimming pool in the Paris suburb of Emerainville has refused entry to a young Muslim woman wearing a burqini. The woman came swimming in July, but when she returned in August, they were ready with a ban and an argument to buttress the ban. They claimed it was because her burqini was everyday clothing rather than swim attire.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/08/12/2654153.htm
The rules to public pools usually don’t permit everyday clothing in the pool. Presumably this is because of safety and hygiene issues, both of which are important ones, given the risk of drowning and of exposure to nasty germs in a public pool.
Is a burqini unsafe? There are no issues with floatation, since the fabric is the same as a regular swimsuit. It’s not an abayah that will get in the way of your limbs, or a dress that will fill up with water and drag you down. It’s simply a swimsuit that covers more of your body. Why is that even an issue of note? If scuba divers wear wetsuits, why is the burqini a problem?
Come to think of it – French authorities may want to question scuba divers as to their reasons for wearing full-body wetsuits. You never know who might be doing it simply to cover their Muslim body underneath.
In fact, one wonders how far Muslims have penetrated the Australian swimwear market … http://shop.mooloolabaus.com/index.php?cPath=11&osCsid=l8m02chcb2sfhua0qcnn7b87i2
As for hygiene, wouldn’t it be better to cover up more of the body so people could keep their germs to themselves and not bring others’ with them?
If a woman is willing to brave the gaze that is sure to turn upon her when she walks into the pool area in a burqini, why, let her swim, I say. It’s quite an exercise in character, and she will probably enjoy her laps a lot less than her observers.
I’ll confess that I’m one of the people who avoid stares. My lack of physical fitness is evidence of my fear.
I’m willing to bet that this is only one case of many that haven’t made it even close to the news. And many more are the women who encounter hostility, or ridicule, or intimidating stares, or outright questioning – everything short of prohibition to enter – and avoid the pool (I can cite one friend’s experience right here in Oklahoma). Women stay home and forget about getting their exercise. Was that what y’all wanted? Stay away from the good Christian-secular pools? The woman prevented from swimming may have an argument when she argues that this is simply segregation.
Strictly speaking, the liberators of Muslim women ought to jump up and down in joy if these oppressed women make it as far as a co-ed public pool. They’ll get some exercise; they’ll spend some time developing physical strength away from their dark-browed swarthy bad-tempered fathers and husbands. The endorphins and resulting euphoria might result in a sense of physical and emotional freedom. What could be better? Hell, they might make it as far as throwing off their yoke and joining the ranks of the liberated.
Swimming is probably the best form of cardiovascular exercise for almost everyone, including individuals with depression, obesity, arthritis, diabetes, and various age-related ailments. Unlike jogging, it does not cause strain to your joints. Water calms you. Swimming makes you happy. Come, now, don’t those poor backward Muslim women need some health and happiness?
I know I won’t find universal agreement on this point, but I find conventional swimsuits to be inherently eroticized attire. Ask any guy perusing a swimsuit edition. Of course you are free to consider me silly, irrational, Victorian, uptight, narrow-minded, or culturally alien. But this is how I feel. Phobias, feelings, hang-ups – however you want to define my opinions – are difficult to shake. And, with my hang-ups, I would like to go swimming but not in a one-piece from Wal-Mart. You are free to disagree with me, but I am also free to feel the way I do. There are people who feel free to go to work without deodorant, or underwear, or appropriate coiffure, with worse consequences than a burqini might have on others. I wish people would take up arms against those offences.
In my opinion, given how I perceive swimsuits, it’s extremely unfair and sexist to require women to dress in such attire. The choice to wear a burqini, or long swim shorts, or such swim attire should be equal rather than either banned or inferior among choices in a pluralistic society. The only conditions should be floatability, safety and hygiene. Aesthetic considerations for women’s swimsuits are anti-feminist and Muslim women shouldn’t be the only ones in this fight. In my personal experience, Muslim women are not the only people who would like some latitude, please, in their choices of swim, evening, work, and casual attire. Not all people like to share the shape or sight of their bodies with others, particularly strangers, and certainly in this age of freaks, psychopaths and weirdos. Many women would like the freedom to not shave their legs or to go bald. You may not like it, but you can’t pass laws or rules against bodies’ use of public spaces.
This is what Western democracy and pluralism is all about. There are choices you can make about who to be, and how. As long as those choices do not harm others around you, one choice should be equal to another. Your personal likes or dislikes are your business. Whether I keep my maiden name or change it, whether I wear pants or a skirt, whether I live with my parents or by myself, whether I ride a motorcycle or drive a car, whether I wear my hair gray or blonde, I should not have to suffer consequences that affect my health and liberty. There are a range of choices we may have in every area of life, and all of the choices that cause no social damage should be equally available to us.
Modesty is not the only reason to want to wear a different kind of swimsuit. A friend who is undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer recently went for a dip in a hotel pool in a – well, not so cosmopolitan area in the US. Her near-baldness attracted so many shocked and disgusted stares from people of various ages that it quite distracted her from her exercise. The psychological damage was not worth it. She longed for the days of the bathing cap – or for a burqini.
But keep the burqini out. The burqini is dangerous. It is a germ. It might spread. It is a visual sign of the disease – Islam – that right-wingers wish to eliminate from the bodypolitic. It symbolizes a form of minority religion that does not keep its head down, quietly fit in, and try to look nonchalant. It is a little too loud-mouthed in its visual message here we are and we’re gonna take a dip in your pools now! Yah! Whatcha gonna do about it, eh?
As the local expert on Islam, of course, the local mayor Alain Kelyor sagely reminded thousands of giddy Muslim women who have only been doing Islam for decades that the burqini was not “an Islamic swimsuit.” As he points out, “that type of suit does not exist in the Koran.” Of course it would be quibbling to ask whether bikinis were mentioned in the New Testament and if saris were explicitly required in the Bhagvad Gita. Or one might legitimately ask whether swimming was mentioned in the Qur’an: that way we could keep the Muslim men and women out of our pools.
The mayor concluded that “all this” – as in the hoopla, the humiliation, the restrictions upon Muslim women’s physical exercise and use of public space – “has nothing to do with Islam.” Indeed.
Every now and again, I allow myself the luxury of switching the dial of nostalgia to ON. – I have started trying to keep it OFF most of the time. I heard a wise saw recently, something to the effect of “We do not possess the past, we do not possess the future, and all we have is this moment in the present” and something like “don’t waste this moment living in the moment you no longer possess.” So I try not to squander the moment I have by living in the past.
But when I do turn the dial, when I think back of being a young woman in Lahore, the scenes that most immediately drift into my mind’s eye are set in long, warm, lazy afternoons. If you think you know boredom, you haven’t, until you’ve spent an entire summer-full of afternoons in Pakistan, as a young woman in a conservative and rather unsociable family. You won’t be going out much; you won’t be hanging out with relatives and friends much; heck, nothing much will be happening anyway, because everything’s supposed to happen in your family and friends circles. So if you don’t come up with it, it’s not really happening.
So a long morning of reading a luridly illustrated newspaper over an endless breakfast ends. Noon rolls in. Stir yourself, shower – unless there’s no water. The Zuhr azaan is called. Zuhr azans, I means. The wahhabi azan, the Barelvi azan complete with durood shareef before, the Shia azan, and numerous others, starting a few seconds after each other with the effect of an orchestra. You take your jainamaz outside – yes, into the garden (not the yard, the garden, thank you), wrap yourself in a dupatta and pray some nafil before the prayer – because since you have all day, you start to find a home for devotions in each moment.
You’re not moving towards the next moment, constantly, not looking to a goal, a destination, you know today is just like yesterday and like many, many yesterdays before that, and today is going to be just as slow as May, June, and July were. Maybe the postman will bring you a letter from a friend; maybe the power outage won’t happen today and you’ll catch the one drama serial of the day; maybe a cousin will drop by. But otherwise, you’d better find a home in these moments. They will not bring you very much, but you have to stop and watch them, carefully, like an elderly person dwelling on every single detail of the day.
So you pray, and then you sit on the jainamaz, reciting prayers on your tasbeeh. This could go on for an hour, especially if the weather is mild. Tasbeeh-e-Fatimi, then a tasbeeh of Job’s Qur’anic supplication, and so on. And then you’d recite some Qur’an. You’d recite Surah al-Fathh, the recommended surah after Zuhr prayer, as you’ve been reciting it regularly everyday. Since there is so much time to do so, you can do supererogatory devotions regularly.
And then, you might just take a nap, because it’s warm and quiet, and nothing is happening. When we had the takht – the wooden outdoor bed – I’d nap outdoors. In winter, the sun warming you is the most wonderful thing, and a most sleep-inducing experience.
Outdoors, you say? Where on earth is all this happening? Is it safe? Is it private? What about the strangers outdoors?
Most of these memories are based in the interstices of the public and the private. Middle class gardens in Pakistan are walled, fully walled from the gaze, with tall gates to allow for cars to leave the garage. One of our homes had a garden not so well-designed – the walls had little slits at a few paces, but mostly, our trees and shrubbery veiled us from the outside. Our very curious, elderly, short-sighted neighbor who had even less of a life than I did, sometimes made a habit of checking on us through those slits. One day when she was doing this, and called out in Punjabi “Well, see, now, we can check on you this way!” she realized that the person stretched out on patio furniture was not her friend, my mother, but my 20+ brother – a MAN, sans shirt, no less – and she turned tail and scurried off in embarrassment. This quite-illiterate lady was actually mother to a famous London-educated artist of Mughal miniatures, who lived in the little house next door.
Mostly, our shady walled garden kept both the aunties and the strangers out, though. But the world remained palpable even so. And the world was a busy one. Packs of dogs, donkeys, cows, herds of goats and sheep, all passed through the street of our middle-class neighborhood. Peddlers selling alu, matar, gajarain (potatoes, peas and carrots), nuts and dried fruit, bright sari material from India, baked corn on the cob, buyers of bottles, cans and paper products by the kilo, and, delightfully, sellers of candy floss, sticky candy twisted on little sticks, ice lollies, ice cream (it wasn’t until I was an adult that the noisy musical ice-cream sellers rolled around), all passed through our little street. Funeral processions. And in Ramzan, the waker-uppers with their noisy drums, making sure you woke up – THREE HOURS BEFORE the fast starts. The street on the other side of that wall was a busy world. You lived near it, but not in it.
And of course there was the mosque loudspeaker, always busy, especially during holy seasons – which was, well, year round. Budding artistes got a hold of the loudspeaker and sang long na’ats – poetry in praise of the Prophet – to the tune of Bollywood songs. They announced lost children, deaths, moon sightings – we didn’t have to check any old websites then. And in so doing, they often woke us from deep slumber, and inspired us with unholy thoughts.
The garden is the scene of many such memories. I lost myself – I could, then, lose myself – in the fragrance and creamy beauty of the champa flowers. To this day I love the underrated sweet-pea because my mother planted them in our garden and they blossomed forth with a frenzy, mixing their colors within a few weeks of blooming. My mother is a keen gardener. We enjoyed corn blackened on outdoor grills- home-grown corn that took over the entire backyard, squash, okra, tomatoes, they all found a place in our garden. And each garden, of course, must have a Raat ki Rani (Queen of the Night) with its magical, intoxicating tiny flowers that only bloomed at night.
I could sit for hours in the monsoon rains – which, of course, went on for hours. Somehow, the rains were fully capable of flooding our garden so the water stood knee-high. The temperature was so mild that we never thought we’d catch cold in that rain. By the time the monsoons arrived, you were so hot and weary, rain was a relief, even when it flooded your streets.
I miss those nights too. Standing on the balcony and telling Allah my secrets – for secrets there were plenty – and no virtual friends to share them with over email that isn’t REALLY telling (I first used email in my late 20’s when I had moved to the UK for an MPhil). I miss prayer in the middle of the night, stealing out of the family bedroom (the one air-conditioned room, because power was expensive and central cooling was a mere idea) to pray in privacy and total silence. – There were no consequences for losing sleep in the middle of the night, because what was happening during the day anyway?
When we were little, it was still okay to sleep on the roof – yes, the roof – the top storey, I guess – was a place you occupied, where you hung out, where you enjoyed the sun. I have not in years and years known again the mystery and pleasure of falling asleep under the stars, on charpoys, to the tune of noisy pedestal fans and scary jinn stories. And sometimes you’d suddenly wake up to fat droplets of rain and run with sheets and pillows to the stuffy indoors. Of course then the 1980s came along, with guns, and educated young men took to burglaries at gun-point. After the actress Anjuman was robbed in her posh Defence Colony house– she was sleeping on her roof – sleeping indoors, as well as air-conditioners, became more common for middle-class Pakistanis. We didn’t get one until the early 80s. We made do with “desert coolers” and pedestal fans – of course humid days left us half-insane.
When I hear experts talk knowingly of encouraging children to deal with boredom, I want to raise one of my most ironic eyebrows and tell them they don’t know what they’re talking about. Cable TV with its endless choices – I would have killed for PBS as a child, public libraries full of new books, public gyms and swimming pools, perfectly maintained playgrounds with their play structures fully intact, movies and hospitable movie theaters, all manner of video games, good heavens- Chuck-E-Cheese, screen on the green events, fabulous museums – heck, children’s museums, – there really is little space for even the most determined American parents to allow their children to be bored – truly bored.
I am a little sorrowful for my daughter, who is surrounded by toys and by a mother who is a little too willing to turn on the TV. She may never know the gleam and glitter of the gems that are minutes and hours of a long, boring, endless series of days and nights. Those deathly boring hours – when absolutely nothing “happened” – that was where I found real secrets to my own soul. That was where, scraping and searching for anything, anything at all, I found reasons for living.
Recently, I was under the weather, and found myself in need of some external help. Some wonderful, sympathetic friends in my town took on the tasks of sending me family meals on days that I was too tired, and to pick up my daughter from school.
This warmth and assistance was invaluable to me. I was truly moved.
But on another level, my emotional response to these gifts disturbed me. I felt strangely burdened. My mind started rattling off ways that I could “repay” these “favors.” I tried hard to STOP calling people for help – even when they’d urged me to call and not to hesitate. I started, in effect, holding up my hand, drawing boundaries, putting up fences — which, we all know, make pretty terrible neighbors.
This made me question myself. When did I become this person who was unable to ‘take’ what was freely and lovingly given? When did I develop such a cold distant sense of self and other? When did I cut myself off from others?
On such days, I found myself missing a distant time in my (relative) youth, when I would show up sick and feverish at a friend’s house, fall asleep on her couch, wake up to a cup of tea and then lunch, fall asleep again, and wake up to snacks and desultory chat. The idea that my friend/s would find me burdensome did not cross my mind. The exchange had already happened emotionally, and that the giving and receiving was merely an outward thing, nothing that had to be earth-shattering. Invaluable, deeply appreciated, thankfully welcomed, yes. But not a disaster for my sense of personal security. Nothing that affected my independence. Nothing that broke my pride.
It is an uncomfortable thing, this fenced-in selfhood. It is frozen, unable to bend, incapable of flexibility, illiterate in the art of freely accepting. This selfhood is crippled when it is forced to take. “What do I have to do to deserve this? Why are they doing this for me? Will they weary of my need? When I am not able to serve them, but have to accept service, will this disadvantage me socially? Will it put me in a position of emotional dependence, and then what if I am abandoned?” …
Many years of rootless wandering from continent to continent, community to community, do make you feel like you don’t belong – anywhere. Anywhere you go, you have to invest time to develop those solid relationships where giving and receiving are almost the same thing. When you’re done investing time in one place, you move, and start over. You remain somewhat of a stranger.
And then, when you feel like you are a stranger, you start making others into strangers.
I think that during my recent visits to Lahore, my family might have found my habit of saying “thank you, ammi” and “thank you, Svend” to be oddly exotic. Now, it may sound like I was raised ill-mannered, but we did not say ‘thank you’ in my family. We just did things for each other. ‘Thank you’ wasn’t necessary, or expected. ‘Thank you’ was a little bit of fence. Of course ‘thank you’ is a wonderful thing, and it sends out the aroma of warmth and appreciation even into long-standing relationships, and awakens them out of stagnancy. But in some cases, ‘thank you’ doesn’t occur – not because we don’t appreciate, but because the boundaries between self and other are not marked out so very darkly. Do I thank you for being in my heart? Do I thank you for being, in many ways, an integral part of me and my life? How do I set you apart, and then thank you?
In the early centuries of Islamic Sufism, we find numerous stories of Sufis whose shaikhs put them through a period of rigorous training, which included service to others and the performance of low-status work. Often, they were commanded to take up their begging bowls and to beg for scraps in the streets. Culturally, today, the pride that closes us off from asking or receiving is billed as an entirely positive thing. But in the spiritual traditions, the ability to erase pride – indeed selfhood – is praiseworthy. The Prophet described a mustard seed worth of pride as blameworthy. “What is a mustard seed worth of pride?” my shaikh asked me. “It is selfhood.” Naturally. this is not about greed for others’ possessions. Acquisitiveness is the opposite of this lack of pride.
I am trying to re-learn to take, but this is a difficult degree to obtain. The mastery of this art is a form of surrender. It is vulnerability, and yet it is emotional strength that is not shaken by give and take. I’m hoping I can regain that strength that I have somewhat lost along the way.
My latest blog post at Religion Dispatches mourns the murder of Marwa Sherbini and the attack on humanity, justice, law and security.
This piece was published at the Religion Dispatches blog in 2007.
I like visiting cafes. Cafes are to me what the phone booth is to Superman. Except I never go in Supermom, sparkling with sugar sprinkles. Nor do I emerge Exceptional Academic, rippling with cerebral muscles. I go in Struggling Momma, and I emerge Dr. Barely There. Cafes help me transition from one mode to the next. In my study, I can’t really transition (surrounded as I am by onesies and jangly toys) , and I end up blogging about the challenges of motherhood.
One day, I left my toddler in her father’s care, and went to a café. I like my baristas. I enjoy making conversation with them about the media, Athens, and health-care (or, I should say, health un-care, since I am in the US). The baristas are young, clean-cut liberals – my peeps, in relative terms, especially here in this red state – college-educated, middle-class, pleasant young people.
One of the baristas is a local student. She was unhappy with one of her professors that semester. The professor claimed that girls in the Middle East were almost universally married off at early ages, with barely any education at all. The professor went a step beyond outrage: she called upon the international and American community (via her undergraduates, if you please) to save Muslim women in the Middle East. America, she entreated, should penalize Middle Eastern nations. Any country that disadvantaged women to the extent that they could not easily pursue careers, and where they were married under family arrangements instead of purely personal choice, should not receive US aid.
(Heck, under that principle, I thought, we should go in and save Pakistani men – plenty of them marry spouses selected by their parents. My brother married a wonderful woman that my parents found for him; I (the daughter) traveled to the US and married an American.
Naturally, that afternoon, I gave up every attempt to jot notes for the public lecture I was preparing. I dedicated myself to studiously being the weird woman eavesdropping on the baristas’ conversation.
I dealt with mixed feelings as I listened to the two young people disagree with the professor. “So she says that American authorities should publicly criticize countries where women are married off early, and don’t have rights to choose their own husbands, and have to get arranged marriages,” Emma said. Peter chuckled rather unenthusiastically. Emma threw her hands in the air. “You know?” she said. “She thinks we should go in and change what people in other countries do, and how they treat women there.”
“Why should we go in to change what they do?” Peter said. “Who died and made us president of the whole world?”
“Exactly,” Emma said. “And it just doesn’t make sense for us to try to change how they feel. Why should they accept our point of view, when we think they’re wrong? Maybe they think we’re wrong because we meet people and marry whoever we like.”
(Uh, the little brown woman here? She’s one of them, and she met and married the man she liked).
“What they’re doing might be relevant to where they live, and their culture,” Peter said. “Maybe women in the Middle East don’t need as much education. Why should we force them to get more education and to marry late?”
“Well, don’t we have enough problems of our own right here?” Emma said. “Women don’t get paid as much as men do, and women get turned down for jobs because they’re going to get married and pregnant, and women don’t get treated equally to men at work either.”
“There’s another side to the problem,” Peter said reflectively. “I wish the whole world could agree on basic moral values today, so we could all enforce them collectively. The UN was supposed to help us achieve that dream of universal human rights. But we’re far away from agreeing on any moral and universal values today. Least of all on women’s rights. Other cultures and other religions will just do things differently, whether we like it or not. What we can do is live up to our own principles of equality and leave the rest of the world alone.”
“People in different cultures will never agree on certain things,” Emma argued. “It’s just something we have to live with, and stay out of people’s business. Would we like them to interfere with our values and our lifestyle? Of course we wouldn’t. So why do we expect them to welcome us with open arms and say, ‘Oh, please come and turn our societies upside down. Please change the way we work. Please make us do things the opposite from how we do them. We love America and we love equality. We love feminism. Come and teach us how to do it.”
As the two baristas chatted, agreeing on culturally relativistic values on gender, I struggled on my private darkling plain, swept with confused alarms of discomfort and delight. When a young American calls for non-interference in “their” business because “they” are different, I am relieved and disturbed. I contrast the non-interfering liberal with the large young Midwestern ex-GI in my class years ago: “Saddam is the Antichrist, and we’ve got to go in and fight him,” he told me solemnly. So I like the tune of non-interference. A little. In relative terms.
But the background harmony assumed total difference. People in the Middle East were different. They treated their women differently. They treated their women unequally. That’s the way “they” like it. Let “them” be. We, here, we like it different. We’re all feminists around here. We like our human rights and our nightclubs. They like their arranged marriages and their veils.
The combination was sort of Samuel-Huntington-with-Edward-Said.
My feelings reminded me of the fall of 1996. Just as I felt in the café – stimulated, troubled, confused about my feelings – I had felt in my graduate classes. I had just arrived in the US that summer, and was very unsure of myself. I had much to say, to be sure, but I recall how I struggled to find my thoughts and words in the conversation. I felt like I wanted to speak a different language.
For me, the struggle became an issue of how to insert myself into the conversation. How was I to re-examine the very bases of the discourse and then to re-examine the conclusions? How could I bring the incisive debate to a grinding halt and deconstruct the binaries – binaries that were foundational to the discourse? How could I challenge the very basis of the debate? And how, then, could I offer the same conclusion, but with a different emphasis? Or how could I offer a new perspective on the whole debate and face the blank surprised faces? – My baristas happily ranted about their professor and I agreed with them against the professor but I was struggling with the very basis of their opinions.
Neither one of my baristas, for all their liberal, distant, hands-off respect for “other cultures,” had even vaguely entertained the notion that norms of gender equality could possibly be shared by strange, brown Muslim folks in distant lands.
As a Muslim feminist from Pakistan – where feminism is local and has many colors and isn’t always called “feminism” because “feminism” is owned and run by White women who bring White men in fighter planes – I felt wracked with discomfort. I heard the baristas’ assumptions about Middle Easterners and Muslims. I thought of Pakistani activists, scholars, lawyers, theologians, politicians, writers, and lay-people that allied themselves with feminist causes.
It hadn’t occurred to my baristas that “those people” had already come up with ideas, strategies, and jihads to try to change patriarchal norms and oppressive customs. It hadn’t occurred to them that brown and black folks who spoke funny languages were sometimes engaged in a life-and-death struggle to change societal practices. Weren’t they all swarthy, bearded males featured shouting furiously about America on the cover of Newsweek? And weren’t “we” all feminists and enlightened?
And then there was the professor. She was so filled with outrage over oppressive practices that limited women’s choices that she wanted the US to engage in a political war with those countries to change what they did. So little did she know about the local contexts and so little credit did she give them that the only hope for them lay in “us.” And “us” meant marines from Alabama, Mavis Leno, or President George Bush (whose mythical cv features only one entry under ‘feminist activism,’ and that entry is labeled Afghanistan slash Oil).
When the white knight knows so little about his damsel in distress, how does he expect to rescue her? When she turns around and tells him to call her Ms. and to stop telling her what to do, will he be outraged at her ingratitude? When she says she’s quite happy wearing a traditional outfit, thank you, but could she please get maternity leave, will he snort in disgust at his charge? When she wraps her head in a veil and stands up for her Islamic prayer, will he throw up his hands at her inability to throw off Islamic slavery? When she says why thank you for your help, but I need my husband out of Guantanamo, and then I’d like to open a Qur’an school for girls – what will he say then? When she says she’s got her own ways of effecting the revolution, and it doesn’t involve selling out brown men to America, will he decide against trying to rescue her after all?
Muslim women are done being rescued. Muslim women are done being defined. Muslim women are done being told what they need.
But Muslim women could use help, doing what they think they should doWomen could use help in the worldwide community of patriarchy. Muslim women are engaged in struggles for humanity, equality and justice as are their global sisters. They sure could use some help. But when they reach out for assistance, to fellow warriors for all kinds of justice and equality they call for a few ground rules:
Respect. Give us some credit. Understand that we’ve been engaged in the struggle for gender equity for a very long time, even if you hadn’t “discovered” us before. As fellow feminists, you’re our peers. To you, we are not victims and certainly not your charges.
Empathy and support. Respect does not go with indifference. Respect does not mean that you must leave us to our own devices. It is not inherently disrespectful to feel for the suffering of others: the recipe combines respect and empathy. Support the cause of gender equity, and offer every assistance that you can, as long as it is combined with respect. This will mean a continuing internal jihad for you, along with the jihad for gender equity.
Don’t infantilize. Even as you empathize, make sure that you do not infantilize. When I feel sorry for my crying child, I gather her into my arms and cuddle her; I try to control her hands so that she does not hurt herself; I protect her from forks and messy food by feeding her spoonfuls of food with my own hands. Well, don’t treat Muslim women like that. Don’t tell them you have exactly the diet of morality and values they need. Don’t tell them you know what they need, and what they should refrain from.
Humility. As you support others, and as you empathize with their struggles, do not forget to exercise humility. This means remembering that you do not have all the answers, that (sadly) your own communities and homelands are not free of inequalities. Remember that your theologies and your cultures have as much patriarchal content as do Muslim women’s – and yet you do not abandon them. So do not call upon Muslim women to abandon everything they know and love for the sake of their rights. Share your ideas and experiences, humbly, but never assume you know. Which means -
Embrace your ignorance. Do not fear your ignorance. We sally out into the world armed with assumptions because otherwise we could not function. But a modicum of uncertainty about your own assumptions is useful. Do not have confidence in Fox News, CNN and Geraldine Brooks, or even in merely the present writer (who is a member of the post-colonial elite). Yes, I know that sounds like you can never truly know, but the best thing you can do is -
Learn and listen. At the conclusion of a lecture, a young White woman approached me and asked me what she should do about the “problems” of Muslim women. She wanted to help people, she said, and she didn’t want to be disrespectful. I reflected for a moment: had I, in my lecture, created a moral impasse? I had lectured passionately on the need for gender equity in Islamic theology, and I had mentioned the dangers of Western cultural imperialism. What was the answer? Very simple: the best thing you can do, I said, is to listen. Talk to people who are different from you. Listen to them, and process what they say. Even then, don’t assume you know all about them. Never assume that you are done knowing. I am a Pakistani and a Muslim, and I still haven’t figured out my own people entirely. You can’t put us in a box. The “different” folks of the world aren’t an easy minor in a college course for affluent White people to “master.”
Don’t crash the party. As you humbly, respectfully and empathetically listen, learn and support, take care not to barge into the struggles with guns blazing, and expecting applause. You are not Michael Douglas in The Ghost and the Darkness, you are not Lawrence of Arabia, and you are not any other White savior of Miserable People of Color. Offer support as Muslim women engage in their own struggles. Ask them what they need. Don’t appropriate their struggles. Ask them if they really want your letters to pour into the President’s mailbox. Ask them if they want statements of protest. Sometimes the last thing a local third world feminist struggle needs is loud shows of support from Washington, DC. Foreign supporters of a movement can destroy the hard-earned legitimacy of local movements. You can disrupt the delicate pattern of evolutionary struggle with your desire to see change occur overnight. When you fly in to “rescue” Muslim women, you can do serious damage to the work and to the credibility of feminist activists.
I am so very sick of them. They seem to arrive every few days. Here’s the new winter collection! Hey, and here’s the late winter catalogue. Oh wait, here’s the clearance winter catalog. … In case you forgot, here’s the winter leftovers … and it goes on. The anorexic models continue to exhibit unhappy pouts that make you want to call a hotline for help, and they continue to twist their bodies into angles one would not consider physically possible. And now, there are the new underage-looking models in their grownup-mimicking styles (don’t you just see your tweenage daughter modeling this stuff some day? Perhaps she could practice).
They offer an easy way online to get ON their mailings. Okay, and to “reduce” mailings (I guess, to just under 75). BUT to STOP their mailings, you have to call 1.800.411.5116. And when you call, you waste 10 minutes waiting for the end-catalogues option which DOES NOT HAPPEN. You ask for customer service and the honey-toned voice insists that “I think you asked for Customer Service but I can help you if you just give me a little more information.” So you hope for the best and pronounce your address clearly, whereupon the voice assures you excitedly that in just a few minutes you’ll be able to RECEIVE their prolific mailings (NOT remove them).
So you hiss Customer Service and the voice cannot seem to make out what you are saying and asks you to repeat. Then you eventually get through to a person (of course you have your inevitable wait) …. And congratulations! I have at last gotten off the mailings (Of course they are pre printed so it will take 90 days for me to stop receiving them.)
Meantime if I make the mistake of ordering a single pair of PINK socks from VS, the deluge will resume. Thank goodness it’s not being taken from the Canadian caribou for now – though who knows where else it’s coming from. If you are one of its victims, don’t feel alone: your catalogue is counted among only about 400 million mailings.
