Trying To Be an Ally: Thinking About Hejab, Muslim Invisibility, and the Casual Hatred that is Cultural Appropriation (1)

In 2008, when my family and I traveled to Iran for my brother-in-law’s wedding, the day after we left Tehran to visit my sister-in-law and her family in Isfahan, the Iranian morality police drove a paddy wagon into Tajrish, a part of Iran’s capital where we’d been shopping in the bazaar the day before, and started rounding up women whose clothing did not appropriately conceal their bodies from public view. A few days earlier, while sitting with my brother-in-law and his wife in an outdoor cafe, I had watched my wife nervously sit up straight and carefully adjust her hejab when a member of the morality police walked in. My brother-in-law’s wife, on the other hand, sat calmly and did nothing to adjust hers. Later, my wife explained the difference in their reactions. Hers was a reflex from growing up in Iran during the years after the 1979 revolution, when even the slightest deviation from what was considered appropriate dress could earn a woman severe beating, arrest, and even worst. My brother-in-law’s wife, on the other hand, had not only grown up in an Iran that had seen periods of relative freedom when it came to women’s clothing, but she herself was part of a generation that has been increasingly defiant when it comes to the government telling women how they should dress. She simply did not fear the officer in the same way that my wife had been conditioned to do.

That women’s bodies and sexualities are contested territory in Iran, as they are in male dominant cultures all over the world, is no surprise, nor should it be a surprise that the constraints placed on women’s dress in Iran is the form of government oppression there ((Just to be clear, I am not saying that Islam oppresses women by requiring them to cover themselves; whether or not that is the case is a debate for Muslims to have within their own communities and on their own terms. Rather, I am saying that the imposition of this dress code by Iran’s government on all women in Iran, under threat of punishment, is a form of oppression.)) most easily latched onto by the popular imagination in the West. Not only does the fact that it’s women whose lives are limited in this way play into western fantasies of rescuing the exotic woman-in-distress from her primitive and despotic, male-dominated family/country/culture, but also, given the high value we place on individual expression and freedom of choice, the limiting of something we see as so fundamentally personal as the decision of what to wear on any given day can seem to us to strike at the very heart of what it means to be alive. That the women of Iran might not see it this way is something too few of us take into consideration.

In the west, or certainly in the United States, one dominant image of the struggle for women’s rights in Iran is something like this one, in which a young woman is being arrested for not properly covering her hair.

The problem with this image, though, is not that it is inaccurate; the problem is that it is incomplete. Not only does it leave out all the other concerns that women’s rights advocates in Iran attempt to address, but it also elides the full complexity of Iranian women’s response, on their own terms and within the context of their own culture, to the dress code that their government has given the force of law. In September of this year, Azadeh Moaveni published an article on IranWire called The Metamorphosis of a Cloak that illustrates what I am talking about. The focus of Moaveni’s article is the spring manteau collection by designer Farnaz Abdoli. The manteau–from French, meaning a loose coat, cloak, or robe–is one of the two choices available to Iranian women when it comes to outerwear, the other one being the chador, which is what the woman on the right is wearing in the picture above. Like the hejab, which has in Iran a far more complex political and cultural/religious history than one might expect, the manteau is not without political significance. As Moaveni writes:

If clothes are a marker of how a society experiences change, then the rise of the manteau reflects just how dramatically Iranian society and values have been transformed in the past forty years. Until the 1970s, women in Iran dressed with great variation and mainly according to social background: rural women and those in smaller cities favoured chador chit or floral chador, less religious urban middle-to-upper class women wore Westernized clothing, while the black chador was mainly worn in big cities by traditional and ultra-orthodox religious women.

The manteau only emerged in the 1970s as a political statement by young, educated women, many devoted to leftist or modern Islamist ideals. But after 1979, when the revolutionary government sought to impose black chador on all Iranian women, the meaning of both chador and manteau were transformed. In the early 1980s, a spectrum of women who might have looked nothing like each other on a pre-1979 street began to embrace the manteau as a compromise.

Even for religious women, says the scholar Ziba Mir-Hosseini, the chador declined as the superior form of hejab…as society began to equate black chador with extremist-political-state Islam…. “The chador’s message became hezbollahi [associated with the government], and the manteau’s message became modern, reformist Islam.”

Here are a few examples of Abdoli’s designs; the photo at the top of this post is another one. (All the pictures are from Moaveni’s article.) Click on the images to see them at full size:

I’d wager that all of the women in these pictures would have been arrested on that day in Tajrish in 2008, something that Abdoli herself acknowledges when she says, “These aren’t clothes for going to the supermarket or the vegetable seller or taking a walk in Park Mellat.” In other words, or at least this is how I understand it, even though Abdoli’s designs are, as Moaveni puts it, “technically compatible with state dress codes, [being] long and flowing with proper sleeves,” they are not modest enough to be acceptable in public.

My own immediate, emotional, very Western, very American response to these pictures and the politics they represent is that Abdoli’s designs are, at best, an accommodation with tyranny, that they perpetuate tyranny by giving it a beautiful, and even sexy, veneer, and that if Iranian women really want freedom, then the only valid approach is to put an end to that tyranny. There are, no doubt, Iranian women, and also men, who agree with me at least in principle, especially with the part about ending tyranny (and I am thinking here of people who live in Iran, not Iranians who live elsewhere). Nonetheless, my response fails to account for the fact that neither the manteau nor the hejab–nor, for that matter, the entire concept of women covering themselves in this way for the sake of a spiritually motivated modesty–are part of my cultural, historical, spiritual, or political vocabulary. Implicit in my response, in other words, is the assumption, the expectation, that my triply vicarious understanding of this issue–I am neither Muslim, nor Iranian, nor a woman–has a validity that is equal to, if not greater than, the understanding of the Iranians themselves. That assumption, that expectation, no matter how nobly motivated, is no less arrogant in its presumptuousness than those who choose to see Iran only through the very narrow lens of images like the one of the woman being arrested above.

I’m not suggesting that the only appropriate stance for someone like me to take is one of pure, live-and-let-live cultural relativism. I think it is unambiguously wrong for the government of Iran to impose a religious dress code–and sanctions for violating that code–on its people, many of whom do not share the government’s understanding of their religion; and I think it’s important to focus on the ways that code impacts women far more than men, who are also enjoined to dress modestly, though the Iranian government seems to focus more on men’s haircuts than anything else. As well, I think it’s important for people in the west not to be silent about issues like this. It’s just that I think it is more important for us first to listen to what the people who live this issue on a daily basis have to say, and not just those whose ideas–at least on the surface–agree most strongly with ours, but also those with whom we disagree or who have perspectives that are new to us. Having listened like that, we can begin to claim an informed perspective, and that perspective (hopefully) will teach us the humility of knowing that we are not now and will never be any kind of ultimate authority on this subject. The arrogance of assuming that we can be is what I will discuss in Part 2.

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28 Responses to Trying To Be an Ally: Thinking About Hejab, Muslim Invisibility, and the Casual Hatred that is Cultural Appropriation (1)

  1. Phil says:

    Just to be clear, I am not saying that Islam oppresses women by requiring them to cover themselves; whether or not that is the case is a debate for Muslims to have within their own communities and on their own terms.

    The way I read this, it seems like you’re using the term “Muslims” to describe people who belong to a particular cultural or ethnic group, and not strictly to describe adherents of a particular belief system. Is that an accurate interpretation of your intention with that sentence?

  2. Phil,

    I am not sure about what you mean by the distinction you are making. People who are Muslim, which is primarily a religious designation as far as I know, come from all different ethnic and cultural groups. Can you say a little bit more about what you mean and why you are asking?

  3. Phil says:

    I meant that you use a term that is appropriately applied to a religious designation, but you write about it as though it were a characteristic that just…”is.” You seem reluctant to criticize Islam and its treatment of women because you are not Muslim. That would make sense if you were writing about a minority group that you could not possibly join. One might say, for example, that I’m reluctant to criticize the way Policy X affects black people because I am not black, or the way Policy Y affects indigenous people because I am not one of them.

    But if a religion is a belief system that a person could choose to believe or choose not to believe, then why should belief in a religion be a requirement in order to criticize the religion? Why would choosing to believe something grant a different kind of agency than choosing not to believe it? A person could say, for example, “I choose not to be Muslim for many reasons, and one reason is because Islam oppresses women by requiring women to cover themselves.” Would that person be doing something wrong?
    I realize that you’re trying to be sensitive and to make sure that acknowledgment and respect is given to individuals who are most affected by the beliefs and policies in question, but I think you’re phrasing it strangely.

  4. Phil says:

    I should add: I asked that question because I was confused abut that particular passage in an essay that I found, overall, to be thoughtful and interesting. Your writing sometimes–and I think this is intentional–has the opposite effect of most blog posts I read. Instead of sharing it to show what I think, I’m driven to share it to ask other people what they think.

  5. A notion– could it be that all religions have an ethnic element as well as an overt belief/practice aspect? This is acknowledged for Jews, but it might be true more generally.

  6. Eytan Zweig says:

    Nancy – that works better for exclusionary religions like Judaism than it does for evangelical religions like Christianity and Islam – religions with a history of attempting to convert/impose the faith on non-members they encounter will have a far less homogeneous ethnic base than religions which encourage insularity.

    It’s also a matter of internal perception – the Jewish faith encourages its members to think of each other as a shared ethnicity, regardless of physical differences or (post-diaspora) place of origin. This is not a feature of many other religions, and, to my (non-expert) knowledge, not something that is normally emphasized in Islam.

  7. Phil,

    First, thanks for the kind words.

    Second, since your question is a little complex, I just want to clarify that the purpose of the footnote you are quoting was to distinguish between the policies and practices of the government of Iran regarding women’s clothing and Islam and the ways in which Islam is practiced, both individually and communally, in non-governmental contexts. I realize this last part might not have been completely clear from the way I wrote the footnote, but it is an important distinction to keep in mind when reading what I am going to say next, because we should not fall into the trap of taking Iran’s government, or the government of, say, Saudi Arabia, or Hamas as speaking authoritatively for some monolithic entity called Islam.

    As I said in the post, I have no problem saying that the government of Iran oppresses women in the name of Islam through its policies and practices concerning how women dress; nor would I have a problem saying that a father who forces his daughters–or a husband who forces his wife–to cover themselves under threat of punishment is oppressing those women; nor do I have a problem saying that when that father’s or husband’s practice is extended into an entire community that such a community is oppressing women in the name of Islam.

    In each of those cases, however, a person, or group of people, is oppressing women, not some independent, monolithic entity called Islam. I recognize that in my footnote I used language which does not make the distinction I am making here, but that was a carelessness in my writing. The distinction is a crucial one, first of all because, as a matter of fact, the practice of Islam varies from individual to individual, family to family, and community to community, and I think it is breathtakingly arrogant (and it is, frankly, a convenience of racist, orientalist, imperialist thought) to assume that the most oppressive forms of that practice–because they are oppressive–therefore define the essence of Islam for everyone everywhere. (And just to be clear, I am not accusing you of doing this; I am staking out my overall position.)

    More than, though–and I will get into this in the next post in this series–too many people who are not Muslim make the mistake of presuming what Islam looks like to them must be what Islam means to those who practice it. So, for example, take this statement from your comment:

    A person could say, for example, “I choose not to be Muslim for many reasons, and one reason is because Islam oppresses women by requiring women to cover themselves.”

    You ask if the person who says that is doing something wrong. I’m not going to answer with a simple yes or no, since, obviously, he or she is within her or his right to choose or choose not to follow any religion. What I will point out is that this understanding of Islam, that it “oppresses women by requiring women to cover themselves” is an ignorant one. As I understand it, Islam enjoins men and women to dress modestly, and the Quran mentions the veil as part of this modesty. There are two points I would make about this:

    First, the idea that “Islam oppresses women by requiring women to cover themselves” does not even admit the possibility that a woman might embrace this version of modesty as a spiritual and ethical stance in the world. Rather, it assumes that Muslim women are passive beings who are always and only acted upon by the rules of Islam as they are enacted and enforced by men.

    Second: the idea that “Islam oppresses women by requiring women to cover themselves” ignores entirely that there is a very large debate among Muslims, started by Muslim women who are feminist, about the precise meaning of the passages in the Quran that refer to modesty and veiling, and that this debate is possible precisely because Islam is not an ahistorical, monolithic entity that oppresses people, but is, rather, a living tradition with many branches that changes with the changing times.

    By way of analogy: One of the most oppressive aspects of Jewish law, as it was–and in some places still is–practiced is the body of law called hilchot nidah, which concern women’s menstruation. There are, however, groups of Jewish women, and even orthodox Jewish women if I remember correctly, and some of them identify as feminist, who have embraced and transformed (some of) the practices within that area of law because the traditions speak to them within their own understanding of what it means to be a woman and what it means to menstruate monthly. Are these women oppressed by Judaism?

    So, when I said that I think the question of whether Islam oppresses women–just to keep my awkward phrasing for consistency’s sake–was one that Muslims ought to debate it was because I don’t think it’s fair for people who have no stake in the developing meaning of a living tradition to presume to make a pronouncement like that.

    I know this is a very long answer to your question, and I apologize for its length, but I hope it makes sense.

  8. alex says:

    That’s ridiculous. Under that logic you couldn’t say patriarchy oppresses women, or the legal system oppresses blacks, or fascism oppresses trade unionists.

  9. Alex,

    But patriarchy, as a disembodied system, doesn’t oppress women. The men who embody that system, who benefit from it, who perpetuate it, etc., do; the same is true for the legal system and for fascism. We insist on this all the time, or at least I do, when people want to blame insert-your-social-problem on “society,” as if society were somehow something separate from those of us who are society.

  10. Pingback: Monday feminist roundup (19th August 2013) | feimineach.com

  11. alex says:

    That seems very far from the ordinary use of the words.

  12. Phil says:

    Richard,
    You make several very valid points in your nuanced answer. In fact, I think that you make several claims that are wholly separate from each other.

    For example: Islam is not an independent, monolithic entity. That’s true. There are many different sects, variations, and interpretations of Islam, and then different interpretations within the sects, etc. This is probably true of most major religions, even the ones that purport to be monolithic. There are different interpretations of Catholicism, for example, even though the Catholic Church doctrinally endows a single entity to be the final arbiter of Church teaching. (And that’s not to mention that Catholicism is itself a sect within Christianity.)

    A second, separate claim is that the most oppressive beliefs of a religion do not define the religion for everyone, everywhere. And I suspect you’d agree that no single belief defines a religion for everyone, everywhere, whether it’s an oppressive belief or something else.

    As I understand it, Islam enjoins men and women to dress modestly, and the Quran mentions the veil as part of this modesty.

    Actually, I think we’re discussing not one, but a series of separate beliefs. For example:
    1. Women should dress modestly.
    2. Women should dress more modestly than men.
    3. Women should be forced by their fathers, husbands, or brothers to dress modestly.
    4. Women should be forced by their government to dress modestly.

    …and we could probably subdivide these beliefs even further. You point out that these beliefs are not held by every single Muslim, and you are entirely accurate. But that doesn’t change the fact that these are actual beliefs that are actually held by real people practicing their faith.

    You write that it is racist, Orientalist, and imperialist to assume that the most oppressive form of a practice defines the essence of that practice. But isn’t it also ignorant to assume that the least oppressive form of a practice defines the essence of that practice?

    To be clear, I am not arguing that “Islam oppresses women,” or that “Islam is defined by its most oppressive practices.” Rather, I am pointing out that you cannot avoid these Catch-22’s when you talk about religion. I further assert that the choice not to believe in a religious belief gives one just as much right to criticize that belief as the choice to believe it.

    Here are some statements that I think are worth further consideration:

    [It is] a living tradition with many branches that changes with the changing times.

    That is a statement that you’ve chosen to believe, and that I happen to believe, too. But you’re surely aware that there are many people who consider themselves Islamic who do not believe that the religion changes over time. So, while you label a blanket statement about Islam’s oppression of women as “arrogant,” you must be aware that there are practitioners of the religion–and I suspect a fairly significant number–who would label the claim that the religion adapts and changes over time as arrogant, as well.

    This is not to say that I personally believe you’re being arrogant or ignorant. Rather, I’d like to make that point that religions are paradoxical things, and you can’t avoid a little bit of hypocrisy, arrogance, or ignorance when you’re discussing them.

    In each of those cases, however, a person, or group of people, is oppressing women, not some independent, monolithic entity called Islam.

    I submit that this is a false dichotomy. A person or class of persons can be oppressed by an individual, by a group, and also by an institution such as a religious belief system. These are not mutually exclusive, and in fact, some feminist writings deal extensively with systemic oppression.

    Furthermore, while it’s fair to say that “society” doesn’t really exist separate from the people who make up that society, I don’t think that’s true of a religion, if we consider a religion to be a belief system. Religions actually do exist apart from the people who practice them. There are dead religions, and we can still discuss them. You can read a book and decide, “By golly, I’m a Christian!” You can’t read a book and decide you’re a New Yorker.

    […]the practice of Islam varies from individual to individual, family to family, and community to community

    While it is true that the practice of Islam varies from individual to individual, the same could be said of any religion in the history of the world, as long as it had more than one adherent. By this logic, there is no such thing as “Islam” as a world religion; instead there are 1.6 billion individualized variations on Islam.

    And while that may be true in a sense, it’s not a particularly practical way of viewing a religion, and, it is fair to say: that’s not the way most Muslims view their religion either. There are myriad schisms and differences of viewpoints within every possible religion, and yet sociologists, anthropologists, and theologians find ways to write about them without personally understanding how every individual, or even every community, practices their version of a faith.

    I’m not saying here that Islam is monolothic. I’m just pointing out that if you want to give credence to the way that people actually live and believe their faith, you’ve got to acknowledge that there are millions upon millions of people who actually believe that they’re following the same faith as the rest of their co-religionists, or that the differences in their beliefs are not as important as the similarities.

    There are, however, groups of Jewish women, and even orthodox Jewish women if I remember correctly, and some of them identify as feminist, who have embraced and transformed (some of) the practices within that area of law because the traditions speak to them within their own understanding of what it means to be a woman and what it means to menstruate monthly. Are these women oppressed by Judaism?

    You seem to be asking if a person can participate in their own oppression. The answer is: yes, yes they can.

    That doesn’t mean that the people in question need you or me to “save” them, or that it’s right for you or me to try to stop them from doing what they choose to do. But it is simply wrong to suggest that a system can only be oppressive if the individuals who are oppressed are not willing participants in that system.

  13. Phil,

    I do want to respond to some of the individual points you raise, but first I want to remind myself of where this discussion started. You wrote:

    You seem reluctant to criticize Islam and its treatment of women because you are not Muslim…. But if a religion is a belief system that a person could choose to believe or choose not to believe, then why should belief in a religion be a requirement in order to criticize the religion? Why would choosing to believe something grant a different kind of agency than choosing not to believe it? A person could say, for example, “I choose not to be Muslim for many reasons, and one reason is because Islam oppresses women by requiring women to cover themselves.” Would that person be doing something wrong?

    I wrote:

    I have no problem saying that the government of Iran oppresses women in the name of Islam through its policies and practices concerning how women dress; nor would I have a problem saying that a father who forces his daughters–or a husband who forces his wife–to cover themselves under threat of punishment is oppressing those women; nor do I have a problem saying that when that father’s or husband’s practice is extended into an entire community that such a community is oppressing women in the name of Islam. (Emphasis added.)

    I’ve italicized the phrase in the name of Islam because I want to be clear about what I think that means and what I do not think it means. On the one hand, I think it means that the people and entities I named are oppressing through Islam, using Islam, that they find in Islam the foundation of and justification for their oppression of women. I think it means that they see themselves as Muslims practicing their faith; I think it means that this oppression is indeed systemic–though I also think that system only functions because it is embodied by those men and, subsequently, by the men who come after them. (And also, I should acknowledge, because it is embodied by the women as well–though I will address that later, or in a separate comment.) I do not, however, think it means that I can generalize from this particular version of Islam to say that Islam, by definition, in any and all forms it is given by the people who practice it, is oppressive of women; and the reason I don’t think I can make that generalization is that the generalization itself removes from women the possibility of their giving shape to a version of Islam that is not oppressive. I know that the question of whether that is even possible is a complex one, and so I will simply say this: I don’t know that it isn’t possible, and I do know that there are feminist Muslim women who are working very hard to make it possible, and I will not presume to tell them that their efforts are futile–especially because I do not know enough about their tradition to be able to contribute anything worthwhile to that conversation.

    So, obviously, I do think one can criticize Islam and the way it is practiced even if one is not a Muslim, but the question of whether Islam is, in its essence, irremediably oppressive of women, is not one that I would presume to answer. I suspect that we will end up agreeing to disagree about this, but I hope, at least, that the distinction makes sense to you.

    Now, a couple of other things. In response to my statement about Islam enjoining men and women to dress modestly and the Quran’s mention of the veil, you wrote:

    Actually, I think we’re discussing not one, but a series of separate beliefs. For example:
    1. Women should dress modestly.
    2. Women should dress more modestly than men.
    3. Women should be forced by their fathers, husbands, or brothers to dress modestly.
    4. Women should be forced by their government to dress modestly.

    On the one hand, of course, you are right, but I would point out that, as far as I know, only #1 is mentioned in the Quran. Everything else is interpretation and culture, which doesn’t mean that the people who hold and act on those beliefs are not practicing Islam as they believe it to be, and this practice is not oppressive; it is simply to point out that different interpretations are possible and to suggest, in the context of this discussion, that we not confuse interpretive and cultural overlays on the religion’s foundational text for the text itself. (And just to reiterate I do not mean by this that the foundational text is somehow inviolate; I mean precisely the opposite, that other interpretations and cultural overlays are possible.)

    You also wrote:

    You write that it is racist, Orientalist, and imperialist to assume that the most oppressive form of a practice defines the essence of that practice. But isn’t it also ignorant to assume that the least oppressive form of a practice defines the essence of that practice?

    Of course, but I did not make the latter statement, nor–I don’t think–did I imply it.

    You wrote:

    But you’re surely aware that there are many people who consider themselves Islamic who do not believe that the religion changes over time. So, while you label a blanket statement about Islam’s oppression of women as “arrogant,” you must be aware that there are practitioners of the religion–and I suspect a fairly significant number–who would label the claim that the religion adapts and changes over time as arrogant, as well.

    First, your language–“and I suspect a fairly significant number”–suggests some underlying assumptions about Muslims. I don’t know what those assumptions are, and I’m not going to presume to speak for you; I just want to point out that the assumptions are there and I imagine they color how you have read me and what you have said in response. (I of course also have my assumptions.)

    Second, what it means to say that a religion “does not change over time” is not a simple thing. For example, the government of Iran, which is a pretty conservative institution religiously, has adapted its laws to take sympathetic account of the existence of people who are transgender. I do not know enough to say what the limitations of the Islamic Republic’s position is and so I am not holding them up as an example of anything other than the fact that even the most conservative of religious traditionalists need to adapt to the changing times.

    Finally, in response to my example about the feminist Jewish women who have reclaimed and transformed the laws concerning menstruation, and my question about whether those women are oppressed by Judaism, you asked

    You seem to be asking if a person can participate in their own oppression. The answer is: yes, yes they can.

    But that is not what I was asking and the fact that you thought it was makes, I think, my overall point. My example was of women who, from their own point of view, on their own feminist terms, have taken a body of Jewish law and turned it into something that bespeaks, honors, reflects, deepens, choose-your-verb their existence as women. Assuming that those women are indeed capable of acting on their own, of claiming their own agency in this way, of transforming at least this aspect of Judaism–and, by extension, perhaps all of Judaism–so that they can put themselves at its center, then to call what they are doing participation in their own oppression is arrogant in precisely the way I talked about in the original post.

    Okay, I guess I will stop there.

  14. Ann Queue says:

    I confess I have always been bothered by young women in the US who choose to wear the hejab. Something in your post triggered a new thought for me. These women choose to wear it and claim their own agency and reasons for doing so. To draw a parallel that may offend some, it feels to me like sex workers who choose to do that work. There are circumstances under which women define their rules and make that choice freely, and create a life which they enjoy. But I believe they are outnumbered by the women who do not freely make that choice. I think that’s the root of why both sex work and the hejab (two words one might never expect in the same sentence) make me uncomfortable. I would not deny any woman the right to freely make either of those choices, but I fear that women who do are supporting the systems that force women into those choices.

    I’m open to (even asking for) feedback on this… I don’t know any woman who wears the hejab with whom I might speak about it, and have only read the basic “I get more respect/I’m honoring my faith” sorts of arguments for it. Plus someone’s comments that they heard many in the US wear it as a political statement (of what I’m not sure).

    I was friends with a live nude dancer in the past, and we did have some interesting conversations about that. I believe her workplace was unionized. Hurrah! More power to them. In the end, though, she felt that the work changed her thoughts and feelings towards men in problematic ways. I think that would be hard to avoid until and unless the world became a much less sexist place. My white western feminist female self suspects the hejab may come with its own such problems, and would love to hear a more informed perspective on it.

  15. Phil says:

    I do not, however, think it means that I can generalize from this particular version of Islam to say that Islam, by definition, in any and all forms it is given by the people who practice it, is oppressive of women

    Well, that’s a fair statement. I don’t think anyone could reasonably say that Islam, in any and all forms, is oppressive of women.

    First, your language–”and I suspect a fairly significant number”–suggests some underlying assumptions about Muslims.

    I suppose that’s possible, but I’d say that it suggests some underlying assumptions about religious people, and in particular, fundamentalist and orthodox religious people. Surely you’re aware that there are people who believe that the religion that they follow is true and/or eternal, and that their religion is perfect and should never change. Surely you’re aware that this is not an uncommon type of belief? I’m kind of baffled that you latched onto that phrase as if it is anything other than a statement that is almost definitely true.

  16. Varusz says:

    Islam itself is not oppressive to women if they are free to choose to follow the religion or not.

    What is oppressive is a state that coerces people into following a particular religion (and frankly being forced to do something is just as oppressive to men if they don’t want to do it).

    Otherwise, if you were perfectly free to choose to follow Islam or not, there would be nothing oppressive about it. Unless you want to be sexist and treat women like little children who have no agency or responsibility for their choices, and who are incapable of deciding anything for themselves.

  17. Ann,

    Note: I have edited this comment for clarity.

    Thanks for commenting. I am not the person to provide the more informed perspective you are looking for, obviously, but there are in the second post that will go up soon some links to books that might help. That said, a google search with the key words feminist, women, and Islam will probably bring you to some worthwhile things. I will say, though, that while I understand how you came to see an apparent structural parallel between hejab and sex work, it is based on an assumption that might not be true, i.e., that most of the women who wear a head scarf throughout the world are somehow forced to do so. The parallel you draw also ignores, I think, how the internal structures of Islam, and the idea of covering within Islam, and prostitution differ. I’m not saying there aren’t apparent similarities along the lines you suggest, especially in cases where a woman’s choice to veil are so strictly circumscribed that she might as well not have a choice, and I’m not saying it isn’t worth talking about those apparent similarities to discern whether or not they are “real.” I just think that it is equally important to look at the ways the two practices are different, both from the perspectives of the women who choose them and from the institutions that the women enter when they do.

    Phil,

    …I’d say that it suggests some underlying assumptions about religious people, and in particular, fundamentalist and orthodox religious people. Surely you’re aware that there are people who believe that the religion that they follow is true and/or eternal, and that their religion is perfect and should never change. Surely you’re aware that this is not an uncommon type of belief? I’m kind of baffled that you latched onto that phrase as if it is anything other than a statement that is almost definitely true.

    I wasn’t latching onto it; I was simply pointing out that the assumptions were there and that those assumptions are, in part, responsible for the different ways we see this issue. I am very aware that there are orthodox and fundamentalist–which is really only an extreme version of orthodoxy–practitioners of all sorts of religions out there. A significant part of the Jewish education of my youth was with those (not fundamentalist) kinds of people. However, orthodoxy and fundamentalism look very different from within a given tradition than from outside it, and the general tenor of your posts and of your questions seem to me to be coming from someone who stands outside religion as a whole–which may be an awkward way of saying things, but I seem to remember you taking a stand like that pretty explicitly in some other thread. I say this not as criticism, but as description.

  18. RonF says:

    I am not saying that Islam oppresses women by requiring them to cover themselves; whether or not that is the case is a debate for Muslims to have within their own communities and on their own terms. Rather, I am saying that the imposition of this dress code by Iran’s government on all women in Iran, under threat of punishment, is a form of oppression.

    In a country where there is an establishment of religion;
    where the religion is interpreted by the religious authorities as requiring a particular dress code of all Muslim women;
    and where the religious law forbidding conversion from Islam to other religions on pain of death is enforced by the government;
    these two concepts are hard to separate.

  19. Eytan Zweig says:

    RonF – I’m not sure what you’re saying here; first, what two concepts? The concept of the country versus the concept of Islam, or the concept of the oppression by the country and the concept of oppression by Islam? Also, hard for whom to separate? Hard for us as external observers? Hard for citizens of the country? Both? Someone else?

  20. Pingback: Not me | Technology as Nature

  21. Richard and Phil:
    I meant that you use a term that is appropriately applied to a religious designation, but you write about it as though it were a characteristic that just…”is.” You seem reluctant to criticize Islam and its treatment of women because you are not Muslim. That would make sense if you were writing about a minority group that you could not possibly join. One might say, for example, that I’m reluctant to criticize the way Policy X affects black people because I am not black, or the way Policy Y affects indigenous people because I am not one of them.

    But if a religion is a belief system that a person could choose to believe or choose not to believe, then why should belief in a religion be a requirement in order to criticize the religion? Why would choosing to believe something grant a different kind of agency than choosing not to believe it? A person could say, for example, “I choose not to be Muslim for many reasons, and one reason is because Islam oppresses women by requiring women to cover themselves.” Would that person be doing something wrong?
    I realize that you’re trying to be sensitive and to make sure that acknowledgment and respect is given to individuals who are most affected by the beliefs and policies in question, but I think you’re phrasing it strangely.

    I don’t think that religion is a choice, or at least it’s a highly constrained choice. I was undecided about making this point, because I’m pretty sure I’ve made it before in the comments of Alas, and because this is a sort of old thread. But after thinking about it some more, I think it’s pretty relevant to the discussion of how to be an ally in both this and part two.

    Part of religion is belief, part of it is practice. I didn’t decide to be an atheist because I wanted to sleep in on Sundays, or because I thought it would make me look edgy, it was because that was what seemed to me to be the truth of the universe based on what I knew about the universe and the way I reasoned about it. I couldn’t just decide to change my mind and believe in God because of, say, Pascal’s Wager. I could act as though I believed in God, but that wouldn’t be quite the same.

    Which brings me to the practice bit. This is where Phil’s “I could just choose to believe in Islam” is not so much false as not applicable. You’re not going to have the experience of the practice without actually doing it. And as Richard Newman points out, your [general you] experience of the practice (of veiling) might not be the same as a believer because your feelings of the practice will change the subjective experience of it. Not to mention that adopting just one practice and not any others could change your experience of the one practice you do adopt, as well.

    [Then there’s the fact that most people follow their parents’ religion, and there are some ways that a Muslim with Muslim parents has a more similar experience to a Christian with Christian parents than a Muslim with Christian parents… I’m not as clear on how to address this, but it is evidence that this isn’t a simple, voluntary choice.]

    Let’s say religious belief is like playing tennis. Anyone can choose to play tennis [with sufficient economic means; that part doesn’t usually fit the metaphor, though–unless the religion is, say, Scientology]. Your family could coerce you to play tennis when you don’t want to, or prevent you from playing tennis if you do want to. (And if your family plays tennis you might be more likely to see the fun of tennis and want to play tennis with your family.) But you can’t really choose to want to play tennis. And saying that since you could play tennis if you wanted to, people should listen to your criticisms of Serena Williams’ playing, even though you’ve never played tennis, wouldn’t make sense.

    What does all this mean to me, in practical terms? Basically, that I know that I lack expertise. I’m pretty confident about criticizing the reasoning or justification behind certain practices, but I’m more cautious and less sure that there isn’t something I haven’t thought of when it comes to the practices themselves and what their effects might be. Even so, I don’t think I need to completely refrain from critiquing practices, but I should approach it with more caution and humility.

  22. ClosetPuritan:

    Thanks for this.

  23. gin-and-whiskey says:

    but the question of whether Islam is, in its essence, irremediably oppressive of women, is not one that I would presume to answer.

    perhaps this is because you are phrasing the question in a way which makes the answer impossible.

    Certainly a group of people can get together and practice what they refer to as “islam” in a way that they personally believe qualifies to be referred to as “islamic.” That’s permissible, just as I would refer to my family as “Jewish” even though most of us are on the atheist side of reform judaism and wouldn’t be considered Jewish by anyone who was orthodox.

    But reform Judaism is, in that way, very distinct from orthodox or conserative judaism. It has its own system and its own set of beliefs and mandates: in many respects the divisions of judaism are like the various divisions of the protestant church.

    As a practical matter this discussion is focusing on a relatively orthodox version of Islam, which is the default one in many countries and some (many?) of the insular Muslim enclaves. And orthodox religions are almost always more oppressive, for various reasons.

    So when you talk about the new Islam that these women are discussing, you’re functionally talking about making a new church of islam, just as the baptists and others did for christianity.

    After all: as with the Torah and the New Testament and pretty much every religious text which was written way back when, the Koran is violent, oppressive, and pretty damn unpleasant in many ways. The Koran is “in its essence, irremediably oppressive of women,” just like the Torah and new testament. It’s not unique: anyone who attempts to follow these books strictly, as an orthodox Muslim/jew/Christian is going to be influenced by all the bad stuff, which is why my fundie christian friend thinks that women should “submit” and my orthodox jew friends think that women are “unclean” and so on.

    Christianity has done a decent job (especially on the protestant side) of handling internal schisms and creating a wide world-spanning set of churches that range from fundamentalist Bible literalists to “go church on Easter Sunday, if your parents happen to be around.” Judaism has also managed the reform movement with aplomb.

    Islam seems to be way, way, behind in that race. Since there’s no reason to think that there’s anything different about Muslims individually, it seems most likely that there’s something different about Islam or the Koran which makes it less susceptible to reform. This is akin to Catholicism, for example, which has been similarly resistant to change and is far less accommodating than many protestant sects.

  24. G&W:

    I am not sure that I agree with your framing here, but I don’t have the time today to give it the thought it would take to explain why. So I will simply say this: Each of the denominations of Judaism exist in response to the same holy text–and the same is true, as far as I know, for the different sects of Christianity–so I am not sure I agree that they constitute “new churches” in the way you have used the term here. Reform Judaism is in some ways continuous with orthodox Judaism and in some ways not. Over time that break might result in two different religious traditions–witness Judaism and Christianity–but right now, I do not think it is the case. More to the point, you seem implicitly to be granting a kind of primacy to the orthodox position as the authoritative and defining one when it comes to religious traditions; if that is the case, I just don’t agree with that way of seeing things. There is more to say about this and if I can I will get back to it later.

    As to this:

    Islam seems to be way, way, behind in that race. Since there’s no reason to think that there’s anything different about Muslims individually, it seems most likely that there’s something different about Islam or the Koran which makes it less susceptible to reform.

    It is also possible that this is because Islam is such a new tradition. Judaism and Christianity have been around a whole lot longer.

  25. Sebastian says:

    It is also possible that this is because Islam is such a new tradition. Judaism and Christianity have been around a whole lot longer.

    I think it is rather likely that the men whom we know as Jesus and Mohamed lived. I’ll extend the same courtesy to Abraham. We can also assume that the three religions were started by those respective worthies, and we can believe the archeologists over the letter of the book(s) on Abraham (it’s only a 5% difference, anyway)

    With these assumptions, the ages of the three religions expressed as a percentage of the oldest are 36, 51 and 100. One of these is not like the others, but I have to wonder what kind of thinking it takes to group the 51 and the 100 together.

  26. Ruchama says:

    Certainly a group of people can get together and practice what they refer to as “islam” in a way that they personally believe qualifies to be referred to as “islamic.” That’s permissible, just as I would refer to my family as “Jewish” even though most of us are on the atheist side of reform judaism and wouldn’t be considered Jewish by anyone who was orthodox.

    This would also depend on how they were thinking about “Jewish.” Most Orthodox people would probably say that you don’t live a Jewish life, but that, if your mother was Jewish, then you are Jewish, no matter how you live.

  27. Islam seems to be way, way, behind in that race. Since there’s no reason to think that there’s anything different about Muslims individually, it seems most likely that there’s something different about Islam or the Koran which makes it less susceptible to reform.

    It is also possible that this is because Islam is such a new tradition. Judaism and Christianity have been around a whole lot longer.

    Or it could be an accident of history/a result of historical forces. I think both textual reasons and young-religion reasons could be among those historical forces, though. It’s interesting that lately, in many countries, fundamentalist/Wahabbist versions of Islam have been gaining ground over more traditional [in that location, anyway] but less fundamentalist versions of Islam, and that short-term trend can’t be well explained by the youth of Islam or the text of the Koran. (I mean, fundamentalism generally involves going back to a more literal reading of the text, but clearly the traditional version was consistent enough with the text for it to become traditional.)

    Seeing how differently people following the same religious text can act, I’m reluctant to ascribe any behavior to a religious text that’s not very closely linked to said text. People seem to be very good at doing what they were going to do anyway, and finding a way for it to be consistent with their religion. Perhaps Muslim groups have more often found themselves in situations that led them to be more conservative, and have kept to a more conservative version of their religion because of it. I’m being vague about historical forces because I don’t think we can really know. However, I did think back to this article. (This response to the article I just linked is also worth reading.)

  28. Sebastian:

    With these assumptions, the ages of the three religions expressed as a percentage of the oldest are 36, 51 and 100. One of these is not like the others, but I have to wonder what kind of thinking it takes to group the 51 and the 100 together.

    That’s a fair point, assuming your percentages are accurate (which I am), though I could have done without the snark at the end.

    ClosetPuritan: Thanks for those links. The articles are both very interesting.

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