Elham Manea, The Female Imam: Change The Story To End The Killings Of Arab Women And The Patriarchal Arabic-Islamic Life
By Rajaa Natour
3 December
2020
Two weeks
ago, following the murder of an Arab Israeli woman named Wafaa Abahreh from
Arabeh, a feminist friend posted on Facebook: “Changing the story, preventing
the next murder.” That phrase, “changing the story,” stuck in my head, as did
the way Wafaa died so brutally, allegedly murdered by her ex-husband who, as of
writing, still walks among us.
Swiss-Yemeni academic,
journalist and activist Elham Manea, right, rehearses a prayer for the visual
media before leading an inaugural Friday payer at the Ibn Rushd-Goethe-mosque
in Berlin, in 2017.Credit: JOHN MACDOUGALL / AFP
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We would
like to change the story. We would like to change the ending, to create a story
that doesn’t end with the blood of Palestinian women, or any women. But our
steps and moves have not been achieving those ends. We demonstrate, we protest,
write, promote legislation, and Palestinian and other women are still being
murdered. Sorry, friends, the story is not changing, and apparently these tools
aren’t going to change it.
The
question of how to change the story and its ending has been haunting me, and
compelled me to look for examples of social and feminist actions that do change
or at least tried to change the story in the Arab world and how it ends. But I
decided that this time I would write about innovative, radical, uncompromising
tools, the kind that clash with reality come what may. I searched for tools
that had turned the patriarchal Arabic-Islamic life into a nightmare.
I found the
tool and the face and the story. I found Elham Manea.
Dr. Manea,
53, a political science lecturer at the University of Zurich and originally a
Yemenite human rights activist, confronted one of the archetypical Islamic
taboos head on. In 2017, she declared herself an imam (the leader of worship at
a mosque), and even prayed publicly with Muslim men and women and delivered a
sermon at a Swiss mosque. As if that wasn’t bad enough for the conservative
Muslim world, the service included musical interludes played within the mosque.
I was
stunned to subsequently discover that things like this have been happening in
the Arab Muslim world since 2005. They never reached the Islamic religious
discussion in Israel in any way. Moreover, it made me realize just how captive
the Islamic discourse is to the male agendas, to which there is no alternative.
Manea’s act
not only went in the face of an Islamic legal prohibition – Islam bans Muslim
women from leading Islamic religious rituals, let alone with men and women
participating together; she also violated a social prohibition by presenting an
alternative vision, with the revolutionary introduction of new ideas regarding
women’s roles within current Islamic religious practice. Manea did not just
gather the crumbs that the dominant religious discourse offered her. She did
not go along (at least not fully) with the religious gender division of roles
in which women are led like sheep to pasture. She negated the physical and
symbolic exclusion of women within Islamic religious practice, and the
submissive female identity within it.
Many in the
Arab world were outraged because her actions indicate that she and other Muslim
women have something to say about how Islam is observed, in terms of content
and practice: Manea speaks about an Islam that is broad and accepting and
embracing, in which there is room for a wide range of Muslim religiosity.
To me, the
religious discourse and practice as well as the feminist struggle from within
it, are unacceptable. The same goes for Islamic feminism, which operates within
the religious boundaries, excusing, interpreting, justifying and collaborating
with the violent Islamic discourse.
But while I
don’t agree with it, I can understand, the need, for lack of choice, of some
Muslim women to act and fight from within. I am cognizant of the price that
Muslim women can pay when they clash head on with the religion, its boundaries
and its religious legal dictates. I also understand that Muslim women have the
right to try, time and again, to find their place within the boundaries of the
religious discourse and practice. It is their right to conduct a dialogue and
to push for change from within the religion that provides them with a physical
and symbolic space too. Muslim women everywhere have the right to challenge
this religious supremacy with whatever tools they choose, even if I think it’s
a lost cause.
It’s a lost
cause because religiosity is the patriarchy’s most available and strongest
tool, and our use of it as women is to our disadvantage. It is a tool that will
lead us to them, because it is their arena, and then we’ll again find ourselves
trapped within a discourse that replicates the power structures and the gender
division.
But beyond
all of this, the fundamental problem I have with change from within the
religious-Islamic discourse is that our rights as women are not supposed to be
subject to interpretation or negotiation by various religious sages. Our rights
are supposed to be anchored in a democratic and egalitarian constitution and
not subject to challenge.
Still, the
interesting thing about the outlook and actions of Manea and others like her is
that they are demanding ownership of the religiosity they’ve been denied not
through empty slogans, but through well-constructed alternatives that are
immediately implemented without waiting for legitimization or any social,
religious approval. Manea is unilaterally changing the story de facto without
relying on religious interpretation or similar precedents. She is basically
saying: I am the precedent, and it is taking place within the religious game
though not completely surrendering to it.
In order to
change the story, the narrative, the language and, most importantly, the
outcome of this narrative, our demand as Palestinian women whose sisters are
murdered morning, noon and night, is to remove the issue of dealing with
violence against (all) women from the hands of the police. We’ve done enough
knocking on the doors of the welfare system, the courts and the police. The
time has come to discard the tools we’ve used up to now and to adopt a radical
discourse and tools that will bring down the patriarchy and its various arms.
But how?
You must be wondering. I have an answer to that too. A forum should immediately
be established of female lawyers and activists and others who will take on the
investigations, lawsuits, monitoring and handling of the problem of violence
against women. Women changing the story means taking the police out of the
picture. Changing the story means creating feminist entities, mechanisms, tools
and processes that will put an end to this bloodshed.
Original Headline: This Female Imam May Have
the Solution to the Killings of Arab Women
Source: The Haaretz
URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-women-feminism/elham-manea,-female-imam-change/d/123660
New Age Islam, Islam Online, Islamic
Website, African Muslim News, Arab World News, South Asia News, Indian Muslim News, World Muslim News, Women in Islam, Islamic Feminism, Arab Women, Women In Arab, Islamophobia in America, Muslim Women in West, Islam Women and Feminism