Gendered Islamophobia and the Politics of Representation
By
Grace Mubashir, New Age Islam
8 August
2022
Duality
Of Islamic Fundamentalist And Victim Of Misogyny Has Become One Of The Accepted
Images Of Our Time As The West's Declared War On Terror Has In Fact Been
Applied To The Body Of The Hijab-Wearing Muslim Woman
Main
Points:
1. Current era
is characterized by rhetoric in the name of emancipation of Muslim women.
2. Stereotype
of the oppressed/victimized Muslim woman has been strategically created by
European/modern/upper caste feminists through their anthropological
perspective.
3. It is the
duty of the advocates of decolonization and Muslim women to destroy the
elite/upper class canonical narratives.
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The current
era is characterized by rhetoric in the name of emancipation of Muslim women.
The time has come to dismantle the ever-flowing secular/liberalist
short-sighted narratives. The stereotype of the oppressed/victimized Muslim
woman has been strategically created by European/modern/upper caste feminists
through their anthropological perspective. Feminists familiar only with
upper/aristocratic milieu are passing along prescriptions of political power
and thereby artificial patronage and hyper-nationalism as the solution to
society's entire problem. Therefore, it is the duty of the advocates of
decolonization and Muslim women to destroy the elite/upper class canonical
narratives.
Vocabularies,
conventions, and conventions for discussion in secular spaces are constructed
and regulated through what Nate said was the aristocratic/upper caste. This is
how the 'plight of Muslim women who are suffocating at the hands of the Islamic
fundamentalist male kesaris' worldwide becomes anathema to secularists and
feminists - the dream Indian feminists. Feminism, built on the laurels of
modernity, is monolithic and self-important patronage. They conveniently
ignored all the complex, multifaceted and circumcised female spaces. It has
thus made it impossible to even discuss the diverse experiences of Muslim women
around the world. Apart from all this secular hostility towards Islam, As
Professors Adrian Catherine Wing and Monica Naismith present, it was in fact
the annulment of secular values themselves and the usurpation of Western
constructed secular spaces. 'Muslims have made a conscious effort to construct
an Islamic identity with a territorial, authoritarian, social and cultural
structure. Building mosques and calling the faithful to loud prayers represents
the conflict between cultures.
For secular feminists, Islamic dress and its
visibility represent a rejection of the West's commitment to secularism and
adherence to the 'male supremacy' that Islam stands for. Prof. Mary Matsuda
(Critical Race Feminism) about the multi-consciousness experienced by a hybrid
woman who comes from very similar political ideologies such as different race,
gender, class, and social status. Bearing this plurality and heterogeneity (I
prefer to call it a different experiment) the hijab-wearing identity is reduced
to the monolithic equation of being a victim of Islam's misogyny, accompanied
by loud voices.
The duality
of Islamic fundamentalist and victim of misogyny has become one of the accepted
images of our time as the West's declared war on terror has in fact been
applied to the body of the hijab-wearing Muslim woman. This equation can be
clearly read in the Feminist Majority Foundation's campaign against Taliban violence
against women in Afghanistan. Apart from popular women's magazines such as
Glamou, Jane, Teen, Sojouner, Off our Black and Ms magazines also published
articles highlighting the atrocities of the Taliban.
The
atrocities of the Taliban are reprehensible and reprehensible. But the
political incorrectness and self-inflicted amnesia of the feminist majority
foundation and secular public consciousness is exposed here. As a ready-made
escape from the complications of the Afghan war, the term Islamic fundamentalism
is being (mis)used to pit the Islamic model against the Muslim woman. The image
of the cultured rich West protecting the Afghan woman (along with their
paternalistic feminists) is being falsely created. (Recall examples of Spivak's
white man saving the dark woman from the dark man). Thus, The aggressive
militarization of the region and the apparent famine and refugee crisis were
cleverly glossed over. All kinds of thoughts, images, and fears about Islamic
fundamentalism continue to flood the American imagination. West-rejecting and
anti-Western headdresses, beheadings, hand-cutting, mass congregations praying
together, morals established through radical interpretations of religious
scriptures – all serve as powerful catalysts where Islam is portrayed as
synonymous with terror, Talibanism, violence and toxic male hegemony. After
9/11 these images were cultivated and propagated as a parallel form of
Islamophobia.
George W.
Bush's February 4, 2004 speech exposes the racist and Islamophobic mind-set of
the West. Because of what we have done, countries in the Middle East no longer
have to fear reckless aggression from a brutal ruler. Saddam Hussein is now in
prison, and Iraqis will no longer be relegated to thunder chambers and rape
chambers. They will not be taken to mass graves and discarded.
Muslims are
scorned by the West for questioning the gender politics of fundamentalists.
They see Islam as a threat to modernity and feminism and a rejection of the
liberal and progressive values that Western culture has produced.
The West
and the Far
East , according to Mogissi, find justification for the misuse of colonial
power by using the two dichotomies of a tamed, oppressed, and uninformed
identity, and an emancipated, free, and thoughtful identity.
Therefore,
the white man took upon himself the responsibility of taming the Oriental Other
and making them aware. This paternalistic state of mind can be found throughout
French and English literary works. This is also the case with colonial
feminism. As Laila Ahmad observes, they sought to legitimize Europe's cultural
mission (colonialism, culture, and women's issues are always contentious
issues). Post-colonial theorists such as Partha Chatterjee (National and
Women's Question), Leela Gandhi (Emblematic of Gender and Sexuality) and
Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak (Can The Subaltern Speak?) have constantly tried to
problematize this mindset. As Edward Syed (Tamashara) says, The imaginary
geography of the East (and the Oriental woman) was spent as the dream of the
Orient. For example, Sayed reads Flaubert's representation of the Oriental
Muslim woman.
Phloba
meets an Egyptian court dancer who is presented as an influential model of the
Oriental woman. She never spoke about herself. Not once did she represent her
old or new feelings. He is a foreigner. Relatively rich, then male. He speaks
for her even though the historical facts of dominance do not allow him to
physically occupy a Kuchuk Hanem. He then tells his readers how she becomes a
typical Oriental woman (Sayed 1978).
Muslim
female identity, thus, becomes more oriental than Muslim male identity. Ghama
Elala Chrisalimehala describes the carnal self that does not demand anything
insensible. Algerian author Malik Alloulah scrutinizes the obsession with
veiling (Barbara Harlow) in his Colonial Hare. Colonial-era picture postcards
reveal hallucinations of a white European colonial man sexually assaulting an
Algerian woman. Fadwa Algindi describes Anthapuram as a place of exotic and
promiscuous sex. The Middle East is a microcosm that glorifies sentimentality
and force.
While
Politicizing The Headscarf
The
campaign to declare the physical and religious spaces of the Muslim woman
through a series of veiled images is rampant. They are the unquestioned
dominant models. Here the headscarf symbolizes the violence of Islam that can
only be remedied by progressive intervention, Western cultural activities.
French feminist intellectual Élisabeth Badande wrote: 'The veil… is a symbol of
the suppression of a gender. Wearing skinny jeans and a wiggonium in yellow,
blue or green is a sign of freedom associated with social norms. Wearing a
headscarf is also a sign of submission. It chokes the whole life of a woman'
(quoted by Mahmood).
The tame
attitude of the headscarf has become dominant in the secular imagination.
According to Algindi it is a physical element of clothing. Mostly it is related
to gender and distorted by ethnocentric transactions. or studied only through
the lens of Western women's studies .This reductive political perspective
rejects the pluralistic sociocultural political spaces within which headscarves
are practiced within diversities of hierarchy, piety, and identity. Algindi in
his cultural anthropology highlights some examples from Shiagram in Bahrain.
Every house has a turtle nest there. Every woman the key to her house, It is
carried around tied to a head-dress or braided hair (Algindi 56). Tying the key
to the headdress is a sign of strength. This signifier seems to be a call for a
post-apocalyptic understanding of headgear construction beyond the
progressive/non-progressive compartmentalization that a unipolar world order
presupposes.
The ethical
deconstruction of spaces related to freedom, private public spaces, autonomy,
etc. exposes the gap between the Western Enlightenment (which was built on the
self and the other) and Western history (its utilitarian movement began in the
Orient). Ziauddin Sardar calls it white freedom, white secularism. It should be
able to tolerate liberal/narrow actions while maintaining a commanding
centrality to individual autonomy. These post-secular spaces of freedom are
emphasized by Saba Mahmood in his book Politics of Pitey. Ambitions and values
are produced, According to the conventional conditions of the self-governing
taste construct that constitutes emancipation. And what is the content of this
Abhiwancha is not the issue. The karana-reactions they emit are
(qualitatively) independent. It leaves little room for freedom to exercise
itself. There the individual has the right to choose or not to choose. It does
not matter whether his actions are narrow or not. This shatters feminist
historiography based on the monolithic conception of liberation. Mahmood then
goes on to explain the discursive landscape of the post-independence state. In
the 1970s, one of them was the call by white, middle-class feminists to dismantle
the institution of the nuclear family. They believed that the family was the
main source of women's oppression. Indigenous African American feminists argued
that freedom for them included the possibility of family formation. Because the
long history of slavery, massacres and racism makes it clear that all this was
made possible by destroying the networks of their communities.
This
article now examines the political debate surrounding the headscarf in Islam,
to please those in the gallery. These discussions significantly advance the
view that the Muslim woman's headscarf is a radical symbol that serves to
deconstruct the power structure that lies between the personal/political
dichotomies. Albert Haulani's essay The Vanishing Veil: A Challenge to the World
Order (1956) posits how the Muslim woman's headscarf may have fallen from the
Middle East by the end of the twentieth century. He emphasized the hypocrisy of
the headscarf and the need for the Muslim community to embrace modernity to
replace it.
'Do you think
that the European, who has perfected the mind and discovered the power of steam
and electricity, would have avoided this genius and spirit which amazes us if
there had been any good in the veils which they had been using for so long?.
Egypt
witnessed such a lifting of the veil in the 1920s. This veil was inspired by
European modernism and celebration at its height. Cromer points out in his book
Modern Egypt that Islam also felt the same inferiority complex that a
dark-skinned Oriental felt when seeing a white-skinned Westerner. Laila Ahmad
argues that the purdah movement did not derive from the concept of purdah,
which had its roots in pre-colonial Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, but
rather from nineteenth-century Western ideas (Ahmad 94). Two subtle threads can
be easily traced in the abolition of the veil in Egypt and the subsequent
Purdayanial, with the current of westward feminism represented by Qasim Amin
and Huda Sharqawi on the one hand, and the current represented by Malak Hifni
Nassif and Zainbul Ghazzali on the other. The role of Zainbul Ghazali's
Jama'atussayidat al-Muslimah in reshaping the role of Muslim women by
integrating public action and religious knowledge is no small.
In the wake
of the Islamic consciousness that emerged in the 1970s, the hijab experienced a
resurgence (albeit accompanied by separate terminology and terminology) across
Arabic-speaking regions. It started in Egypt. The social spaces of the new
spirit were presented there with nuances. They also put forth certain narratives
related to socio-political-gender-religious identities. The emergence of a new
Egyptian Muslim woman was linked to political corruption in Egypt. The rebirth
of Islamic religiosity marked a very important turning point in university
spaces. In the 1970s, women activists began wearing Assiyul Islami (Islamic
dress). They, according to Algindi, It represented and proclaimed the central
importance of a society committed to gender segregation. They were able to
become living models of egalitarian principles and social justice that embraced
heterogeneity.
Algindi argues that 'this new woman' was
well-versed in Islamic sources of knowledge, capable of leading discussions,
and serious about public affairs. Algindi wrote of the New Egyptian woman's
visibility or choice: By her choice of headscarf, she liberates herself by
entering public spaces with determination, unmolested and unmolested. It can be said that the synthesis of Islamic
principles and political activities took place through this grassroots movement.
Their new face rejects Western materialism, consumerism and commercialism and
advertises Islam's ideals of equality, justice and identity. But strangely
enough, this all-inclusive movement, which had a strong presence at the
grassroots level, has not figured in any of Egypt's feminist chronicles. Even
the existence of a movement that freed Muslim women from imported and imposed
identities and indulgences was not acknowledged by feminist scholars.
The
positions taken by indigenous women during the stages of colonial
confrontations have often invited controversy when it comes to politicizing the
headscarf . According to Leela Gandhi, she was never a subject or an object.
She was nothing more than a body image stitched with the aristocratic insignia
of the colonial rulers' culture, practice, purity, colonial modernity, etc. In
Algeria, the headscarf was a cultural and national symbol rather than a
religious one. Colonial strategies were implemented using the same symbol.
Fanon
argues in Algeria Unveiled that Algeria was embracing colonial coercion—every
hijab thrown off, everybody freed from traditional gates. He then goes on to
explain how frustrating it was for the occupiers to be unable to see others but
to be able to see others. Colonialism presented headscarf as an obsession that
grew to the point of psychosis. The image of the veiled woman was also popular
among modernist secular feminists.
During the
Algerian War of Independence, the headdress emerged as a powerful national
symbol—locals saw it as a symbol of indigenous culture and heritage. It also
became a form of resistance against the cultural plunder of the occupying
powers. Hal Lehrman of The New York Times Magazine called it a headscarf war.
Algerian women's resistance is explained as follows:
'Sights...
of dispossessed black women fleeing devastated villages... of women serving as
nurses, often as fighters for the National Liberation Alliance. Of the women
fighters who hide fighters in the cellars of Kasbi… of those who dress in
European clothes and carry bombs in bags slung from their wrists while in
sophisticated cafes, of those who pass unharmed through the torture of French
soldiers, of those who participate in protest rallies in the streets, and yes
of course those who wait in prison camps and refugee camps…”
Pierre
Beauhadeau says that what shrouded Algeria was traditional traditionalism that
lost its tainted traditional dimensions.
Emergence
of sign defining socio-cultural regional diversity beyond religious dimensions.
The veil worn by Assyrian women was a symbol of status - it was worn by high
class women. There is a big difference between hijab practices among
Palestinian women before and after the Intifada. Algindi suggests that the
hijab previously signified their austere status and identity as a woman living
in the thump.
The
epistemic subversions perpetrated by women's studies groups and liberal secular
feminist groups are revealed through the monolithic identity of the headscarf
they present—a subversion that presents the invisible, anonymous, subjugated
woman as synonymous with Islam. The fact that they are obfuscating it by
conveniently forgetting its socio-political symbolic destiny further reinforces
the subversiveness that Nate has spoken about.
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A
regular columnist for NewAgeIslam.com, Grace Mubashir is a journalism student
at IIMC, Delhi
URL: https://newageislam.com/muslims-islamophobia/gendered-islamophobia-politics-/d/127670
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