Category: Part 2: Intersectionality

Chapter 6: Can I be a Muslim and a feminist, or nah?

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I was driving home with my mom one day, super excited about the fact that I’d finally settled on a topic for my thesis. So I blurted out that I, Bashiera Parker, would dedicate a year of my life to discussing what it means and how important it is to be a feminist.

“Hold up,” my mom said, as she hit the brakes. “Bashiera, you can’t be a feminist and a Muslim. That’s wack and downright wrong, baby girl.”

This probably isn’t exactly what happened – the dialogue could be a bit off – but in my head, this is close to how things went down. I mean, my whole world came crashing down, so the drama of it all is real, because for the past few years I’ve been tweeting about how I’m a feminist and starting arguments with every second person that didn’t see the value in being one or trying to tear someone down who actually was.

So can I be a Muslim and a feminist?

Well, as we did with feminism, let’s start by looking at issues of representation or rather, misrepresentation, when it comes to Islam and being a Muslim.

We all know that being a Muslim in Trump’s America right now is life-threatening. Heck, being a Muslim anywhere in the world right now is risky. And largely due to the fact that most people have already made up their minds about what it means to be a Muslim, or have had their minds made up for them by the media. Edward Said explains that within the Western media, Muslims are only ever represented on terms which suit the West. He therefore says, of his own experiences living in the Western world as an Arab Palestinian:

“The life of an Arab Palestinian in the West, particularly in America, is disheartening. There exists here an almost unanimous consensus that politically he does not exist, and when it is allowed that he does, it is either as a nuisance or as an Oriental.”

To put it bluntly in terms we’ve all tragically come to understand, when it is allowed that we do get to exist, it is either as some “exotic” being, as he suggests, or, a terrorist.

The women of Islam have also been branded by the Western world, but for the most part as the “oppressed”. As a result, the traditional headscarf that a lot of Muslim women wear as a sign of their piety and modesty has even been banned in some parts of the world. And while some, as in the case of political movement Femen, have endorsed the removal of the headscarf to “liberate” women who are ‘forced’ to wear hijab, I’d like to at this point make my first point in the direction of establishing some sort of feminist stance for Muslim women:

Surely, if women are being forced to cover up in certain parts of the world (and I don’t deny that that is actually happening), then surely someone forcing them to remove their headscarf, burkini or turban is equally as oppressive.

Surely you realize the irony in this situation?

There are, however, women who are so unapologetically themselves while rocking their hijab who seem pretty liberated to me. People like fashion blogger, Dina Tokia, for example, or my friend and local blogger, Areeba Baker, who happens to be in a scarf, that she decided to start wearing and even shows people how to drape in cool and exciting ways in tutorials she films for her page. She’s also created her own scent and has a driver’s liscense – imagine that.

Sarcasm aside, my point is that there are actually women who, despite the stereotype that Muslim women are submissive and oppressed, actually live their own lives by their own rules, with authority over their bodies, independent of any Western or patriarchal power.

What are some Muslim scholars’ responses to the idea of being a feminist Muslim?

Well, from my research, I found that the Quran both supports and denies the notion that one can be both a feminist and a Muslim. But before you say “I told you so”, stop and read, because it’s not quite as simple as you may think.

Let’s begin by discussing Khadijah, the wife of the prophet (SAW).

Khadijah is said to have been born around 555 C.E and was known in full as Khadijah bint Khuwaylid, as she was the daughter of a successful merchant who traded in the Quraysh tribe. When her father passed on, Khadijah took over his business and became known as “Ameerat-quraysh” – Princess of Quraysh – and “al-Tahira” – The Pure One – for her reputation as a business-savvy woman who was a devoted Muslim and compassionate soul, as she gave much of her earnings to the less fortunate.

And this was all in a patriarchal society, one that I suspect was far more rigid than today’s.

Anyway, Khadijah was such a good woman that she was asked for her hand in marriage many a time, and turned down many proposals. She did marry twice though, before she met the prophet Muhammad.

Khadijah didn’t need financial support though, but upon hearing about the remarkable character of the prophet, she employed him and after, fell in love, proposed and married him.

Khadijah became the wife of the prophet as well as his adviser and greatest confidant. Prophet Muhammad said that Khadijah, a woman who was independent and yet, possessed the qualities of a devoted and compassionate Muslim, was one of four of the greatest women that we will ever know.

Khadijah bint Khuwaylid is therefore the very first and possibly the best example I can give you of how you can, in fact, be a Muslim and a feminist, all the while being considered one of the greatest women of all time by the prophet of Islam.

Further into my research, however, I felt slightly more conflicted and thought, I not only couldn’t be a feminist and a Muslim but I actually didn’t want to.

Bear with me here.

See, when Amina Wadud made the courageous and monumental step for women in Islam by leading the first ever female-led Jumuah prayer, the Muslim world was up in arms and horrified at this gross violation and disrespect for the deen, while others were shook by those who were horrified and couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t be overjoyed at the fact that finally, women were getting the same recognition as men and the equality that they rightfully deserved.

Yasmin Mogahed, however, wrote the most beautiful response asking why on earth women would want such a thing. Why would we want to be equal to man?

Mogahed explained that after years of fighting, Western feminists have established some sort of standard for themselves in relation to man. We assumed that, because a man could do something or because he did something, it was somehow better, despite the fact that for years before, men have led prayer and it hasn’t really pained the majority of us. But now, after years, because a man leads prayer, we assume that that makes him better and so we also want to be better. But Mogahed explains, man is not the standard, God is. And God has given women things that men will never have – thing that do make us, for lack of a better word and for the sake of this argument, better.

“On the other hand, only a woman can be a mother. And God has given special privilege to a mother. The Prophet ﷺ taught us that heaven lies at the feet of mothers. But no matter what a man does he can never be a mother. So why is that not unfair?

When asked, “Who is most deserving of our kind treatment?” the Prophet ﷺ replied, “Your mother” three times before saying “your father” only once. Is that sexist? No matter what a man does he will never be able to have the status of a mother.
And yet, even when God honors us with something uniquely feminine, we are too busy trying to find our worth in reference to men to value it—or even notice. We, too, have accepted men as the standard; so anything uniquely feminine is, by definition, inferior. Being sensitive is an insult, becoming a mother—a degradation. In the battle between stoic rationality (considered masculine) and selfless compassion (considered feminine), rationality reigns supreme.”

In Mogahed’s explanation she says that we cannot be equal to me, because God has made us so different to begin with. But such difference should not be considered an injustice because while God has given men something that we do not possess, he has similarly given women that which men do not and will not ever have.

Considering both these arguments, I can’t help but question my position as a Muslim feminist. But if I consider my initial argument of believing men and women should be equal and giving women the agency to be who they want to be in a constantly changing world that seems to still fit particular standards set by men, then yeah, I’m pretty sure I can be a Muslim feminist. Sure, there are things that I cannot do and I don’t want to do because my deen comes before anything else, and I quite frankly would not like to lead prayer because leading will make me no better than praying behind someone, but I’m pretty happy with what I can do too. I have a voice, a laptop and an interent connection, which means I have the ability to do what I love and write about things that matter, all the while being a Muslim and a woman, mind you.

And if there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that I am proud to be a woman in Islam. So to conclude, and in the words of Yasmin Mogahed:

“Given my privilege as a woman, I only degrade myself by trying to be something I’m not – and in all honesty – don’t want to be: a man. As women, we will never reach true liberation until we stop trying to mimic men, and value the beauty in our own God-given distinctiveness.

If given a choice between stoic justice and compassion, I choose compassion. And if given a choice between worldly leadership and heaven at my feet—I choose heaven.”

 

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Chapter 5: What is Intersectionality?

Taraji P. Henson earned herself an Oscar nomination this year for playing the incredible Katherine Johnson in the 2016 film Hidden Figures. The film follows the life of Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson, three of the first African-American women allowed to work for NASA.

Katherine Johnson graduated from high school at 14 years old, and high school at 18, and the brilliant mathematician went on to become a teacher and then stay-at-home mother. But in 1953, after allowing women to work at NASA and then African-American women to do tedious counting work (they didn’t have computers back then) Johnson joined the Langley Research Center’s Guidance and Navigation Department and went on to contribute to missions that saw the first American orbit the earth and walk the moon. And all the while, having to run across NASA in heels to use the coloureds only bathroom and drink coffee from a separate kettle because not only was she a woman, she was also black.

Now, imagine a reality in which we didn’t have the contributions of all these queens because firstly, they have the reproductive system to carry another being in their bodies and secondly, they’re born with the skin-colour you go to tanning salons to get:

Beyoncé – of house Knowles, mother of Blue Ivy, Sir and Rumi, breaker of records.

Dr Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – award winning Nigerian author named Time Magazine’s top 100 influential people in the whole wide world.

Shonda Rhimes – creator of Grey’s Anatomy, How To Get Away With Murder, and, my tears.

And then there’s also Oprah, you know.

The difficulty with feminism is, not only do some people misunderstand feminism and what it means to be a feminist, but they also lump all feminists together, usually with that of “white feminists”. Kimberle Crenshaw, however, explains exactly why this is problematic.

Crenshaw suggests that when we lump women together we don’t consider that experiences and injustices may differ across terrains where someone is not just a woman, but also of a different race, religion or class, for example. Thus, in the context of identity politics, when Crenshaw talks about intersectionality, she refers to the way in which, particularly black women, for example, are oppressed and dominated due to multiple axes of power that come into play, such as gender and race. She gives the chilling example of what tends to happen when black women get raped.

Crenshaw begins by pointing out the two axes of power that dominate black women: race and sex. In doing so she points out the fact that in a particular situation, particularly one in which a male is raping a female, the black community often fights racism from a male perspective, enraged by the idea of black men always coming into conflict with a white female, and then being cast as the animal-like “savage” in the narrative. Feminists within this same narrative, or one in which the female is the victim of the assault, often find themselves having to fight particular notions that justify rape. Like the fact that “women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimised.” – Michael Sanguinetti

Now, with this already in mind, black women not only have to deal with this level of stupidity of victim-blaming and discrimination, they also have to deal with the fact that they’re black women. See, in the past, in order for a female victim’s assault to even be considered rape, she would have to have proof that she resisted and did not consent to the rape, while this would also be cross-referenced with her sexual history, because had she consented to sex in the past, she must have consented this time as well, right? Never mind his sense of entitlement – she was asking for it. I mean, she was asking him to stop and beating him off but she was also asking for it.

Black bodies, and in this particular context, black women’s bodies, have for centuries been sexualized by cultural imagery. Homi Bhabha suggests that this is a way of exerting colonial power which has been established through the establishment of difference, on both racial and sexual terms. This difference has been articulated through the separation of the white, civilized and knowledgable man and the black, savage, native. Thus, black women, more specifically, have been portrayed as “more sexual, more earthy, more gratification-oriented” than that of white women. This has therefore pre-packaged black women as sexual bad women, suggesting to society or at least the determinants of their fate, that they were less likely to have been raped and more likely to have “asked for it”.

Thus, as Kimberle Crenshaw so perfectly phrases it:

“Where systems of race, gender, and class domination converge, as they do in the experiences of battered women of color, intervention strategies based solely on the experiences of women who do not share the same class or race backgrounds will be of limited help to women who because of race and class face different obstacles.”

So, to be an intersectional feminist, would mean that we actually care about the issues, injustices and inequalities facing not just white women, but black, coloured, transgender, the women in India and Palestine, poor women, Christian, Jewish, Muslim women – ALL women. We shouldn’t just care about the issues facing certain women, but the issues facing every woman. So we shouldn’t just care about Wonder Woman’s armpit hair, but also the very very important fact that our superhero, feminist icon, also endorses the straight up murder of other men, women and children.

And there’s nothing super about that.

 

References:

  • Smith, Y. 2015. Katherine Johnson: The Girl Who Loved to Count. NASA. [Online] 24 November. Available from: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/katherine-johnson-the-girl-who-loved-to-count. [2017, September 10]
  • Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6): 1241-1299.
  • Cho, S., Crenshaw, K.L. & McCall, L. (2013). Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis. Signs, 38(4): 785-810.
  • Bhabha, Homi. (1994). The location of culture. London : Routledge.
  • Homi Bhabha. (1994). Interrogating Identity: Frantz Fanon and the Postcolonial Prerogative in The Location of Culture. Routledge: New York & London.

Chapter 4: Not so Wonder Woman

When I start thinking about all the powerful women on screen, and when I say powerful I mean the ass-kicking, crime-fighting actual superheroes we see in the movies, my list starts with Jennifer Garner in Elektra and ends with a failed Halle Berry in Cat Woman. That’s the list right there – a total of two female superheroes, in two movies I had to look up again because I barely remember the below-average impact they had. That is, of course, until Wonder Woman’s recent success.

Wonder Woman is the female superhero dressed in a bold red, gold and blue, with super strength and speed, the ability to fly, and just about any other superhuman power you can think of, that she uses to fight all the baddies that want to take over the world, kill the good guys and force women in the usual damsel in distress narrative. I don’t think I really need to explain how or why she’s become a feminist icon – she’s super strong, saves the world, despite unfortunately having lady parts – bruh, mind-blowing

But some people don’t feel as strongly about Wonder Woman, or rather, the 2017 Gal Gadot Wonder Woman. Here’s why:

A lot of people felt that Wonder Woman still largely followed the Classical Hollywood film of actually placing the woman in a subordinate role:

While most other criticism actually came from the film’s portrayal of the Amazonian warrior who, once again, fits into some traditional standard of beauty:

Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman, clean shaven and bleached – fresh out the beautician’s rooms

A lot of people were upset because Wonder Woman, being an Amazonian who was presumably not exposed to any sort of Western influence and therefore, no Gillette adverts, of course, should not have had shaved and bleached pits. But while feminists are asking ‘why doesn’t Wonder Woman have armpit hair?’, I’d like to know, why do you care?

Now I know that casting model Gal Gadot would mean this super badass superhero would fit the usual traditional standard of beauty. She’s tall, skinny and what society has come to know as beautiful. Honestly, I get that – we aren’t making any significant changes in perpetuating the exact same standard of beauty that has always been in place.

Now I know that casting Israeli model Gal Gadot without armpit hair was also a headache because firstly, unrealistic, and second, women can grow their armpit hair out if they want, as second wave feminists intended. Honestly, I get that too, even though you can be clean as a naked mole-rat and still a feminist.

Now I know that casting Israeli model and Israel Defense Forces soldier Gal Gadot as a feminist icon might be an issue, since she’s served in the military for 2 years, the military that operated against and took the lives of innocent men, women and children in Lebanon, Syria and Palestine. Honestly, I get this argument the most since 2016 became the ‘deadliest year’ for children living in the occupied West Bank at the hands, or rather, the guns of Israeli Soldiers. And while our new Wonder Woman no longer serves in the Israel Defense force, she has pledged her allegiance to the IDF.

Pro-IDF and a current member of the Justice League.

JUSTICE League – a superhero team that is pro… justice?

So, white feminists asking ‘why doesn’t Wonder Woman have armpit hair?’, I’d like to pose my question to you: why do you care?

I say white feminists because while some white feminists are up in arms about armpit hair, they are unaware, or blind to the atrocities that don’t directly affect them, like, say, dying, or having your people die in occupied territories around the world. White feminists love to say that they stand by and fight for the rights of all women, but ignore much larger and greater issues.

How is armpit hair more important than killing innocent children?

How can armpit hair be so important?

Tell me, why do you care?

 

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