The vessel for honor
NPR’s Ari Shapiro interviews Asra Nomani, co-founder of the Muslim Reform Movement and author of Standing Alone: An American Woman’s Struggle for the Soul of Islam, about the op-ed she co-wrote with Hala Arafa in the Washington Post about why, as Muslim women, they are asking other Muslim women to not wear the hijab.
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ASRA NOMANI: Well, what we argue in the piece is that the headscarf has become a political symbol for an ideology of Islam that is exported to the world by the theocracies of the governments of Iran and Saudi Arabia. Just like the Catholic Church in the 17th century did religious propaganda to challenge the Protestant Reformation, these ideologies are trying to define the way Muslims express Islam in the world.
And that ideology of Islam is not a good ideology. It’s a bad one: anti-human, coercive, cruel, and stunningly harsh toward women.
SHAPIRO: Are you urging Muslim women who feel most comfortable wearing hijab not to wear one or are you just saying to well-intentioned non-Muslims please don’t do this as a sign of solidarity?
NOMANI: Well, very interestingly in a movement that I call now the hijab lobby, sadly promulgated by women that some of us refer to as Muslim mean girls and their friends, are trying to put out this meme that we are denying women their choice. But of course in this world everybody should have their choice. What we are saying is we have to be smart about the ideology that is putting this idea into the world that a woman must be defined by her idea of modesty, that she is the vessel for honor in a community. And I believe that we have to be very pragmatic, too, about the consequence of this. Women in Iran and Saudi Arabia are jailed, punished and harassed if they don’t cover themselves legally, according to the standard of those countries. So the consequences for many women is oftentimes very dark.
Women in the UK and the US and other places are harassed if they do wear it, so you can see why people want to be in solidarity with them, but…hijab doesn’t become benign or feminist because of that harassment.
SHAPIRO: I see certain parallels between the debate over feminism where some women argue that women should not be forced to stay at home and take care of children. And there are other women who are saying you are criticizing my decision as a free liberated women to stay home and take care of my children.
NOMANI: Right, but at the end of the day here what we’re talking about is choice. And we’re talking about everybody’s free right to have choice. And so what we’re also getting are interesting messages like you really need to obey the command of Allah and put a scarf on your head. And what we caution well-intentioned Americans and others to think about is whether the scarf matches their own values related to issues of honor and shame.
That’s the thing, you know – it’s not a “choice” in the full sense, because it is a (putative) religious obligation or command. It’s a “choice” to obey a religious command, one that is violently enforced in some parts of the world. That’s a dubious form of “choice,” if you ask me.
There’s a very ugly comment on the interview:
Not having standing in a religion is like not having standing in an animated cartoon. No one does but the standing for the self possessed is sufficient for any disregard, criticism and evaluation of religion.Nothing else is needed and for those who live with their eyes wide shut, those who lack the civilizing force of self possession informed by the realization that there is a difference between the subject being considered and the self doing the consideration, there is no standing other than what can be stolen or gotten away with.
There was also no mockery, no laughter. What I read was a very serious explanation that it isn’t really a choice to wear something that is illegal not to wear in some countries, and when people are influenced by that, even in countries where they can choose, they feel coerced.
I guess the mean girls reference could sound light, but it isn’t– it’s talking about real, painful social consequences of being bullied by the community leaders.
Well Yaseen Overlee does have a point. Why aren’t jews, mennonites, quakers, amish, hutterites and all the rest held to the same standard? Is it perhaps that those sects do not kill members who try to leave? My once-upon-a-time mennonite wife just walked away. How many muslim women in the west would just walk away from islam if they really felt free to do so. Of course, there is no coercion in islam so they must stay because they really really want to – no?
Our dear, sweet, modest Yaseen tells it like it is.
And her thinly disguised death threat was a nice touch.
Something like 85% of the world’s Muslims do NOT speak/read/write in Arabic. And the Quran is not written in an Arabic legible to actual speakers of the living language.
This allows the Perfect Revealed word to be edited and amended by, for example, the Saudi Government. And for the overwhelming majority of Muslims to be oppressed and controlled by self-endowed ‘leaders’ who claim special access to god’s word.
Most women in the West wouldn’t be killed for leaving the faith or even adopting a more liberal version (I acknowledge the comparatively rare exceptions), but even that majority would be dramatically affected by practices of shunning and condemnation.
@6,
Yes, tell me about the condemnation. But family haven’t been a problem; the worst have turned out to be “leftists” shocked that a muslim-born (so to speak) brown woman won’t sign onto their “anti-islamophobia” campaign.
Btw, the Quakers, aka, the Society of Friends, is hardly like the others. They are considered a Protestant splinter group but a friend of mine who joined said that these days you don’t even have to be Christian. They practice religious tolerance and pacifism and were the core of the abolition and suffrage movements in the US in the 1800s. They don’t dress oddly (the Quaker oats logo is not representative). They don’t live apart from the world. They don’t really belong on the same list as the others.
@8
My experience of the Quakers is very different.
Some years ago, when an acquaintance learned that I came from a Muslim background, I was invited to a local “Friends” meeting. “We can share experiences”, is how she put it. I wasn’t especially interested but she was persistent and I finally accepted her invitation. We met in a small building that was once a curling club and now housed a black theatre company among other community groups. The whole thing was uncomfortable from the start. It seems I was not just attending a “meeting” but that I was its featured guest. Everyone wanted to know my “experience” but were soon dismayed (yes, unfortunately that is the appropriate word) to learn that I discarded the hijab along with all religious inclinations even before I entered university. When he discovered that a branch of my family had links to Lebanon, one of the “friends” pointed out that he was strongly anti-Israel. When I asked whether he supported Hezbollah (this was in 2006) he nodded enthusiastically. And others chimed in with similar support. I tried educating them about Hezbollah but soon abandoned the effort. I realized that they were little more than “stoppers” with a spiritual veneer, useful semi-religious idiots.
To be fair, my acquaintance later apologized for the “experience” and I attended a Quaker Christmas charity concert. But they are certainly not my “friends”.
@5
Yes the ‘true’ Koran can only be accessed via a form of Arabic no longer spoken. Similar to the situation in the Middle Ages when the New Testament was available only in Latin, a dead language only understood by a select few who then called all the shots.
Ironically Allah, the all-seeing, all-knowing, omnipotent god, can only make him/herself clearly understood in one human language.
That’s a rather limited *omnipotence*, isn’t it?