Frankly, I’m loath to post on this tired topic and continue the never-ending discussion on the hijab. But, I wanted to begin recording here conversations that I’ve engaged in elsewhere (and not just on this subject), as I recently realized that in the years since I’ve become a much more active facebooker than a blogger, it’s been easy to just loose sight of things I say/write pretty much all over the place. And that’s probably not a good thing; I suppose keeping track of thoughts is the least a thinker should do, regardless of how crappy or brilliant those are.
In any case. A few weeks ago, one of my best friends from college published this excellent piece at altmuslimah on rape and women’s clothing, dismantling the oft-parroted myth (we’ve all heard it, whether from upset imams or wise aunties/uncles) that rape and sexual assault have something to do with how women dress: a myth that is, alas, not restricted to our community alone, but is really a textbook example of blaming-the-victim. It’s great that people like Altaf (and others!) are addressing this loud and clear, and judging by the number of Facebook shares/likes in my networks alone, her piece at altmuslimah has been immensely influential among the online reading public.
On that note, when posting a link to the article, a friend of mine raised the following question:
So here’s a thought: The Muslim reason for a woman covering herself is so that she can be modest and avert male desire (according to the Quran). If a full-body/face covering does NOT save a woman from rape, much less averting male desire….then what is the point of wearing a hijab/head scarf from Islam’s perspective?
This may be in some sense the very essence of “the hijab problem” that continues to confuse all kinds of people, especially Westerners but also Muslims themselves. But it’s also a legitimate question, one that is however not so easy to answer. Let me just reiterate, with a few slight modifications, the couple of comments I wrote then in response:
While that, i.e. modesty, has indeed become the conventional rationale, it is also one that is arguably somewhat inaccurate (note though that rape and desire are NOT on a continuum–precisely the point of Altaf’s article). But this inaccuracy has more to do with the history of gender and the body (i.e. the shifting social configurations of male and female between the pre-modern to the modern), than with the Qur’an per se. One key to solve this problem is to examine why in classical Islamic law, certain “women” were forbidden to veil while others were required to do so. There’s a paper that pursues precisely this analysis and offers I think the best explanation so far in terms of social and legal history–I’m referring to this article.
Note however that especially from an anthropological point of view, it is sort of meaningless to ask what Islam says about this or that (which is like the perennial question these days), because “Islam” is not an actual entity that exists in reality. Rather it is the texts or people that speak.
I realize that I ignored above my own appeal to anthropology, because from that perspective, it shouldn’t really even matter what the text/law says but rather the voices of people themselves. Perhaps there are as many “reasons” to veil as there are women who do, even though I think a notion of piety is important and undercuts all of them. So the question is as complex as if we were to ask, why do we dress?
But to get back to the history (after all, my thing), basically it seems that in the classical Islamic legal conception, the point of veiling was not modesty in the sense of protection from male desire per se (even though jusrists did actually make this argument), but rather modesty in the sense of propriety and guarding social reputation, etc and to distinguish between respectable–what in Bengali we would call bhodro–women from “common” ones. Of course, this isn’t unique to Arab/Muslim history at all, as there’s evidence for veiling being practiced in most ancient Near Eastern traditions (including Judaism and Early Christianity) as well as as the Eastern Roman Empire i.e. the Byzantines. So for example, almost no traditional icon of the Virgin Mary shows her without a headscarf.
Now, the reason I was referring to gender history: the basic principle is that ideas about, or even who counts as, male or female are not the same in every time/place. Modernity erased a lot of social hierarchies that used to be there, such as noble/common, free/slave, etc. This has specific implications for the veil in Islamic law, but I don’t really need to get into that right now :)
That’s as far as I got then, but it’s probably important to clarify what specific legal implications I’m alluding to above: basically, what to do about the fact that pre-modern jurists considered the `awra (“shame zone,” or “private parts”) of legally un-free women to be different from and more limited than that of free women, and indeed the same as that of men, i.e. from the navel to the knee! This precisely is the point of departure for the academic paper I cite above; but also, this strongly suggests that what we mean when we say “women” is not necessarily the same as what Muslims back in the day would have meant, hence my reference above to a sort of constructionist principle of gender history. Of course, like it or not, what we’re really doing here is to open a can of worms that include such immensely complex problems as what us full-time nerds call “the history of the body,” as well as the very basic analytic categories of “sex,” “gender,” etc.
Filed under: Uncategorized
I’m curious if and how this interesting take on the nature of autobiography might apply to blogging, at least that of the diary/journal type:
In the final analysis, then, the prerogative of autobiography consists in this: that it shows us not the objective stages of a career–to discern these is the task of the historian–but that it reveals instead the effort of a creator to give the meaning to his own mythic tale. Every man is the first witness to himself; yet the testimony that he thus produces constitutes no ultimate, conclusive authority–not only because objective scrutiny will always discover inaccuracies but much more because there is never an end to this dialogue of a life with itself in search of its own absolute. Here every man is for himself the existential stakes in a gamble that cannot be entirely lost nor entirely won. Artistic creation is a struggle with the angel, in which the creator is the more certain of being vanquished since the opponent is still himself. He wrestles with his shadow, certain only of never laying hold of it. (p. 48, Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical)
These are the closing words of Georges Gusdorf’s now-classic 1956 essay on autobiography (“Conditions et limites de l’autobiographie”)–which James Olney, a leading scholar in the field of autobiography studies, characterizes thus: “[I]t is only with Gusdorf’s essay…that all the questions and concerns–philosophical, psychological, literary, and more generally humanistic–that have preoccupied students of autobiography from 1956 to 1978 were first fully and clearly laid out and given comprehensive and brilliant, if necessarily brief, consideration” (p. 9, ibid.).
Gusdorf’s most potent idea, one that I think remains foremost in theories of autobiography, is about how a life-narrative constitutes a definitive moment in that life itself: “Any autobiography is a moment of the life that it recounts: it struggles to draw the meaning from that life, but is itself a meaning in the life. One part of the whole claims to reflect the whole, but it adds something to this whole of which it constitutes a moment” (p. 43).
I don’t remember ever having laughed out loud when reading Kafka. That is, until yesterday.
It may have had to do with the fact that while reading the following passage, and before reaching K.’s hilarious punchline, I was thinking of the most recent of my own encounters with the Bureaucracy, with stories of which I have bored many a friend in the past. Earlier this summer, soon after I got home, I learned that I could no longer travel on my current passport, since it’s now only valid for less than six months. So I had to get a new one, better yet, a machine-readable one, now that the government has finally started issuing these after missing several international deadlines over the past decade or so (Yay! We’re finally catching up with the rest of the world–when I guess they’re actually moving on, with biometric passports and whatnot). Anyways, since due to lack of technical resources they’re apparently still having to outsource production overseas (Yes, they make our nationality documents in another nation!), the process takes some time, and there was some concern I might not have a new passport in hand before I had to get back…to my other home.
It turned out, however, that I was not even eligible to get one of these new passports (more…)
Last night I returned from a brief trip to what is called my desher bari--which in the awkward literal translation would mean “country house,” but is better understood as one’s native village or hometown. It is the Bengali version of where one is really from, and although to the outside world we’re all basically just from this one tiny country, among ourselves our locale of origin makes a lot of difference. ”Where’s your desher bari?” is thus often among the first things one would ask on meeting a fellow Bangladeshi. I’ve found myself as intrigued when I’ve occasionally faced the question even in America, as I used to be when, growing up in the Middle East, I would observe my dad bring it up with friendly strangers from the motherland. Replies to the question may sometimes be even more interesting, as one might try to further clarify his or her father’s and mother’s respective desher baris.
I think this quintessential Bengali concept may have begun to loose some significance for groups/generations of people born and raised in the big city, or even outside the nation. For me, however, the problem has usually been more in trying to accurately translate what desher bari could mean exactly. (more…)
It’s about half-way through the Ghana vs. Uruguay quarter-final match at the World Cup, and this is what my Facebook newsfeed looked liked a few minutes ago (more…)
In her post “Menstruation as power: A history,” my friend Suroor offered a good overview of cultural perceptions about menstruation and menstruating women, starting all the way back from ancient societies. It’s an interesting piece, all the more so because it reminds me that Suroor and I are so alike as historically-oriented thinkers. I thought I’d make a small, if belated, contribution to the discussion by delving a bit into the Islamic traditions concerning menstruation, especially since the past school year I happened to spend some time studying Islamic law, including the rather abundant juristic debates on ḥayḍ (menstruation). This would be a good opportunity to revisit my notes and review the stuff, and also share a bit with interested readers. In this post, I’ll try to look at how Muslims thought of menstruation generally, and in a subsequent entry I’ll deal with the question of prayer and access to mosque (which was the subject of Organica‘s awesome photolog). It seems to me that all discussions of menstruation keep circling back to notions of cleanliness and purity, so I’d like to draw attention to the broader issue of ritual purity in Islam, especially since this seems to be a source of common confusion and misunderstanding. For example, I remember someone telling me once that when he was traveling in India, he wouldn’t eat until he found a “Muslim restaurant,” because you know, the Hindu ones are “na-pak” or impure! You’ll see below why, at least from a legal/fiqh perspective, he was simply wrong. (more…)
Filed under: Autobiographic
On the spur of the moment, I just decided to write here again right now. While the thought has of course come up occasionally, I guess this time it has actually materialized. I don’t know if it’s an odd and inadvertent patterning that it has been exactly a year since my last appearence on June 22nd, 2009. And interestingly enough, the one time I nearly came back to post happened to be exactly six months ago: I have a saved draft, dated December 21, when I began: Everytime I return here after an unannounced hiatus, I debate on how to re-start, how much to recount. It’s as if I’m always playing catch up, wanting to make sure that the narrative thread does not get cut off. I don’t even know why I assume there is a thread of continuity. The only continuity I know is myself, even which I’m often confused about.
In any case, I’m not here to try and find silly patterns and meaning where there is none. And yet I cannot but mention, since it did cross my mind, that I now happen to be sitting in the very room where I first began to blog just over eight years ago. Lest that imply a false sense of continuity, I need only reflect on where all I’ve been, what all I’ve done and who all I’ve become in these long years. But yes, I am home, although honestly I don’t know if I still think of it as “home” any more.
A few days ago, a friend of a friend who is visiting the country for the summer asked me how I deal with coming back here, whether I feel like I really belong. Of course, neither of us knew where we really belong and we reflected on our shared experience of diaspora in America. It was intriguing to hear her talk about the first time she went back to Beijing after many years: a moment she had mentally enacted again and again, but when it finally came she was unprepared for the shock of realizing that both she and her hometown had become so different.
My trips back to Bangladesh have been accompanied by a similar recognition, or perhaps I should say misrecognition. It really is a bit of a paradoxical situation when I remember and therefore reconnect with the place where I grew up, but thereby also realize how distant I have become from it: a distance both literal and temporal. The paradox lies also in the double bind of continuity and discontinuity: the place that is, both is and isn’t the the place that it was; the I that am, both is and isn’t the I that was. And so if every act of remembering is an attempt to reattach our dismembered selves back to where it used to belong, isn’t it always already a failure, merely a longing to be?
Last week, I met up with two of my best friends from high school, and for much of the time I was quietly overwhelmed by a familiar but oddly intense sense of nostalgia that I didn’t quite know how to react to. At some point, as they argued over what to order at the cafe, I remarked: “you guys haven’t changed!” This made them both laugh, but then I began to wonder why I said that. After all, so much has changed, even though they are still young and beautiful and so much like how I remembered us and our friendship. Maybe it’s still taking some getting used-to, that we’ve come a long way, with our respective lives, careers, and for some even spouses. I suppose we’re perpetually still getting used to growing up, and perhaps nostalgia is no more than a mere coping mechanism? Oh well, c’est la vie.
She’s apparently “cut off from social life” and “deprived of identity,” he said. With all due respect, Monsieur President, there’s a better way to critique a cultural practice than totally discounting the agency of its practitioners. At the very least, please don’t talk shit about people you don’t know.
I sometimes wonder if it might be a good idea to institute a rating system for khutbahs, basically as a guidance for those preparing their sermons. I can’t remember the last time I felt so awkward at jum’a that I stopped looking up at the khateeb just to avoid eye contact. Actually, I do sort of remember, but I was sorry to have to do this again today. Honestly, the last thing I ever want to hear in a khutbah is how people should remove hair from the armpits and “shave the pubic area.” And this applies to both men and women, it was promptly clarified. (more…)
Filed under: Política
Sometimes I think Tom Friedman is so ridiculous that I can’t even believe they pay him to write crap for the NYT. Take, for instance, this line from his latest op-ed: “Is Facebook to Iran’s Moderate Revolution what the mosque was to Iran’s Islamic Revolution?” Like, seriously: WTF? Firstly, 1979 was not an “Islamic” revolution: it was an Iranian revolution that got co-opted by the Islamists. Secondly, it was organized on the streets, not in the mosques. I hate when journalists can’t write without resorting to such pigeonholing platitudes.
