Filed under: Islamica
I was just flipping through an issue of Comparative Islamic Studies in the library, and happened to come across an article with the following interesting anecdote, with analysis:
In a record of a real time debate on the Muslim Ummah, a contributor who styles herself as “HotHijabi,” a humorous hybrid constructed of Western and Muslim feminist identities, was confronted by a male contributor who thought her presence in the chatroom was inappropriate saying, “You shouldn’t be here without a mehram anyway. Please stop spreading fitna and leave.” It is interesting how he attempted even to segregate cyberspace, a realm of disembodiment. HotHijabi’s response, as a twice-veiled sister, veiled both by hijab and cyber-anonymity, was to respond in SMS message style text-speak with, “Who the hell du yu think you are? This is the 20th century yeh, women have been LIBerAted. I can do wot I want.” The juxtaposition of the upper and lower case letters in “liberated” represent the “doing what you like” kind of liberation to which one of my informants objected. It is nonsymmetrical, nonsubmissive and decidedly “Western” in its origins. Interestingly the opponent is silenced. HotHijabi, undaunted, goes on to show herself a committed Muslim by suggesting that going on Hajj is about everyone being there for the same reasons and “Worshipping the same Allah and we even wear the same clothes to symbolise that…It’s about being connected and united. That’s what gives us our strength.” Frequently disparate ideologies do not meet so easily in one person and perhaps the hope for building bridges is within the very personhood of the young who can unselfconsciously adopt both ways of being. [Myfanwy Franks, "Islamic Feminist Strategies in a Liberal Democracy: How Feminist are they?" in Comparative Islamic Studies 1.2 (2005): 215-6]
The online conversation reported by the author took place on a chatroom of the British young Muslims’ website MuslimYouth.net. An abstract of the article itself is available online, here.
“What a man!” That was the concluding remark of a blonde German reporter named Judith Bonesky in her enthusiastic account of an encounter with Obama at the Berlin Ritz Carlton, where she went to stalk him in the hotel gym. Yeah, no kidding. Apparently, “he didn’t even sweat!”
Everyone has been writing about Obama’s trip to Germany, where over 200,000 people showed up to hail the prophet. Some crush, they have. In the words of a young man interviewed by NYT’s Berlin correspondent: “He’s more like a rockstar, I think.”
Filed under: Feminism
Is it possible for a man to be a feminist? Yes and No. Let me point out on the outset that I’m not posing this question simplistically, but really to hash out some of the complexities of this problem. I cannot and do not promise to resolve the issue, but this is hopefully the beginning of a process of understanding.
Firstly, the reason I bring this up. I only just learned about the Kyle Payne story day before yesterday (Here’s a reminder to not miss out on my reading Feministe for longer than a week!). So Payne is a blogger apparently well-known for his feminist activism. Specifically, he describes himself as “an advocate for survivors of sexual violence and other forms of abuse,” with an interest in the feminist anti-pornography movement. Now here’s the shocker: last year, while Payne served as an R.A. at his college, he assaulted an intoxicated and unconscious female student in the dorm under his care. And, get this, he also filmed/photographed the girl in the process. If that sounds hypocritical for an anti-porn activist, that’s because it is!
Now, I don’t want to discuss Kyle Payne per se, because the feminist blogosphere has been doing so already. For starters, you can see this post by Cara at Feministe. What I do want to discuss, and what I have been thinking about since yesterday, are the implications of this story and some of the questions it raises. Do Kyle Payne’s actions constitute a damnation of all pro-feminist men? Certainly not. But that’s not the end of the story either. After all, there are reasons why there are stereotypes of male feminist allies as “wolves in sheep’s clothing” (more…)
Welcome (back) to Rawi’s blog! As you can see, I have just moved to WordPress. After more than six years with Blogger, I suddenly decided last week it was time to call it quits. Well, the decision was not all that sudden, as I did briefly consider it before, especially last year when I had switched URLs. But now I realized why I needed to do this. I won’t waste time listing the pros and cons of the two platforms, when there are many such discussions already out there in the blogosphere (in fact, some of them were very useful in helping me make the move). The tipping point for me was the commenting system: Blogger’s really got on my nerves, and the system here at WordPress is unquestionably superior. All in all, I’m happy with the move (and I’m sure everyone will appreciate the simpler URL!). Like any change of address in real life, there’s anxiety as well as excitement. But when you’re finally settled in, you can only look forward to the future.
Of course, we were only waiting for the attacks on Michelle to begin. Dinesh D’Souza has taken his turn. In a typically horrible piece of writing, Mr. D’Souza–the Indian immigrant turned crazy right-wing American, and a homophobe who also blames the cultural left for causing 9/11 (!)–vilifies Michelle Obama and identifies her as the “real problem” of Senator Obama. But we all know that for sexist misogynists, the real problems somehow always have something to do with women!
D’Souza, characterizes Michelle as an “above-average but far-from-stellar performer” who never deserved to have gone to Princeton. And then, you knew it, he quotes from her already much-quoted college senior thesis! For a man who doesn’t have a real job other than getting paid for spewing forth bullshit like this, D’Souza comes across as exactly the kind of person who would bother spending hours going through a 21 year old’s paper until he finds a “typical” sentence with a couple of grammar mistakes. And voila! Mr. D’Souza declares his triumphalism as he proves once and for all the lack of intelligence of an inherently inferior being. Of course, what were we thinking? Did we forget, black people are not supposed to know good English! And we have Mr. BA-in-English to remind us of that.
But D’Souza’s main contention is that Obama should be married to a strong woman like her, “a woman who clearly influences him and who stands to have public influence in her own right.” The assertion, it seems, is that Obama can’t control his wife. And a man who can’t control his wife is the real horror in the eyes of misogynists.
