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.
