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.
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i can’t access the entire text of the article, but that segment you’ve quoted irritates me.
first, because it unquestioningly reinforces the hugely simplistic notion of a West/Muslim dichotomy – and it does so by using bad examples. “Hot” = Western now? seriously? so it’d have been a uniformly “Muslim” username if it had been … PrettyHijabi? JameelahHijabi? bah.
second, breaking down the use of case in her PM is just stretching the analysis too far. that kind of netspeak a teenager thing, rampant throughout the SMS-word, and is only a symptom of “Western-ness” insofar as cellular/IM technoculture is central to youth cultures.
the conclusion re disparate ideologies meeting is too pat for my liking. the whole thing just defamiliriases to an unproductive and potentially alienating degree what basically is how young people all over the world communicate on the net.
what would have been much more useful and interesting would have been a discussion on what it means to be a hijabi on the net and to identify as such, as well as what kinds of attitudes feed into the male contributor’s ridiculous demand that women needed mahrams in order to participate in an online forum.
Comment by fathima July 28, 2008 @ 4:38 pmFathima: I fully agree, and not surprisingly, I had a very similar reaction to the author’s observations when I read the above paragraph. Since my interest was only piqued by the mahram quote, I didn’t bother adding any other comments when posting this on the blog (Nonetheless, I did consciously decide to quote the whole paragraph instead of that line alone, just to put it in context).
I had a few problems with the rest of her article as well, though I was even more skeptical when I began reading it (because, I thought that “whether Islamic feminists are really feminists” is a very loaded question). Thankfully, her conclusion was in the affirmative. However, she seemed to me to imply feminism as a rather monolithic discourse, which I found problematic. But of course, even more troubling was her framing of feminism as a “Western” ideology (even though she did occasionally put Western within inverted commas). Regarding her comment on hybrid identities/ideologies, I kept thinking: people are always already hybrid. As a disclaimer, I’ll have to add that I did not peruse the entire article–so it is possible that I’m amiss on some things.
It would certainly be more interesting to discuss the implications of being a hijabi in cyberspace, and specifically that mahram comment I found so interesting (to put it mildly). The author probably didn’t do so because this was more an aside in the context of her article.
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