Modesty…Isn’t An Extreme Sport

As an Arab woman, my whole life I heard the term ‘modesty’ as a sports term. I remember sitting in on conversations with family friends and relatives, who described how they trained their daughters for ‘modesty’. This training involved many different approaches. When some daughters became teenagers, they were no longer allowed to leave the house in skirts above the knee or tops exposing her shoulders. Others would be made to wear the hijab altogether, with little consideration to their choice. The people who perplexed me the most were those who spoke of ‘training’ for modesty beginning at early childhood. I have unfortunately come across too many who ‘trained’ their daughters, sometimes as young as five years old, to be wearing t shirts in swimming pools or leggings under their dresses, all in the name of getting them ‘used to’ modesty.

Their argument claims that forcing young girls into ‘modest’ dressing ensures that when they grow up they replicate the same style. In many situations where I listen along to these kinds of conversations, I feel as if rigorous piano training or something of equal nature is being discussed and not…putting on clothes.

Scrolling through Twitter recently reminded me of this phenomena. A user tweeted something that took my breath away, which is saying a lot considering the cesspool that Twitter can be most of the time. It was that bad.

The tweet reads;  “I’m not happy about how Mo Salah dresses up his daughter. He should know better as a Muslim.”

In the photo is a joyous Mohamad Salah, the famous Liverpool soccer player who has become the Egyptian sweetheart of the world, with his young daughter Mecca. Mecca is in black shorts and a t shirt. Her hair flies around her face as she chases a soccer ball alongside her father.

While one could easily dismiss this as usual nonsense that is posted on Twitter by men who think their misogyny is edgy and funny, I found myself extremely disturbed and reliving a lot of conversations while reading the replies of agreement to the initial tweet. Every conversation about ‘decency’ and how men only want to marry women who ‘dress decently’. Every ‘women are like lollipops’ conversation.  One user tweeted back that “decency needs to be taught at a young age”.

I found myself disturbed because this sexualization of children and control of their bodies in the name of ‘training’ for later life modesty is a real phenomena. Many people argue that it is not an especially big deal if parents make the decision for their young daughters to dress in a conservative way because it is the same as a parent ‘forcing’ their daughter to dress in ‘liberal’ clothing. I use all these terms loosely because I am unsure what any of them mean. I don’t know how children’s clothing can be liberal or conservative. Children should just be dressed and treated as children, not as bearers of cultural norms and modesty.

Following that especially horrid tweet which made the rounds online, I came to the horrific realization at how strong the privilege of Arab men is. Now don’t get me wrong. I love Mo Salah. I think he is doing a great job representing Arabs in the diaspora and Muslims as well.

But following the posting of the photo of Salah and his young daughter came a stream of posts from the soccer heart throb in um…some very scantily clad clothing choices. Salah is on vacation in these photos, smiling wide and giving fans a great view of some his ‘assets’ that we aren’t used to seeing on the field.

Now again, don’t get me wrong. I liked and favorited this eye candy vivaciously and sent them to all my girl group chats. But reading the comments on these photos and contrasting them to the photos of Salah and his young daughter showed a stark contrast in how Arab society views the bodies of men and women.

 

Salah is allowed to be as at liberty with his body as he wants. Beneath his shirtless photos are a plethora of Quranic quotes praying for his protection and the adoration of men and women alike. In the photos of his young daughter is scorn that she is going to ‘get used to’ showing her legs in shorts. And I dare make the comparison to Egyptian actress Rania Youssef, who last year was forced to apologize to the entire country of Egypt and the greater Arab world for wearing a sheer dress that exposed most of her legs and allegedly some more.

 

The double standards here are so clear that I don’t know if I will ever be able to look at a photo of barely clad Salah again. While I also adore him, the leniency he is afforded serves as a reminder that men can own their bodies and do with them what they please and still be regarded as ‘fakhr al arab’ or the pride of the Arabs, while no matter how much Arab women succeed and represent our communities in arts, film, music, science and politics, the question will always boil down to if she is dressing her body in a way that society deems as respectable.

That Time of the Holy Month

Ramadan began a little oddly for a friend of mine. As one of few Muslims working at a predominately white office, she imagined that the fact her period began on the first day of Ramadan wouldn’t be much of an issue. She envisioned herself eating for a week, then telling her co-workers she was fasting next Monday until the end. No awkwardness, no questions.

Unfortunately, my friend works with woke white people.

When she arrived at the office, coworkers wished her a happy Ramadan and spoke about ways to keep food out of her sight. They asked her how she was feeling without coffee (which she had been planning on brewing when she reached the office) and that they hid her a Monday muffin which she could save and eat at iftar (which she’d really wanted to eat that morning with coffee).

My friend ultimately admitted that she wasn’t fasting. When they asked her why, she replied she was on antibiotics and had been violently ill over the weekend. Later, as she shared her story and explained how embarrassed she had been, she told me that as a feminist she knew that she should have been able to admit that she was on her period: “I know it’s nothing I should be ashamed of,” she said, “but when I was questioned, I clammed up.”

Ramadan influences the lives of both practicing and non-practicing Muslims and Arabs in the Middle East and beyond. The month of fasting changes people’s daily schedules, their behaviors, and their relationships to faith. As a holy month, Ramadan provides Muslims with chances to grow closer to God, and in the world of social media, also jibe at their experiences and share the struggle of fasting long hours, foregoing coffee, and explaining fasting to non-Muslims.

One of these struggles is shared by women alone – with videos, memes, and tweets galore created by women about the challenges facing menstruating women during the month of Ramadan. Throughout the past few years, multiple conversations discuss the unfair treatment of menstruating Muslim women over the holy month, with articles published on Global Citizen compiling tweets of women frustrated with period-shaming, from VICE exploring religious views on menstruation, and HuffPost about the experience of having your period in Ramadan. The plethora of articles, funny videos, and memes all point to women’s growing frustration at feeling like a natural bodily function turns them into food thieves during a week.

Discussion on menstruation is paradoxical in Islam. Scripture prohibits Muslim women from praying, holding the Quran, and fasting, leading many male scholars to conclude that the female body is “impure” during the menstrual cycle. And yet, other scripture appears to refute that conclusion. For example,  while one hadith claims that women should not hold the Quran while menstruating, scholars haven’t found any evidence indicating that women cannot recite Quran while menstruating – the ban is in the physical holding of the book. Furthermore, a hadith in al-Saheehayn describes how the Prophet (PBUH) used to recline in Aisha’s lap while she menstruated and recite Quran. What can we accept from these disparate scriptural notes? On the one hand, women are banned from physically holding the Quran while menstruating because their bodies are seemingly “impure”, and yet a menstruating women’s body is “pure” enough to hold the Prophet (PBUH)  while he recites Quran. In the modern world, the ban on the physical holding of the Quran is further complicated by technology – if a Muslim women can recite Quran while menstruating, can she read Quran from her phone or tablet if she isn’t allowed to hold the book?

My aim isn’t to debate the merit of hadiths discussing menstruation, nor to interrogate Islam’s feminism based on such discussions. The point I’d like to make is that conversations about menstruation are complex, however, the fact that we often view Islam through a male-tilted lens often takes questionable hadiths about menstruation (i.e. women cannot hold the Quran) and compounds them into more dramatic cultural practices. Historically, women haven’t been allowed to become Islamic leaders because, as my religious tutor used to say, a female imam could not guide prayer for a week and everyone would know why, bringing her shame. However,  Myriam Francois argues in a lecture titled “Can Muslims Escape Misogyny?”  that the opinion that women cannot be fit religious leaders because they take breaks from prayer during menstruation can easily be flipped with a change in gender perspective. Instead of viewing women’s breaks from prayer as a fault in their religiosity, we can view it as a fault in men’s religiosity – that men should require strict and constant prayer is a sign of men’s inferiority given their need to be consistently challenging their desire to not pray, which can stem from laziness, a lack of faith, or temptation. To bring our discussion back to fasting, instead of viewing women’s ban from prayer and fasting as a sign of their impurity, we could view it as an excuse that women are allowed to take time off, an indication that women can take prayer and fasting breaks while men are not trusted to do the same.

Even as women respect the scriptural decision to not fast while menstruating, publically, we often don’t see the same respect with women often being shamed for eating in front of others. The most mainstream, moderate argument I come across in defense of this shaming is the issue of politeness  – talking about a bodily function can be perceived as vulgar. Yet the argument for the politics of politeness pales in comparison to the daily needs of menstruating women – if you’re a Muslim woman who isn’t fasting in an open-concept office where everyone assumes you are fasting, what option is left for you if you decide you don’t want people to see you eating?  God literally gave women the excuse to eat, but societal pressure now means they should spend the day as if they’re fasting? Not only that, but choosing not to eat while menstruating puts you at risk for dehydration, low blood sugar, and low iron levels – in other words, it’s not healthy for menstruating women to skip eating for the sake of politeness. No one is saying that Muslim women should savor every morsel in front of their fasting male colleagues, but the choice in not doing so shouldn’t be shame on a woman’s part as much as it is respect for the individual fasting in the room.

The discussion about women feeling publicly shamed while on their period during Ramadan isn’t only relevant to women – but to all Muslims. People have a myriad of reasons for not fasting, whether taking medication, traveling, pregnancy, age, or a lack of religiosity, and criticizing someone who “looks Muslim” for drinking a cup of coffee in the mall doesn’t do anything but perpetuate a system which considers the comfort of a minority of fasters over the real-life needs of the majority. Women need to practice not feeling ashamed at a fundamental function of their bodies and learn to stop apologizing for something they have no control over (after all, it’s not like not fasting while menstruating is a choice). On the other side, we need to educate men about why their female counterparts won’t be fasting with them for one week so that if they see one of their colleagues trying to speed-eat a granola bar in a dark corner, they don’t ask her why she isn’t fasting, but maybe offer her a cup of coffee or chocolate bar instead.

A few days ago, one of my Muslim female colleagues pulled me aside and said she worried about people seeing her eating during her period. I told her she could close the door to my office and eat inside, but also shared my honest opinion – half of all people fasting will not fast for a week. Everyone knows why. The fact that people don’t admit it shouldn’t affect her health nor her comfort. God gave women a break for a week – I call that a blessing, and a blessing to be taken advantage of.

Enjoy your Ramadan coffee, ladies.

 

Sexual Violence Against Men is a Feminist Issue

Content Warning: This piece touches on topics such as rape, violence, and pedophilia which may upset some readers.

A few weeks ago, I attended the Arab Conference at Harvard: an annual conference where students and locals gather to hear talks held by academics, activists, and professionals to talk about salient issues in the Arab World. The conference attracts such a large turnout not only due to Harvard’s prestige but because it touches on topics that we’re often too afraid to talk about openly as Arabs in the MENA region.

One such ‘controversial’ talk was titled “Sexual Violence in the Arab World” and was headed by activist Murad Ismail, clinician Alexandra Chen, and academic Maya El-Helou. The speakers talked about the preponderance of sexual violence, coming from repressive governments who use sex as a means of asserting their power, or terrorist groups like Daesh who legitimize their rape under religious pretext. While hearing about the macabre stories of violence endured by Yazidi women captured by Daesh and Egyptian prisoners violated by Sisi’s regime was horrifying, the stories that surprised me most were the ones concerning boys and men, simply because I seldom heard of them. When discussing rape, the discussion is framed around men being the perpetrators and women being the victims, but in the Middle East and around the world, a silent epidemic exists where men and boys are silenced by a broader culture that disbelieves and ignores the horrific crime of sexual violence against them. Alexandra Chen explained how many of the Syrian men she worked with experienced various forms of sexual assault, which has led to depression, an inability to speak with their families, and in some cases, suicide. A Washington Post reporter highlights the full extent of some of the crimes endured by these men.

It’s not hard to understand why these men have such a hard time assimilating back into society for those lucky enough to have been freed or released; the experience and recollection of forced nudity and rape is bad enough, men have to come to the realization that women are not the only ones who bear the brunt of sexual violence. When I was researching the topic of men being the victims of rape, I came across a Pop Culture Detective episode titled: “Sexual Assault of Men Played for Laughs” that went through endless examples of how often rape jokes against men are normalized and promoted for cheap laughs. One of the most common themes is the idea that men who we wouldn’t expect to go to jail will be special targets’ of another inmate’s sexual aggression. For example, when Justin Bieber got arrested for driving under the influence in 2014, popular late-night host Conan O’ Brien recounted how “the police report described him (i.e. Bieber) as 5’9 and 140 lbs…or as his cellmate put it ‘just right’ ”, to which another person on the show replied, “You know, he’s like a bite-sized Snickers. Fun Size.” which led to an eruption of laughter from the audience.

Here are just a few more quotes from some other mainstream shows, movies, and cartoons:

Sponge Bob: *Sponge Bob hands over soap to Dubloons*: “Doubloons…don’t drop them! *wink*”

Guardians of the Galaxy: “I’m gonna slather you up like Gunavian jelly [laughs] and go to town…”

Deadpool: “This doesn’t end with us riding into the sunset. It ends with me dying of cancer and you winning the icebox award for softest mouth.”
21 Jump Street: “I don’t want to go to jail! You know what happens to handsome guys like me!?”

Terry Crews testifies about being the victim of sexual assault

After I watched 25 minutes of the commentator going through a myriad of examples to show just how normalized these comments are, I stopped and asked myself why I never noticed. A big reason is probably because lad-culture makes light of such humor because men believe that they personally could not or will not be the victims of rape when making these jokes. A second reason is because society still finds the idea of a man being treated like or acting like a woman something to laugh about. Most of us wouldn’t laugh about the idea of a woman getting raped, but some privileged male celebrity? Seems funny. This was made especially apparent after actor Terry Crews opened up about being sexually harassed by a male talent agent. Unsurprisingly, he was mocked by high-profile celebrities like D.L. Hughley, 50 Cent, and Tariq Nasheed who questioned Crews’ “inability” to defend himself, with one of them mocking the fact that he was assaulted by a white man––an added layer of how race and masculinity intersect to influence our interpretation of the situation. As Crews himself put it, “when my assault happened… quite honestly, I probably would have been laughed out the police station”.

The idea that men are the sole perpetrators of rape palliates the crime as a uniquely innate male tendency rather than contextualizing rape as a tool of dominance over another human being. Rape isn’t as much about sex as it is about exerting force over someone to ensure submission by violating a person’s sense of ownership over the parts of their body that are least exposed to others. In the Arab World, the taboo nature of talking openly about consensual sex is coupled with patriarchal views of the phenomenon of rape as well as narrow definitions of what it means to be a man. This trifecta of patriarchal ideas makes male victims of rape an uncomfortable reality to deal with because it seems so out-of-place. How is an Arab male survivor to feel if not out-of-place when his culture and society tells him that only men rape and only women get raped? How is his masculinity supposed to cope when he’s taught that the possibility of him getting raped is null because men can’t be subject to that sort of intimate violence experienced only by women?

“Rape isn’t as much about sex as it is about exerting force over someone to ensure submission, by violating a person’s sense of ownership over the parts of their body that are least exposed to others.”

Alexandra Chen, who is a clearly not an Arab woman, recounted that when doing clinical work, she thought it was more culturally appropriate for female clinical workers to work with female clients, and for male clinicians to work with male clients; but what she found was that several Arab boys and men wanted to speak to her specifically. Why? Because they couldn’t fathom the idea of telling another Arab man that they had been sexually abused. This heinous reality makes it imperative to talk about sex, consent, and ownership openly in order to dismantle ideas like “men can’t get raped”. Fundamentally, we do a disservice to children, both boys and girls, who experience sexual abuse when we raise them without explaining to them clearly that their body is theirs solely. Alexandra Chen pointed out how many Arab girls’ first experiences with sexual assault happens when they’re young and don’t fully realize that they were assaulted until they grow up. She believes that this happens because we socialize girls, in particular, to be kissed, hugged, and picked up by relatives and strangers when they’re young. Obviously, I’m not saying that being affectionate to a child is a bad thing, but when we socialize kids to expect that a stranger can pick them up and start to innocently kiss their cheeks or carry them without their permission, it makes it harder for them to understand that they can say no when someone wants to show them affection. We shouldn’t tell kids that it’s rude not to go and kiss their uncles on the cheek when they say goodbye, and instead ask them how they want to say goodbye to someone. This is subtle, but it takes the pressure off kids to not seem rude if we give them the choice to say goodbye however they want––whether that’s through a kiss on the cheeks, a hug, or just verbally. We should also fight for sex education to be taught in schools so that teenagers know exactly what it means to have consent, what it means to violate consent, and that sex is not the act of men taking something from women (virginity) and women giving something to men. Calling out rape-jokes no matter who they’re directed at (whether it’s men or criminals who “deserve it”) is vital, and teaching men to be vulnerable is necessary so that an Arab man isn’t scared to the point that opening up to another man is seen as disgraceful.

The Infamous Tucker Carlson Remarks

And why they should make us think of Arab women

On 5/30/06, in a talk show with Bubba the Love Sponge, the following exchange takes place between Tucker Carlson and the host. Iraqi culture, in this elevated conversation, is broken down into three components: toilet paper, forks, and the mistreatment of women. My aim, today, is to discuss these components, their merits, and their consequences.

Carlson: “Iraq is a crappy place filled with a bunch of, semiliterate primitive monkeys. I have just zero sympathy for them or their culture. A culture where people just don’t use toilet paper or forks.”

Co-host: “And the way they treat women – you know, I agree with you. Their culture is – but you’re in their homeland, and you’re over there as an American, who they hate, and they want nothing more than the Americans off of their soil, so they’re not going to play games.”

Carlson: “The second we – they can just shut the fuck up and obey, is my view.”

In talking about “primitive” Iraqi culture, the subject of toilet paper, forks, and women are brought up as examples of how “primitive” Iraqi culture is. To the subject of toilet paper, I’ll admit that the quality of toilet paper in the Arab world isn’t fantastic (much too thin), but I find it unfair for our culture to be called primitive because of our lack of choices. Please, Tucker, don’t judge us desert folks too harshly. Try being bombed and colonized for a few centuries and we’ll see how plentiful your toilet paper brands are. Not to mention the Arab world is far ahead of the Western world in the bidet department so I feel like our cleanliness factor evens out, don’t you, Tucker?

On the subject of forks, why should we Arabs need forks when we have so many finger-licken-good foods? You have no problem digging into some chocolate flavored hummus with pretzels from Whole Foods, can you fault us for doing the same?  Bread, I find (as well as most of the world, in fact) is a great vehicle for meals. You should try dipping things in bread sometimes, Tucker, I think you’ll find your palate much enhanced.

The co-host of the podcast then mentions the treatment of women alongside the talk of using toilet paper and forks. I believe the comment should, therefore, be discussed with similar care and regard. The West has always been obsessed with the Arab and Muslim woman. Whether she is the subject of an Orientalist Painting, the reason why Laura Bush wanted so badly to bomb Afghanistan, or whose unfair treatment is one of the fundamental issues with Iraqi culture. I, as an Arab and Muslim woman, am utterly touched by the centuries of concern. I love knowing that while my homeland is bombed back to the stone age, my people forced to become refugees, and my religious rights and freedom of political speech limited, that the West has cared about my welfare every step of the way.

Carlson’s radio conversation, we could imagine in the midst of the Iraq war, is typical of the time. War always needs reasoning;  Embedded Feminism is when state actors co-opt feminist discourses in order to justify their agenda based on a moral hierarchy. For example, Iraqi people are savages we must educate or (better still) annihilate, and one of the reasons we must do so is that they so abuse their women. These views taken for granted, of course, by a man who only a few months later says that “I love women but they’re extremely primitive, they’re basic, they’re not that hard to understand.” Ironic, right, how white men hold Arab women with such respect and regard, and yet are so easily disrespectful to their own? It reminds me of British colonizers in Egypt who would solemnly unveil and liberate the Oriental woman, while campaigning against a British woman’s right to vote back home. It is this historical, seemingly timeless quality of racists using Arab and Muslim women as tools to further their political agendas that I find so fascinating.

Carlson made these particular racist comments a decade ago, but just last week Jeanine Pirro made headlines when she said that Ilhan Omar’s hijab was an example of her adherence to sharia, and thus, an unconstitutional action. The universe conspired to ensure that the slime we’ve seen slide down our newsfeeds have Arab and Muslim women as an aside, or central focus, of the conversation. Doesn’t it scare you that the conversation hasn’t changed in all these years? That we could have heard Carlson’s comments made fresh today and see them complement Pirro’s just as well?

Despite the yards we’ve moved forward in discussing Arab and white feminism, refuting the imperial feminism underlying the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, news anchors can still, on live air, point to a Muslim woman’s hijab and use it as a tool to claim that Islam is incompatible with the American constitution. We have a woman in a hijab and a Palestinian woman sitting in Congress, and yet still rhetoric moves to use them as bullet points in conversations about the ethics of imperialism and American identity. They say those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it, but I feel in discussions on Arab and Muslim women we’re not so much seeing history repeat itself, as living in an endlessly long straight line in which nothing changes enough to be considered a repetition of the former.

They say those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it, but I feel in discussions on Arab and Muslim women we’re not so much seeing history repeat itself, as living in an endlessly long straight line in which nothing changes enough to be considered a repetition of the former.

Am I surprised by the comments? No. More than anything else, I’m disappointed at this reminder that despite the steps we’ve taken, racists remain emboldened to use Arab and Muslim women as battlegrounds for religious and cultural debates that have neither their interests, nor their freedoms, in mind.

 

 

 

 

Arab Racism in Robin Hood

I doubt you watched Robin Hood 2018 – the film scored a 14% on Rotten Tomatoes and bombed in the box office. And yet, Robin Hood, weirdly enough, became an unlikely representative of the Arab in Hollywood today.

The film opens, as in the original legend, with Robin’s time during the Crusades. The opening scene looks startlingly modern, in a desert city that looks shelled out as though by bombs, with protagonists dressing in clothes more reminiscent of bulletproof vests than period-piece armor. From the sounds to the aesthetics, the scene visualizes a Middle Eastern landscape that looks more modern than it does ancient. I linked the scene below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGqMJ-FULEY

The scene serves to introduce us to Robin Hood’s “Moorish” commander. Jamie Foxx plays Yahya, who says the English pronunciation of his name is John (?). Yahya becomes a heroic protagonist in the film – he trains Robin to become “Robin Hood” and fights alongside him.  He even has a startling interrogation scene towards the end of the film where the antagonist teases Yahya’s Muslim faith and makes threats to force him to drink “pig’s blood”. On one hand, there’s a tiny part of me that’s happy that an Arab (?) plays a good guy for once alongside a white character, however, the odd integration of this Arab representation in a film utterly unprepared for it exposes Hollywood’s diversity flaws.

In Hollywood Reporter’s review of the film, the reviewer summarizes Yahya’s role in the film as “Jamie Foxx as an angry man from the Middle East who’s gotten mixed up on the wrong side of a Crusade, or maybe just in the wrong movie.” Sesali Bowen, writing for Refinery29, writes a deeper analysis. While calling out Robin Hood’s lack of meaningful diversity, Bowen interrogates the character of Yahya:

Then there is Egerton’s co-star, the talented Jamie Foxx, who deserved better than his role as “John.” Despite the Oscar winner’s proven capabilities as an actor, his accent is unplaceable. Is he supposed to be from an African country or somewhere in the Middle East? He loses his hand and watches his son get beheaded in the war, despite Robin’s attempts to prevent the execution. But while Robin has a white savior’s heart of gold, he doesn’t have the patience to pronounce John’s real name, Yahya. With a severed hand, John still managed to train Robin to become the efficient thief known to his community as The Hood. Thus, Foxx essentially serves as a strong magical negro.

Bowen hits the nail on the head. The issue of Yahya’s casting is it demonstrates Hollywood’s growing tendency to make the Arab everyone. The Arab is the representative of the desert, of savagery and war in dusty, closed corridors, of shelled out mosques and an ancient way of thinking – all the tropes we now call “Orientalist”. And yet, this modern day Arab has neither race nor origin. No doubt Bowen couldn’t determine whether Foxx’s accent was from the Middle East or Africa when Yahya’s origin is the “Kebrit Peninsula, Arabia” which doesn’t exist. Yahya is a Muslim fighting in the Crusades, which took place in the Levant region not in what we would call “Arabia”, and yet wears African scarification and is dubbed a “Moorish” commander, with the term “Moor” being a created term largely associated with African Muslims in Spain. In other words, Yahya who is fine being called “John”, is a Muslim Arab/African fighting in a Crusade battle that didn’t happen and labeled with a Spanish name.

Makes sense.

In an alternate universe, Robin Hood could have been a screenwriter’s attempt at integrating meaningful diversity in a movie which people wouldn’t think to write diversity into. It is creative to make Robin Hood’s teacher a Muslim man Robin fought in the Crusades, and to then make that Muslim man just as heroic as his white counterpart. However, whatever good intention at the root of the creation of Yahya’s character is lost when he’s written with little more intelligence than an Orientalist writer during the Early Modern period. How easy could it have been to sit an Arab writer in the room and listen to them list out the character’s muddled origins. To have them to cast an Arab actor as an Arab character fighting in the Crusades, whose name is Yahya, who is Muslim, and is dubbed an “Arab commander”? Instead, Robin Hood fell into every Orientalist pitfall, insensitive to both Arabs/Arab Americans and Africans/African Americans, creating a magical negro where there could have been a refreshingly unexpected Arab hero.

I call out Robin Hood not because it is the poster-child of bad Arab representation in Hollywood. In a time when movies like Aladdin (2019) and Dune (2019) are already sparking conversations about the representation of Arabs in today’s theaters, Robin Hood is an example of the everyday racist depictions of the Middle East which can make it casually onto an unassuming movie-goer’s screen. Otto Bathurst, the film’s director, could get away with introducing the location card “Kebrit Peninsula, Arabia” because he knew that no one was going to google it to see whether or not it was a real place. The screenwriters could get away with dubbing Yahya a “Moorish” commander because they know all people will associate with the term “Moor” is Black Muslim, and they can use it with disregard to the term’s origins and racist undertones because they know people won’t care.

Films like Black Panther and Crazy Rich Asians, which proved that not only could movies with meaningful diversity be both great and smash the box office, can make us complacent enough to think Hollywood’s racism is changing. Just because there are diverse faces on screen does not mean that the narrative of white supremacy has dissipated, especially since in this age of new cinematic diversity, not all minorities are created equal.

 

PS: If you’re wondering why I haven’t mentioned the representation of Arab women in Hollywood Blockbusters, it’s because I haven’t seen one this year. Go figure.

 

       

 

The Power of the Word ‘NO’

In the past week, the story of Rahaf al Qanun, an 18 year old Saudi woman who escaped an abusive household and the restrictive male guardianship system in Saudi Arabia, dominated global headlines. She bravely left home alone, traveling all the way to Thailand and risking deportation back, before reaching the safe hands of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, UNHCR.

Reading Rahaf’s story I could not help but think that this was not just a Saudi Arabia problem as the media portrayed, but a patriarchy problem that existed all around the world. Patriarchy affects Arab women in the Middle East and in the West, not just in Saudi Arabia. How many girls like Rahaf struggle today to break free? I found such a girl online a few days earlier with a story eerily similar to Rahaf’s. Below, I tell her story.

Amna, an eighteen-year-old Iraqi-American, grew up in a strict and conservative Iraqi household. She often felt excluded from friends as a child because her parents kept her from attending social events. At nine years old, her parents introduced the idea of hijab to her. They eventually forced her to don it and Amna became the target of Islamophobia at her school. Amna felt like an outsider both at home and at school, dealing with the consequences of decisions out of her control.

Let’s fast forward.

Amna entered her first semester as a freshman in college. She decided to study Spanish Education, a decision her parents disapproved of because they didn’t see her choice of major as compatible with the life they imagined for her as a housewife. They threatened to send her to Iraq to get married, however, at some point during her first semester her parents’ attitude appeared to change.

Suddenly, they seemed supportive. Her parents seemed fine about her decision to sign up to go on a trip to Costa Rica as part of her program. With this newfound freedom, Amna no longer spent late nights lamenting her life, instead she lay in bed excited about the changes she saw in her family. Maybe, someday, she could accomplish her dreams without losing them. In fact, their attitude changed so drastically that Amna even contemplated telling her father she no longer wanted to wear the hijab.

During the fall, Amna’s father informed her that the family would take a trip to Dubai and Iraq in the winter. Amna was ecstatic. She loved traveling and thought her parents planned the trip to make her happy. The visit to Iraq would last a week – long enough for them to visit family. Amna bought new clothes, packed, and traveled. Her enthusiasm lasted only days.

Upon arrival to Iraq, her family greeted her with the words “welcome home”. Amna was confused. Things started taking a sour turn. Her brother lambasted her for how she wore her hijab ‘incorrectly’ and her father yelled at her for dressing as she normally did. Her family barred her from living the family home in Basra. As the days went by, Amna noticed that they did not seem like they were ready to travel to Dubai. She asked her father and he dismissively said that he would book the tickets later. Amna reminded him that her next semester at university started soon but he didn’t seem to care. Amna couldn’t stand being around her parents anymore so she decided to stay with her aunt and cousins for a few days, which made her father weary because he couldn’t keep a constant eye on her.

Her father decided that the family would take a trip to the holy city of Karbala in the south of Iraq, where Amna and her sister became prisoners at home. Amna told her best friend in the United States her situation and confided in him the fear that she would never return. He proposed that she make a GoFundMe so she could buy a plane ticket and replace her American passport (her father kept hers). Amna gave her American friend all her social media and told him to do whatever necessary. She did not expect for her story to go viral online and for her parents to hear.

Once her parents found out, she faced serious abuse. Her mother woke her up in the middle of the night screaming, asking her what she did. Her father physically abused her and her sister in front of all their relatives, who watched the scene with a cold sense of normalcy. Throughout the ordeal, Amna maintained contact with the American embassy in Baghdad. Amna decided that she needed to escape but couldn’t since now her family watched her every movement. Amna’s brother came all the way to Karbala from Basra to also beat her for tarnishing the family name.

Time passed. Amna begged her family for forgiveness. They forgave her enough to spend a night with her aunt and cousins in Basra. Amna returned to Basra, and in the wee hours of the morning, Amna left her aunt’s house with nothing but her phone and her purse. She took a taxi to the American embassy. Upon arrival, the Iraqi guard at the checkpoint of the first denied her entry because she did not make an official appointment. Amna broke down, swearing that she had emails from the embassy, telling the guard that she feared for her life. He allowed her inside.

That day, her parents arrived at the checkpoint to the embassy but were denied entry without an official appointment. With the situation now clearly unsafe, the embassy provided Amna with an emergency passport and placed her on the first flight to the United States.

Amna dreams of continuing her studies, having a career, traveling, dressing as she pleases. Amna dreams of living without fear and laughing loudly. Amna dreams of living a normal life which she herself determines. To be her own person, not the person her parents tried to mold her into becoming.

In a statement given to the Canadian press, Rahaf al Qanun expressed the same desire; that she wants to live a normal life. She won’t give interviews for a time, hoping to focus on creating a new life for herself in Canada.

Amna and Rahaf experienced the same pervasive patriarchy, that seeks to control every aspect of a woman’s life. Rahaf’s story was shared all of the world, but less because she escaped from an abusive home and more because she is from a country whose sexism is so dramatically codified into law. That doesn’t make her story any less valid, nor does it make the realities for women in Saudi Arabia any less harsh. But it does allow those misogynists within our own Arab community to continue to abuse freely. Just because Iraq, or Jordan, or Lebanon or Egypt don’t have written male guardianship laws doesn’t mean that they don’t turn a blind eye to abuse and enable it continually with their regarding of it was ‘culture and tradition’. How many Rahaf’s exist in the Arab world? How many Amna’s? How many nameless victims suffering in their own homes?

We must support Arab women who want to break free from the chains that stifle their dreams and take away their freedom. Abusive households are an elephant in the room that our communities must discuss. A father shouldn’t have the power to decide whether his daughter can leave the house if she isn’t dressed for his liking. A brother does not have the right to kill his sister for ‘dishonoring’ him. A woman shouldn’t live in fear for daring to disobey.

Rahaf and Amna exemplify the revolutionary power of the word ‘no’. They both decided that they would not live their lives waiting for the day their abusive families gave them freedom. They set themselves free, despite the risks. They said no, this is my life. No to patriarchy, no to sexism, no to the continuation of abuse in the name of culture and tradition.

You can support Amna here and follow her on Twitter @AmnaShawi

Male Friendships and Emotional Labor

In this piece, I argue that men’s unfair expectations of female friends and partners are often a result of feeling like they can’t open up to other men for fear of social punishment, leading to poor emotional intelligence manifest in superficial friendships with men and inequitable relationships with women.

Image source: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/275348

Anyone who knows me knows I’m an overthinker. It’s a trite saying you hear from people, but as someone who has studied psychology in my past and currently has an unhealthy penchant for watching/listening to philosophy debates, it’s fair to say that I think a lot about human behavior and cognition. A definition I once heard of philosophy is that it’s the act of thinking of a better way of thinking about things. Lately I’ve been thinking about friendship: Who do I consider to be some of my closest friends? How did our relationships form? Where do I see my friendship with this person going? Are there shared values and interests that sustain the friendship or are we merely friends of convenience (i.e. simply spend time together because of forced and shared circumstances like being in the same class)? What are the expectations that I have of said friend, and what expectations do they have of me? Am I a good friend? What’s the point of this litany of rhetorical questions?

Apart from proving that I am in fact, an overthinker, what my philosophizing over the past few days has done is point out an obvious truth that I probably knew but never quite understood the reasons for—my relationships with women are by far more fulfilling and meaningful than my relationships with men. My close friendships are evenly split between the genders, but it’s a recurring theme that I find myself frustrated that friendships with men often feel vacuous, lack meaning, or are merely friendships of convenience. For example, when I met up with a group of five male friends who I had been friends with for over a decade last year over spring break, the entirety of the trip consisted mostly of smoking and drinking, arguing over trivial things, and banter. There was no sense that we only get to see each other once or twice every couple of years and that we could have done things other than how we spent our days hanging out every day as teenagers. This isn’t true for all my male friendships of course, but it’s definitely more prevalent than it is with women. This led me thinking about the reasons as to why this is the case.

It’s no secret that many of us look for different things in different people. There are friends that I like spending time with because of their witty sense of humor, or their strong personality, or their inspiring passion for a certain cause or interest, or because they’re always in a good mood and are down to spend time doing anything. The thing about my female friends, however, is that they also have much higher emotional intelligence on-average, which means that they are more likely to be invested in having open conversations, actively listening, and making sure that the relationship is reciprocal. There’s something refreshing when I sit down with a close friend and have them ask me questions that force me to reflect on the reasons for why I’m choosing certain life decisions, or have a genuine interest in my opinions on politics, philosophy, and current events, or actively listen and pay attention to the language I’m using in order to decipher what might really be going on with me—paying attention to the balance of how often they’re listening versus talking. Ultimately, such friendships built on mutual interest in another person’s well-being and opinions are what make relationships “real” and worth keeping. It’s frustrating to think of the number of male friendships where this is far from being the case.

Actor Justin Baldoni talking about his frustrations with the limits of male friendship

I like to think of myself as someone who is good at active listening and has a genuine interest in cultivating relationships with the traits I previously mentioned, and I believe that most of my friends would agree because they often come and talk to me about their problems and insecurities. The thing about men is that we’re taught to hide our problems to preserve the image that we have our shit together and are thus “real” men. Some of us go down the path of confiding in a friend and making it a point to cultivate good active listening skills in order to have meaningful conversations, the rest bottle up emotions and continue to have superficial friendships that will be unlikely to last. After forcing myself to do more of the former, I’ve noticed a number of male friends open up to me about their problems, including one traditionally masculine friend who I’d never thought would call me for an hour because of an incredibly stressful scenario his family put him in. I never thought another man would call me after I could tell that he was crying but I was happy that he’d broken down a barrier that helped me understand why he was acting a certain way. Another friend (also male) makes it a point to talk to me about his insecurities concerning his romantic life, and yet another has approached me admitting he has depression because of his family, the list goes on.

Let me be clear, I am more than happy to be a friend that people can confide in, I don’t view it as a burden to spend a long time listening carefully so that someone can get something off their chest, and I think it’s a positive step for men to finally break the tough guise act and prioritize their mental health. The disappointing part is feeling like I can’t do the same, and this is true for 90% of my relationships with men but with almost none of my relationships with women. Let’s face it, men are generally awful at active listening—no trying to summarize why you’re stressed about a specific issue, no follow-up questions, no understanding of the fact that “I’m sorry bro” or “just do X” are terrible ways of making someone feel heard.

Image source: https://businessanalystlearnings.com/business-analyst-career/2017/10/17/5-tenets-of-active-listening

Active listening with men just turns into emotional labor—caring to the needs and egos of someone expecting no reciprocity in return. This is a burden that’s traditionally imposed on women with their relationships to their fathers, partners, and male friends, being expected to be caring to the endless needs and/or fragile egos of traditional masculinity. Women need to make sure to be caring, but not too caring (lest the man feel emasculated that he’s opening up), women can strive to be high achieving, but not too ambitious (lest the dad feel like the community might question his status as head of the household), women should expect men to share household chores (but if they’re mad the man didn’t clean-up after himself it’s because she should have asked him to clean-up).

So how can we remedy this and not have to deal with emotional labor? How can we be more considerate in our relationships?

…a few tips for people who are bad at active listening. Some listening don’ts:

Do not,

1. Immediately try to problem-solve when someone is opening up to you about their issues.
2. Say “that must be tough” instead of summarizing what the other person said in your own words.
3. Fail to ask follow-up questions to better understand your friend’s situation
4. Shift the conversation to be about you. Key indicators include: “ I felt the exact same way when X happened to me…”, “Let me tell you when something similar happened to me…” (Obviously this isn’t a hard-and-fast rule, but unless your friend has already spent a good amount of time talking and you’re only sharing your experience because it’s similar and might help your friend relate to you as a shared struggle avoid doing this).
5. Immediately offer your opinion or judge how your friend is handling their situation.

Doing these things will make it likely that your friend will:

1. Limit their relationship with you as much as possible or make conversations much more superficial
2. Harbor resentment towards you because of the lack of reciprocity
3. Hide how they’re truly feeling
4. Not think twice about what you think of their life-choices, major decisions, or actions that involve moral implications.

Nothing illustrates this more than when I overheard my friend listening to his girlfriend talk about her problems. She was stressed working a part-time job as well as doing a major academic project her last semester of college while trying to find a job within a saturated industry. As she described her frustration, my friend immediately went into problem-solver mode: “You should try doing X, what about trying Y? You should stop worrying”. While his intentions were good, he failed to realize that her frustration was due to feelings of self-doubt and feeling like she didn’t deserve to get a good job—not just the universal worry of finding a job post-college. As she later told me when I approached her in private: “It makes me feel like I can’t share what I’m feeling with the person I’m closest to”.

A recurring theme I find with my female friends is that their male partners don’t realize that their advice about how to solve a specific problem is clearly something women have already considered. They don’t need someone to problem-solve on their behalf for an issue with obvious approaches, they need someone to make them feel heard. Problem-solving on behalf of someone immediately is a sure way for the person venting to feel infantilized and feel like they’re not being understood.

So let’s all put in a little extra effort to work on the way we listen so that we’re not hurting our relationships with the people most important to us.

 

Feminists aren’t immune to society’s never-ending obsession with beauty

Feminist and legal scholar Dr. Kimberle Crenshaw stated that the goal of feminism is to assess situations where gender plays a role in distributing undue burdens towards individuals and seeking to eliminate them. One clear gendered burden that transcends all cultures is beauty—the need for individuals (usually women) to invest an inordinate amount of time, energy and money into fitting into societal standards of what’s considered beautiful. And while beauty standards worldwide do differ, humans, regardless of socialization, favor specific traits that indicate a higher likelihood of genetic and reproductive fitness: youthful faces, shinier hair, physically-able bodies, and for women, an ideal waist-to-hip ratio of 7:10.

A Google search of “beauty” results in unsurprising images—interestingly only of women.

I could postulate and research the many possible reasons for why physical beauty has taken center-stage in today’s world: the rewards beautiful people receive in-person (attractiveness is linked to higher chances of career promotion, a wider selection of romantic mates, as well as superior social skills and perceived trust from others) and on social-media (there are endless examples of people who have made a living off of posting photos of themselves), neoliberalism’s creation of atomized individuals in society that are easy prey to market values of individualism and consumerism, etc.

For the sake of this piece, I’m going to highlight how our obsession with beauty has permeated to such an extent that even critics of such realities (feminists) don’t realize how they continue exacerbating the problem. And this obsession isn’t just about women mind you (although evidence of negative consequences for women are typically more apparent), the male beauty industry is now a whopping 29 billion dollars, with many men reporting increased insecurity about the way they look.

For those of us growing up or having grown up in the social media generation, it’s easy to understand why self-reported insecurities about physical beauty have only increased over time. If you log on to Instagram, your feed will likely contain a number of fitness posts from shirtless men and bikini-clad women. Engaging with these posts makes it more likely for Instagram’s algorithms to show you pictures based on your previous engagements, and if your heterosexual male friends are anything like mine (probably), you’ve probably seen one of your mates scrolling through a feed where 90% of posts are of bikini models or porn-stars posting pictures that might just be enough to violate Instagram’s term of service. To be clear, I’m not attempting to make a moral judgement on people posting nearly-nude photos, but I am wondering what the preponderance of these photos means and what it reflects on us culturally and socially.

Sponsored photo-altering apps on Instagram reflect a great deal on society’s desperate obsession with looking a certain way

I’ve lost count of the number of friends who seem to have such an unhealthy mindset when it comes to beauty. I have friends who feel completely devastated by the way they look whenever they have an unsuccessful romantic encounter (even though their looks had nothing to do with their failed attempts at pursuing a mutual friend), friends who will exclusively go on a date with someone only because of their physical beauty, friends whose daily conversations revolves around what they plan to look like once they gain the wealth to be able to dress the way they want and alter their bodies and faces. I find it hard to name a friend (committed feminist or otherwise) who has a healthy relationship with the way they look and conceive of physicality in public space. Given our digital age, it is easy to see how people leverage the salience of beauty online. Some feminists have sadly not thought about the irony of attacking people based on their looks. Remember those naked Donald Trump statues that gave so many of us a laugh? Or that tweet about Tomi Lahren’s ‘unfashionable’ eyebrows getting tens of thousands of retweets? It is now commonly accepted to call into question individuals based not only for their character instead of their arguments, but for their physical appearance. This new form of ad hominum attacks are sadly too common and too reflective of the complacency of fellow feminists in examining the ethical implications of belittling people based on their looks—no matter how troublesome such people’s’ political and social views may be.

Naked Trump statues placed in cities across the U.S. depicting Trump with a large belly, flat glutes, and a lack of testes made some of us laugh

For Arab women, the importance of beauty is so ingrained in our culture that it’s considered acceptable by many to belittle a bride for not looking as beautiful as people expected her to be, for an Arab man to request his wife be physically fit without making any effort to exercise himself, for society to judge a man who is romantically involved with a woman “below his league”. While these issues are certainly not specific to Arab culture, I can safely say that Arab women’s relationship and obsession with beauty and fashion is some of the unhealthiest I’ve seen from the women I meet. It’s no surprise that when we find out about a friend’s new romantic partner we tend to automatically want to know what she looks like rather than about her persona and mutual compatibility with said friend. It is high-time for feminists to re-examine the importance of beauty in society and how such importance maintains a patriarchal status quo. Here’s just a few tips we can all implement in our day-to-day lives that might mitigate the salience of physical beauty and lessen this burden on women, who suffer the brunt of these societal standards.

1. Stop categorizing people into “leagues” and instead categorize people by “types”. The concept of what “league” someone is in in terms of attractiveness, necessitates that some people are universally beautiful and others are universally not. While symmetrical faces and muscular/slim bodies are generally something we find attractive because of our evolution, it is an obvious fact that people differ quite starkly in terms of who is considered attractive to them. I can find someone extremely attractive and a host of people might not understand why, because said person is my type and not because they’re in a higher “league”.
2. Going off of the first point, stop acting shocked when you meet a couple that you think has one individual that is much more attractive than the other. It’s sad that as a society we conceive of a happy relationship being primarily built on supposedly equal levels of attractiveness between two individuals–ignoring the history, sacrifices, shared values/experiences that ultimately are what form a strong base for a relationship.
3. Focus your compliments based on peoples’ style and health rather than their bodies and unalterable characteristics.
4. Don’t talk about how good or bad someone looked when they change up their haircut, lose or gain weight, or lose a key part of what you thought made them attractive.
5. If you’re a woman, stop apologizing to your friends about not looking your best because you didn’t have time to apply your makeup. Wearing makeup should not be expected of any woman in any circumstance.
6. Challenge the sexual objectification of women AND men in media, popular culture, and in conversations.

Rashida Tlaib and an Arab/American Victory

After winning the Democratic primary for Michigan’s 13th District, securing an uncontested Congressional election in November, Rashida Tlaib told the cameras in tears:

“I want to shout out to my grandmother, who is from a small village on the West Bank – they are literally glued, it is like 5’ o’clock  in the morning – but they are glued to the TV, my grandmother, my aunts, my uncles in Palestine are sitting back and watching their granddaughter –“

The rest is indecipherable in the applause.

On her labels, Rashida says people see her as a child of immigrants, a Palestinian, an Arab, a woman, and the label that has been making headlines over the last few days, the first Muslim woman poised to win a Congressional seat. Years spent serving the Michigan House of Representatives, heckling Trump rallies, and rallying for a progressive wing of the Democratic party, culminating in a Palestinian flag waved to celebrate an American victory. What does Rashida Tlaib’s victory say of Arab women in this country, of how far they’ve come, of how their activism takes shape?

Political Entity

I frequently tell people who ask me why I often solely write with a political bend that when your identity is a political statement, you can’t choose to be political. You simply are. Wrap a scarf around your head, speak in Arabic, put a foreign flag on your laptop – it doesn’t matter how American you are, or not-American you claim to be, if you are an Arab woman you are a political statement. I encourage my friends to learn their histories, to learn their religions, and to learn their rights for that very reason, because when a white man sees you he has a political thought, and if you don’t have political nuance how can you challenge that thought? It’s only when you weaponize that political identity that people can begin to see you as not only a controversy, but a neighbor.

Ally ship

Regardless of Fox News’s obsession with our community, the population of Arabs in America is still only about 1% according to poor census records. When a Palestinian, Muslim woman wins an election, it means her constituents voted for someone outside their community. Michigan’s 13th district is largely African American – Tlaib is a strong advocate for Black Lives Matter. It goes to show that when Arab women become allies, we receive allies. Rashida Tlaib’s victory demonstrates how Arab women are finding a political voice in this country and people are listening, but not only to the issues Arabs find important, but also to how Arab women respond to the issues that affect other communities. A good step forward, but a reminder to challenge the misogynist, the homophobe, and the conservative cultural voice in the community. We only win as advocates for others.

Disconnect

When asked how she will address the divisiveness in this country, Tlaib said that this country isn’t divided, but disconnected. That we don’t speak to one another – perhaps the greatest irony in an age of total connection, where all we do is connect on screens with friends and strangers alike. How do you bridge a digital gulf? After all, likely the only people who read this blog are people who advocate for Arab women, just as you and I are only going to read Breitbart for anthropological purposes. For Tlaib, connection means advocating at a grassroots level, bridging communities, and giving people the chance to see the similarities between themselves and the eldest of 14 Palestinian children.

History

The legacy of failing empires leaves wounds. The last centuries cut Arabs a hundred times, by hand of the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Ottoman collapse, by the divisions created by colonialism, by the occupation of Palestine, by bombs that fall as frequently as rain. These cuts are raw – some chafe, others still bleed. Do you imagine that we are each born with unmarked skin? That from birth, our cultures and our families don’t pass on their scars and wounds to us? Older generations do not bear the burden of fallen empires on their own. They need their youth to carry the weight with them. As young Arabs learn their scars just as they suffer continued wounding, and struggle to find unmarked skin, why should they be expected to be silent? The power of a Palestinian flag waved to celebrate an American victory is not only a political one, but a historical one – it’s a sign that Arab women haven’t forgotten where they come from, what brought them to this place, and demonstrates that the anger of all the generations before us isn’t dimming. That the anger is creating positive change in the world.

Maybe there’s still hope for a generation of giants Nizar Qabbani hoped for.

 

The Imaginary Mosque

Sometimes I imagine what it would be like praying on a white marble floor in the center of a great mosque. There’s no roof, only a blue sky and the looming shadow of the minarets. The image comes, perhaps, from my early memories walking through the Ummayad Mosque with my family, where the hustle and noise of the Hamideyyah Souq faded to a hum and the cooing of pigeons. I imagine what the smooth stone would feel like on my palms and forehead. The smell and feel of a cool breeze. In the Alhambra in Spain, architects incorporated water into their gardens and marble courtyards, as though, even in a lush landscape, the Muslims there remembered our religion’s birth in a dry desert and celebrated the blessing of clean water. For that reason, I might put a fountain in my mosque, like the Andalusian Muslims did, even as I keep the striped, Syrian arches. In a mosque like that, I think, I’d find spirituality.

But, standing during taraweeh in Dhahran, in the back of the mosque closed in by dull, brown barriers, jostled in the over-cramped space by women all dressed in black, the image of the mosque I try to imagine while I pray quickly fades. Children run through the aisles and cry in the back while their mothers pray, seemingly unbothered. It’s hot, and all I can see of the mosque is the thick carpet beneath my feet and the top of a man’s head over the barrier. In my Dhahran mosque, there was a top floor that jutted out and ended a quarter into the space. As women, we prayed under the overhang that floor created. With the barriers and short roof, I often thought of myself praying in a cardboard box. For that reason, I rarely frequented the mosque. When I say “rarely”, I mean never outside of Ramadan, and never outside of taraweeh, and just this year, I only attended prayer a few days out of the month.

Whenever I complain to my father about the women’s space in the mosque, he says that women are not mandated to go the mosque and so rarely go, and consequently the mosque doesn’t accommodate them. But I might flip the logic around – because the mosque doesn’t accommodate women, they do not go. While it’s true that men are mandated to attend Friday prayers, there isn’t a verse that discourages women from attending prayer. In fact, in one religious account, a woman corrects Caliph Umar during his sermon. Not only does this tell us that in early mosques women were present during prayers and sermons, but they had the voice to correct even the Caliph in his religious citations. Ironically, centuries later, a Muslim woman can’t be imagined correcting the imam at her local mosque. After all, how can you speak confidently in a space if you can’t confidently occupy it?

The issue of women’s spaces in mosques has gained traction in recent years. Just this year, Turkish women demanded safer spaces in their mosques with the hashtag #kadinlarcamilerde, British women launched an Open My Mosque campaign to encourage women to actively engage in their mosques, Egyptian women won the fight to become imams, the #MosqueMeToo movement provided women a platform to talk about the harassment they face within mosques, and female-led mosques in Copenhagen are advocating for feminist interpretations of Islam.  

The growing voice of Muslim women demanding the egalitarianism promised in their faith is to be applauded, however, while we begin to demand female spaces in mosques, especially in the Arab world, I want to guard against the imperial language that often slips into our dialogue. Frequently, discussions of providing women with more space and agency in mosques, and in Islam as a whole, often positions the West and Western values as catalysts that Islam must react and adapt in consequence too. For example, Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el Sisi called on state-supported Muslim clerics “to improve the image of Islam in front of the world” – in that, Islam must change in response to the world. Furthermore, there’s a common misconception, I think, that Muslim women must reconcile their faith and “Western values”. In one article, one otherwise poignant female writers notes “Like many Muslim women living in the West, I have struggled to find the balance among my religion, my culture and American social mores.” In another article, a male Muslim ends his article saying “The first and second generation of Britain’s Muslims built mosques as they knew them to be. It falls upon a new generation to adapt to the reality of the modern West.” The problem with this language is that it positions the West as a “modern” force that enacts change upon a culturally backwards Muslim world – orientalism at its finest. I would argue that, in creating new spaces for women in our mosques, we shouldn’t imagine ourselves adapting our mosques for a modern West, rather, we are course correcting to return to a rich history of mosques as the centers of diverse, theological engagement. When we use imperial language in discussing Muslim women, we further the erasure of Arab and Islamic history and continue the tradition of ignoring the nuances of Middle Eastern religions and cultures.

After all, in his autobiography, Ibn Sina writes that whenever he suffered from writer’s block or grew frustrated with a text he could not understand, he would go to the mosque and pray, then return home and drink half a glass of wine.

Western scholars often claim that Ibn Sina was not religious, given his note of drinking wine, but that’s because they often see our faith through a lens that they have unfortunately given us. That there is one practice of Islam that must be amended to be more Western. But classical Islam was as diverse as the thinkers which illuminated the texts of its Golden Age, and their mosques and interpretations were not influenced by an enlightened West, rather, they grew out of Muslim and Arab power. Consequently, when women demand spaces in mosques, they are not demanding that their mosques adapt to their Western lives, but rather, they are calling for a return to the best of Arab Islamic practice.