Muslim Women Shockingly Not Grateful for Topless European Ladies Trying To Save Them

[BainsBane]

215. I don't really agree that women have no voice anywhere

You may not hear that voice, but that doesn't mean they don't exercise it. I know of some women in an area under Sharia law that carve out a space for resistance within that oppressive structure. They take advantage of the fact military police will not search a woman to smuggle guns under their burqas for revolutionary opposition. They work with the men in their families who stay hidden and transfer weapons and munitions to arm an independence movement. That is not to say they have the full range of ability to express their views as women elsewhere, but they are nonetheless politically active, far more so than you or I.

What perplexes me is how anxious you are to privilege the voices of some young European feminists over Muslim women. My core belief is that if you don't respect a people, you are only going to do them harm. Statements like "fuck he Qur'an reveal as much contempt for Muslim women as Muslim men. I really don't see it as much different ideologically from the neoliberal determination to deny political self-determination and instead justify war for the purposes of redeeming the poor benighted Muslim people through so-called democracy. Enter, war in Iraq. Enough looking down our noses at people across the world. Who are we to pass judgment? We are a highly militaristic society with the highest incarceration rate in the world. We are one of a handful of nations that exercise state sanctioned murder through the death penalty, and we have one of the greatest income disparities in the world. I don't believe we are fit to pass judgment on other cultures. It's not for me to determine what is best for women in Tunisia, Kandahar, or Cairo. They have every bit as much of a right to make those determinations as I do, and I refuse to treat them with less respect that I expect myself.

To view the veil as entirely oppressive is ignorant and ethnocentric. It's meaning is far more complex. It is decidedly contested, but not nearly as one dimensional as many here imagine. There is a body of academic literature on the subject: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=muslim+veil&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C24&as_sdtp=

I also happen to know women in my state of Minnesota who choose to veil. There are also native white Minnesotans who convert to Islam and veil. While I confess to feeling a bit perplexed when I see them, I recognize it is their choice. Certainly many women do not veil by choice, but some do. Muslims for me are not a foreign and strange other. I have Muslim friends and work with many others. I have met Muslim women artists from Egypt, art historians from Iran, dancers and scholars from Indonesia, as well as many Muslim men-- Arab, African, and Persian--who are filmmakers, artists, and scholars. I'm successful in working with them because I don't share the kind of prejudice toward their religion and ethnicity that is so common in the West, as some have specifically told me. As a result, I see this issue quite differently from many here.