Obviously being an Islamicist who studies gender, my battleground is Islam v. Women. I hate to act as though the two are mutally exclusive because of course they’re not (cue chorus of neo-cons declaring me an apologist, thanks!), but I have to express my utter exhaustion reiterating that Islam is not “anti-woman.” The superficial commentary on the status of women in the Muslim world to me is like the dragging of nails down a freshy washed chalkboard. Excruciating. I just stumbled across a blog about Muslim women, that had I not been so vacuous as to have had my hair styled yesterday, I would pull it out and put it all in a bag and light it on fire.
Yes, it was that bad.
The majority of commentaries on “the status of Muslim women” is loosely based on the Western gaze upon popular images that accompany articles and publicity from the Muslim world. Rarely do you read an article about Islam where there is not an image of a Muslim woman. Further, I routinely see images of Muslim women drawn from the most conservative Muslim countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia to accompany any article remotely related to Islam. The most recent example of this phenomenon is on the blog The Muslim Woman where the author uses an image of an Afghan man and young girl to illustrate commentary on the state of child marriages in Saudi Arabia. Right.
Orientalist art, once thought to be solely the product of the 19th century, is alive and well. Artificial constructions of harem life, reassigning and concocting ethnicities and features of race continue to permeate the media. Globalization and internet media make the neo-Orientalist renderings of Islam even more perverse because they permeate every corner of the globe and every stream of feminist consciousness. Suddenly Afghan women/Saudi women/Iranian women/American women are all conflated into the modern Muslim monolith.
