Eight Years of War: 9/11/2009

My friend Afifa asked me to change my Facebook profile picture to a graphic of a woman with the words “STOP BOMBING AFGHANISTAN” under it. I obliged of course because like everyone else, I am tired of war. I am tired of hearing the battlecry be the “liberation of Afghan women” when I’ve seen more women slaughtered in the aftermath of bombings and Taliban retaliation than in the course of forty years of war in Afghanistan. I’m tired of war. I’m tired of hearing about my friends and former students not knowing if they will be the next contingent to go to Afghanistan. I’m tired of my Afghan friends suffering, never knowing if they will ever see Afghanistan again. Not knowing if Afghanistan will even continue to exist. Fragments of Afghanistan exist, smuggled out as cultural artifacts, human artifacts, literary artifacts, and we crave them as we help to piece together an Afghanistan shattered by forty years of war and terror.

Today is 11 September. It has been eight years since the horror unfolded in front of us. I was in Granada, the capital of Islamic Spain when the first plane hit. I shattered. That day my innocence ended. I was an innocent abroad and suddenly I had to grow-up in a matter of hours, make phone calls, make change, find friends, get off the street, obey the curfew for Americans…  I was vomiting and as the token Islamicist-in-training in my study abroad programme, I was forced to go to bat for the 1 billion Muslims who were not responsible for the murders of thousands of people that morning. I don’t regret it and I know that it makes some of my friends and colleagues uncomfortable, but I always remind people that the rules of jihad do not include the arbitrary slaughter of non-combatants, women, and children and that the hijackers who murdered so many that day are not in jannah, they are in hell.

I will never excuse the actions of those murderers of that day, which is what many expect me to do. They were not Muslims. I have been told repeatedly by moderates, liberals, Wahhabis, everyone, that the men who committed those acts that September morning were murderers, deranged and driven by lives that were so pathetic and deranged that their only way to validate their existence was through the bastardisation of religion and the aspirations of making their lives worthwhile. Clearly they failed. Victory is never theirs.

Victory will be ours when Afghanistan is free. When Afghanistan has peace. When the Afghanistan of the Silk Road returns and true Islam illuminates the roads from Kandahar to Kabul.

Muslim Women and the Western Gaze

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.

Back… again.

After spending nearly an entire academic year away from Professopatra, I am returning to my regular updates. This past year has been quite difficult for me starting my PhD and the sudden death of my beloved father in January, but I am determined as ever to return to my world here at Professopatra.

x

Cluecake News 8.9.08

Novel on Prophet’s Wife Pulled for Fear of Backlash

Sh*t? Meet fan.

This is possibly the most ridiculous on-going discussion ever and possibly the best free publicity that any book has ever received. I am trying very hard not to get started on this trash again, so I will just contribute to its free publicity.

Qur’an Instructs Modest Clothing

Slow news night in Salt Lake City.

Suitable Lap Time

I take a lot of this for granted, however I love how even the most mundane of activities by Muslim women becomes a subject of massive public interest. The “West” has not evolved beyond the harem paintings of the 19th century… AT ALL.

“Honor Killing” (Does Not) Come to America

Irshad Manji writes in the Huffington Post today that “Honor Killing” has now come to America. (It actually arrived in 1989 with the death of Tina Isa, but it’s not really necessary to split hairs, now is it?) Manji contextualizes it as though it is some kind of Muslim Bird Flu, a pandemic of female-centric violence that has finally arrived on American shores and can only be overcome by progressive Muslims and as a footnote, non-Muslims.  However, as my friend and colleague Melissa Robinson pointed out today in the Atlanta Journal Constitution is, that so-called “Honor Killings” are not inherently Islamic. Killing women in the name of “honor” however loosely we define this concept within patriarchal cultures is not limited to the Islamic or Abrahamic world with their fluid perimeters: these killings span centuries, cultures, and creeds.

“Honor Killings” have been recorded amongst Christians, Jews, Sikhs, Hindus, and Muslims, yet in the climate of hysteria that surrounds Islam and the notion that Islam is inherently violent, inherently oppressive to women, and that the slip of an eyelash from under a veil means certain death and dishonor, Muslims are assumed to be the creators, purveyors, and holders of the world’s monopoly on “honor killings.” Rarely does anyone venture to think that “honor killings” happen in entirely different contexts, racial or religious groups: only Muslims are capable of committing and constructing the environment that can foster and perpetuate the concept of the “honor killing.”

“Honor Killings” it has been argued can be contexutalized as “Crimes of Passion” in the so-called “Western” legal sense because they are driven by an almost perverse desire to remedy a blight on masculinity, the family unit, and/or social propriety. If we re-contextualize them, re-name them, then “Honor Killings” are not new to to America and they are certainly no exclusive to Islam, they are as old as time, as old as constructions of gender and masculinities and patriarchal and familial devices for control of women and gender.

“Honor Killing” has not “come” to America. It was already in America and not because of Islam.