A Quiet Revolution (46 page)

In terms of the level of intellectual liveliness, ferment, and activism, the era we are in today seems to be one that most directly parallels and resembles, in relation now to Muslim American women, the era of ex- traordinarily dynamic activism and cultural and intellectual productiv- ity which American feminism more broadly—Christian, Jewish, secular, and to some extent Muslim—underwent when second wave feminism

vigorously emerged in the
1960
s and
1970
s.

Nor is it only in relation to legal and scriptural texts that the field of the study of women in Islam is a dynamically expanding field of knowledge and scholarship. Year by year the number of American Muslim female voices in the academic world is steadily growing. Books that have ap- peared since
2008
include a study by Jamillah Karim, author of
Ameri- can Muslim Women
and a hijabi professor at Spellman College; another by Jasmine Zine, a former hijabi and author of
Canadian Islamic Schools
and professor at Wilfrid Laurier University; and a third by Sherene Razack,

author of
Casting Out the Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Pol- itics,
a professor at the University of Toronto
.

From the
1970
s to the
1990
s, when feminist scholarship in relation

to the Euro-American heritage and to Christianity and Judaism came into its own on American campuses, the study of women in Islam and in particular in relation to the Middle East also expanded, albeit not quite as extensively, alongside other areas of feminist study. Through that era a good proportion of these studies were undertaken by non-Muslim ac- ademics. Some also were done by women of Muslim background, very few of whom self-identified as believing Muslims. But that was an era, perhaps now passing, when secularism seemed de rigueur in the academy and open commitment to any religious belief rare. Today a shift seems to be distinctly under way as regards American Muslim women. Often self-identified as committed Muslims, such women are increasingly now coming to make up the majority of those studying Islam and women.

Notably too, it was typically Christian women, and sometimes women of Christian background, who studied women in Christianity. And similarly it was Jewish women or women of Jewish background who studied women in Judaism. Today’s trend of increasing numbers of Mus- lim women studying women in Islam thus appears to be bringing the study of women in Islam into balance with what has been the norm in ac- ademia (in recent decades, anyway) in relation to women in Christian- ity and Judaism.

Activist commitments today by American Muslim women to issues of gender and women’s rights are by no means confined to the academic arena but are emerging in a variety of other fields too, among them fic- tion, documentaries, and television series and plays. One notable collec- tion,
Living Islam Out Loud,
brings together the voices of a number of American Muslim women, all of whom share a commitment to women’s rights—though “feminist” is not a term that women of this generation willingly apply to themselves. All share a commitment to Islam typically as faith and certainly in any case as identity. Among them—as was the case among Islamists most evidently in the Resurgence of the
1970
s to the
1990
s in Cairo—Islamic identity is typically not merely an ascribed and passively accepted identity, but rather it is actively embraced. It is the

identity they speak from and which they enact and make visible, some- times through the adoption of hijab. This is an identity (again as with Islamists) that often entails ethical commitments—including commit- ments to women’s rights. This collection of stories, bringing together the personal narratives of sixteen such women from a range of professions, offers an overview of the interests and perspectives of this rising gener- ation of American Muslim women in their diversity.

All of the contributors to
Living Islam Out Loud
are under forty, and all are also women who “do not remember a time when they weren’t both American and Muslim,” and who come from a variety of ethnic backgrounds. “We are the children of immigrants from Pakistan, Egypt, Senegal,” writes the editor, Saleemah Abdul Ghafur, and “we are the dis- tant descendants of African slaves brought to the Americas as well as the children of American men and women who accepted Islam in adult- hood.”
28

They see themselves, as the editor writes, as a generation breaking new ground in the ongoing story of Islam in the world. For the first time in history, Abdul Ghafur writes, “we have a critical mass of women under forty raised as Muslims in the United States by parents who themselves struggled to reconcile their American and Muslim identities.” Conse- quently they are “the first true generation of American Muslim women.” Braiding in their own lives new combinations of identities and histories, this cohort understand themselves as pioneers, forging a way forward for other Muslims across the world. “I believe,” she writes, “that Islam is in the midst of global transformation.” This transformation, she con- tinues, is being led “largely by Muslims in the West: because we have cer- tain academic freedoms along with freedom of speech and freedom to worship. These civil liberties are largely unknown in Muslim-majority countries. Those of us leading this transformation are confident in claim- ing Islam for ourselves.”
29

The conditions Abdul Ghafur lists—freedom of speech, of worship, and so forth, which American and European Muslims enjoy and which many other Muslims across the world lack—are real enough. It is cer- tainly plausible and even likely that American Muslims, like American Catholics and American Jews before them, will come to be an important force in global Islam. It is also possible that—as is the case with Catholi-

cism and Judaism—Muslims in other parts of the world will not neces- sarily easily cede authority in matters Islamic to Western Muslims.

In any case, the book brings together the personal stories of a range of young Muslim professionals—a CEO, a woman working at MTV net- works, and a member of the board of al-Fatiha, as well as several writers, including poets and novelists. Among their number are four of the women who made up the Daughters of Hajar. The women’s stories illu- minate the ways in which their multiple heritages as Muslim Americans are affecting their lives as women and often in relation, specifically, to is- sues of sexuality. For sexuality and problems around sexuality are un- mistakably among the core themes in many of the women’s stories.

Samina Ali, for example, a novelist born in Hyderabad, India, who arrived in Minnesota with her immigrant parents at the age of one, of- fers an intimate account of growing up attending the Urdu-speaking Is- lamic Center of Minnesota, and a childhood and an adolescence that were followed by an arranged marriage to a man from the home coun- try who proved to be gay and who divorced her as soon as he got his green card. Falling in love subsequently with a man who was “white and atheist,” she decided to marry him despite the rift that it would cause in her family. Subsequently journeying through atheism herself and reject- ing much of what she had been taught was Islam, she finds life without God a “vast emptiness.” After immersing herself in studying Buddhism and surviving some harrowing experiences, she finds her way to Su- fism.
30

A contributor of Iranian background tells the story of her struggles as a Muslim lesbian. Writing under a pen name “for safety reasons,” Khalida Saed describes wearing hijab and starting up a Muslim Student Association chapter at her high school. After meeting her first girlfriend and experiencing her mother’s hostility to her sexuality when she came out to her, Saed rejected Islam. “I equated all things Iranian and Muslim with being anti-gay, and therefore anti-me, and those messages were re- inforced by the mainstream LGBTQ movement.”
31

Discovering al-Fatiha at college, Saed joined the organization and through it found her way back to Islam. Al-Fatiha included women in its leadership, she tells us, provided inclusive prayer space, and encouraged women to lead prayers. “This was the Islam every woman dreams about,”

Saed wrote, explaining that “progressive” Islam “operates under the be- lief that anything that sanctions discrimination against anyone is un-Is- lamic.” This “branch of Islam,” Saed explains, is grounded in the belief “that working towards social justice is an integral part of the religion.” Strikingly—but not, after all, surprisingly in a young woman who was a founding member of her local MSA—Saed’s words here directly echo the Islamist understanding of Islam as centered on the quest for social justice and the activist commitment to working to bring this about. Saed goes on to explain that according to this “distinctly American” under- standing of Islam, “patriarchy and sexism are not necessarily Islamic traits but are actually cultural traits.”
32

And indeed, Saed is right to emphasize that these latter concerns are “distinctly American.” The Islamist core commitment to activism in pursuit of social justice becomes, in the American context, for Saed as for others of her generation living at the confluence of the two tradi- tions, a quest also for equal rights for women and minorities, among them, in Saed’s view, for gays. For, today in America, equal rights for women and gays are constitutive elements of what many in this society mean by “justice.”

Other contributors to
Living Islam Out Loud
similarly illuminate the complex and evidently often richly productive braiding of culture and history and of Islamist and American ethics under way in our time in the lives and thought of this rising generation. Precious Muhammad, for example, explains that her parents had been followers of Elijah Muhammad at a time when “Islam, as freedom, justice, and equality, of- fered sorely needed structural solutions to combat the terror of Ameri- can racism.” Later her parents followed W. D. Mohammed into Sunni Islam. Thus, Muhammad tells us, “I was not born into the Nation of Islam but rather into true Islam as revealed to the Prophet Muhammad

1400
years ago.”
33

From childhood on, growing up among “strong Muslim women,” Muhammad never doubted that Islam “gives recognition to women’s independent existence.” Like many Muslim American writers of her gen- eration concerned about women’s issues, Muhammad is acutely aware of the multiple fronts on which she must fight as woman, African Ameri-

can, and Muslim.
34
As a Muslim feminist website succinctly put it, “As Muslim feminists we aim to locate and critique misogyny, sexism, pa- triarchy, Islamophobia, racism and xenophobia as they affect Muslim women.”
35

Another contributor to the volume, Mohja Kahf, similarly makes clear her commitment to fighting on several fronts: as an impressive line of American minority feminists and women of color (Audre Lorde, Glo- ria Anzaldua, Cherie Moraga, bell hooks, Alice Walker, and many more) had done before them. Deeply critical of what she considers to be sexist interpretations of Islam, Kahf at the same time considers herself com- mitted to Islam, a religion she understands as being intrinsically just and nonsexist. Consequently, critical of Islamic patriarchy, Kahf is also deeply critical of “Muslim-bashers” who manipulate the issue of the oppression of women in Islam for their own purposes. “Spare me the sermon on Muslim women,” she wrote in an article published in the
Washington Post
. Going on to describe, in the same article, the pleasure she takes in choosing which hijab to wear, Kahf observes that even as she protests against Muslim-bashers and rebuts and exposes the inaccuracies of peo- ple’s perceptions about women in Islam she continues, she notes, to “put in my time struggling for a more woman-affirming interpretation of Islam and in criticizing Muslim misogyny.” Like most contributors to the volume, Kahf also mentions details that indicate her early exposure to Islamism. In Kahf ’s case she grew up, we learn, enjoying the apples “on the ISNA farm in Indiana.” This detail presumably indicates that her family had been active in founding or in running ISNA.
36

As Abdul Ghafur observes in her Introduction, the issue of the hijab was one of two themes that almost every contributor chose to address in relation to her own life and practice. Women wear hijab for many rea- sons, Ghafur explains, some “because they believe it is mandated by God, others to demonstrate solidarity or resistance, and still others to follow familial and community mores.” She then goes on to note that “there are many reasons a woman does not wear hijab. Some don’t because they don’t want to distinguish themselves in Western society; others don’t believe that Islam requires hijab of its female followers, believing that modesty is required of all Muslims.” Above all, Abdul Ghafur continues,

“most of us are exhausted with the hijab debate and envision a future where we move beyond the judgments of women with and sans hijab.”
37
‌

The very fact that the subject of wearing hijab is a salient issue for many of the contributors is in itself indication of the shaping influence that an Islamist understanding of Islam has had on this first explicitly Mus- lim-identified and numerically significant generation of American-born and/or American-raised Muslims. A number of contributors to the vol- ume (Abdul Ghafur, Yousra Fazli, and Saed, for example) note they had once worn hijab and had then ceased to do so for various reasons

—Fazli because she became convinced in the course of her research that hijab was not an Islamic requirement after all.
38
Similarly, a num- ber of academic Muslim-American women, including women men- tioned above, once wore hijab but subsequently ceased to do so. Typically these women continue, despite removing their hijab, to consider them- selves to be committed Muslims.

The decision to “dehijabize” (or “de-jab,” as another former hijabi called it) while remaining a committed Muslim seems to be a growing trend among this generation of professional Muslim Americans.
39
A number of women, both academics and journalists, have written about and have begun to track this emergent trend. Among those writing on the subject is Andrea Useem, who writes about her own decision to cast aside her hijab. Converting to Islam while abroad in Harare, Zimbabwe, Useem says that she had never thought of changing her dress or of tak- ing up hijab until she returned to America and saw educated Muslim women her own age wearing hijab.