A Quiet Revolution (48 page)

Nomani and Manji also differ from most other such activists in that their relation to Islam and the broad Muslim community seems to be above all adversarial. In contrast to other such activists, neither views either their local mosque-going community or the global umma or Mus- lim community as communities to which they naturally and properly belong. Both depict their experience of the American versus the Islamic ethos as tantamount to—as Manji put it (borrowing obviously on Bernard Lewis’s phrase)—“my own personal clash of civilizations.” And both present themselves as intrepid and lonely reformers striving to change a benighted and in many ways profoundly repugnant religious heritage.
49
Nomani, for example, writes of the “fear and loathing” she

felt “in my heart” for Islam in response to the atrocities committed in its name.
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And Manji, as Mahmood pointed out, commonly expresses deep contempt for Muslims.
‌

Neither Nomani nor Manji display much awareness of the well-es- tablished tradition as regards minority feminism of the need to simulta- neously fight on two fronts: the fronts of gender bigotry and also of racial or religious bigotry. But as a result, Nomani’s and Manji’s works have the virtues of vividly exposing the entrenched bias and prejudice around gender and other matters that are doubtless endemic to the everyday practices and ideas informing some strains of Islam and Islamism in America. Nomani’s experiences, as recounted in her book and even more vividly as captured in the PBS documentary
Mosque at Morgantown,
make sharply clear the entrenched patriarchal and misogynist assump- tions that sometimes inform the attitudes of mosque officials. Similarly, Manji’s account vividly brings to the fore the dogmatic and prejudiced views of women and others, that no doubt too are to be found some- times among mosque teachers: a subject certainly deserving further re- search.
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Clearly in the wake of
9
/
11
we have entered an era of exuberant and highly visible American Muslim “feminist” activism: an era of creative chal- lenge to patriarchal norms that is reminiscent in its liveliness and cre- ativity of American feminism in the sixties and seventies. In this era, this exuberant efflorescence seems to be occurring specifically and uniquely in relation to women in Islam. This is a “feminism” too, we should note, that, for all its resemblance in its goals and ideals to the familiar feminism of the last decades, nevertheless also often refuses to be identified by the brand name and label of “feminism.”

As in past eras of American feminist activism, the views and posi- tions that are finding expression span the gamut from radical and liberal to conservative. At the conservative end are ISNA and MSA women such as Mattson, McGee, Alkhateeb, Haffajee, Mubarak, Elgenaidi, Barazangi, and Beshir. At the liberal and radical end are Kahf, Wadud, Saed, No- mani, Manji, and others. Some at the liberal and radical end of the spec- trum are skilled too at courting and making use of media attention to convey their messages. There are differences, to be sure, distinguishing

the conservatives. Most notably, perhaps, is the fact that liberals and rad- icals take up issues of sexuality, while conservatives typically eschew the subject. Noticeably, however, conservative “feminists” do not explicitly speak out against liberal positions on sexuality. Similarly, conservative women generally do not, unlike liberals and radicals, overtly challenge the validity of Quranic verses and/or their classical interpretations, al- though they may indeed express, as Mubarak did, uneasiness about them. Commonly they express their conservatism in their dress: liberal women may or may not be hijabis, whereas ISNA and MSA women are consistently hijabis who, moreover, commonly wear long, loose Islamic robes and strictly concealing headdress.

Rooted originally in the gender-conservative Islamist movement and deeply influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood and the Jamaati, ISNA and the MSA naturally and by definition represent the conserva- tive end of the spectrum. Such movements in their home countries, far from challenging the patriarchal rules that are endemic to the world’s dominant forms of Islam, in fact typically emphatically reaffirmed them. Besides insisting on the hijab and gender separation as foundational re- quirements of Islam, Islamists in the home countries certainly did not in- clude as part of their agenda any discussion of the idea of women’s equal rights or of justice for women in the American sense of equal justice— the very ideas that today inform the thought and perspectives of a num- ber of prominent MSA and ISNA women mentioned in these pages. Such ideas were not even broached within the Islamist framework in the con- text of the Middle East. Although al-Ghazali and other Islamists in the Egyptian context developed lines of argument that permitted women’s activism in the cause of Islam to take precedence over their duties as wives and mothers, these measures were understood to be essentially ex- ceptional and temporary measures to be resorted to only in times of cri- sis for the community.

Furthermore, the radical Islamist Sayyid Qutb explicitly endorsed men’s permanent dominion over women as part of the Quranic vision of the ideal Muslim society. Qutb excluded women from among those who were to be considered autonomous human subjects subservient to no one and entitled to equal justice in the ideal Islamic state that was to be ruled by sharia. This was the state that Islamists were dedicated to re- alizing through ongoing struggle. To this day in the Middle East there are

no cases of religious or Islamist women heading major Islamic organi- zations consisting of both men and women. There have been no cases, that is, of women seeking, let alone attaining, the positions that conser- vative American Muslim women have already attained in America—in the person, for example, of Ingrid Mattson. Even Zainab al-Ghazali, the “unsung mother” of the Muslim Brotherhood, as we saw earlier, never held an official position in the Brotherhood. Similarly, although Nadia Yassine today in Morocco is the very visible and public spokeswoman for the Justice and Spirituality Party founded by her father, she does not officially hold a position of leadership in the party other than as the leader of the women’s division.
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Needless to say, there have been no cases in the Middle East of women leading or even seeking to lead mixed-gender prayers. These, as well as other “feminist” claims and projects described here, represent specifically American Muslim developments—developments in which Americans are forging the way forward even in relation to trends under way in Europe. For instance, women-led prayer events were held in Ox-

ford in the United Kingdom in
2008
and
2010
, but in both instances the

women brought in to lead them—Amina Wadud and Raheel Raza— were North American (U.S. and Canadian) Muslims.

Many forces played a part in creating the conditions that brought about the rise of the second wave of American feminism in the
1960
s, among them most notably the struggle for African American civil rights. Simi- larly, a variety of factors and conditions coming together today appear to be contributing to the sudden emergence in the post-
9
/
11
era of the extraordinarily dynamic Islamic “feminist” activism we are witnessing. Among these are the coming of age of a new cohort of a numerically sig- nificant generation of American-born (or raised) American Muslims, along with converts also of their generation—a generation conscious of themselves as pioneers of the American Muslim experience. Another factor is the opening up of new space for criticism of Islam in the post-
9
/
11
era, including in relation to women. The very prominence now of the topic of the “oppression of women in Islam” in the national con- versation in this country itself clearly put the issue on the table for Amer- ican Muslims.

Another important factor contributing to this ferment and activism

is—paradoxically—the very presence now not only of Islam but also and more specifically of Islamism in the fabric of America. For while feminism and the idea of rights and justice for women formed no part of the original Islamist agenda, activism in the cause of justice most em- phatically
was
a foundational requirement and obligation of Islamism.

Translated to American society in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the Islamist obligation to pursue activist work in the cause of social justice easily came to mean, for many of those who grew up imbibing both American and Islamic and specifically Islamist values, a commitment to working for justice as understood by Americans at this moment in history.

For of course the particular moment we are in right now in the his- tory of America and American notions of justice has been crucially de- cisive in producing the lively activism of this decade among American Muslims on matters of women and gender. It would be a very different story if this were America of a hundred years ago, when women did not have the right to vote, let alone the many other rights they have won since. It would be very different, too, if this were America of some fifty years ago, when it was legal to exclude blacks from “whites only” restau- rants, hotels, latrines, drinking fountains, libraries, and so on, as it would

also be very different if this were America even of the
1980
s in relation to

gays.

In both traditions, Islamic and American, at different moments in their shifting histories both women and minorities were not among the groups included as entitled to equal justice. The emergence of this wave of Islamic activism in relation to issues of women and gender is thus the product of the convergence of key elements in the teachings of Islamism with the ideals and understanding of justice in America in these very spe- cific decades. Today evidently for a significant group among Islamist- influenced American Muslims who are living their lives at the confluence of those traditions—a group spanning the spectrum from Mattson to Kahf, Useem, Wadud, and Nomani—the justice they are working for is inclusive of women and minorities.

This group includes people based in ISNA and the MSA, and peo- ple therefore who are by definition at the conservative end of the spec- trum of Islamic practice. Still, it would probably be accurate to describe

ISNA- and MSA-based women concerned implicitly or explicitly with issues of justice for women as most distinctly at the liberal end of the conservative spectrum: for concern for equal justice for women does in- deed represent a departure from the Islamist blueprint where gender is- sues are seen as necessarily and properly grounded in gender separation and also typically in a notion of gender hierarchy.

Consequently, it is important to note that it is not only in relation to gender issues that some Islamist-based American Muslims have re- vised and expanded their understanding of the meaning of justice in light of the American understanding of justice. In the home countries Is- lamists did not (and do not) espouse a notion of the equal rights of mi- norities any more than they espoused the notion of equal rights for women. But today in America, where Muslims are themselves a minor- ity, Islamists do emphatically embrace and support the idea of equal jus- tice for minorities. This is clearly the case with CAIR, a Muslim American organization with roots in Islamism that is playing a prominent role in supporting and defending the civil rights of Muslims. By definition and by virtue of its activities in defense of civil rights and equal rights for Muslim Americans, CAIR now, in a clear departure from Islamist views in the home countries, grounds itself and its activism and its very rai- son-d’être in the American definition of justice as inclusive of justice for minorities as fully equal citizens.

In the confluence of histories that is unfolding now in America— a confluence signaled among other things by the growing commonness of the hijab, the phenomenon that I set out in the first place to explore

—it is clearly the Islamist understanding of Islam which has not only come to gain institutional and public dominance but which also, ironi- cally, with its commitments to activism in the service of the poor and in pursuit of social justice, is now most easily and naturally merging with the American tradition of activism in the cause of justice and social change. This tradition arguably is the signature American tradition: rooted in the idea of America as a work-in-progress, a society always striving forward, in struggle after struggle, toward an ever fuller and greater realization of the goal of social justice for all, through the com- mitment of its activist citizens—from the founding fathers on through abolition, suffrage, workers’ rights, civil rights, women’s rights, rights

for gays and other minorities. There is nothing more American, Howard Dean had said at ISNA, than protest, and every generation, as Marcy Kaptur said at that same venue, must win liberty anew.

And so we have now the deeply ironic and paradoxical situation in which it is Islamists and those touched and influenced in some way by Is- lamism who, in their lives, writings, and activism, are joining and be- coming part of this signature American tradition of speaking out and taking stands in the cause of justice, joining their voices with those of other socially committed and activist non-Muslim Americans—writers, politicians, media figures, and others.

It is not, by and large, secular American Muslims nor American Muslims for whom religion is a private matter but rather the children of Islamists who are notably present in and at the forefront of the activist American and American Muslim struggles of our times: be it against torture, erosions of civil rights, racial profiling, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other foreign policy issues, and also in the cause of women’s rights and gay rights in relation to Islam. Voices in support of nearly all of these causes, non-Muslim as well as Muslim, were part of the tapestry of voices I heard at ISNA conventions. Ingrid Mattson, Bonita McGee, Khadijah Haffajee, Maha Elgenaidi, Howard Dean, Marcy Kap- tur, Eric Yoffie, Arnold Waskow, Keith Ellison, Amy Goodman—all seemed to be speaking from within a recognizably similar understanding of what the project of America was and should be, and a largely shared understanding of the meaning of justice. True, voices in support of gay rights and those fundamentally challenging Quranic readings on women were not among the spectrum of voices speaking out at ISNA. But it is the case too that such voices are no less contested, marginalized, and ex- cluded within other mainstream American religious traditions.