In an old parable, some people gather in a dark room in which there’s an elephant. They’re asked to describe it. One, who can touch only the elephant’s trunk, argues the elephant is like a tree branch. The one who can only feel its tail claims the elephant is like a rope. The people begin to argue amongst themselves about what is correct, and the parable reveals its wisdom when someone lights a candle and all see the elephant – and their incomplete perception – for what it really was.
A gloriously crude topless 'jihad' from a Femen activist
Jonathan Jones
Jonathan Jones
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Such judgements, that are as adamant as they are ignorant, are nothing new to humanity. But they play out with startling frequency when discussing Muslim women.
The latest antics of Femen at a French Muslim conference allegedly discussing wife-beating and proper womanly pursuits are a case in point. Running on stage in front of the two shocked male speakers after tearing off the abayas they had worn as a disguise, they stripped to the waist with slogans such as “I am my own prophet” and “no one subjugates me” scrawled across their naked torsos. They then shouted at the crowd until they were forcibly removed by security.
Femen protesters storm the stage.
What is most troubling about this event is not the outrageously condescending attitude of Femen, nor the reported appalling sexism of the some of the Muslims involved: it is that these two voices are once again propped up as the only two in the conversation. It is as if one can only be either a Muslim who loves misogyny as a religious duty, or an orientalist feminist who hates Islam. There is no other option.
Forcing the discourse into such a binary is not only myopic, but factually incorrect. I’ve researched the way Muslim women fight sexism within the Muslim community, and to the shock of many non-Muslims, my research showed that far from being a recent practice borrowed from the west, Muslim women had been standing up for themselves since the advent of Islam.
Aisha, the prophet’s wife, lacerated her male contemporaries with, “You make women worse than animals?!” for believing (wrongly) their prayers were nullified if a woman walked in front of them during worship. It was a woman who challenged, and beat, the second Caliph in a debate in the mosque about women’s financial rights in marriage. And today, lawyers like Asifa Qureshi use blisteringly strong sharia arguments to fight against rulings that punish rape victims in Pakistan and call for the stoning of women in Nigeria.
Far from seeing Islam as a barrier to liberation, a majority of the women in my investigations use Islam to help them in their fight against sexism and shockingly, many named Muslim men (husbands, fathers, teachers) as some of the biggest supporters of their endeavours.
When I’ve told non-Muslims about my findings, they were often baffled, even infuriated. The belief that women can pursue advancement and emancipation as Muslims will be dismissed by many as a kind of “false consciousness”, so certain are they that there is only one way to understand the issue.
Read more:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/16/femens-topless-condescension-towards-muslim-women-only-helps-sexismFor what it's worth, the reporters conclusions pretty much match my own observations.
