By Laila Alawa
Muslim-American activist, blogger and outspoken feminist
April 10, 2013
I am a proud Muslim-American woman, and I am tired. I am tired of being told that I am oppressed. That I have no voice. That I need to be liberated.
I am tired, and I am speaking out for the rights of my and other fellow Muslim sisters to be able to dress and be how they wish to be.
When I first heard about the ‘titslamism’ campaign that the radical feminist organization FEMEN was undertaking, I regarded it with apathy. Their original mission seemed to be intended to raise awareness around the Tunisian activist Amina Tyler, a woman who posted a photo of her bare breasts to the FEMEN Tunisia Facebook page and received backlash from the Tunisian government for doing so. As a result, FEMEN opted to begin protesting in front of Islamic centers around the world, baring their breasts in an effort to deal with Islamism.
Or so they purported.
In actuality, however, their campaign is not aligned with what they supposedly intended. FEMEN and its supporters have banked on what they feel is ‘politically correct’ these days to tap into: a healthy dose of Islamophobia with a heavy dash of sex appeal. Inna Shevchenko, the leader of FEMEN, backs up these allegations in a response she wrote addressing the very Muslim women who protested the efforts of her campaign to ‘free’ them:
So, sisters, (I prefer to talk to women anyway, even knowing that behind them are bearded men with knives). You say to us that you are against Femen, but we are here for you and for all of us, as women are the modern slaves and it’s never a question of colour of skin. … And you can put as many scarves as you want if you are free tomorrow to take it off and to put it back the next day but don’t deny millions of your sisters who have fear behind their scarves, don’t deny that there are million of your sisters who have been raped and killed because they are not following the wish of Allah!”
Wow.
As the very woman who is supposedly being ‘freed’ by these protests, I am offended and disgusted. As a covered Muslim woman, I am greeted on a daily basis with passersby who tell me that I no longer need to wear the headscarf because I am in America. In this exact statement supposedly freeing Muslim women from the clothes they seem ‘forced’ to don, there is a level of oppression being expressed, as though there is only one way to be ‘free.’ The same beliefs are employed in FEMEN’s offensive and ultimately pointless protests.
I anticipate there being a number of comments posted to this article notifying me that my father will stone me once he hears that I’ve spoken out (he will not, he is a sweet, supportive man, as most men are in the Islamic faith), that if I were ‘back home’ where I ‘came from’, I would be forced into a hut with four other women and raped on a daily basis under the guise of Islam (I come from Syria and Denmark, neither of which engage in those supposed practices, practices that are not condoned in Islam, although unjust instances of domestic violence still occur under the guise of the faith). So, for any readers who quickly scan through this piece and begin complaining about my so-called oppression, recognize that I am fully free and require no sort of help on your part.
FEMEN protests display a blatant expression of orientalism and colonialism in their belief that there is only one way to be free: through the utter disrobing of all garments covering the body. In perpetuating the belief that there is only one way to go about being free, FEMEN provides a narrow-minded solution that is not feasible for anyone else to fit into. Rather than being revolutionary, FEMEN utilizes the same rhetoric used in colonial history to simplify women to just their attire as a representation of their ultimate freedom. Amusingly, topless protests are not even legally permitted in the free nations in which the FEMEN protests take place — effectively contradicting the freedom that FEMEN attempts to express to Muslim women as being the only way to live. I have not heard a single Muslim woman speak out about how she now feels freed due to the FEMEN protests.
Why is that the case? Is it because all of the — as Inna so condescendingly put it — “bearded men with knives” are holding Muslim women back from speaking out? No.
It is because we have no need to be freed by a group of condescending protesters, all skinny, white and fitting squarely into the acceptable media paradigm of ‘true beauty.’ It’s like a random stranger telling you how to eat ‘better,’ even though they have no information on who you are or how you manage your daily nutritional intake.
Just as many past colonialist movements have only served to hurt, rather than help, the very people they pretend to care about, so too does FEMEN with its movement to ‘free’ Muslim women from the imaginary oppressors. n its attempts to bring attention towards the movement, FEMEN blatantly shut off any attempts for a dialogue, telling Muslim women that we have no right to speak out on the very issues that we are supposedly being hurt by.
I speak out not because a bearded man told me to, not because I am nothing but, as Inna stated, a puppet for “dictatorial countries to promote the official position of the government… .” I speak out because the FEMEN protests offend and infuriate me, as a Muslim woman, as a covered woman, as a feminist, and as an equal human being in this world. I am tired, and I am speaking out for my own and fellow Muslim sisters’ right to be able to dress as we like and be who we wish to be in this world.
My choice to cover is my own, and FEMEN’s very protest to uncover is oppression in itself.
Follow Laila Alawa on Twitter: www.twitter.com/lulainlife
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
![FEMEN And The Suppression Of Native Voices | Frustrated Arab
By The Frustrated Arab
April 6, 2013
I loathe the premise that people of colour should be ‘grateful’ that others are taking notice of their subjugation, or that they should bite their tongues and clench their fists and instead show gratitude because their varied plights are being in some way ‘acknowledged‘ by others.
“Shouldn’t you be glad that people are recognizing these issues?” is the arrogant lamentation which customarily follows even the most caustious criticism of these perverse pseudo-solidarity actions – FEMEN’s nude predominantly white, predominantly thin photo-ops “for Amina“, a 19 year-old Tunisian woman who posed for them with the words “my body belongs to me, it is not the source of anyone’s honour” scrawled across her torso, being the latest example, and KONY2012 being an earlier one. This aforementioned response contends that we should withhold criticism, alleging that even being ‘noticed‘ should be good enough.
Despite having our religious attire, skin colour and even facial hair, being routinely mocked and worn as makeshift costumes as a part of ‘solidarity actions’ it is said time and time again that we should be ‘grateful‘ that anyone simply has reason enough to ‘care’.
Despite the watered down slogans of liberation and freedom being copy-pasted by the parade of online followers of groups such as FEMEN many of these same activists are so inebriated with colonial feminist doctrine that they gleefully take part in patronizing , Islamophobic and misogynistic rhetoric in response to women of colour telling them that they take great offence, that their voices will not be usurped, that they are the sole guardians of their plights and no one has the authority to speak on their behalf, no matter how allegedly ‘well-intentioned’. In response to FEMEN’s topless “jihad day” event Muslim women created #MuslimahPride on Twitter; Sofia Ahmed, one of the women behind “Muslimah Pride Day” described the campaign as follows:
“Muslimah [term for a female Muslim] pride is about connecting with your Muslim identity and reclaiming our collective voice. Let’s show the world that we oppose FEMEN and their use of Muslim women to reinforce Western imperialism.”
Using #MuslimahPride many Muslim women began voicing their disapproval of FEMEN, one such woman was Zarah Sultana who posted the following photograph on her public Twitter page, which I have received permission to post here, and which in turned catalyzed many other Muslim women to do the same in an array of languages, by women from multifarious backgrounds:
The sign reads: “I am a proud Muslimah. I don’t need “liberating”. I don’t appreciate being used to reinforce Western imperialism. You do not represent me!”
The responses Sultana received were drenched in perverse Islamophobia, sexism and pure, unashamed hatred: “Fuck off back to your own country”, “burn in hell”, “grab your ankles and remain silent”, “Mohammad was a pedophile”, “put on your burka”, “she’s happy with her chains” etc.- all coming from those who, just moments earlier, were tweeting gleefully in support of Muslim women.
When it comes to non-natives speaking in regards to native issues – it is a path that must be tread upon lightly in order to avoid (a) tokenization and (b) the usurpation of native voices. Solidarity is great, but it is when campaigns turned publicity stunts like the ones FEMEN indulges in begin using brown bodies as props while at the same time perpetuating orientalism and engaging in blatant prejudicial acts to promote their idea of ‘liberation’. FEMEN, and other such groups, offer no solution to the undeniable subjugated of women present in the Middle East-North Africa, it is all a show of thin, white grandeur.
Simply stating that you are in solidarity, that you support a woman’s right to don the headscarf, remove it, cover/uncover etc. is in no way dubious. It is when aforementioned solidarity crosses the red line and veers into the seizure of native voices and the tokenization of these voices does this become intensely problematic, ineffective and perverse.
Also it has long been chronicled that women of colour are often left out of mainstream feminist discourse, unless it is by means of humanitarian imperialism channels where they are simply tokenised. Bell Hooks (Gloria Jean Watkins), a feminist, social activist, does a magnificent job describing this in much of her work.
In terms of the mounting questions in regards to how one is to raise awareness in light of such groups as FEMEN: you raise awareness by highlighting native voices, not co-opting them. It is your duty to amplify, not commandeer.
As Sara Salem, PhD researcher at the Institute of Social Studies in the Netherlands, notes:
“Feminism has the potential to be greatly emancipatory by adopting an anti-racist, anti-homophobic, anti-transphobic and anti-Islamophobic rhetoric, instead of often actively being racist, homophobic, transphobic and Islamophobic. By clearly delineating the boundaries of what is “good” and “bad” feminism, Femen is using colonial feminist rhetoric that defines Arab women as oppressed by culture and religion, while no mention is made of capitalism, racism, or global imperialism. It is actively promoting the idea that Muslim women are suffering from “false consciousness” because they cannot see (while Femen can see) that the veil and religion are intrinsically harmful to all women.
Yet again, the lives of Muslim women are to be judged by European feminists, who yet again have decided that Islam – and the veil – are key components of patriarchy. Where do women who disagree with this fit? Where is the space for a plurality of voices? And the most important question of all: can feminism survive unless it sheds its Eurocentric bias and starts accepting that the experiences of all women should be seen as legitimate?”
Post-Colonial feminists worth mentioning, a few of many:
Arundhati Roy Gloria Anzaldúa Chandra Talpade Mohanty Audre Lorde June Jordan bell hooks
Responses to FEMEN by women of colour, others:
The Inconsistency of Femen’s Imperialist “one size fits all” Attitude by Bim AdewunmiFemen’s Neocolonial Feminism: When Nudity Becomes A Uniform by Sara SalemThe Fast-Food Feminism of the Topless FEMEN by Mona CholletThat’s Not What A Feminist Looks Like by Elly BadcockThe African History of Nude Protest by Maryam Kazeem
My piece on rediscovering Feminism
Suggested reading:
Is Western Patriarchal Feminism Good For Third World/Minority Women? by Azizah Al-HibriWomen and Gender in Islam by Leila Ahmed
And two relevant books by Edward Saïd:
Culture and ImperialismOrientalism](http://24.media.tumblr.com/5a44272216fb382e0b01f534a14ad861/tumblr_mkuhnuZnnb1qb5wbbo1_1280.jpg)
![How to write about Muslims | Al Jazeera English
Media depictions of Muslims kill two birds with one stone, justifying oppression at home and imperial devastation abroad
By Belen Fernandez
March 31, 2013
The Western press and social media often seem to exercise two options for dealing with the Muslim population of the world: overt, unabashed Islamophobia or slightly subtler Islamophobia.
As Georgetown University’s John L Esposito writes in the foreword to Nathan Lean’s The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims, 9/11 and other terror attacks “have exacerbated the growth of Islamophobia exponentially” and resulted in a situation in which “Islam and the Middle East often dominate the negative headlines”, thanks in part to the calculated machinations of “a number of journalists and scholars”.
Needless to say, the aftermath of 9/11 did not yield much thoughtful consideration on the part of the mainstream punditry as to the context for such events. According to one prominent narrative, 9/11 was simply evidence of an inherent and unfounded Muslim hatred of the West.
A notable exception was veteran British journalist Robert Fisk. In an article published in The Nation immediately following the attacks, Fisk issued the following prescient warning:
“[T]his is not really the war of democracy versus terror that the world will be asked to believe in the coming days. It is also about US missiles smashing into Palestinian homes and US helicopters firing missiles into a Lebanese ambulance in 1996 and American shells crashing into a village called Qana and about a Lebanese militia - paid and uniformed by America’s Israeli ally - hacking and raping and murdering their way through refugee camps.”
The sale of the “war on terror”, Fisk stressed, depended on the obscuration of all details regarding past and continuing devastation of Arab lands and lives - including US State Department-applauded sanctions that eliminated half a million children in Iraq - “lest they provide the smallest fractional reason for the mass savagery on September 11”.
Outlets such as Fox News took advantage of the opportunity to impute mass savagery to select Arab populations via de-contextualised post-9/11 headlines like, ”Arafat Horrified by Attacks, but Thousands of Palestinians Celebrate; Rest of World Outraged”.
‘Muslim Sickos’
The demonisation of Muslims by certified sociopaths such as Pamela Geller comes, of course, as no surprise. However, the subtler dissemination of similar sentiments in Western mainstream discourse underscores the fundamental utility of the sociopathic sector in making institutionalised prejudice appear more rationally benign.
For example, according to Dr Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, executive director of the Institute for Policy Research and Development in the UK:
“[a] study commissioned by the Greater London Authority of 352 articles over a randomly selected one week period in 2007, found that 91 percent of articles about Muslims were ‘negative’.”
As it turns out, a little journalistic trick called “the invention of information” may come in handy in the proliferation of negativity. A 2008 article by Peter Osborne in the British Independent - titled “The shameful Islamophobia at the heart of Britain’s press” - catalogues some of the news industry’s more egregious deviations from the truth, such as a front-page story in The Sunannouncing that a “Muslim hate mob” had vandalised a home and left a “Fuck off” message in the driveway.
As Osborne notes, The Sun quoted MP Philip Davies’ opinion that “[i]f there’s anybody who should fuck off, it’s the Muslims who are doing this kind of thing”. Osborne adds:
“But there was one very big problem with The Sun story. There was no Muslim involvement of any kind.”
Other instances of scaremongering discrimination and deceit cited in the Independent report include:
1. A front-page newspaper headline implying that “Muslim Sickos” were to blame for the disappearance of a young girl. The corresponding text reportedly revealed that the so-called “Muslim Sickos” merely suggested on the internet that the girl’s parents were involved in her kidnapping.
2. A Daily Express article “claim[ing] that NatWest and Halifax had removed images of piggy banks from their promotional material in an effort to avoid offending Muslim customers”.
3. A story about a Muslim bus driver commanding passengers to disembark at prayer time.
Beards and civilisation
John L Esposito highlights some of the disconcerting repercussions of pervasive Islamophobic rhetoric in the US in his foreword to The Islamophobia Industry. According to a 2006 USA Today-Gallup Poll of non-Muslim Americans, Esposito writes:
“[f]ewer than half the respondents believed that US Muslims are loyal to the United States. Nearly one-quarter of Americans - 22 percent - said they would not like to have a Muslim as a neighbour; 31 percent said they would feel nervous if they noticed a Muslim man on their flight, and 18 percent said they would feel nervous if they noticed a Muslim woman on their flight. About 4 in 10 Americans favour more rigorous security measures for Muslims than those used for other US citizens: requiring Muslims who are US citizens to carry a special ID and undergo special, more intensive, security checks before boarding airplanes.”
It’s not enormously difficult to see how such a climate would spawn record levels of anti-Muslim violence in the country.
The de facto criminalisation of certain types of facial hair and other signifiers of Islamic piety is meanwhile aided and abetted by certain journalistic manoeuvers such as references to “bearded savages” and the like in the mainstream press.
A 1998 New York Times feat of Orientalist travel writing entitled “Exotic Oman Opens Its Doors” begins:
“Think of the Persian Gulf and what do you see? Gulf war soldiers, burning oil, bearded fanatics, polluted seas and flat, bleak desert.”
Luckily for the author-vacationer, Judith Miller, “exotic” Oman defies stereotypes and proves itself to be an “exquisitely civilised country”. As for less fortunate Persian Gulf locales, the same Miller subsequently expanded her talents from providing the Times’ readership with detailed descriptions of the turtle egg-laying process on the Omani coast to falsified reports of an Iraqi WMD programme.
In the end, media characterisations of Muslims kill two birds with one stone, justifying oppression at home and imperial devastation abroad.
Belen Fernandez is the author of The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work, released by Verso in 2011. She is a member of the Jacobin Magazine editorial board, and her articles have appeared in the London Review of Books blog, The Baffler, Al Akhbar English and many other publications.
Follow her on Twitter: @MariaBelen_Fdez
Copyright © 2013 Aljazeera.
[Photo © Getty Images.]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/a54521f275f994b06e3d180bf5239c6e/tumblr_mkj88d5g5p1qb5wbbo1_1280.jpg)
![Promising Platform for Secularism, ‘Free Arabs’ is Shackled by Stereotypes | Al Akhbar English
By Hocine Dimerdji
March 11, 2013
Last week marked the launch of Free Arabs, a new journalistic venture which aims to provide “democracy, secularism & fun” while “advocat[ing] secularism as what it is: institutionalized freedom of choice.”
“Millions of Arabs have internalized the notion that secularism is tantamount to faithlessness, and is all about demonizing Islam and promoting a dissolute way of life,” the editorial guidelines read. “This is certainly not the working definition for Free Arabs.”
While I have a few issues with that particular definition of secularism, as it locates secularism within a statist perspective, while ignoring both the historical contexts in which secularism as a concept was born and the rich history of Arab secularisms, I was intrigued. A space for secular Arabs to gather and provide analysis, satire, and commentary on Arab issues from a secular progressive perspective sounded promising.
However, within hours of the site’s launch, most of the responses I read on Twitter were scathing and seemed to pre-judge what on the surface looked like a welcome endeavor.
My first reaction was a mixture of hope and apprehension. While some of the listed contributors have a history of incisive, nuanced, and intelligent commentary, others associated with it do not. The title of the website bothered me as well: it seemed to imply that only secular Arabs were free.
Unfortunately, as I explored the website more thoroughly, my apprehensions solidified.
The website does not live up to its promise. In fact, I find much of its content damaging.
Indeed, within hours of the site’s launch, listed contributors like Mona Kareem (who blogs here at Al-Akhbar) had withdrawn. Other contributors, while critical of the content, defended their choice to participate.
The first issue I have is with the choice to publish most of the material in English – without any translation into Arabic. If the website is attempting to reach Arabs in the Arab world then it would be rational to expect that content be presented in the language of the target audience.
By choosing not to publish in Arabic, the website appears more interested in reaching a western or westernized audience, thus alienating the majority of people who it ostensibly ought to reach.
While the editors promise a future Arabic version of the website, the point remains that choosing to publish in English first, rather than launch both at the same time, is troublesome.
The other issues relate to the content. The website promises to open up new spaces for discussing secularism in the Arab world without demonizing Islam and Muslims. Instead, the content on launch was almost exclusively devoted to Muslim bashing and rife with contempt for religious Arabs, mocking them in crude and unimaginative terms that rely on tired orientalist fantasies, as well as flagrant misogyny and body-shaming. The overriding tropes about Muslims and Arabs signal that, unless one is a free Arab (that rare breed of enlightened westernized Arab), one is part of a culture that is inherently impervious to modernity.
The space that the website occupies is not a new space. Arabs are homogenized, their experiences and histories collapsed within a commonly heard orientalist perspective. Thus, we have “The Homosexual” (one of the website’s four contributors dubbed “Satan’s personal envoys to the Ummah”) arguing that the experience of homosexual men is uniform within the Arab world.
There is no depth or nuance to his “argument.” It reproduces the imagery of Arabs as inherently homophobic and does not take into account the important work of LGBTQ rights activists throughout the Arab world.
Another of “Satan’s personal envoys to the Ummah” is “The Jew,” who is an Israeli of Arab Jewish descent. He argues in his first piece that Arab Jews are the freest Arabs because he can write expletives directed at Israeli leaders. Ironically, that piece was published the same week Israel introduced segregated bus lines in the West Bank.
Maybe Arab Jews are the freest in that they are free of sitting on the same buses as Palestinians.
It is also interesting to note that the first piece that Free Arabs published touching on Palestine is from an Israeli perspective and that it reinforces notions of Israel as “the only democracy in the Middle East,” ignoring the oppressions of Palestinians, African immigrants, and Ethiopian Jews, to name a few. Palestine is arguably the most politicizing issue in the Arab world, and Arab secularism has a rich and continuing history within Palestinian resistance to Zionist settler colonialism.
However, that is completely ignored and instead Israel is represented as an island of tolerance and freedom within a sea of ignorance and bondage.
What Free Arabs promises to do and what it ends up doing are two very different things.
I attribute its failure to provide an intelligent and original perspective on secularism to the website’s editorial line, which is rooted within the ideology of liberalism rather than a progressive secular perspective. It is an ahistorical perspective that ignores the intersections of oppressions and problems faced by Arabs within the different contexts of their lives. It relies on taking the binary of religious/secular as pure and uncomplicated, and it sees this binary to be the central problem within the Arab world today.
An intelligent discussion of secularism in the Arab world that avoids orientalist tropes must begin by a thorough deconstruction of the concept of secularism in order to free it from its Eurocentric history.
Secularism as a concept was born within a particular set of European historical contexts. Arab secularism also has a long and complex history, which has not always been a positive one. Most Arab anti-colonial movements were secular. Islam and Christianity often informed that secularism, and those seculars saw no problem complicating the binary of religious/secular. The work of deconstructing and decolonizing the concept of secularism cannot be ignored.
Unless these serious issues, as well as many more that cannot be explored fully in this article, are addressed and rectified by the editors of Free Arabs, I cannot imagine this website providing anything positive.
The fact that most of the substantive criticism of the website comes from Arab seculars should tell the editors something about their failure to open a space where we feel comfortable residing.
Ali Hocine Dimerdji is an Algerian-Lebanese MA in Philosophy. He is interested in questions of secularism, feminism, and liberation politics, particularly in the Palestinian context.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/fdb90a53c87304ae39669173dfee45f5/tumblr_mjnfb6QY2s1qb5wbbo1_1280.jpg)
