Gendered Islamophobia and the Politics of Representation

By Grace Mubashir, New Age Islam 8 August 2022 Duality Of Islamic Fundamentalist And Victim Of Misogyny Has Become One Of The Accepted Images Of Our Time As The West's Declared War On Terror Has In Fact Been Applied To The Body Of The Hijab-Wearing Muslim Woman Main Points: 1. Current era is characterized by rhetoric in the name of emancipation of Muslim women. 2. Stereotype of the oppressed/victimized Muslim woman has been strategically created by European/modern/upper caste feminists through their anthropological perspective. 3. It is the duty of the advocates of decolonization and Muslim women to destroy the elite/upper class canonical narratives. ------ The current era is characterized by rhetoric in the name of emancipation of Muslim women. The time has come to dismantle the ever-flowing secular/liberalist short-sighted narratives. The stereotype of the oppressed/victimized Muslim woman has been strategically created by European/modern/upper caste feminists through their anthropological perspective. Feminists familiar only with upper/aristocratic milieu are passing along prescriptions of political power and thereby artificial patronage and hyper-nationalism as the solution to society's entire problem. Therefore, it is the duty of the advocates of decolonization and Muslim women to destroy the elite/upper class canonical narratives. Vocabularies, conventions, and conventions for discussion in secular spaces are constructed and regulated through what Nate said was the aristocratic/upper caste. This is how the 'plight of Muslim women who are suffocating at the hands of the Islamic fundamentalist male kesaris' worldwide becomes anathema to secularists and feminists - the dream Indian feminists. Feminism, built on the laurels of modernity, is monolithic and self-important patronage. They conveniently ignored all the complex, multifaceted and circumcised female spaces. It has thus made it impossible to even discuss the diverse experiences of Muslim women around the world. Apart from all this secular hostility towards Islam, As Professors Adrian Catherine Wing and Monica Naismith present, it was in fact the annulment of secular values themselves and the usurpation of Western constructed secular spaces. 'Muslims have made a conscious effort to construct an Islamic identity with a territorial, authoritarian, social and cultural structure. Building mosques and calling the faithful to loud prayers represents the conflict between cultures. For secular feminists, Islamic dress and its visibility represent a rejection of the West's commitment to secularism and adherence to the 'male supremacy' that Islam stands for. Prof. Mary Matsuda (Critical Race Feminism) about the multi-consciousness experienced by a hybrid woman who comes from very similar political ideologies such as different race, gender, class, and social status. Bearing this plurality and heterogeneity (I prefer to call it a different experiment) the hijab-wearing identity is reduced to the monolithic equation of being a victim of Islam's misogyny, accompanied by loud voices. The duality of Islamic fundamentalist and victim of misogyny has become one of the accepted images of our time as the West's declared war on terror has in fact been applied to the body of the hijab-wearing Muslim woman. This equation can be clearly read in the Feminist Majority Foundation's campaign against Taliban violence against women in Afghanistan. Apart from popular women's magazines such as Glamou, Jane, Teen, Sojouner, Off our Black and Ms magazines also published articles highlighting the atrocities of the Taliban. The atrocities of the Taliban are reprehensible and reprehensible. But the political incorrectness and self-inflicted amnesia of the feminist majority foundation and secular public consciousness is exposed here. As a ready-made escape from the complications of the Afghan war, the term Islamic fundamentalism is being (mis)used to pit the Islamic model against the Muslim woman. The image of the cultured rich West protecting the Afghan woman (along with their paternalistic feminists) is being falsely created. (Recall examples of Spivak's white man saving the dark woman from the dark man). Thus, The aggressive militarization of the region and the apparent famine and refugee crisis were cleverly glossed over. All kinds of thoughts, images, and fears about Islamic fundamentalism continue to flood the American imagination. West-rejecting and anti-Western headdresses, beheadings, hand-cutting, mass congregations praying together, morals established through radical interpretations of religious scriptures – all serve as powerful catalysts where Islam is portrayed as synonymous with terror, Talibanism, violence and toxic male hegemony. After 9/11 these images were cultivated and propagated as a parallel form of Islamophobia. George W. Bush's February 4, 2004 speech exposes the racist and Islamophobic mind-set of the West. Because of what we have done, countries in the Middle East no longer have to fear reckless aggression from a brutal ruler. Saddam Hussein is now in prison, and Iraqis will no longer be relegated to thunder chambers and rape chambers. They will not be taken to mass graves and discarded. Muslims are scorned by the West for questioning the gender politics of fundamentalists. They see Islam as a threat to modernity and feminism and a rejection of the liberal and progressive values that Western culture has produced. The West and the Far East , according to Mogissi, find justification for the misuse of colonial power by using the two dichotomies of a tamed, oppressed, and uninformed identity, and an emancipated, free, and thoughtful identity. Therefore, the white man took upon himself the responsibility of taming the Oriental Other and making them aware. This paternalistic state of mind can be found throughout French and English literary works. This is also the case with colonial feminism. As Laila Ahmad observes, they sought to legitimize Europe's cultural mission (colonialism, culture, and women's issues are always contentious issues). Post-colonial theorists such as Partha Chatterjee (National and Women's Question), Leela Gandhi (Emblematic of Gender and Sexuality) and Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak (Can The Subaltern Speak?) have constantly tried to problematize this mindset. As Edward Syed (Tamashara) says, The imaginary geography of the East (and the Oriental woman) was spent as the dream of the Orient. For example, Sayed reads Flaubert's representation of the Oriental Muslim woman. Phloba meets an Egyptian court dancer who is presented as an influential model of the Oriental woman. She never spoke about herself. Not once did she represent her old or new feelings. He is a foreigner. Relatively rich, then male. He speaks for her even though the historical facts of dominance do not allow him to physically occupy a Kuchuk Hanem. He then tells his readers how she becomes a typical Oriental woman (Sayed 1978). Muslim female identity, thus, becomes more oriental than Muslim male identity. Ghama Elala Chrisalimehala describes the carnal self that does not demand anything insensible. Algerian author Malik Alloulah scrutinizes the obsession with veiling (Barbara Harlow) in his Colonial Hare. Colonial-era picture postcards reveal hallucinations of a white European colonial man sexually assaulting an Algerian woman. Fadwa Algindi describes Anthapuram as a place of exotic and promiscuous sex. The Middle East is a microcosm that glorifies sentimentality and force. While Politicizing The Headscarf The campaign to declare the physical and religious spaces of the Muslim woman through a series of veiled images is rampant. They are the unquestioned dominant models. Here the headscarf symbolizes the violence of Islam that can only be remedied by progressive intervention, Western cultural activities. French feminist intellectual Élisabeth Badande wrote: 'The veil… is a symbol of the suppression of a gender. Wearing skinny jeans and a wiggonium in yellow, blue or green is a sign of freedom associated with social norms. Wearing a headscarf is also a sign of submission. It chokes the whole life of a woman' (quoted by Mahmood). The tame attitude of the headscarf has become dominant in the secular imagination. According to Algindi it is a physical element of clothing. Mostly it is related to gender and distorted by ethnocentric transactions. or studied only through the lens of Western women's studies .This reductive political perspective rejects the pluralistic sociocultural political spaces within which headscarves are practiced within diversities of hierarchy, piety, and identity. Algindi in his cultural anthropology highlights some examples from Shiagram in Bahrain. Every house has a turtle nest there. Every woman the key to her house, It is carried around tied to a head-dress or braided hair (Algindi 56). Tying the key to the headdress is a sign of strength. This signifier seems to be a call for a post-apocalyptic understanding of headgear construction beyond the progressive/non-progressive compartmentalization that a unipolar world order presupposes. The ethical deconstruction of spaces related to freedom, private public spaces, autonomy, etc. exposes the gap between the Western Enlightenment (which was built on the self and the other) and Western history (its utilitarian movement began in the Orient). Ziauddin Sardar calls it white freedom, white secularism. It should be able to tolerate liberal/narrow actions while maintaining a commanding centrality to individual autonomy. These post-secular spaces of freedom are emphasized by Saba Mahmood in his book Politics of Pitey. Ambitions and values are produced, According to the conventional conditions of the self-governing taste construct that constitutes emancipation. And what is the content of this Abhiwancha is not the issue. The karana-reactions they emit are (qualitatively) independent. It leaves little room for freedom to exercise itself. There the individual has the right to choose or not to choose. It does not matter whether his actions are narrow or not. This shatters feminist historiography based on the monolithic conception of liberation. Mahmood then goes on to explain the discursive landscape of the post-independence state. In the 1970s, one of them was the call by white, middle-class feminists to dismantle the institution of the nuclear family. They believed that the family was the main source of women's oppression. Indigenous African American feminists argued that freedom for them included the possibility of family formation. Because the long history of slavery, massacres and racism makes it clear that all this was made possible by destroying the networks of their communities. This article now examines the political debate surrounding the headscarf in Islam, to please those in the gallery. These discussions significantly advance the view that the Muslim woman's headscarf is a radical symbol that serves to deconstruct the power structure that lies between the personal/political dichotomies. Albert Haulani's essay The Vanishing Veil: A Challenge to the World Order (1956) posits how the Muslim woman's headscarf may have fallen from the Middle East by the end of the twentieth century. He emphasized the hypocrisy of the headscarf and the need for the Muslim community to embrace modernity to replace it. 'Do you think that the European, who has perfected the mind and discovered the power of steam and electricity, would have avoided this genius and spirit which amazes us if there had been any good in the veils which they had been using for so long?. Egypt witnessed such a lifting of the veil in the 1920s. This veil was inspired by European modernism and celebration at its height. Cromer points out in his book Modern Egypt that Islam also felt the same inferiority complex that a dark-skinned Oriental felt when seeing a white-skinned Westerner. Laila Ahmad argues that the purdah movement did not derive from the concept of purdah, which had its roots in pre-colonial Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, but rather from nineteenth-century Western ideas (Ahmad 94). Two subtle threads can be easily traced in the abolition of the veil in Egypt and the subsequent Purdayanial, with the current of westward feminism represented by Qasim Amin and Huda Sharqawi on the one hand, and the current represented by Malak Hifni Nassif and Zainbul Ghazzali on the other. The role of Zainbul Ghazali's Jama'atussayidat al-Muslimah in reshaping the role of Muslim women by integrating public action and religious knowledge is no small. In the wake of the Islamic consciousness that emerged in the 1970s, the hijab experienced a resurgence (albeit accompanied by separate terminology and terminology) across Arabic-speaking regions. It started in Egypt. The social spaces of the new spirit were presented there with nuances. They also put forth certain narratives related to socio-political-gender-religious identities. The emergence of a new Egyptian Muslim woman was linked to political corruption in Egypt. The rebirth of Islamic religiosity marked a very important turning point in university spaces. In the 1970s, women activists began wearing Assiyul Islami (Islamic dress). They, according to Algindi, It represented and proclaimed the central importance of a society committed to gender segregation. They were able to become living models of egalitarian principles and social justice that embraced heterogeneity. Algindi argues that 'this new woman' was well-versed in Islamic sources of knowledge, capable of leading discussions, and serious about public affairs. Algindi wrote of the New Egyptian woman's visibility or choice: By her choice of headscarf, she liberates herself by entering public spaces with determination, unmolested and unmolested. It can be said that the synthesis of Islamic principles and political activities took place through this grassroots movement. Their new face rejects Western materialism, consumerism and commercialism and advertises Islam's ideals of equality, justice and identity. But strangely enough, this all-inclusive movement, which had a strong presence at the grassroots level, has not figured in any of Egypt's feminist chronicles. Even the existence of a movement that freed Muslim women from imported and imposed identities and indulgences was not acknowledged by feminist scholars. The positions taken by indigenous women during the stages of colonial confrontations have often invited controversy when it comes to politicizing the headscarf . According to Leela Gandhi, she was never a subject or an object. She was nothing more than a body image stitched with the aristocratic insignia of the colonial rulers' culture, practice, purity, colonial modernity, etc. In Algeria, the headscarf was a cultural and national symbol rather than a religious one. Colonial strategies were implemented using the same symbol. Fanon argues in Algeria Unveiled that Algeria was embracing colonial coercion—every hijab thrown off, everybody freed from traditional gates. He then goes on to explain how frustrating it was for the occupiers to be unable to see others but to be able to see others. Colonialism presented headscarf as an obsession that grew to the point of psychosis. The image of the veiled woman was also popular among modernist secular feminists. During the Algerian War of Independence, the headdress emerged as a powerful national symbol—locals saw it as a symbol of indigenous culture and heritage. It also became a form of resistance against the cultural plunder of the occupying powers. Hal Lehrman of The New York Times Magazine called it a headscarf war. Algerian women's resistance is explained as follows: 'Sights... of dispossessed black women fleeing devastated villages... of women serving as nurses, often as fighters for the National Liberation Alliance. Of the women fighters who hide fighters in the cellars of Kasbi… of those who dress in European clothes and carry bombs in bags slung from their wrists while in sophisticated cafes, of those who pass unharmed through the torture of French soldiers, of those who participate in protest rallies in the streets, and yes of course those who wait in prison camps and refugee camps…” Pierre Beauhadeau says that what shrouded Algeria was traditional traditionalism that lost its tainted traditional dimensions. Emergence of sign defining socio-cultural regional diversity beyond religious dimensions. The veil worn by Assyrian women was a symbol of status - it was worn by high class women. There is a big difference between hijab practices among Palestinian women before and after the Intifada. Algindi suggests that the hijab previously signified their austere status and identity as a woman living in the thump. The epistemic subversions perpetrated by women's studies groups and liberal secular feminist groups are revealed through the monolithic identity of the headscarf they present—a subversion that presents the invisible, anonymous, subjugated woman as synonymous with Islam. The fact that they are obfuscating it by conveniently forgetting its socio-political symbolic destiny further reinforces the subversiveness that Nate has spoken about. ------ A regular columnist for NewAgeIslam.com, Grace Mubashir is a journalism student at IIMC, Delhi URL: https://newageislam.com/muslims-islamophobia/gendered-islamophobia-politics-/d/127670 New Age Islam, Islam Online, Islamic Website, African Muslim News, Arab World News, South Asia News, Indian Muslim News, World Muslim News, Women in Islam, Islamic Feminism, Arab Women, Women In Arab, Islamophobia in America, Muslim Women in West, Islam Women and Feminism