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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Mariam Khan
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January 3 - January 30, 2021
Women are supposed to be ‘less than’, not ‘too much’. Women are meant to be quiet, modest, humble, polite, nice, well behaved, aware of the red lines. They are supposed to tread softly and within their limits. Patriarchy demands that of all women, but the more women fall within intersections of oppression, the more they are expected to live by those demands, and Muslim women are especially vulnerable to what I call a trifecta of oppressions: misogyny (faced by all women), racism (faced by women of colour) and Islamophobia (faced by Muslims).
Muslim women are caught between a rock – an Islamophobic and racist right wing that is eager to demonize Muslim men, and to that end misuses our words and the ways we resist misogyny within our Muslim communities – and a hard place: our Muslim communities that are eager to defend Muslim men, and to that end try to silence us and shut down the ways we resist misogyny. Both the rock and the hard place are more concerned with each other than they are with Muslim women. They speak over our heads – literally and figuratively. Our bodies – what parts of them are covered or uncovered, for example –
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loved this paragraph, perfect example of how it’s ‘not about the burqa’. arguments based around muslim women are never actually about them as individuals, more so just an excuse for racists and misogynists to talk over the oppressed; through discriminating against them, or trying to speak for them (we should be speaking up and trying to challenge the oppression and discrimination minorities face, however we should NEVER be speaking over them; let muslim women use their voices, let them be heard!)
When a woman is ‘too much’, she is essentially uncontrollable and unashamed. That makes her dangerous.
Writing is dangerous because we are afraid of what the writing reveals: the fears, the angers, the strengths of a woman under a triple or quadruple oppression. Yet in that very act lies our survival because a woman who writes has power. And a woman with power is feared.1
I knew that the way women and girls were treated in Saudi Arabia was wrong and that this was not the Islam I was taught, nor did it represent the home I was raised in.
What does such a revolution look like? A revolution is ‘too loud’: it defies, disobeys and disrupts patriarchy. The revolution ‘swears too much’: it tells racists and Islamophobes to fuck off and that you will never ally with them, and it tells misogynists – our men and other men – to fuck off and that you will not shut up. Revolutions ‘go too far’: if your community is ready for you, then you are too late. You must challenge your community. You must throw down the gauntlet of freedom to your community and dare it to accept.
Revolutions rattle the privileged and discomfort the complacent. They are never about the comfortable majority. Rather, it is always the minority, especially those who are caught by the intersection of multiple oppressions, who instigate and inspire.
Who decides who is ‘too loud, swears too much and goes too far’? It is usually the ‘community’. While that word and concept can provide a sense of solidarity and strength in the face of racism, Islamophobia and other bigotries, it is imperative to ask who speaks for the ‘community’ and whose interests that community serves.
Another paragraph which I loved. Who is the ‘community’? Who’s voice gets heard, who gets to speak over minorities? We need to be challenging this so called ‘community’, those with privilege should be using their voices to AMPLIFY the voices of minorities, help muslim women (and others) be heard!
Who determined that it was culture and who speaks for the community? Men and men. That is the simple answer. The more complicated answer is men and men and a system – patriarchy – that enables and protects them at the same time as it socializes women to internalize the dictates of patriarchy and to accept them as culture and as community. If women created culture and community, we would not be accused of ‘going too far’.
Profanity – especially delivered by women – is a powerful way to transgress the red lines of politeness and niceness that the patriarchy – shared by the rock and the hard place – demands of us as women. I say fuck because I am not supposed to. I say fuck because I believe that the crimes of racism, bigotry and misogyny – enabled and protected by patriarchy – are more profane than swear words. I say fuck because there is nothing civil about racists, Islamophobes and misogynists arguing over my body as if I did not exist.
So important is the black bisexual poet and activist June Jordan to me that I have tattooed one of her verses onto my arm: We are the ones we have been waiting for.
We are the revolution. Be too loud. Swear too much. Go too far.
Beautiful
Coco Khan
I’m loving her writing style and her personality.
But to us girls, no one talked about health. Rather they talked to us about bodies, flesh. How much of it was on show, where it was shown, to whom it was shown. They talked about the colour of it, the volume of it, the texture of it, and how it looked in photos to be passed around potential suitors.
But while his first marriage didn’t last, his fantasy of the elite did. He’d demand that my mother wear make-up, put rollers in her hair, and only wear a mid-length skirt, never trousers. If he was with his friends he’d call her into the room and ask her questions about art before sending her off to make chai. He wanted his peers to envy him for his wonderful, modern wife. But should one of them show it, he’d fly into a jealous rage, banning her from anything but a salwar kameez, and telling her whose name was on the lease. He liked to remind her that she was dependent on him in every way.
Men should not control women, they are their own person. They are not objects, nor should they be treated like one; look pretty on display, don’t speak out of line, listen only to men.
‘Well, she is a whore, and I am a married man!’ Irfan would tell our neighbours when they asked if it was true, about him and her, and the newborn. ‘The child isn’t mine. Who are you going to believe?’ he’d say. ‘Me, or her? She is hardly respectable.
Misogynistic point of view; a man can do whatever he pleases and still be seen as a strong powerful man, however a woman will be seen as ‘dirty’, ‘a whore’, ‘shameful’, ‘disgraceful’, and so on, for doing the exact same things.
Respectability is an exclusive club, and once you’re out, you’re out.
‘Never, ever let people make you feel ashamed for who you are. You know what is right and wrong in your heart, and it is your heart that Allah sees, that I see, and that you have to see every day when you look in the mirror. No one has the right to judge you.’
‘I know, right! This guy says “only virgin!”, “no party girls!” He also loves exclamation marks.’ ‘Translation: I can’t be with a woman who has met other men because then she’ll know how rubbish I am.’
I’ve never thought about it like this before, love it!
The book my father gave me, however, was not about Prophet Mohammed, and although flimsy in appearance, it was the one that sowed the seeds of feminism in my mind – it taught me that the foundations of my faith were fairness and justice, and that God does not promote gender inequality.
So there was another very personal reason why Khadija’s independence resonated with me. It made me realize that the choice to live on one’s own terms was not forbidden in my religion. It gave me the choice to reject a patriarchal culture that controlled women’s movements, and especially the ones that boxed them into relationships that were unhappy or violent.
As the first grandchild I was absolutely adored by my grandparents and uncles and aunts. And it did not matter that I was a girl rather than a boy. Stories of boys being valued over girls is nothing new in South Asia. Boys are regarded as breadwinners for elderly parents, whereas girls are seen as burdens that have to be married off with dowries. I have engaged in enough women’s rights activism to know that the belief ‘sons are better than daughters’ is a huge problem in some parts of the world, especially in India.
For those who have little knowledge of Islam, there is the assumption that Muslim women’s oppression stems from Islamic teachings. This is simply not the case.
It was First Lady of the United States of America Eleanor Roosevelt who said that ‘no one can make you feel inferior without your consent’.
The only difference was that now it wasn’t the auntie-jis making an issue of my presence, but Muslim men who challenged me for daring to exist outside my traditional Muslim woman box.
‘No, I meant how did your father allow you to attend university? You’re a Muslim girl. You should not be here.
In order to feel superior, he needed to make someone else feel inferior.
‘I have every right to be here. Your family must be proper backwards to keep daughters locked up at home.’
I felt minimized and alienated. As if my being an Asian Muslim woman somehow rendered me a second-class citizen behind all the white English people and the Asian Muslim men.
When a woman travels from A to B, she will encounter mad dogs along the route who will bark at her. Some men (and there are many women too) will always shout discouragement to a woman on her path to success. The thing to do is to ignore them. Never stop to reason with a mad dog.
I explain how Khadija’s existence cemented my belief that my faith could never promote inequality. When I have been faced with the argument that women are not equal to men by Muslims who doubt that gender equality exists in Islam, I have always given this scenario: Imagine a woman stealing an apple. Now imagine a man stealing an apple. Theft is forbidden in Islam. The sin of stealing for both a man and a woman is equal. In no verse in the Quran, or in any hadith, is it written that a woman’s sin is less than a man’s. Islam is very clear that a woman’s capability to do wrong is equal to a
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Above all, Khadija taught me that I had every right to exist as I chose. Just like she did as the wealthiest merchant in Mecca.
Amaliah.com
Representation of Muslim women flip-flops between fitting a stereotype or breaking one, not the middle ground where most of us are. The use of a Muslim woman is seemingly dependent on what’s being promoted or sold.
So for Muslim women the default within both the Muslim communities and ‘mainstream’ communities is something they can never be: male.
What we so often forget is that God has honored the woman by giving her value in relation to God—not in relation to men. But as Western feminism erases God from the scene, there is no standard left—except men. As a result, the Western feminist is forced to find her value in relation to a man. And in so doing, she has accepted a faulty assumption. She has accepted that man is the standard, and thus a woman can never be a full human being until she becomes just like a man.3
Commercialisation didn’t make hijab easier, it changed what it is. People no longer ascribe [sic] to the hijab, they ascribe [sic] to a fashion trend [. . .] The turban [headscarf] has become the symbol of the New Muslim Woman. A marker of success, liberation, and modernity. Yet this symbol supposedly aiming to help Muslim women feel included, for many, has done the exact opposite of what it set out to do. In including one faction of society, it has ostracized another, and a number of Muslim women no longer feel represented.5
What is the point of being represented if it is only our image that is invited to the table?
Representation is meant to exert some sort of cultural influence, but that influence can often be skewed depending on who holds the keys to the wider platforms.
As a member of a minority she had terms and conditions to her free speech.8
‘focusing on individual success stories is far easier than changing the way business operates – but doesn’t actually improve women’s working lives’.11
Representation is sold to our communities as the holy grail of acceptance. If a Muslim becomes a Member of Parliament, he has not only achieved the highest status of representation, but also then becomes an exemplar for representation. If you look then, to those Muslim MPs who were part of Tony Blair’s Labour Party, they were pro or abstained on issues to do with war, securitisation and neo-liberalism – and so when I want to consider what the panacea to structural racism and the system’s inherent bias against us might look like, I remain unconvinced that it takes place through people that
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Often times when Muslims (and many other minorities) are represented in the media, they are portrayed in a negative light to fuel the racists, misogynists, homophobes, bigots, etc. However these negative portrayals are the voices of the few, not the many. The media shows you what they want you to believe, not what is factual and the majority.
Muslim communities have had clear markers as to who isn’t the right person to be speaking about our issues. But who is right is still something that lies in murky waters. For me, the diverse nature of Muslim communities ultimately means there will never be one figure we’d be happy to see representing us. Representation will always come in bits and pieces, and those representing will not all look like me or be cut from the same cloth. We also need to understand that one person’s whole existence cannot seek to represent us.
But the truth is, I cannot expect that everything Muslim women in the public eye do will resonate with my own ideals of what I want to see in the world. In expecting so, we are in danger of contributing to the perception of Muslim women as a monolith by picking and choosing people who we feel represent us and then dropping them when we feel they no longer serve our ideals of representation.
We must realize that the critique of Muslim women in the mainstream is often an extension of misogyny and Islamophobia.
their platform has in part contributed to how Muslims are represented in popular culture. We know that, even if they’re totally different from us, the rest of the world sees them as representing us.
In order for our faith to stay intact in the public and private spheres, we must have guidelines on representation, but where do they come from? Of course we can say our guidelines should come from Islam, the Quran, the sunnah and scholars, but with such diversity of faith and practice, who gets to draw up the blueprint? And does that blueprint mean that we – in fact – do not need to be represented in every space and in every moment?
If being Muslim is about faith, the representation of Muslims should come with terms and conditions.
The terms of my empowerment as a woman are dictated by what White Feminism and the West perceive as empowering.
remember making a list of all the things wrong with me. ‘Bisexual’ made an appearance twice: the first time I crossed it out; the second time, I underlined it.
