Spiced Spare Ribs! A Woman’s Question Time was a refreshing hour-long panel/audience discussion that touched on a lot of issues affecting British Muslims, Western Muslims as well as Muslims from around the globe. The women on the panel were four extremely articulate women: Catherine Heseltine (seated on the far left), Khola Hassan (seated next to Catherine), Fatima Zohra (seated on the far right) and Humera Khan (seated next to Fatima). You can view a video of the panel here.
When I first saw the advertisement for this event, I have to admit that I was disappointed with the title of the event “Spiced Spare Ribs”. I wondered why an event focusing on Muslim women had such a stereotypical name. This made me wonder what the actual panel discussion was going to be like.
Poster for the event.
However, once I started watching the actual video, I realized that the advertisement was in fact quite deceiving. Two of the panelists as well as moderator Fareena Alam critiqued it, saying that the woman in the poster “doesn’t represent all of us” and that she was a “stereotype that excludes a whole continent of African women who are never seen as Muslim women when in fact we are.” Humera critiqued it the most saying:
The title is awful and flippant. Why is that when we deal with women’s issues we make a joke about it? If you limit the image to one kind of image then by definition you’re excluding other kinds of people.
I was especially happy with the last sentence in Humera’s quote because it definitely gets to heart of why images can be troubling and why some of us, including me, do point out when an image is being presented that only presents one picture of Muslims or Muslim women. That fact the women critiqued the poster is a testament to how open the entire event was.
After discussing the poster, the panel discussed a wide range of issues that affect Muslims in Britain (which is where the panel took place), as well as Muslims in other parts of the Western world. One issue that was discussed in detail was the issue of platonic relationships with the opposite sex and intimate relationships. This issue was discussed in a frank and open way, with both the panelists and audience challenging norms, discussing shortcomings, and offering solutions. One statement that stuck out for in this segment was Humera’s statement that “men and women must work together for the public good.”
Humera put the focus on men and women and pointed out that men are needed just as much as women for social change. Throughout the discussion, Humera would focus on the role and issues of men as well as women. This could be reflective of her work on Muslim boys and men and how they deal with identity and alienation, but I think it was still necessary. Too often when we discuss gender issues, especially among Muslims, the focus turns on women and very little thought is given to how Muslim men deal with gender issues.
On the issue of balancing work and the family, the focus was not entirely on women either. Again, I found this refreshing, since men are as much a part of the home as women. Khola asserted that the Qur’an does not have one paradigm for the family. I thought that was especially important because a lot of Muslim women are made to feel like “bad Muslimahs” when they work outside the home or are the main breadwinners for their homes. It also challenges the view that men cannot be the primary caregiver for children and must be the breadwinner. Another important point in this portion of the discussion was Humera’s remark that “we respect our mothers but not motherhood”, as well as Khola’s remark that ‘Aisha was not a mother. In all of these statements, there is a challenge to patriarchal ideals that a woman’s most honored role and only role is as a mother and wife.
While I didn’t agree with everything that was said by the panel, I found the overal discussion to be extremely engaging, as well as frank and open. People were free to express whatever opinions they had no matter how conservative or liberal without being attacked or belittled. We need more dialogues like this among Muslims and we need more open discussion about women, men and gender among Muslims.
Great analysis! I think your point about gender misconceptions hurting men is a great one, and really should be brought up more often.
Great post. Thanks for writing about this, Faith! You inspired me to go and watch the actual discussion.
I think the points you brought up were also my favourite parts. I really liked how open the women were in critiquing the whole framework for the discussion – not only the name and image, as raised at the beginning, but also later on, they talked about the issue of why it is we have to have these specific women-focused events, why these aren’t seen as concerns of the Muslim community as a whole. I really appreciated that, and how self-conscious they were that we can’t just sit back and be proud of ourselves for having this discussion, since even the context in which it’s happening is flawed.
The one thing I found really weird was that they looked like they were on a really tight schedule, which meant that there was very little time to answer any of the questions. It seemed like a lot of people were interrupting each other, and the moderator was having to cut people off, often before the full question was asked or before they were able to give an answer. While a lot of good points were raised, it felt like the conversation kept moving too fast for there to be much resolution on any of the topics (not that I was expecting them to solve the problems then and there, but a lot of conversations ended up feeling totally unfinished.) I guess that in itself is another sign of why it’s problematic to relegate women’s issues to short, hour-long events, rather than having these things as ongoing discussions… but I wonder if the event might have been more effective if they had made it more focused (in terms of both the topic and what they hoped to get out of it), rather than what seemed like a bunch of questions getting thrown out and not much time to properly consider them.
If you look at the way the BBC Question Time program is run, it is even faster. It’s a way of covering loads of issues in a short amount of time. BBC QT has only about 40 min I think. I think these events are always a starting point for conversations – whet people’s appetite so their inspired to talk about the various issues raised in other settings. I hope they have a followup though.