Increasing Muslim Women’s Significance through Mediatization, Part I

December 14, 2010 By emanhashim

A very interesting workshop was organized on November 24-25 by the Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo (NVIC) titled: “Female Actors in Islamic Public Sphere – Increasing Significance through Increasing Mediatization.” This was a great conference, and I wish I could recap it all for you. But I’ll keep my review to the media-related panels.

Maria Roeder from Mannheim University discussed how private life could be highly political: she raised the questions of who is defining what is public and what is private, and also who speaks in the talk shows, because half the speakers only represent themselves, and in terms of gender, males to females ratio is 100 to zero:

“The dominance of male actors is a trend in such shows, there’re high barriers for female voices in political talk shows.” She continues: “The concept of public sphere empowerment is highly connected to the female almost-absent appearance and involvement in talk shows.”

She then explained that there’s a big problem when one tries to identify what is “private” and what is “public:” “The whole idea of domestic violence being private matter makes it harder to be considered as an issue to be discussed by the public sphere.”

Roeder thinks that increasing the mediatization of life world opens new spaces to public participation, which leads to increased female voices. Blogging helps in circulating news and actions away from the government and official spheres, lowers the barriers in economical terms, and does not take into account who you are, which leads to more gender equality. Though the fact remains that the Arab blogsphere is still dominated by males, at certain ages, half the bloggers are women. She then used the example of Ghada Abdel Al, the Egyptian blogger whose blog “Wanna be a Bride” was published as a book and turned into a TV series starring Tunisian actress Hend Sabry.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Events, Technology/Science Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

The Doha Debates on The Burqa Ban: Filling in the Gaps

December 8, 2010 By Guest Contributor

This is a guest post, written by Layla in response to our Doha Debates Roundtable.

I’m a Muslim woman by birth and cultural affiliation that has lived in the U.S., the Middle East, and most recently, France.  For a year and a half now, since President Sarkozy first began advocating the ban on the face veil, I’ve had mixed feelings about this issue.  So I was very excited to watch the Doha Debates on this subject, thinking that I’d finally hear an echo of how the two sides of this debate have been playing out in my own head for so many months.

But while the side I always verbalize when discussing this topic with supporters of the ban was very well articulated by Mehdi Hassan and Nabila Ramdani, the other side, which I have long kept bottled up for fear of adding fuel to the fire of opportunistic right-wing politicking here, was very poorly expressed by Jacques Myard and Farzana Hassan.  He came across as a bumbling old man and she was extremely scattered in her argument, relying on hypothetical possibilities and projections vs. on available facts and statistics.  As Sana points out at the recent roundtable discussion of the debates here on MMW, you could tell there was a bias simply in the selection of more competent speakers who rejected the motion over the two who supported it.

So, I figure that here on MMW is as good a place as any to try and fill this gap, and finally break my own silence on this issue. Quickly, then, let me sum up the points against the motion that I most strongly agree with before turning to the other side of the coin.

I agree that the niqab, as a symbol, has been opportunistically used by the French government to appeal to the far right and to distract voters from more urgent matters.

I agree that simply taking off a piece of fabric will not automatically liberate women from abusive or controlling husbands or result in their social integration.

I also agree that the way Sarkozy has approached this issue is more divisive than unifying.  He’s clearly not interested in having a real dialogue with the Muslim community, or addressing the many social problems (unemployment, discrimination, etc.) Muslim minorities in France face.  I also doubt he’s interested in dealing with more pressing women’s issues in this country (such as wage discrepancies, and the low numbers of women in high-ranking positions in government and industry, as evoked by Hasan in the debate).

On the other hand, I feel that there were legitimate issues raised in defense of the motion, which were not sufficiently discussed or well argued by Myard and Hassan. Some of these issues include the following: [Read more...]

Filed Under: Events, Politics Tagged With: , , ,

Revealing Democracy: A Conference on Bill 94 (Part I)

December 1, 2010 By Krista

Quebec’s Bill 94, which would deny access to public services to women who wear niqab, is back in parliamentary hearings and, by all accounts, likely to pass.  This past weekend, an international conference entitled “Revealing Democracy: Bill 94 and the challenges of religious pluralism and ethnocultural diversity in Quebec” was held at Concordia University in Montreal.  Its focus was on looking critically at the social and political contexts in which the bill has come to be.  Among other topics, presenters talked about secularism, racism, sexism, multiculturalism, and Islamophobia.

This discussion will be longer and more academic than some other MMW posts, but I thought it was worth sharing, because there were many issues raised that reflect a lot of the conversations that we often have on this blog.  I’ll talk about the keynote speech for now, and will get to some of the panels in part two.

Wendy Brown, a professor from the University of California – Berkeley, was the keynote speaker.  She began her speech with reference to this “astonishing historical moment in which women’s clothes are subject to legislation in a 21st-century liberal democracy,” a moment where, in order to remain in the public sphere, women are being asked to take off their clothes.  Brown followed this by acknowledging several elements of the context around Bill 94 that she would not be discussing in her speech: that the West is in the midst of a “giant Islamophobic seizure”; that the proposed Bill 94 here as well as the burqa bans across Europe represent an aggression towards Islam that exceeds any other form of institutionalized racism in recent decades; that the vast “range of reasons given for these bans cancels out their credibility”; that women are finding themselves as “battlegrounds for masculine norms of female sexual comportment,” and that dress is being attacked under the pretext of saving women, while other forms of violence against women are continuing rampantly and largely unaddressed.

Setting all of this aside, Brown moved to the main part of her talk, which was to look at the assumptions that make this kind of legislation possible, with a particular focus on understandings of secularism and tolerance.  She raised five major assumptions:

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Culture/Society, Events, Politics Tagged With: , , , , , ,
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