At the Centre of the Debate on Secularism, Faith, and Gender Equality

October 11, 2012 By

Last week, Christopher Majka posted an article on rabble.ca in response to Sheema Khan’s piece in the Globe and Mail entitled “Muslim men: Stop blaming women.”

At the centre of the debate is: what is the best way to bring gender equality and rights to Muslim women? Is it at all possible? Should it be a faith-based solution or a secular one?

Sheema Khan’s article speaks to Egyptian women’s current situation under the Muslim Brotherhood’s influence, and focuses on the Brotherhood’s latest pre-marital seminars, where women are reassured of their “proper” role as men’s followers. Khan argues that the image of women as a passive observer and follower of male authorities is a myth. In her view, Muslims can find plenty of examples in Islam’s history that advocate for women’s emancipation and gender equality.

On the other hand, Christopher Majka disagrees with this view. A research associate at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Majka draws his conclusion from his observations of Muslim women in Iran during the 70s. These experiences enable him to conclude that a faith-based approach to achieving women’s equality is not viable in modern society. For him, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and other documents like it, should be the basis of modern civil society, and should then be able to provide women with an equal untouchable status that does not rely on theological interpretations. [Read more...]

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Change Is Now? No, Not Yet: Manuel Valls as France’s New Interior Minister

May 22, 2012 By

I was rather excited about Francois Hollande winning the French elections this month.  I hoped that five years of hateful, fear mongering policy towards Muslims by Sarkozy and his minions would come to an end and that Hollande, for all his supposed blandness, would bring some low-key normalcy to the French presidency.

There was one flaw in my reasoning: Manuel Valls, Hollande’s new Interior Minister.  The Interior Minister in France is a quite important cabinet position, responsible for internal security, law enforcement, identity documents and the like.  But what’s wrong with Mr. Valls personally? Known for being as far to the right as possible, he’s a man after Marine Le Pen’s ideological heart, and his personal battle cry is the sacrosanct laïcité, French secularism. After five years of niqab bans and Muslim scapegoating, Manuel Valls is in the continuity of Sarkozy’s policies, not the disruption Hollande promised.  And I’m not the only one who thinks so. [Read more...]

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The French “Niqab Ban,” One Year On

April 18, 2012 By

A year ago this week, a French law came into effect banning face veils for women.  At the time, the law was subject to much derision for “only” affecting the very specific number of 367 niqab and burqa-clad women (as of 2009) in France, although at its time, the law was thought to concern a couple thousand women.

Anything relating to Muslims has long been a political tool in France, be it from the far-right National Front (FN) party, or from President Sarkozy’s Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) party, whose government passed the law.  Admittedly, to bring a little of the “fair and balanced,” the first headscarf affairs did take place during the Mitterand (Socialist) administration. Given that preying on anti-Muslim sentiments and adopting parts of the National Front’s platform (much like the Republicans court the Tea Party) seem to be two of the UMP’s hobbies in an election season, I was curious to see how the one-year mark would be “celebrated” in the unique context of France’s upcoming presidential elections, where Sarkozy is not assured re-election, and where the country is just coming off the tragedy of the Merah shootings. [Read more...]

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Women in Tunisia’s Revolution

January 17, 2011 By

On Friday, the President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia fled his homeland as it was engulfed by an uprising, sparked by the suicide of Mohamed Bouazizi, an unemployed university graduate who had taken to selling fruit in Sidi Bouzid.  When authorities confiscated his wares for not having a license, Bouazizi set himself on fire in front of a government building. Protests followed, as thousands took to the street in a movement fueled by rage over corruption among the elite.

Unidentified Tunisian woman protesting. Image via AFP.

Anger in Tunisia has been building up for years, with Laila Al Trabelsi, former first Lady of Tunisia and infamous as “The Queen of Carthage,” becoming a lighting rod for much of the dissent.  As Larbi Sadiki puts it “The First Lady is almost the Philippines’ Imelda Marcos incarnate. But instead of shoes, Madame Leila collects villas, real estate and bank accounts.” Laila and the Trabelsi extended family are often referred to as “The Family” or “The Mafia” in Tunisia, and  “No to the Trabelsis who looted the budget,” has been a popular slogan in the protests.  The irony is that the references to Laila al Trabelsi have been the only mention of Tunisian women in the events leading up to the ousting of the regime. Unlike in Lebanon or in Iran, where Neda Agha-Soltan became a symbolic figure of resistance, there was little mention of the women who took part in the protests in Tunisia, or of the victims of the security forces response, such as the woman who was shot and killed in Nabeul.

What explains this disparity? This was very much a media event, and perhaps this in itself was part of the reason. In the Arab world, and to a lesser extent in French media, there has been a month of in-depth coverage of a developing story, but in English-language media, the real coverage began only as Ben Ali began making concessions. Consequently, there was no narrative to frame events, so a disproportionate amount of the analysis has focused on the new media’s role in the uprising, from Wikileaks to Twitter.

Yes, social networks had a huge role to play, as did bloggers and sites such as Nawwat. However, to suggest that social media “caused” the revolution, is ridiculous to say the least, and to call this the first Wikileaks revolution is to suggest the Tunisians were not informed of what was going on in their own country and needed to be told that the Trabelsi clan was corrupt. It also ignores the role of pan-Arab satellite TV, which was at least as important as the internet, as was recognized when activists acknowledged Al Jazeera for its part in presenting the story as a people’s struggle, rather than dismissing it as “unrest” over unemployment.

In focusing on the new media and its part in the uprising, the English-language media has diverted attention away from the people in the street, other than as an undifferentiated mass of angry Arab men. With so many deaths, and the revolt starting in more conservative regions, perhaps there were initially few women on the street. The lack of attention to the role of women may partly be because Tunisia’s revolution focused on issues, with little attention paid to the importance of circulating images of “liberated” women to get the West on its side. [Read more...]

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

December 1, 2010 By

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...]

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