{"id":4538,"date":"2009-09-02T00:00:22","date_gmt":"2009-09-02T07:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/muslimahmediawatch.org\/?p=4538"},"modified":"2009-09-02T00:00:22","modified_gmt":"2009-09-02T07:00:22","slug":"4538","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/mmw\/2009\/09\/4538\/","title":{"rendered":"Mad Magazine: Marie Claire’s Bias Against Muslim Women"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

This piece was written by Guest Contributor Asma T. Uddin<\/a>.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

Asra Nomani\u2019s recent piece in Marie Claire<\/em>, \u201cMy Big Fat Muslim Wedding\u201d<\/a>, underscored everything that is wrong with Marie Claire<\/em>\u2019s coverage of Islam and Muslim women.\u00a0 Nomani\u2019s piece was a confused narrative at best, conflating culture with religion and individual bad experiences with larger truths about entire faiths.\u00a0 A story that should have been about Nomani\u2019s conflicted path to love somehow became a treatise on Islam and love generally, suggesting that all Muslim men and women follow similarly conflicted, contradictory paths. Western ways of premarital intercourse and freedom to marry without regard to religious frameworks are presented as the higher moral ground.<\/p>\n

\"courtney-cox-on-marie-claire-cover-november-2008\"A similar sort of paternalism is rampant throughout Marie Claire<\/em>\u2019s treatment of Muslim women.\u00a0 Time and again, the image we see emerging from this magazine is that of Muslim women as sequestered, brainwashed, and victimized if by no one else than their own na\u00efve, unknowing selves. \u00a0Almost all of Marie Claire<\/em>\u2019s stories dealing with Islam or Muslims have to do with Muslim women either oppressed by or complicit in terrorism and extremism.\u00a0 Women who choose to embrace Islam are belittled, and Islam, in the process, is portrayed as attractive to only lost and desperate souls.\u00a0 On the flip side, Malika, the female jihadist in \u201cLove in the Time of Terror\u201d<\/a> reflects the danger of Muslim female strength, while purportedly more respectable brands of strong females have spurned Islam to some degree or another (think Ayaan Hirsi Ali).<\/p>\n

Consider, for example, Paul Cruickshank\u2019s piece, \u201cI Married a Terrorist\u201d<\/a>, the story of Maureen, a Belgian woman who met a non-practicing Muslim man at a bar and started dating him, their affair a whirlwind of partying.\u00a0 Somewhere amidst all the clubbing, Maureen began feeling empty, overwhelmed by her crazy ways.\u00a0 Her emptiness prompted curiosity about religion, and she began asking her boyfriend, Rachid, about Islam, of which he himself was ignorant.<\/p>\n

This where the story about Maureen begins to reveal its anti-Islamic and sexist undertones; as Cruickshank describes Maureen\u2019s mosque visits in search of knowledge, he notes, \u201c[l]ike many young women with few career prospects, Maureen was in search of a sense of purpose, something to believe in.\u201d<\/p>\n

In that one sentence, Cruickshank reveals a number of troubling assumptions and biases: Women without careers are purposeless.\u00a0 Maureen\u2019s curiosity and interest in Islam was necessarily rooted in her lack of career prospects, suggesting in itself that Maureen must be uneducated and even gullible.<\/p>\n

The complexity of a spiritual quest and the attraction of Islam to rational minds are lost in this one simplistic sentence.\u00a0 The biases in that one sentence frame the story that follows and is repeated throughout it. Cruickshank goes on to describe Maureen\u2019s conversion and how her excitement led to Rachid\u2019s return to his religion. Rachid and Maureen end up turning to \u201cfundamentalist\u201d religious leaders for guidance, and one day Maureen decides to don the all-encompassing burqa on the basis of her conviction that Islam requires it.<\/p>\n

As Cruickshank makes his way through Maureen\u2019s stories\u2013whether they be of her belief in the utility of the burqa or her disbelief that her husband, accused by Belgian police of aiding in the Madrid bombings, was implicated\u2013he continues to reflect an astonishment, almost disbelief, that Maureen really believes what she\u2019s telling him.\u00a0 There\u2019s a sense that Maureen is blinded, almost brainwashed, by forces greater than herself, partly owing to female weaknesses and partly to the force of her fundamentalist beliefs and community.<\/p>\n

Describing Maureen\u2019s new husband, Ayoub, as a \u201cmoderate\u201d Muslim \u2013 as reflected, apparently, by his easy-going personality and clean-shaven face \u2013 Cruickshank writes, \u201cBut despite Ayoub\u2019s positive influence, traces of Maureen\u2019s old views linger.\u201d\u00a0 Because Maureen \u201crefuses to describe her years wearing the burka as a mistake\u201d, the reader gets the idea that Maureen doesn\u2019t really know what is right or wrong, or what type of influence a scary, oppressive Islam had on her.<\/p>\n

While \u201cI Married a Terrorist\u201d emphasizes the victimization of Muslim women by their own na\u00efvet\u00e9, many of Marie Claire<\/em>\u2019s other stories on Islam repeat the mantra over and over again that Muslim women need to be saved by greater, external forces, most often Islam itself.\u00a0 Admittedly, there are social conditions in the Muslim world that affect women adversely and need to be addressed, but Marie Claire<\/em>\u2019s treatment of these topics lacks in nuance and complexity, leaving the reader to pity Muslim women simply for their being Muslim.<\/p>\n

Consider Jan Goodwin\u2019s, \u201cHonor Suicides in Turkey\u201d<\/a>.\u00a0 According to Goodwin, as a response to more stringent laws against honor killings (apparently initiated merely so that Turkey can prove itself worthy of admission into the EU) many families in Turkey are foregoing honor killings by asking women to commit suicide instead\u2013thus the term, \u201chonor suicide\u201d. Nowhere in her piece does Goodwin discuss cultural factors, or the fact that honor killing occurs among some minority communities in Turkey rather than being a mainstream phenomenon.\u00a0 Instead, honor killings and suicides are clumped into the same group as headscarves and female illiteracy, the entire group being symptomatic of Turkey\u2019s Islamist government.\u00a0 Muslim women are the losers in this country, all because of their and their country\u2019s Islam.<\/p>\n

There are thus multiple levels of victimization expressed in Marie Claire<\/em>\u2019s coverage of Muslim women, ranging from self-victimization (Islam as the answer for desperate, lost souls and only<\/em> those souls), to falling prey to female weaknesses (Islam as attractive to only stupid, career-barren women), to being the inevitable victim of the ominous Islam of one\u2019s family, society, and government. <\/em>All of this adds up to Marie Claire\u2019s <\/em>distorted view of Muslim women.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This piece was written by Guest Contributor Asma T. Uddin. Asra Nomani\u2019s recent piece in Marie Claire, \u201cMy Big Fat Muslim Wedding\u201d, underscored everything that is wrong with Marie Claire\u2019s coverage of Islam and Muslim women.\u00a0 Nomani\u2019s piece was a confused narrative at best, conflating culture with religion and individual bad experiences with larger truths […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[658,808,1215],"class_list":["post-4538","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-booksmagazines","tag-islamophobia","tag-marie-claire","tag-sexism"],"yoast_head":"\nMad Magazine: Marie Claire's Bias Against Muslim Women<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"This piece was written by Guest Contributor Asma T. Uddin. 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