One of the well known Islamic principles is to give your brother 70 execuses.

Sadly, here it would appear not one was given.

This article is well-written and well-thoughout discourse to an initial reaction. The initial reaction being flawed, incorrect, unjustified.

The snippet from HY’s interview starts with the following “… If a woman has a child [and] she abandons that responsibility in pursuit of an empty career or the idea of making her mark on the world, she has completely misunderstood … ”

The context here is IF she abandons the responsibility in pursuit of an EMPTY career….then something has been completely misunderstood!

Clearly in your personal, passionate and amazing story your mother NEVER pursued an empty career, she NEVER abandoned her responsibilities and she NEVER misunderstood anything! I am SURE HY would agree.

SubhanAllah – what he is saying does not apply to you or situations that do not meet his criteria.

The misunderstanding is PURELY on YOUR part which has resulted in you “slandering” someone else.

Before you write in a such a way you would be well advised to contact the subject to make sure you are understanding his views correctly.

Again an another Islamic principle has been violated: The burden of proof is on the accuser.

What makes this whole article even more amazing is that it appears you are either a “lawyer” or training to be one.

So just to re-cap for your “legal mind”.

1. The phrasing of HY at a minimum leaves ample ground for distinctly different interpretation.

2. Unsubstantiated, your comments could be viewed a defamatory and slanderous.

3. The burden of proof is on you – and that burden entails finding out and clarifying what he really meant.

Not to speak of the spririt of the law.

My father is extremely religious, and while there are many things about his view on gender and the gendered divisions of labor that I disagree with, I can’t deny that almost all of my ethical and critical values vis a vis the treatment of others (male or female) come from him and the values instilled by him (always from within a fundamentally muslim viewpoint). I remember once I was screenprinting a t-shirt for my lil sister, and since I couldn’t think of anything else, I just wrote ‘I’m the prettiest girl in the world.’ My dad asked me later why I didn’t write ‘smartest’ or ‘talented.’ It was pretty embarrassing to realize that what he was asking was why I was insisting on some sort of artificial notion of beauty as the highest value to be put on a girl’s shirt. And yet, if one follows the binaries we internalize when talking about west/east and fundamental/moderate etc., it becomes rather hard to comprehend/fit neatly into a box my dad’s question that day.

All of this is to say I think most of these binaries and the insistence we have put on maintaining them lead to rather sterile and artifical intellectual spaces.

i. you’re right. disclaimer notwithstanding, i do need to be more careful about how i write about muslim women who work outside their homes, if in writing about them, i trivialise or appear to trivialise women who work at home. if that weren’t a binary that i’ve internalised i wouldn’t have needed to make that opening disclaimer; that nuance would have worked its way into this paper regardless. so that does worry me, and thank you for pointing that out.

ii. while i think it’s valid to read that intro to my father as underscoring his street cred and it’s possible that that was somewhere in my thought processes, my conscious intent with writing him up as a very traditional muslim man at the beginning was so i could later complicate that image. there’s this binary i think we’re all familiar with, especially with regards to gender politics in islam: either you’re devout or you’re secular, traditional or westernised, authentic or deviant. yet in reality our practices of faith are so much more complicated and contradictory than that. and thus we have people as deeply as conservative as my father can sometimes be, also being much more open-minded on several fronts than many bougie muslim men i know who laud themselves on their supposed progressiveness.
so what i’m saying is, merely on the basis of how he is a husband and father, he can’t be dismissed as insufficiently muslim, because his every other religious marker swings so strongly the other way.
then again, maybe that’s what street cred is all about and i am protesting too much. i’ll need to think on that one a bit, and what it means for me and my community activism that i can exploit my father’s conservatism in this way for non-conservative ends.

I also find it interesting that you spend the first several paragraphs highlighting you’re (or you’re family’s) ‘traditional’ muslim street cred before you make any sort of substantial critique of Hamza’s comment. If that’s what it takes to engage in any sort of criticism, I guess I should just give up the ghost now.

:)

That was a really beautiful piece. I could sense/feel your incredibly controlled rage in nearly every sentence. Something I have to learn how to do myself.

I tend to think that we learn more about what is considered the ‘norm’ and ‘normal’ when we view things from an anomalytic or ‘exceptional’ viewpoint. Your upbringing is a case in point.

My dad would tell us about the hadith of ‘paradise being at the feet of the mother’ and ‘love your mother, your mother, your mother, and then your father.’ But then he would treat my mom like chattel and I would be forced to wonder about this distance between his words and his actions. This idealization and romanticization of the mother is, on the surface, beautiful. But I find more often than not its just a cover really, to make women submit to patriarchal authority. Its also a specific and specifically constructed notion of ‘motherhood’ that is lauded – clearly, a mother who decides to work cannot be counted as a ‘real’ mother (according to some).

And the flip side is this construction of masculinity which is also very specifically coded and, I would agree, more harmful than not. I’m really thinking of Khadija in a wholly different light now & thinking about what her role in such a primary (almost mythical) narrative means for the construction of muslim gender identity.

I also find this construction of ‘Muslim career woman,’ which obviously gains the meaning you intend by contrasting it with woman who stay at home (and thus do *not* ‘work’), quite troubling, and as much as I hate to say, almost patriarchal in the way you write about it. My mother worked her ass off *every* *single* *day*. And she didn’t get a paycheque, she didn’t get recognition, most of the time she didn’t even get a thank you. That was just what she was ‘supposed’ to do – and in a way, your title renders invisible this kind of work – which is also, apart from the gender codifications or whatever it carries, extremely valuable & life sustaining. I cried the first time I attempted to make karelas – because when my mom used to make them (and it takes about 3-4 hours to make them), we would bitch & moan cause it was ‘just vegetables.’ But now, I think holy crap! She just did this because she knew it was good for us – she could just as easily have made daal or something much simpler. And what did your dad do? Was that not also a form of work? Is it only the market that decides what is work and what isn’t?

Coming off a bit ranty, aren’t I? See note above re: controlled rage/anger.

One day I’d like to do a detailed study of ‘exceptional’ and/or anomalytic gender roles in Muslim history. I do second that suggestion for Leila Ahmed’s book – she’s pretty awesome.

Anyways, I hope you keep writing these kinds of critiques. We need more voices to do this kind of ‘work’ (ha ha) from within the Muslim community.

leila ahmed’s 1992 women and gender in islam, of course, but also fatma muge gocek and shiva balaghi’s 1994 edited volume reconstructing gender in the middle east: tradition, identity, and power. but most of all, the chapter called ‘love and marriage’ in samira haj’s fabulous 2008 reconfiguring islamic tradition: reform, rationality, and modernity, which among other things specifically describes the way qasim amin & co reconfigured discourses of femininity and domesticity according to the needs of the emergent nation-state.

re the history of gender in muslim societies — could you send me a reading list? i need to learn more about this, to be able to articulate things better.