Learning to accept Muslim women’s choices
Earlier this week, a hijab-wearing student named Bayan Zehlif opened her California school yearbook and found she was called Isis. Her school said it was a typo. Her principal then tweeted a half-apology calling it a misprint, saying Bayan was simply mistaken for another girl.
Last week, seven hijabi women sued a California restaurant for discrimination after being hustled out while dining because they were, according to the restaurant, violating a policy that limits seating to 45 minutes. The women said other non-Muslims seated longer were allowed to stay. A Facebook video shows their interaction with police and a restaurant dotted with empty tables.
When it comes to discrimination, Muslim women are jostling with black women to take the bottom of the totem pole.
The Muslim women’s totem would tell tragic stories of being hit hard by the intersectionality of gender and race, as with other women of colour, but also by the third element of religion. Heaven forbid if you are Muslim AND black.
Many of us on the outside view Muslims as a monolithic group that looks the same, thinks the same, acts the same.
I, too, once found occasion to explore and acknowledge my own feminist bias against Islam.
But I have nothing on British Prime Minister David Cameron who offered this head-scratcher in January, when he said that fluency in English among these women would make Muslims less susceptible to extremism. U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump’s views on all Muslims are such low-hanging fruit, I won’t deign to dignify them with a comment.
Like auto wreckers with cars, society places Muslim women — especially the visible ones — under a compactor, ready to crush them.
Within their own communities, many face pressure to conform to prove they’re traditional enough, Muslim enough. Consider how award-winning EgyptianAmerican journalist Mona Eltahawy was silenced this week by a Pakistani newspaper when it published white space instead of her piece on taking control of her body and her sexual choices.
The AFP news agency quotes a source at the Express Tribune saying, “You can’t afford to publish such controversial articles about Islam.”
The same pattern of subjugation emerges from the rest of us, who pressure them to conform to our standards of liberation, to prove they’re not “too Muslim.”
We either see them as submissive objects of pity forced into modesty or as religious fanatics incapable of integration.
There are almost one million Muslims in Canada. They are made to feel responsible for explaining or justifying the differences between them and terrorists/ violence, according to an Ontario Human Rights Commission report.
Our simplistic generalizations make it difficult to be rational with any concerns we may have.
A mother in my eastern Scarborough neighbourhood, of Greek ethnicity, once told me hesitatingly that she wasn’t Islamophobic. Her problem was how to explain their new neighbours and clothing choices to her 6-year-old daughter. The newbies also kept to themselves and she didn’t know how to bridge the gap.
Upon reflection we realized that while we considered ourselves liberal and open-minded, if either of our daughters grew up and chose to wear a hijab, we’d be deeply uncomfortable.
Why was that? For me, it was partially my distaste for conforming for the sake of conformity. But in this case it was also because we inherently saw the hijab as a submissive, regressive piece of clothing.
From a western viewpoint, we see a nun’s habit as a voluntary choice and a hijab as forced.
Yet, when I stopped to think about it, I realized I knew strong women who, reacting to outsider pressure on their religious identity, chose to wear hijabs while their fathers or husbands begged them not to.
A bikini-clad woman with breast impants walking on Lake Shore Blvd. is either a manifestation of empowerment or the victim of objectification by males. Many of us intuitively grasp that nuance. But we don’t consider the same options for hijabis.
In the Scarborough mother’s case, the thing to do would be to do what you would with any new neighbour. Be Canadian. Show up on their doorstep with a basket of muffins. Treat them as individuals.
Of course Muslim women are not treated equal to men. None of us are. But further subjugating them to our prejudices will hardly help them achieve equality on their terms.
We can’t wait for Muslim women to throw off their Islamic robes for us to relate to them. Their struggles may be different from those of white women or of other women of colour. But surely they deserve to be treated as equal.
From a western viewpoint, we see a nun’s habit as a voluntary choice and a hijab as forced
Shree Paradkar has been a journalist in Bangalore, Mumbai, Singapore and Toronto. She is a deputy digital editor — multimedia at the Toronto Star.