Our braincells need an intellectual workout to self-educate, re-
educate and un-educate from things our culture and society has
been predominating our rigid minds. I read “It’s Not About the
Burqa” a year ago; it consists of seventeen essays of self-experience
written by Muslim women of different cultures and origins. They
were not just Muslim women but black, South Asian, POC,
immigrants, etc. In 2016, the then British Prime Minister David
Cameron linked the radicalization of Muslim men to the “traditional
submissiveness” of Muslim women. This made Mariam Khan, the
editor, set herself to find Muslim women’s voices who can tell their
stories better than non-Muslim people, including hers.
This quote from the first essay aptly summarizes the rooted
problems in our culture and community:
“Too often, ‘community’ is synonymous with men, and too often
those self-appointed male leaders are the ones who determine what
is ‘too far’. In fact, the word and concept ‘community’ is much like
the word and concept ‘culture’: for example, a popular way to rein in
people – read ‘women’ – is to tell them that they must not oppose a
behaviour or way of being because it is part of the ‘culture’ or what
the ‘community’ wants. Who determined that it was culture and who
speaks for the community? Men and men. That is the simple answer.
The more complicated answer is men and men and a system –
patriarchy – that enables and protects them at the same time as it
socializes women to internalize the dictates of patriarchy and to
accept them as culture and as community. If women created culture
and community, we would not be accused of ‘going too far’.”
I remember reading in Fiona Tolan’s “Feminisms” that how women
are psychologically trained to accept patriarchy since birth; this is
why we see our mothers and grandmothers accepting and acting as
the advocate to patriarchy because they have been ‘educated’ like
that by the ‘community’ and the ‘culture’, and obviously, by their
mothers. The reason I consider this book important is because it’s
not just about the Muslim women but the entire community of
women.
In her essay, Nafisa Bakkar says, “If our feminism is not intersectional
then we run two risks: that we will never escape this idea of the
default being male, and that we dilute our faith in our attempts to
mould Islam to make it more palatable to outsiders.” It is widely
believed that Islam is everything Arab and anything Arab is Islam; this
is the type of “Arabization” that is wrongly represented for Islamic
people and has to be recognized.
It was the essay of the editor Mariam Khan that enticed me the
most. She talked about “White Feminism”, the white privileged
women and its impact on marginalized ones. She says, “I believe we
should all exclusively identify as intersectional feminists; in doing this
we are allowing ourselves to recognize how power structures overlap
and reinforce each other and how feminism today is dominated by
white, cis-gendered, middle-class, able-bodied women who refuse to
acknowledge the multiple layers of oppression women of colour
have to go through. If White Feminists want to be a part of the
narrative they will need to de-centre themselves and their views of
empowerment to include women of colour, trans women, non-
binary women, gender-queer people and women of faith.”
I don’t think I can cover all the topics these essays are positioned on,
I put out the apt quotes here because they are collectively speaking
about all the other essays. Each of the essays are essential and I’d
not be surprised to see them in the curriculum of universities in
future. It’s not about the burqa that you wear, or hair-beads or
sarees or salwar suits, skirts, etc... it’s about YOU!
- Aayushi Jain, I am a final year Master’s student in English at GGSIPU.
I am a book reviewer and share my love for books on Instagram:
@_penandpapers. When I'm not reading or photographing books, I
journal and write. I also work as a part time Editor for
www.bookishsanta.com.