Eltawahy and Hirsi Ali commentary

Book reviews and commentary of Mona Eltahawy’s and Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s latest books. One could argue that both are more aimed at “preaching to the converted” and non-Muslims more than engaging in debate within the various Muslim communities.

That doesn’t necessarily make their arguments less valid, just less effective.

Just as the Conservative government’s penchant for the use of phrases “Barbaric cultural practices” is more aimed at their base than engaging Canadian Muslims than addressing the issues.

Stephanie Nolan’s review of Eltawahy’s book and how it remains largely a rant, with no practical plan of action:

But as a reader, I stumbled repeatedly over two problems. First, her research is not deep: The majority of cases she cites are from reports in the limited English-language Arab media, and she draws heavily on interviews she did for a BBC radio documentary. Sometimes there are UN statistics, and sometimes there is something a woman said to her once on the subway. I found myself craving a deeply researched, Andrew Solomon-esque book on this topic, one where the author has immersed herself in the subject not just from lived experience but in research, in criticism, in thousands of hours of interviews. I wanted the anger to be irrefutably backed up.

Second, she levels charges against all Arab societies – although culturally and even linguistically Tunisia has a limited amount in common with Lebanon and the two are a world again different from Saudi Arabia. Nonetheless Eltahawy feels that crimes against women in one are from the same root as those in another – but why draw the line there? I found myself thinking repeatedly of my last posting, in India, and the pervasive misogyny that I ran into in story after story I reported there. No different, surely – Eltahawy’s response, I think, would be that of course patriarchy is universal but she is entitled as an Arab woman to start her critique in her own community. Well, sure, but at the same time she is invested in arguing that there is a uniquely Arab pathology here – tied up in the twin obsessions with female virginity and veiling – and she does not convince.

Eltahawy says she was “traumatized into feminism” when she moved to Saudi Arabia with her family at the age of 15, “because to be a female in Saudi Arabia is to be the walking embodiment of sin.” She is an old-school feminist, sprinkling the books with quotes from bell hooks and Audre Lorde and others from the generation whose writing she discovered as a teenager. “To this day I have no idea what dissident professor or librarian placed feminist texts on the bookshelves at the university library in Jeddah, but I found them there. They filled me with terror. I understood they were pulling at a thread that would unravel everything.”

There is still enormous power in the writing of hooks and others of her era, and it is refreshing to see their words given weight as relevant today, not just as artifacts. It’s a reminder that feminism is about revolution, not just Dove ads or whether you should call your daughter bossy.

….Yet the vital next paragraph – the one that suggests a plan, a path, a strategy – never comes. Eltahawy’s prescriptions are limited to vague instructions to “confront” misogyny wherever it is found, “for each of us to expose and to fight against local versions of it.”

What would that look like? Who is she talking to? What does she suggest Arab women do? And men? It’s important to be angry – as Eltahawy makes clear there is ample reason. But as events in her beloved Egypt have made brutally evident since the first brave protesters went to Tahrir Square, it’s vital to have a plan for what comes next.

This book has value as the opening salvo in a debate. But you will have to read elsewhere to find the next lines of the manifesto for this revolution.

Why Mona Eltahawy’s provocative new book, Headscarves and Hymens, falls short in its goal to change the Arab world 

More reaction to Hirsi Ali:

As every generation of Muslims has done since the 7th century, modern Muslims are seeking to interpret the spirit of the divine text in light of the mundane realities of its followers. The difference today are the effects of large-scale Muslim migration to the West and modern technology. Education, mobility, and access to information have lead to opportunities of new interpretive freedoms, sped up by the breakdown of the stature of the traditional Islamic authorities. This process cuts both ways: It has made it easy for the Kansan teenager wondering about whether Islam allows her to write her own marriage contract (it does), and it’s also made it easy for fundamentalists to spread a message of intolerance. The same historical disruptions that have produced the horrors of Al Qaeda and ISIL have also produced increasingly confident Muslim activists and scholars, who are working to square their understandings of the Quran’s divine message with universal human-rights norms.

Unlike bombs or beheadings, these gentle disruptions don’t make the news. Earlier this year, the conservative scholar Mohammad Akram Nadwi reversed his acceptance of child marriage – a practice generally allowed in medieval Islamic jurisprudence – after two of his female students told him of the ways they’d seen the practice ruin girls’ lives. He also found a fatwa from an 8th-century scholar denouncing the practice. In other words, he found ways to change his understanding of his faith from within.

Too often, non-Muslims and Muslims alike don’t know enough about Islam to see how flexible Islamic laws can be. Like the violent extremists she rightly opposes, Hirsi takes the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad’s example to be an unbending set of rules and Islam to be “the most rigid religion in the world.” However, its flexibility was one of the reasons it could spread so effectively from Arabia through Asia and Africa, allowing local practices to remain as long as they didn’t contravene its basic tenets.

How could Islam be a rigid set of one-size-fits-all edicts, as the zealots claim, when it’s a faith with followers who range from dreadlocked Oakland grandmas to Hyderabadi mystics to French businessmen? How could it be rigid when interpretations range so widely, running the gamut from bans on women driving (see Saudi Arabia) to giving women the right to lead countries (see Pakistan and Bangladesh)? Such is the decentralized nature of Islam’s majority Sunni sect, which lacks an organized clergy, that it allows followers to go from scholar to scholar until they find an opinion that matches their own.

To reform, Islamic societies needs more Islamic education, not less. The Prophet Muhammad warned his followers against blind faith. A famous anecdote tells of him coming across an Arab nomad walking away from his camel, having neglected to tie it up. When he asked the man why he didn’t secure the beast, the man said, “I put my trust in Allah.” Muhammad’s answer was pithy: “Tie your camel first – then put your trust in Allah.”

What Ayaan Hirsi Ali Doesn’t Get About Islam | TIME.