When Culture Robs Girls of Role Models

2014/05/10 Leave a comment

Good commentary by Amira Elghawaby on the need, within Muslim communities,  to provide more role models and visibility for women in both institutions and in popular culture:

Just take a look at most North American Muslim conferences.  How many women are on stage? From Chicago to Toronto to Ottawa, the answer is, very few. This is not for a lack of successful women leaders in our communities. We have Canadian Muslim women who are doctors, scientists, academics, educators, lawyers, engineers, filmmakers, authors, journalists, activists, editors, entrepreneurs, etc. But for some reason, our community seems unwilling to showcase their talents. Just last year, after praising the success of the Reviving the Islamic Spirit conference which attracts over 20,000 people annually, the well-known American academic, author, and consultant, Dalia Mogahed, nevertheless lamented the dearth of female speakers. Mogahed is one of just over a handful of women who have ever spoken at this immense gathering, now in its 13th year.

What is behind this? Surely, young women and girls deserve to hear from women who are paving the way forward. And, certainly, women were not invisible in Islam’s earliest days as a pioneering faith that recognized gender rights and women’s agency. Why then are our communities today so reluctant in acknowledging and spotlighting female achievements?

There seems to be a disconnect, or, more specifically, confusion around the role of Muslim women in society. There is a deep and ingrained cultural fear about intermingling. That fear is so strong that it has essentially led to the erasure of the female presence from many community institutions.  Take the barriers that have popped up at mosques across North America over the past few decades, making many women feel unwelcome and apart, as chronicled in the 2005 Canadian film Me And the Mosque. While some Muslim women themselves have internalized concerns over intermingling, so much that they cling to the barriers, the fact is that these barriers have come to represent an unwillingness to model respectful interactions between the genders. This emerges out of misplaced concepts of modesty and piety and is perhaps the attitude that led a York University student to famously ask to be exempted from working with female peers.

When Culture Robs Girls of Role Models – New Canadian Media – NCM.

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , , ,

‘Self-censorship’ in discussion of multiculturalism, says London’s deputy mayor

2014/03/22 Leave a comment

Interesting discussion with Munira Mirza, deputy mayor of London, on multiculturalism, with particular reference to academic circles. Her point on the mistake of treating Muslims as “a homogenous group” particularly relevant (a lesson that can likely be applied to any community engagement strategy):

While at Policy Exchange, Mirza was lead author of a 2007 report, Living Apart Together: British Muslims and the Paradox of Multiculturalism, that claimed that “Government policies to improve engagement with Muslims make things worse. By treating Muslims as a homogeneous group, the Government fails to see the diversity of opinions amongst Muslims, so they feel more ignored and excluded.”

This argument was obviously controversial, but Mirza reports a “quite vicious” response from academics who focused on “quibbling with the technicalities of the research”. There was also “an assumption that, because it was published by a thinktank, it was therefore driven by ideological motives and there was nothing in it that was substantial, whereas we in the universities are much more objective”.

It is here that Mirza detects “a kind of coercive consensus around some of the debates in higher education around issues such as multiculturalism.

“There isn’t much appetite to criticise it as a policy or to entertain the notion that some of these ideas have had damaging effects. I think there’s a degree of self-censorship. I don’t think you get the critical level of discussion and debate [about multiculturalism] in the university sector that you do in the press and media. I think there’s more intelligent public conversation outside than there is inside.”

‘Self-censorship’ in discussion of multiculturalism, says London’s deputy mayor | News | Times Higher Education.

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , , ,

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