Wadjda Official Trailer from Razor Film on Vimeo.

My interview with the very lovely Saudi filmmaker Haifaa Al Mansour is now out – see the full article at Aquila. I was lucky enough to meet Haifaa when she was in London promoting her debut film Wadjda about a young Saudi girl’s battle to cycle. See the trailer above. We got talking about the rise of female Middle Eastern filmmakers, the importance of personal victories, filming in Saudi and also cycling (of course!).

Here’s a snippet:

http://www.aquila-style.com/magazine/

Related articles

• @FabulousSISTERS – Hymens, Hijabs and Helmets: Muslimahs Who Cycle (arwafreelance.com)

‘I am trying to give my friends the courage to join me, so we can prove to all those who think bad of us that we’re well educated Muslimahs,’ explains Rola Mohammed. ‘That we wear the hijab and what we do isn’t wrong.’

This young pharmacy student living in the Egyptian city of Mansoura clearly has a battle on her hands. Rola wants to change engrained beliefs and cultural taboos that dictate how a woman is seen, the freedom she is granted and the physical activities she is permitted to do. She wants women in Egypt and all across the region to rise up and try something they’ve probably never done before: She wants them to cycle. 

To read the full feature, go to Aquila Style Magazine – The Empower Issue and download it for a couple of dollars. Go on. You know you want to.

Related articles

• Aquila: The Pink Revolution – Overthrowing Sexual Violence (arwafreelance.com)
• @FabulousSISTERS – Hymens, Hijabs and Helmets: Muslimahs Who Cycle (arwafreelance.com)

But as she explained, that childish racism was at least easy to confront and fight against. If a kid called you a ‘Paki’, you could at least tell them to piss off, thump them or maybe try and explain that, in fact, you are not of Pakistani origin (not that that matters to them or is even the point). However, about two days ago, another lovely friend of mine found something a little scary on her Apple Mac which made me question the destructive impact of the ‘quiet racism’ that normally goes unnoticed and unchallenged.

While looking up the word ‘relegation’ on the Mac’s own dictionary, this definition came up in the thesaurus section. It reads:

relegate

verb

Islamic tradition and tribal custom relegate women to lives at home. DOWNGRADE, lower, lower in rank/status, put down, move down; demote, degrade. ANTONYM upgrade.

I know what you’re thinking. This has to be a joke or mistake of some kind. It’s not. Hidden in the Apple Dictionary version 2.0.3 (51.5) © Copyright 2005-2007, is this prejudiced and exasperatingly simplistic description of Islam and the role that women play within the faith. The source appears to be this 1996 CNN article.

So, let’s break it down a little and unpack that sentence.

First: What is meant by tribal custom? I am assuming that they don’t mean that Islamic tradition is much like the rest of the world’s tribal customs in its “relegation” of women to the home, but that in fact Islamic tradition and Islamic tribal custom are seen as one and the same. This is odd as I imagine that the tribal customs of say, Indonesia or Azerbaijan are very different to those of Saudi Arabia or Nigeria. So what tribal customs are they actually talking about? One might guess that they are referring to the Arab world, given the common assumption that Arab and Muslim are the same – although of course Arabs aren’t necessarily Muslims and Muslims aren’t necessarily Arab.  On the other hand, one might also think of the tradition of purdah which crosses religious lines and has historically been observed by both Hindu and Muslim communities in some parts of India and South Asia.

In either case, the attempt to locate which custom is intended underlines the fact that the very idea of an “Islamic tribal custom” is nonsensical, since customs in the Islamic world are so diverse and include everything from patriarchal traditions which stop women from wearing trousers to the world’s largest matrilineal society amongst the Indonesian Muslims of Sumatra.

Second: Islamic tradition does not relegate women to lives in the home. It doesn’t stop them from working, earning their own money, being independent and choosing not to consign their entire lives to the domestic sphere. Yes, there are some conservative Islamic clerics who preach that a woman’s place is in the home – just as there are conservatives in all religions who hold that opinion.

However, there are millions of Muslim women who do work, now and in the past. And if we consider Islamic tradition to be our heritage, the past does provide us with inspiring examples of the public role of women in early Islamic socieities. Perhaps the most famous example is that of Khadijah, the Prophet Muhammed’s (pbuh) first wife who was his employer, owned her own business in the 7th century and was influential in the public arena. Indeed in the Qur’an and hadith, Prophet Muhammad’s wives are portrayed as dynamic members of the Muslim community who were fully engaged in Muslim public affairs. Aisha bint Abu Bakr, for example, was involved in military raids and political affairs and took part in the Battle of the Camel.

If you want to find out more- read anything by Margot Badran, Miriam Cooke, Laila Ahmed, Amina Wadud or just google ‘Islamic Feminism’.

Back to Apple’s thesaurus: what’s more frightening than the casual Islamophobia my friend stumbled on her Mac laptop, is the idea that someone – someone with less knowledge of Islam and Muslims – has looked up ‘relegate’ and now thinks it’s okay and widely accepted that Islam relegates women to the home. That Islam, “downgrades” and “degrades” women and dismisses them as “lower in rank/status”. Whilst this definition has been removed in the updated version of the dictionary – it doesn’t say this in my 2007-2009 Mac dictionary version – I can’t believe there hasn’t been an effort to remove it completely. I don’t think it is acceptable for anyone to look up the word ‘relegate,’ and read a simplistic Islamophobic definition which presents itself as incontrovertible ‘fact’.

Arwa Aburawa is a freelance journalist with an interest in the Middle East, the environment, Islam and various social issues. Follow her on twitter @arwa_journalist

:: This post was originally published at Muslimah Media Watch.

From women in Saudi Arabic championing recycling to eco-Muslimahs using the green message to challenge perceptions about Islam, Arwa Aburawa meets the women changing the world for the better.

 Click on the image for the full article.

by Arwa Aburawa

Not too long ago, if anybody wrote about Muslim women in the down-and-depressed, stereotypical manner then it would be left to some sensitive Muslim man to reply. Or more than likely, it would just be left. All that is changing due to a new generation of media-savvy Muslim women who are fighting back with articles, blogs and witty comebacks quicker than you

Asma Uddin of AltMuslimah

can say “oppressed housewife.”

“I think the hijab debate in France back in 2003 made us all realize that stereotypes we thought we had dealt with were still there,” explains Rajnaara Akhtar of Pro-Hijab, a UK-based campaign group which defends the right to wear the hijab. “Certainly in France, the view still seemed to be that Muslim women were oppressed and waiting to be rescued. We could not sit back in silence any longer and decided to engage in the debate.”

Rajnaara acknowledged that part of the problem was that until recently, Muslim women have been particularly reluctant to talk to the press. Fear and mistrust of the media meant the many were holding back and were consequently represented by Muslim men- something which proved rather counter productive. “I mean you can’t say ‘look at how free these women are’ but it’s a man saying it! It was high time that we used our knowledge and skills to represent ourselves.”

On a more global scale, the rise of the internet has meant that many Muslim women can now setup a blog or website and speak their mind without fear that their words are going to be misrepresented. News sites tackling inaccurate portrayals of Muslim women such as Muslimah Media Watch (MMW) and Altmuslimah are going from strength to strength. MMW which started life as a one woman blog in 2007 was recently re-launched as a website with a 21 plus blogging team hailing from places as far afield as Egypt to Switzerland.

Fatemeh Fakhraie of Muslimah Media Watch

Fatemeh Fakhraie, the US writer and founder of MMW, remarks that she was uncomfortable with the mainstream media’s tendency to portray Muslim women as either “exotic sex slave, oppressed woman, or dangerous terrorist” and so decided to setup the blog. MMW states that it tackles “one-dimensional and misleading” representations of Muslim women in everything from small-town newspapers and blogs to major news channels and women’s magazines-for example MMW questioned the consistently negative portrayal of Muslim women in Marie Claire.

Whilst this media intervention is certainly novel, it by no means reflects a sudden awakening amongst Muslim women. As Fatemeh explains, “Muslim women have been thinking and writing and participating since the beginning of Islam but I don’t think anyone’s been listening until now… I do think there’s been a wonderful influx of differing Muslim women voices in the last ten years in response to 9/11 and the fact that, as Muslims, we have been forced into a spotlight.”

This “spotlight” may also explain the success of these sites and organisations which, Asma Uddin of Altmuslimah insists, are taking issues that were previously restricted to academic circles and the masses and Muslim women are dealing with them in their daily lives.

The increasingly vocal reactions also reflect a new generation of Muslim women who are well-educated, smart and unafraid to question what they read in the news. As Asma explains, “As second generation American Muslim women we are a lot more concerned with civic engagement and dealing with the media than our parents, who were busy trying to make a living. We have more ownership and confidence to express ourselves.”

Rajnaara Akhtar presenting an award

Rajnaara, who lives in the UK echoed this sentiment stating that Muslim women identify themselves as British Muslims and are secure enough in their identity to stand up for what they believe.  “We feel part of this society, we see ourselves as British… We don’t feel apologetic for our particular religious affiliations, so hopefully our positive engagement and responses will make it much harder for people to depict Muslim women in a stereotypical manner in future.”

Thankfully, the people at Bitch were great and Andi Ziesler was so generous with her time and getting useful feedback to me. Being a young freelancer, the one thing I crave is feedback! Constructive, of course I am only human

Enjoy. And feedback anyone?

Link to the Article on the Bitch website.

During some research for an article on Parisian guerrilla artist Princess Hijab (see here and here), I stumbled across another guerrilla artists, this time from Italy, who was using the image of the hijab.

BR1 ( not sure what that stands for although strangely, in the UK it’s the form that migrants have to fill in so they can work), states that his work is about normalising Muslim women by placing diverse poster-images of them on walls in the street: “My Muslim women are represented in daily life situations: they are mothers, grandmothers and daughters, smoking, taking pictures and smiling. My message is: pointing out that Muslim women have the same needs and necessities of the majority of Western women. Certainly, the only exception is the veil.”

BR1′s work however has faced some serious criticisms. In his bid to draw similarities between Western and Muslim women, BR1 seems to have fallen into the patriarchal-view-of-women trap. One blogger, ‘Killing denouncement’, noted that BR1′s images are too narrow and fit neatly into the patriarchal ideals of womanhood- i.e childcare, raising families, taking pictures and smiling. “Nevermind seeing any Muslim men (not exotic or fetishisable enough? too dangerous?), it would have been nice to see hijabis in other situations outside the traditionally feminised. Like perhaps working, or, I don’t know, holding AK-47s?”

His wide range of beautiful and bold posters also fail to, even once, represent the non-hijabed Muslim women which leads onto the issue of: is his work riding on the isn’t-she-exotic-orientalism which seems to have flourished post-9/11? One comment on his flickr account made my this pop into my mind: “I love the way you’re challenging the imagery of muslim women in our occidental society. Please keep up the good work!” *cringe*

I always find this issue of representing Muslim women without fetishizing them a really difficult issue to resolve. As yes, it’s great to have them out there in the public sphere but it really does need to move forward from them just ‘being’ there to giving them the power and freedom to do stuff which is important to them. For example, in Europe there is a lot of talk of getting Muslim women involved but I don’t see how the recent hijab banning spree, which seems to have hit Europe helps this.

We all know, that they only thing that this achieves, is pushing more and more Muslim women away from the public sphere back to their homes where they have the freedom to (legally) express themselves. Whilst some take off their hijabs to go to school, I always wonder how many more simply don’t attend?