Voices of Resistance: Muslim women on war, faith and sexuality

Sarah just wrote to say the book we are all in got reviewed in JordanTimes.Here it is:

BOOK REVIEW
‘Authoring change’



Voices of Resistance: Muslim Women on War, Faith and Sexuality
Edited by Sarah Husain
US: Seal Press, 2006
Pp. 284
$16.95

What brings together the 39 women — and one man — who contributed to this volume is not only their Muslim background, but a shared conviction that something is seriously wrong across the globe.
In essays, poems and artworks, all 40 are crying out for a better world.
This is a cross disciplinary group: writers, visual and performance artists, professors, graduate students, lawyers and community activists. A number of them hold multiple degrees. One, Maryum Saifee, was formerly a Peace Corps volunteer in Jordan, teaching English in a rural school.
They are also transnational. While most live in North America, their roots curl back to Asia: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Iran, Malaysia, Pakistan, Palestine, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Many of them include autobiographical elements in their essays, and the sheer cultural diversity which finds expression in their writing is fascinating.
Besides being of mixed origins, most of them refuse to be pinned down in a single static identity, as expressed by the title of Mansha Parven Mirza’s piece: “My Kaleidoscopic Identity.” (p. 206)
While the essays are intensely personal, they cover issues of great political and social import. These women are on a mission, engaged in a multi-pronged struggle to resist war and other forms of violence — from the Israeli soldier threatening to rape a Palestinian teenager, to the Koran teacher taking advantage of his position to sexually abuse a female student.
Editor Sarah Husain calls it “authoring change”. (p. 273)
“Connecting the wars ‘back’ home — the ones stored in our memory and in/on our bodies — to the wars being carried out today under the dictates of democracy and security, our work seeks to create the disturbances necessary to build peaceful futures.” (p. 7)
An important component of this is struggling to reclaim the essence of their Muslim faith, casting off customs which subordinate women in the name of Islam.
September 11 complicated their mission greatly. As Muslims and women of colour, they faced misunderstanding and harassment, and were deeply affected by the ensuing “war on terrorism”.
As Jawahara K. Saidullah writes, “This current American war machine, chewing up resources, truth, money and people, terrifies me. I am angry there is a war that my tax dollars are paying for. A war that is killing Muslims…. I am enraged at the complacency of the people of the United States who are so naïve as to allow themselves to be willfully mislead.” (p. 194)
Pondering the situation in Palestine, Iraq and other sites of wars and atrocities, as well as the state of the poor and homeless in America, Nuzhat Abbas notes: “There are many ways to kill a people.” (p. 60)
On the other hand, the post-September 11 atmosphere made it more difficult to raise problems within the Muslim community.
Azza Basarudin queries: “Dare I bring gender into the frontier when my community is being harassed, humiliated, denied its freedom of worship, and detained without proper trials, in the name of national security? … People who advocate for gender reform in Muslim societies are, more often than not, accused of being ‘agents’ of the corrupt ‘Western’ world.”
Yet, while “mosques across American scrambled to open their doors to non-Muslims” in the wake of September 11, “in the hope of salvaging the image of Islam,” Muslim women were still hindered from praying alongside men. (pp. 144-5)
In one of the most lively pieces, Aisha Sattar recounts her experience of going on the Hajj to Mecca. Shocked to find that women had less access to the holy places than men, she also resented being constantly reminded not to have a hair showing by the “purity police”, but all the while “they were silent on the obscene presence of malls and McDonald’s lingering outside the gates of the Ka’aba”.
To her, the “focus on technical improvements, rather than on the spiritual dimension of Hajj, undermines the beauty and power of the pilgrimage”. (pp. 164-5)
Most of the authors have kept their transnational links to their country of origin and their essays express a strong sense of family. Despite having broken out of the mould family and society set for them, they value the lessons learned from their parents.
One example is what Bushra Rehman learned by watching her parents telephone networking in New Jersey, to organise relief for her grandmother’s remote mountain village in Pakistan, when it was hit by an earthquake.
“It is from my parents that I learned my first lesson of community organising: You must first have a community, one that you share joy with as well as suffering.” (p. 81)
“Voices of Resistance” is an effort to generate the discussion and commitment needed to form such a community, or series of communities, of people brave enough to resist violence and take control of their own bodily and spiritual lives.
This book may be found at ARAMEX media stores.

Sally Bland
Monday, January 22, 2007