List of Responses to Mona Eltahawy’s piece “Why Do They Hate Us?”

muslimwomeninhistory:

In case you are not sure why Mona Eltahawy has been regularly subject to criticism, here is a good introductory article. Most of the articles I found via sharquaouia’s tumblr.

1. Al Jazeera’s Roundup of praise and criticism
2. Samia Errazzouki, “Dear Mona Eltahawy, You Do Not Represent “Us”
3. Mehreen Kasana (Quote from her Tumblr)
4. The Frustrated Arab, “Us and Them: On Helpless Women and Orientalist Imagery”
5. Foreign Policy, “Debating the War on Women” - Includes responses from Leila Ahmed, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, Hanin Ghaddar, Naheed Mustafa, and Sondos Asem
6. Tahrir Spirit, “I don’t really think they hate us”
7. Dima Kathib, “Love, Not Hatred, Dear Mona”
8. Omid Safi, “The hypocrisy of the “Why They Hate Us” rhetoric of Muslim Native Informants”
9. Mona Kareem, “‘Why Do They Hate Us?’ A Blogger’s Response”
10. Ayesha Kazmi, “Oh Mona!”
11. Tahrir and Beyond, “Mona: Why do you hate us?”
12. Tom Dale, Open Democracy, “Hatred and misogyny in the Middle East, a response to Mona el Tahawy”
13. The Atlantic, “The Real Roots of Sexism in the Middle East (It’s Not Islam, Race, or ‘Hate’)”
14. Global Voices Online, “Do Arab Men Hate Women? Mona Eltahawy Faces Firestorm”
15. Sherene Seikaly and Maya Mikdashi, Jadaliyya, “Let’s Talk About Sex”
16. Egypt Initiative for Personal Rights, “Get an Arab Woman to Say it For You”
17. AltMuslimah, “Everybody ‘Hates’ Mona”
18. Colonial Feminism, “Dear Mona Eltahawy”
19. LoonWatch, “Why Do They Hate Us? They Don’t”
20. Sheila Musaji, The American Muslim, “Mona Eltahawy Jumpstarts an Important Dialogue”
21. Muslim Reverie, “Responses to Mona Eltahawy’s ‘Why Do They Hate Us?’”
22. Nesrine Malik, The Guardian, “Do Arab men hate women? It’s not that simple”
23. Mohammed AbdelFattah: An Egyptian Journalist, “What Six Egyptian Women Have to Say About Mona Eltahawy”
24. Sohrab Ahrami, The Tablet Magazine, “The Egyptian journalist Mona Eltahawy is being smeared as an imperialist for calling out gender apartheid in the Mideast. She’s dead right.”
25. Eric Justin, Harvard Crimson, “Hatred, Women, and the Arab Spring”

If you know of any more articles to contribute to this list please send me a message (You can send links through fanmail)

She’s one of Islam’s harshest critics, and – as her recent talk at the Sydney Opera House showed – even otherwise politically correct western liberals lap up her rhetoric. But author Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s own fundamentalism makes her arguments against her former religion less persuasive, writes Katrina Fox.

esprit-follet:

When [Ayaan Hirsi Ali] moved on to critique Islam’s requirement of unwavering adherence to the will of Allah without questioning or critical thinking, its governing of sexuality by honour and shame, and the abuse of young girls through FGM, I found myself nodding in agreement.

But alarm bells started to go off when, asked by an audience member about the moves to ban the burqua in Europe, she said: “If I were a law maker I would make it my priority to ban Muslim schools rather than the burqua.”

When challenged on how she could justify banning Muslim schools and not other faith-based schools, she replied:

“We know how bad Muslim schools are for assimilating Muslims into society. The point of Christianity is enlightenment. If we apply the argument of cultural legitimacy, it is ok to allow Jewish or Christian schools while banning Muslim schools because Islam is a very different religion. We should ban Muslim schools because they are grooming people to reject the values of the country they are now living in. Muslim kids are isolated in Muslim schools and it’s not fair to isolate them. Also there is a worldwide jihad movement that targets vulnerable kids. Judeo-Christian schools are not targeted this way. A ban on Muslim schools is in the interests of the kids and society.”

Her comments elicited a large round of enthusiastic applause. And if the people sitting at my table were anything to go by, audience members were not uneducated rednecks or right-wing conservatives, but liberal, left-leaning folk who would proudly reel off their support for equality and social justice in most other contexts.

And that’s when my epiphany happened. Where once I would have been clapping vigorously along, pleased to have my long-held assumptions confirmed by ‘someone who knows’ and who ‘you can’t really argue with’, I felt sick.

Now, I’m no fan of religion – of any kind. But Hirsi Ali’s simultaneous condemnation of Islam and obvious admiration of Christianity was disturbing. As with any religion or ideology, it’s how it’s practised that impacts on people’s lives and on society.

Many of Hirsi Ali’s criticisms of Islam could be applied to fundamentalist Christianity: unwavering adherence to the Bible and the control of women’s sexuality. Even FGM has a western parallel in the state-sanctioned, legal, non-consensual mutilation of intersex children’s genitals to force them to conform to a male/female sex binary – something that rarely warrants an outcry in mainstream media or from feminist activists. If Christian fundamentalists such as Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church had their way, our society would look very different in terms of women’s and queer rights, to name just two.

Of course in no way am I saying that we should not pay attention to and speak out against the abuses endured by so many women and girls in the Muslim world. Nor am I saying we should not be critical of radical, fundamentalist Islam – as Mona Siddiqui points out in her review of Nomad in the UK’s Daily Telegraph, there are many Muslims who fear radical Islam. But vilifying an entire religion or people who follow that religion is not the way to create a harmonious society – as history as shown time and again.

The irony is that while Hirsi Ali is (rightly) applauded for her courage in fighting for and finding personal freedom, she now denies others such rights. In unleashing her wrath on Islamic fundamentalism, she has (perhaps unwittingly) become a fundamentalist herself.

It doesn’t help that she has achieved celebrity status, because once a person reaches a certain level of fame for their ideas, they are then invested in sticking with them for their own economic survival. It’s a rare academic, writer or thinker who is willing to take the risk of losing their career and/or income by doing an about-turn.

So, perhaps it’s down to publishers to champion other writers with as much vigour as they do Hirsi Ali; to publish and promote the hell out of the work of Muslim feminists working on the ground in their local communities to educate and effect change; to bring the female activists such as those featured in Coleman’s book to international writers’ festivals and posh venues like the Sydney Opera House.

I’d certainly buy a ticket. What about you?

—

Why white people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali - The Scavenger

— Article: Voice Appropriation & Writing About Other Cultures ~ RukhsanaKhan.com (via racismfreeontario)

REVIEWS: by Muslim Canadian Congress for “Me and the Mosque: A documentary.”

esprit-follet:

See video here. 

An insightful and often amusing look at the past and resent role of women in Islam, Me and the Mosque features both whimsical animation and in-depth interviews with people on all sides of the issue. The film was produced through the NFB’s Reel Diversity program, a national, annual competition for emerging filmmakers of colour.

As Islamic scholars reveal to Nawaz, early Muslim society was egalitarian: both sexes prayed together, and women played prominent roles in the community. However, over the last two centuries in particular, women have been increasingly segregated.

Today, more than 90 percent of Muslims in Canada come from Muslim countries where men and women never pray together, and mosques here naturally cater to these expectations. Of the approximately 140 mosques in this country, an estimated two-thirds require women to pray behind barriers, partitions or curtains.

Frustrated by their exclusion, many young women of Nawaz’s generation have turned away from organized worship altogether. In the course of her odyssey, Nawaz speaks to men with traditional views on the separation of the sexes, and women yearning to play an equal part in worship. She meets the architect of a new mosque in Surrey, B.C.,interviews an American writer who fought publicly for the right to pray alongside men at her mosque in West Virginia, and hosts an eye-opening panel discussion on this issue at a gathering in Gimli, Man.

As one female activist tells her: “Every woman who has the courage of her convictions has to get up and say no. You can ignore me as long as you want, but here I am to stay.”

. Me and the Mosque

Me, The Muslim Next Door – What Muslim Reality Shows Should Be

I very much recommend watching these videos, regardless of your religious…or nonreligious affiliation.

esprit-follet:

One of the main criticisms of TLC’s All American Muslim was that the show’s characters were representative of only a small part of the American Muslim community.  If you felt that way, then a great antidote is Me, the Muslim Next Door, a web documentary produced for Radio Canada International.  Filmed in Montreal and Toronto in both English and French, Me the Muslim Next Door is over two hours of audio, video, and still photography, broken up into 4-6 minute segments, with each of the show’s participants having several segments.  These segments took place in the participants’ personal landscapes – at home, on the street, with their families.

 

Me, the Muslim Next Door is cast like a cross between the United Nations and a Benetton ad. I love it.  We have:

• Eduardo, a Brazilian convert who, by his own admission, used to hate Muslims;
• Dania, whose father is Eritrean and whose mother is a convert from  Quebec;
• Mehdi, a Moroccan married to Laila from Afghanistan; they met on Facebook;
• Suad, whose mother is Syrian and whose father is part Palestinian, part Bosnian and, to add some fun to the mix, her husband Karim is part Finnish, part Egyptian;
• Rizwan, of South Asian background, who lives in Toronto and takes us to his neighbourhood masjid.

One of my recurring problems with Muslims in the media is that we are often portrayed answering the same questions in the same ways. Every show has something about polygamy or hijab or “fitting in.” We either go on tape with platitudes (“oh but you can only be polygamous if you afford it, isn’t it great that widows can be taken care of”), with statements designed to shock the middle classes (“jihad is ok for the kuffar!”), or with instant fatwas about how our religion says things in black and white (“Islam says music is BAD”).

These topics show up in Me the Muslim Next Door, but the  “personal landscape” format of the videos allows a fresh, personal light without bringing down the level of the discourse.

Mehdi and Laila, a mixed Sunni-Shia couple, explain that for them, the most important part of Islam is at the level of the shahada. If you say the shahada, you’re ok, and sectarian or other differences don’t matter.  That spoke to me. Jamila, part of a large family, explains why she stays close to her parents – because they made sacrifices for her when she was a child, so she will make sacrifices for them as an adult. Suad and Karim had a marriage semi-arranged by their MSA, “but” played the piano at their wedding. And Dania’s 23^rd birthday party was alcohol-free. She mentions alcohol – that she has never had it, but doesn’t see what it could bring to an already good time. These are people and situations I can relate to and the type of Muslims I want people to see when they ask me about my religion. The show’s participants leave out “Islam says this” and instead talk about these topics in the terms of personal choices they have made in their private lives.

As a francophone Louisianian who lived and studied in Canada, I absolutely LOVED seeing normal Muslim people I could relate to in their living rooms talking about their families, hopes, jobs and dreams. I found my place more in this show than I did in All-American Muslim. The difference is that the goal of Me, the Muslim Next Door isn’t sensational. It nails the fine line between “educating the mass market” and giving Muslim viewers characters who are different enough to be interesting yet similar enough for all of us, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, to find common ground.

Me, The Muslim Next Door – What Muslim Reality Shows Should Be | Racialicious - the intersection of race and pop culture

My Take: ‘All-American Muslim’ doesn’t speak for this Muslim

esprit-follet:

Anytime I hear about a TV  how coming out that features Muslims, my initial reaction is almost always “Oh man, please don’t suck. Please don’t suck.”

Unfortunately with TLC’s new reality show, it does.

“All-American Muslim” is the network’s new series about a group of Muslim families living in the Arab-rich city of Dearborn, Michigan.

 Brilliant! What better way to show the mainstream public an insight into how multicultural and intellectually diverse Islam’s followers are… with a show focusing on just Arabs (20 percent of the world’s Muslim population) who follow the Shia sect of Islam (about 10 percent of the world’s Muslim population).

The show, which premiered over the weekend, presents itself as a glimpse into the American Muslim community but ignores an overwhelming majority of the cultures that comprise it. South Asians like my parents, who came from India, make up one of the largest group of Muslim immigrants in the United States.

That doesn’t bother me as much as the fact that the show makes no reference to African-American Muslims, another huge American Muslim group. Many of the black slaves that built the foundation of this country with blood, sweat and tears were Muslim.

And Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Dave Chappelle and Lupe Fiasco are all American Muslims, too. Hell, Detroit is right next to Dearborn. All the producers had to do was turn around and they’d find one of the most active African-American Muslim communities in the country.

The first episode said Dearborn has the largest population of Arabs in the United States – a statistic I’ve heard echoed time and time again. But I just checked the latest statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau and learned that the Arab population in New York City is more than twice that of Dearborn. Seems like TLC can’t even stereotype correctly.

A bigger issue I have is with the show’s characters.

One woman is a boozing, tattoo-laden rebel child who wants to marry an Irish Catholic. Another is a scantily-clad and confrontational business shark who dreams about opening her own nightclub.

While I appreciate that the show is implying that Muslim women are more than just devout, headscarf-wearing housewives locked in the kitchen all day, why do the “liberal” characters represent an opposite extreme? Most Muslim women in this country don’t fit neatly into the ultra-conservative or ultra-liberal categories. They’re in the gray area.

The men on the show, meanwhile, are just plain boring. There’s a Muslim cop who insecurely reiterates his patriotism every 10 seconds. I’m surprised he doesn’t sleep in American flag pajamas and that his cell phone ringtone isn’t a Toby Keith song.

My favorite part of the show’s first episode is the spotlight it throws on the predominantly Muslim football team at Dearborn Fordson High School. “All-American Muslim” spends significant time on the team but leaves out that they’re 6-5 this season and scoreless in the first game losing by more than 40 points.

While its great that faith means so much to these players, it would be nice if scoring touchdowns meant just as much to them, too.

I recently co-created a project with called 30 Mosques in 30 Days, in which my friend Bassam Tariq and I drove over 25,000 miles to each of the 50 states to tell unfiltered stories about Muslim Americans. “All-American Muslim” doesn’t speak for them, nor does it speak for me.

These stories bear little resemblance to the narratives of my own or the ones I’ve stumbled across in my community.

You want to do an authentic story about an American Muslim? Do a story about a scrawny 20-something guy who awkwardly spends months mustering up the courage to tell a girl he likes her. Or girls that blabber about another girl they see talking to a guy for more than 11 seconds.

Best yet, passive aggressive parents that try to segue anything that comes out of your mouth into a lecture about why you should have been a doctor or why you’re going to die alone if you don’t get married by age 23.

That’s Muslim America. They’re stories of people no different than any one else in this country.

TLC has disappointed me. But maybe that’s not saying much, considering the network airs two shows exploiting the lives of little people and one called “I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant.”

My Take: ‘All-American Muslim’ doesn’t speak for this Muslim – CNN Belief Blog - CNN.com Blogs

So I guess I agree with this guy, minus the part about liking religion. Mainly the part I italicized. That part I can relate to, and I’m sure a large of the Muslim population can. 

Did anyone watch this? Thoughts?