Muslim Schoolgirls Research Articles

Bodies of Walking: Trans-Materializing the Experiences of Racial Harassment

Partaking in some of the material and affective moments and movements that emerged from my PhD research, I map the ontological, epistemological, and ethical possibilities/impossibilities that trans-corporeality and trans-materiality open in my research. Using walking and photo-diary as PhEmaterialist multisensory methodologies, I followed 15 Muslim schoolgirls in two London secondary schools (East Dulwich and Bethnal Green) mapping relational materialities between things that matter for them in their ordinary everyday practices and experiences. Employing Jane Bennett’s creative and absorbent I as a partaker rather than either actor or recipient, taking in and being taken up by virtues specific to the moment, this article materializes some partaker agencies and “more-thans” that Maha (my PhD participant) and I walked, made, challenged, and became with in different “spacetimematterings.” I argue that social injustice and inequalities, gendered and racial harassment as political, ethical, and material issues, are not always raised by those represented or able to name and speak up as part of social structures but emerge through complex webs of power relations and ordinary, everyday material moments and affective encounters. I consider bodies of walking as partakers of influx and efflux, many “I”s, moving and making the moments and experiences of racial harassment, affective entanglements, and the potentialities of the virtual, material, and affective that emerge in-between human and more-than-human walking bodies.

Moving and Mattering with the Wall-ed Feelings: A Posthuman Movement between Possibilities and Impossibilities of Becomings in Educational Research

Taking an affective and material turn, the author maps British-Bangladeshi Muslim schoolgirls' embodied and embedded experiences of racial harassment and racializing assemblages in London.

Watery assemblages: the affective and material swimming-becomings of a Muslim girl’s queer body with nature

AbstractThis paper materialises the affective emergence of watery assemblages between sea, shark, swimming and British-Bangladeshi Muslim schoolgirls of my PhD research. Watery assemblages pushed further my participant’s lived experiences into another layer of ‘force field of differentiation’ (Alaimo,Bodily natures: Science, environment, and the material self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010, p. 14) where stories, flesh and sea became no longer discrete, where the ground is not solid but watery, the movement is not walking or speaking but swimming and the body is not just human but human-animal. Watery assemblages enabled the fluid and affective entanglements with complex and thick experiences of gender and racial harassment. Entangling with images and stories I explore how the affective and material agency of sea, swimming and shark as concept and a performative multiplicity (Protevi,Life, war, earth: Deleuze and the sciences. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013) works as praxis and provocations for thinkings and doings.

Faiza Ambah's Mariam and the Embodied Politics of Veiling in France

This article argues that Mariam uses its eponymous heroine's lived and embodied experiences of veiling to explore the impact of French secular legislation on Muslim schoolgirls' everyday lives in France. Interweaving secularism studies, feminism and phenomenology, I argue that the film portrays the headscarf as the primary means by which its protagonist is able to resist male patriarchal authority and negotiate her hybrid subjectivity. I conclude that Mariam offers a nuanced representation of veiling that troubles the perceived distinctions between Islam and secularism, oppression and freedom, and the veil and feminism in France and the West.

An examination of barriers to physical education for Christian and Muslim girls attending comprehensive secondary schools in the UK

This study examined barriers to Physical Education (PE) in a sample of Christian and Muslim schoolgirls attending UK comprehensive secondary schools. Also assessed was whether religion and school year (age) had any impact upon barrier strength and if school year × religion interactions existed. A questionnaire was developed and exploratory factor analysis was utilised to uncover barrier factors. Six factors were found; these were: ‘Self-Conscious’, ‘Sensations’, ‘Embarrassment’, ‘Dislike/Unimportant’, ‘PE Uniform’ and ‘Religiosity’. For the total sample, the highest quotient was assigned to the ‘PE Uniform’ barrier factor. The remaining barrier factors received relatively low quotients. When analysed by religious persuasion, it was found that four of the barrier factors were rated significantly higher by the Muslim girls. For both Christian and Muslim samples, barrier strength tended to increase in line with school year (age). School year × religion interactions were also evident. These results provide a contemporary picture of potential barriers to PE for girls attending comprehensive secondary schools in the UK.

Physical Health of Sunni Muslim School Girls of Delhi (6–12 years)

The present study is an attempt to investigate the physical health of Sunni Muslim school girls of Delhi. The study subjects were selected form educational institutes of Delhi, India. A total of 370 girls aged 6–12 years were measured. All the subjects were measured for the Body Weight and height as per the recommendations of Weiner and Lourie [1981]. It has been observed from the present study that there is an increase in body weight and height with advancement of age. In the present study, it has been seen that there is a high degree of relationship between height and weight. The mean height and weight of the present study was compared with other Muslim girls. The Sunni Muslim girls of Delhi were healthier than Aligarh and Pakistani girls but were less healthy than girls of Bahrain, well to do Indian girls and Qatari girls.

Muslim schoolgirls' identity and participation in school-based physical education in England

Muslim schoolgirls' identity and participation in school-based physical education in England

COMMON PRINCIPLES, DIFFERENT HISTORIES: UNDERSTANDING RELIGIOUS LIBERTY IN THE UNITED STATES AND FRANCE

In her bookLiberty of Conscience: In Defense of America's Tradition of Religious Equality(New York: Basic Books, 2008) the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum joins a chorus of American intellectuals who have criticized France and other European nations for their failure to embrace the concept of cultural pluralism. In Nussbaum's opinion, the meaning that the French attach toegalitéhas remained stuck in circumstances peculiar to the eighteenth century. The concept is outdated and has not in the contemporary world been able to protect cultural diversity in general and religious diversity in particular. Her book takes to task what she terms “the French tradition of “coercive assimilation” that is insensitive to what George Washington stressed as the “‘delicacy and tenderness’ that is owed to other people's ‘conscientious scruples.’” The French refusal to allow Muslim schoolgirls to cover their heads with a foulard, however stylish it might be, is linked back to the French emancipation of Jews that required, in Nussbaum's analysis, a heavy requirement of cultural erasure. The French, like most Europeans, grew used to the idea “that citizens are all alike,” an idea that now haunts France as it tries to figure out what to do with its Muslim population.

Muslim headscarves in France and army uniforms in Israel: a comparative study of citizenship as mask

ABSTRACT On 15 March 2004 the French government passed a law that banned the wearing of ‘conspicuous signs’ of religious affiliation in public schools. The ban was the result of an ongoing controversy in France about the admissibility of the hijab worn by Muslim schoolgirls. On 8 November 2007 Professor Nizar Hassan, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, asked a Jewish student of his, who came to class wearing his army uniform, to refrain from wearing it to his classes in the future. Following the incident a public storm erupted in which high-ranking officers in the Israeli army participated. Considering these two very different controversies involving individuals belonging to minority groups can provide a new perspective on current debates about citizenship and difference. It can shift the focus of the investigation from the Islamic Other as an object of enquiry to the interaction between the state and the individual as participants in a complex symbolic conversation. The two controversies should be read against the background of two contrasting conceptions of the public sphere and its relations to equality: while the French republic insists on creating a neutral public sphere as a pre-condition for equality, in Israel the possibility of equality is connected to guaranteeing a separation between the public and the private sphere. Comparing the two controversies, Bilsky considers one recurrent theme that dominated them both, the accusation of hypocrisy, and she analyses the ways in which this accusation distorted the public debate. She argues that the focus on hypocrisy reveals an important aspect of citizenship that was misinterpreted in both cases, namely ‘citizenship as mask’. Without a proper understanding of the role of masks in democratic citizenship, we witness the transformation of a debate about equality and plurality into a competition for the exposing of hypocrites. Bilsky returns to Hannah Arendt's reflections on citizenship as a way to understand the limits of a theory of equality based on sameness, and uses the two controversies to demonstrate the need to develop a theory of citizenship that can better respond to both equality and plurality.

PAKEHA TAONGA AND THE SOCIOLOGY OF DRESS

When in 2004 a Pakeha student was not allowed to wear her amethyst pendant to school, she claimed it as her taonga since it was spiritually and culturally significant to her. Through this she entered a cultural and political debate about what it means to be Pakeha, drawing on Maori cultural meanings to do so. Demonstrating the dynamic and transformational nature of culture, her actions contributed to constructs of cultural identity in Aotearoa New Zealand in a vital way, although her arguments to wear her pendant were never formally recognised. The ensuing struggle over cultural meanings and interpretations which her situation provoked has some parallels with that of Muslim schoolgirls in France wanting to wear headscarves to school, highlighting what it means to wear culture. Their claims are for diversity in the face of a dominant monoculturalism, exposed through this debate as defining cultural identity in its narrowest sense. The debate also exposes some beliefs about where Pakeha stand in relation to the Treaty of Waitangi.

Symposium Introduction: Immigration and National Identity

n February 2, 2005, newly elected Florida Senator, and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary, Mel Martinez, a Cuban-American immigrant, shattered a 216-year tradition of the U.S. Senate ... when he used the ceremonial occasion of his first floor speech to speak three sentences in Spanish.' This event represents the first time a language other than English was entered in the Congressional Record. He did so in support of Mexican-American Alberto Gonzales' nomination to the post of Attorney General. Martinez was rhetorically addressing his remarks to immigrants, whom he described as having come to America to seek a better life. He described Gonzales as uno de nosotros, or of us. This event is notable for more than simply the use of a language other than English on the floor of the U.S. Senate. First, Martinez's use of Spanish is just the latest example of the growing comfort across a variety of political stripes and segments of American society with the use of Spanish in public and official environments. After all, President George W. Bush delivered a weekly radio address in Spanish, itself a precedent-shattering moment. Second, the apparent expression of social identity-nosotroswith Mr. Gonzalez, a Mexican-American, is emblematic of a slowly emerging pan-ethnic identity among Latinos across a variety of national origin groups. Finally, what is perhaps most remarkable is that both the speaker and the subject of his comments represent the right of the American political spectrum. This event perfectly illustrates the circumstances described, and decried, in Samuel Huntington's latest book, Who Are We? In his latest effort, Huntington lays out an argument regarding the nature and origin of American national identity. America, he suggests, is an AngloProtestant society, at least culturally, and it is the values and customs of this culture that are uniquely responsible for American greatness. But this identity is seriously threatened, he argues, by the large-scale immigration from Latin America-and especially Mexico-that has characterized the last three decades. Latino immigrants, he contends, do not share salient aspects of this Anglo-Protestant culture and, unlike generations of immigrants before them, seem disinterested in acquiring them. While newly articulated, the core claims of Huntington's argument are actually quite familiar. Elements of the intellectual contentions can be found within a longer line of thought which includes Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s The Disuniting ofAmerica; Peter Skerry's Mexican Americans: An Ambivalent Minority; Nathan Glazer's We areAllMulticulturalists Now; and Patrick J. Buchanan's The Death of the West, among countless others. Certainly, there are important points of departure that distinguish each of these works from Huntington's, as well as from each other, but each reflects one or more aspects of the national angst that has historically been engendered by the twin issues of immigration and assimilation. These arguments and fears find political expression in the outspoken comments of Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-CO), the passage of antiimmigrant initiatives in California and Arizona, Englishonly laws and initiatives in a variety of states, as well as the public advocacy of groups like U.S. English and the Federation for American Immigration Reform. The American experience, of course, is not entirely unique. Contentious debate over immigration, occasionally accompanied by violence, has emerged in several parts of the European Union, Australia, Canada, Israel, and elsewhere. Whether it is changes to asylum and nationality laws in Germany, banning of head-scarves for Muslim school-girls in France, or riots at the gates to the Spanish North African enclaves of Cueta and Melilla by North Africans seeking to migrate to Europe, the movement of culturally, racially, or religiously distinct peoples across international boundaries, and the implications of these to the national character and identity of the receiving society, continues to be the subject of ongoing political contestation. Moreover, the relatively poor fit globally between international boundaries and culturally homogenous populations has repeatedly raised questions about the ability of culturally and linguistically heterogeneous populations to hang together as functional and successful polities. The American experience, however, is at least somewhat different in that the United States was never an organic nation, at least not in the way that Western Europeans would recognize. Even in the earliest stages of non-indigenous settlement of North America, there was

Laïcité and the banning of the ‘hijab’ in France

In Spring 2004 the French Parliament agreed to the passing of a Bill named ‘Application of the Principle of Secularity’. The new law was brought into effect on 2 September 2004, banning all ‘ostentatious’ religious symbols in state schools and the enactment denies Muslim schoolgirls the right to wear the ‘hijab’ (or the traditional Muslim headscarf) in French public schools. The new enactment has stirred controversy within the Islamic world where many have considered the law to be an example of ‘Islamophobia’ and the West's intolerance towards the religion of Islam. This article aims to understand the historical background and the rationale of the ban on religious symbols in French state schools and seeks to examine some of the main criticisms of the new law.

Dressed to Impress: Looking the Part

Our dress is our identity. In dress, we live, move and have our social being. This book shows how the dressed body is central to the construction of a recognizable identity and provides accessible accounts of the particular dress 'ways' associated with a considerable variety of lifestyles. Churchgoers, ballerinas, Muslim schoolgirls, glamour models, 'vampires', monks and country gents all fashion a social self through dress. These cultures all have characteristic forms of displaying the dressed body for social visibility - whether in religion, sex, performance, or on the street. In contrast to much of the literature on dress, which often assumes a lack of agency on the part of the wearer, contributors to this book focus on the conscious manipulation of dress to reflect an identity that is designed to look 'different'. Why do people choose to mark themselves off socially from others? What are the costs and benefits? For every dress 'identity', there is a corresponding set of entitlements and expectations as to behaviour and belief. 'Priestly' bodies inhabit a different universe of response from strippers, just as 'Gothic' bodies experience the public gaze differently from 'Methodist' ones. Where one look commands respect in one setting, in another it can incite antipathy and rejection. Contributors tackle head-on this 'paradox of dress' - its potent power to unite and divide. Evidence of the dressed body's social ambiguity as a medium of consensus, on the one hand, and conflict, on the other, provides a glimpse through dress into an elementary condition of social and cultural life that has all too rarely been part of historical and sociological discourse.

Responses of Liberal Democratic Societies to Claims from Ethnic Minorities to Community Rights

Immigrants within European and North American countries, with their different religions and ways of life, pose many challenges to the receiving countries' liberal values and ways of life. These challenges express themselves in the form of cultural conflicts played out within the microcosm of the schools. The paper explores the place of minority rights within two liberal societies and examines how the societies' different procedures and ideology resulted in different outcomes for minority rights. These are examined in relation to two selected court cases involving cultural and religious expression through the wearing of religious or cultural attire in schools which attempted to ban these religious or cultural attire despite claims that these 'dress' or attire constituted a religious requirement or an intrinsic aspect of a way of life. The first case involves the wearing of headscarves (called foulards) by Muslim school girls in France, while the second case involves the wearing of a turban by a Sikh pupil. Attempts are made to discuss broader issues of cultural minority community rights within liberal democratic and human rights frameworks.