Representations Of Muslim Women Research Articles

Specters of Islam

In this paper, I trace historical developments in Islamist politics and mainstream feminism in relation to media representations of Muslim women. By examining articles in The New York Times (NYT) published between 1979 and 2011, I suggest that secular representations of Islam, both in the media and feminist discourse, propagate what I call ‘anti-Islamism.’ By constructing a periodization based on signature events within contemporary Islamist history (what I term an ‘Islamist periodization’), I identify tactical shifts within the larger, global strategy of anti-Islamism. As a conceptual frame, anti-Islamism moves beyond articulations that either conceptualize Islamophobia as a behavioral-psychological disposition created through misinformation, or as a structural form of racial bigotry. Instead, anti-Islamism describes a consistent effort to counter and negate Islam’s world-making aspirations. Ultimately, I deduce that feminism as a political and epistemic project (with three major exceptions) is necessarily incompatible with Islamic orthodoxy – an incompatibility reinforced by media representations.

Specters of Islam

In this paper, I trace historical developments in Islamist politics and mainstream feminism in relation to media representations of Muslim women. By examining articles in The New York Times (NYT) published between 1979 and 2011, I suggest that secular representations of Islam, both in the media and feminist discourse, propagate what I call ‘anti-Islamism.’ By constructing a periodization based on signature events within contemporary Islamist history (what I term an ‘Islamist periodization’), I identify tactical shifts within the larger, global strategy of anti-Islamism. As a conceptual frame, anti-Islamism moves beyond articulations that either conceptualize Islamophobia as a behavioral-psychological disposition created through misinformation, or as a structural form of racial bigotry. Instead, anti-Islamism describes a consistent effort to counter and negate Islam’s world-making aspirations. Ultimately, I deduce that feminism as a political and epistemic project (with three major exceptions) is necessarily incompatible with Islamic orthodoxy – an incompatibility reinforced by media representations.

Representation of Muslim Women in Manga Satoko & Nada

Since the beginning of the 21st century, the mass media has been inclined towards constructing a negative image of Islam, which is internalized by the societies in countries where Moslems are in the minority, including Japan. Modern Japanese society is very dependent on the mass media for quick and concise information. The image of Islam internalized by the Japanese society is the one associated with terrorism and backwardness. This paper presents a different representation of Islam as reflected in a Japanese manga Satoko & Nada which focuses on the friendship between a Japanese girl Satoko and an Arab girl Nada in the United States. Visual and verbal analysis on the manga reveals an uncommon image of Moslem women which is not inclined towards excessive self-limitation. The manga shows that Moslem women really have a degree of freedom to express themselves, albeit with some limitation. Besides that, it also features open-minded Moslem women who are not hesitant to welcome modernization. Those characteristics are very different from the popular beliefs about Moslem women as constructed by mainstream mass media. As one of Japanese popular media, manga Satoko & Nada serves as a counter narrative by offering a different image of Moslem women as never shown in common mass media. Mulai dari dekade 2000-an, Media massa mengonstruksi citra Islam yang cenderung negatif dan telah terinternalisasi pada masyarakat di negara-negara non-mayoritas Islam, termasuk Jepang. Masyarakat Jepang modern sangat tergantung pada media massa untuk mendapatkan informasi dengan ringkas dan cepat. Imaji Islam yang terinternalisasi di dalam masyarakat Jepang pun terasosiasi pada terorisme dan keterbelakangan. Dalam makalah ini akan dipaparkan representasi muslim yang berbeda dalam manga Jepang berjudul Satoko&Nada yang menceritakan persahabatan Satoko, gadis yang berasal dari Jepang dan Nada, gadis yang berasal dari Arab di Amerika Serikat. Dari analisis visual dan verbal terlihat konstruksi identitas wanita muslim yang tidak sepenuhnya tertutup. Diperlihatkan bahwa wanita muslim di dalam Satoko&Nada memiliki kebebasan untuk mengekspresikan dirinya walaupun terbatas. Selain itu diperlihatkan pula wanita muslim yang memiliki pemikiran terbuka dan mengikuti arus modernisasi. Karakteristik-karakteristik tersebut sangat berlawanan dengan popular belief mengenai wanita muslim yang telah dikonstruksi dalam media massa. Manga Satoko&Nada sebagai salah satu dari media populer Jepang menyampaikan wacana tandingan mengenai wanita muslim yang tidak pernah terlihat di dalam media massa.

Representation of Muslim Women in the Western Media

This essay attempts to argue about the representation of Muslim women in veil in Western media. This topic is chosen because of general discourse about Muslim women, who wear veil as a threat to secular tradition and value of freedom. Besides, media has power to create affirmation about the general discourse. This paper analyses some researches about Muslim women in media. Based on previous research, it can be assumed that media has power to create women representation as otherness and placed them as threat towards secular tradition and value of freedom.

Reimagining Muslim Women Through the Prism of Minor Diasporic and National Literatures

This essay explores the representation of Muslim women by reclaiming the concept of diaspora as disrupting both orientalist imaginations and the increasing tyranny of a homogenized Muslim ‘Ummah’ regulating their bodies. In British Bangladeshi author Monica Ali's Brick Lane (2003), Mauritian writer Carl de Souza's La Maison qui Marchait vers le Large (2001) and South African novelist Rayda Jacobs’ Confessions of a Gambler (2003), traditional boundaries of Muslim female identities can be redrawn through the inscription of the South Asian diaspora as a significant site for the exploration of Muslim femininities. The indentured system was based on an exploitative system of contracted labour. Bangladeshi factory workers today, like Indian indentured female labourers of much earlier times, can also be evoked in terms of Spivak's concept of the ‘gendered subaltern subject’. The story lines of Brick Lane and La Maison qui Marchait vers le Large also contain elements of Bollywood cinema narratives, a key matrix for the construction of South Asian diasporic identities, which unlocks potentially different readings of Muslim female characters. Confessions of a Gambler and La Maison qui Marchait vers le Large plot Muslim identities beyond traditional cultural geographies and imaginaries in terms of creolized practices.

A Reformed Islamic Education: Grounds for Re-visiting Cosmopolitanism

Inasmuch as Muslims and Muslim women in particular, are struggling to find accommodation and expression in a pluralist society, cosmopolitanism is grappling in its understanding and acceptance of what constitutes the presentations and representations of Muslim women. By proposing a reformed approach to Islamic education as well as a renewed cosmopolitanism, this article sets out to show how cosmopolitanism can contribute to the lived experiences of Muslim women, and how the latter can indeed find a space of recognised articulation. It is the main argument of this article that by re-visiting the notion of the otherness of Other, in terms of cosmopolitanism, and by exploring options for a reformed Islamic education - by specifically looking at the elements of ta’lim (instruction), ta’dib (just action) and tarbiyah (nurturing) - the nurturing of a commensurable relationship is not only possible, but holds unexplored implications for democratic citizenship education.

Al-Huda International

Al-Huda International was founded in Islamabad in 1994 by Farhat Hashmi and has since spread across several continents. Its rapid spread has been considerably aided by the online classes in English and Urdu from its headquarters in Canada. Its goal is to teach the Qur’an in Arabic to as many women as possible so they can access the sacred text directly without mediation and live in greater harmony with Qur’anic values. One might argue that Al-Huda uses a very “modern” technology, the Internet, to promote “traditional” religious values. But online students’ mastery of Arabic and intensive study of Islamic history and theology, my study argues, simultaneously gives them voice and a sense of empowerment, thereby challenging both traditional Islamic authority structures and Western representations of Muslim women. In this study, based on research grounded in participant observation as a former online student at Al-Huda, I provide an ethnographic portrait of the online learning experience.

Interrogating Practices of Gender, Religion and Nationalism in the Representation of Muslim Women in Bollywood: Contexts of Change, Sites of Continuity

Through a discourse analysis of four commercially successful Bollywood films between 2012-2013, this paper investigates Bollywood’s role in creation of hierarchical identities in the Indian society wherein Muslims occupy the position of the inferior ‘other’ to the superior Hindu ‘self’. Focusing on Muslim heroines, the paper demonstrates that the selected narratives attempt to move away from the older binary identity narratives of Muslim women such as nation vs. religion and hyper-sexualised courtesan vs. subservient veiled women, towards identity narratives borne out of Muslim women’s choice of education, career and life partner, political participation, and embodied practices. However, in comparison to signs of change the sites of continuity are strongly embedded in the religious-nationalistic meta-narrative that drives the paradigms of Indian femininity/ womanhood. To conclude, the nature of the recent deployment of Muslim heroines in Bollywood reinforce the hierarchy between the genders (male-female), between the communities (Hindu-Muslim) and between nations (India- Pakistan).

The veil or a brother's life: French manipulations of Muslim women's images during the Algerian War, 1954–62

In the middle of the Algerian War of Independence, the French military and government launched an elaborate campaign to ‘liberate’ Algerian Muslim women. The timing of its inception indicated one of the strongest motivations behind this elaborate series of policies. Indeed, French propagandists and officials, prompted by the appearance on the international stage of ‘modern’-looking female Algerian nationalist agents, scrambled to uphold the myth that Algerian Muslim gender relations in the territory were ‘backwards’ and only they could rectify this shortcoming in Algerian society. They consequently embarked upon the emancipation campaign mainly in pursuit of convincing outsiders of France's purported ability and duty to make Algeria ‘modern'. For this reason, the production of photographic evidence capable of visually demonstrating that Muslim women were becoming French and liberated under French guidance was one of the campaign's central aims. In order to obtain such evidence, military agents exploited and falsified representations of Muslim women, a process this article examines. The present work additionally elucidates many of the hypocrisies inherent in the French army's exploitation of Muslim women and their bodies through their elaborate propagandist efforts; through their actions on the ground in Algeria, French soldiers and military leaders, including individuals directly implicated in the ‘emancipation’ campaign, were actually confining, abusing, and torturing Muslim women rather than freeing them.

Transgressing Boundaries despite the Barriers: Arab Women in Four Recent Films

Transgressing Boundaries despite the Barriers: Arab Women in Four Recent Films

Of Trojan Horses and Terrorist Representations: Mom Bombs, Cross-Dressing Terrorists, and Queer Orientalisms

This article employs anti-racist feminist theory to respond to a document published by the Department of Homeland Security United States in 2008. This document communicated the threatening possibility that women would use burqas or pregnancy prosthetics to hide bombs. Focusing on this report, the authors explore how the bodies of Muslim women have become spectacular in the post-9/11 period. Working at the intersections of gender, modernity, and visibility, they demonstrate that representations of Muslim women as threats is a new Orientalist discourse that justifies aggressive interventions against Muslim women, including new technologies such as backscatter X-rays.

American Muslim Women, Religious Authority, and Activism

In American Muslim Women, Religious Authority, and Activism: More Than aPrayer, Juliane Hammer traces recent conversations around gender and religionwithin American Muslim communities. Taking as a starting point the mixedgenderFriday prayer led by Amina Wadud in 2005, the author examines howquestions of gendered religious authority have been negotiated through interpretationsof scripture and religious laws, challenges to constructions of traditionand community, contestations surrounding prayer spaces, and representationsof Muslim women in the media and autobiographical narratives.100 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 31:1The result is a valuable and insightful mapping of some of the majorscholars, activists, and public figures engaged in work related to women, gender,and Islam in North America. Based on an analysis of texts produced byfemale American Muslim scholars and writers since the 1980s and especiallywithin the past decade, the book highlights women’s contributions to debatesaround women-led prayer, Qur’anic interpretations, women’s spaces inmosques, and women’s leadership within Muslim communities, among otherissues. Hammer acknowledges that of many of the texts she studies have a“progressive” leaning, but frames this as itself a research finding that reflectsthe perspectives and voices most likely to be published or otherwise highlightedwithin an American context ...

(Muslim) Women’s Bodies, Islamophobia, and American Politics

Taking Islamophobia as shorthand for a set of more complex phenomena in recent American politics this article offers an analysis of some of the ways in which Muslim women’s bodies have occupied center stage in discourses on Islam and Muslims in the United States. It focuses on representations of Muslim women as victims of their religion and the men in their communities on the one hand, and the discrimination and marginalization of the same Muslim women in public discourse and security policies on the other. Islamophobic discourses are also gendered through the particular contribution of women pundits and their claims to feminist authenticity. Recognizing the racist, xenophobic, and misogynist dimensions of Islamophobic discourses within a liberal framework makes it possible to go beyond decrying its premises and repercussions.

Just between us: identity and representation among Muslim women

Postcolonial feminist representations of Muslim women as subjects and agents have successfully cleared a space for unsettling oppressive colonial representations of Muslim women as unchanging victims of patriarchal religion and Muslim men. This space has also brought into view new problems and issues that divide Muslim women into feminist and fundamentalists, secular and religious, diasporic and native. This paper focuses on one of the most contentious issues of Muslim women's representation: secular feminists' attempts to represent women in Islamic religious movements. In this process I examine some of the normative and ethical dimensions of feminist research as they emerged in my research with women in the Jamaat‐e‐Islami, a movement for religious reform and renewal in Pakistan. I reflect critically on issues in feminist research across ideological differences, incongruent locations and divergent cultural and spiritual investments.

September 11

Abstract The links among feminism, race, and transnationalism, which are key to the Meridians project, are also crucial to understanding the events of 9/11 and the war on Afghanistan. Some pieces in this archive provide feminist perspectives on the impact of war and fundamentalism on women’s lives in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Other pieces analyze the ways in which racist representations of Muslim women and of Islam have come to play a key part in colonial and neocolonial “great games” being played in South, West, and Central Asia. Yet others link the U.S.-sponsored war in Afghanistan to the repression of the media and the attacks on civil liberties within the U.S. itself. In constructing an archive of these courageous testimonies, Meridians honors the courage and integrity of women in the United States and around the world who aspire to a better, more just world.

Gender, Interculturalism and Discourses on Women's Leadership in the Olympic Movement

This paper addresses Western discourses relating to the role of women in the leadership of Olympic and elite sporting bodies in two contrasting non-western contexts, namely in selected Muslim countries (i.e. Member States of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference) and in the People's Republic of China. The two cases are selected because they reflect contrasting contexts in which the role of women is seen to be embedded in very different ideologies, often referred to simplistically as a religious, and a political ideology respectively. The data through which we scrutinise these two cases are derived from two separate studies. The first is an evaluation study of IOC policy Women in Leadership in the Olympic Movement. In 1996 the IOC adopted a set of minimum targets in relation to the proportion of executive decision-making positions in National Olympic Committees and International Federations which women should hold (10% by 2000, and 20% by 2004). This paper draws on an evaluation of the achievement of these targets commissioned by the IOC from Loughborough University. We focus here on the representation of Muslim women in NOC Executive Committees. The vehicle for discussing the second case is an on-going study of the role of women in state and Olympic sport organisations in China, which has involved case studies of women in senior positions in the Chinese system.

Unveiling radio coverage of Muslim women

With renewed calls for the banning of the Burqa in the United Kingdom and Australia triggered by French President Nicolas Sarkozy's push for a ban, the representation of Muslim women, and particularly coverage which focuses on the wearing of the veil, is once again an important issue in media analysis in this post-September 11 world. If radio is to some extent a blind medium, where visual appearance is less important, we can ask if the representation of this group is in anyway significantly different on radio than other media. However, there have been few detailed studies of the issue. This article seeks to address the gap in analysis of radio coverage of Muslim women by examining their representation on the flagship radio current affairs programmes produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). The case study presented here highlights the strengths and weaknesses of reportage of Muslim women in sound broadcasting. The author also offers some reflections on the implications of the study for the identification of future best journalism practice for radio coverage of minorities.

Veiled Subjects: Shirin Neshat and Non-liberatory Agency

The controversy over Shirin Neshat's representations of Muslim women has been dominated by interpretations that use an unexamined liberatory model of agency to understand the artist and her subjects. Consequently, criticism of Neshat has become polarized by readings of Islam and women's agency as fundamentally incompatible, and the possibility of female subjects whose agency is grounded in and who aspire to Islamic values has been ignored. Using Saba Mahmood's theory of non-liberatory agency as a way to approach women's embodiment in Islamic culture, this article provides re-readings of the films Turbulent, Rapture and Fervor that suggest how Neshat's art can be read as depicting pious Islamic modes of embodiment.

On Becoming Good Women: A Study on the ‘Fragmented Self’ in Malaysian Muslim Women’s Writing in English

Malaysian Muslim women’s writing in English is a new literary phenomenon, and hence, there is not much critical literature. This paper examines some samples of writings in English by Malaysian Muslim women. It begins by providing the background of English language and literature in Malaysia in an attempt to address the complexities of writing in English in Malaysia. The paper also raises issues of importance to Malaysian Muslim women writers by focusing on the struggles and conflicts that they encounter, writing as Muslim women. This is because of cultural tensions faced as a result of urbanization and modernization, which bring in new values, very often based on Western mores. The paper examines how identities are fragmented as these women address taboo subjects like sex, sexuality, and illegal abortions. Their writings express the tension between succumbing to the dictates of society and the need to expose reality as it is. Muslim women writers are also at pains to voice their Muslim identity in a world so misinformed on matters relating to Islam and Muslim women. Muslims are expected to be virtuous by their religion, and where the women are concerned, the expectations are often higher than for men as interpretations of “good” behavior are often focused on women. This unbalanced representation of Muslim women, be it by Muslims themselves or Western media, has elicited gross misrepresentations of women in Islam or Muslim women in general. This paper documents the voices of Malaysian Muslim women writers in their attempts to represent themselves and their world but not without conflicts and predicaments. The paper focuses on the women’s ‘fragmented selves’ as they struggle to define and redefine what it is like to have multiple roles as Muslim women.

The ‘Non‐dit’ in the Zenana: representations of Muslim women in Islamic canonical texts, the neo‐colonial imagination and a feminist response from Bangladesh

This essay recognizes that representations of the ‘Muslim woman’ as the Othered ‘object’ of the ‘Western’ gaze and the domesticated ‘object’ which the Islamic apologists strive hard to defend, are both constructions and false antitheses of each other. It seeks not the ‘truth’ regarding the Muslim women in the world of social reality but to examine how various representations of the women are constructed and to what effects and consequences these representations are mobilized. The essay proceeds in three stages. The first stage shows how the patriarchy mobilizes the Qur’an and the Hadith in order to construct the woman as the negative, the inessential and the abnormal of the man so as to exert complete subordination over her. However, the very act of attempting to mute the woman in Islam is the most strident proof that she is engaged in resistance against patriarchal control and the degree of resistance must be judged by the degree of patriarchal control. The second stage demonstrates how patriarchy operates in colonial and neo‐imperial landscape: it legitimizes the appropriation of Muslim woman ‘possessed’ by the Other (as exemplified by the orientalist seduction fantasy in William Dalrymple’s The White Mughals), but, haunted by the fear of rape and anxieties regarding the sexuality of the White woman possessed by the Self, it attempts to maintain strict control over her (as in the cases of Miss Wheeler in the ‘Mutiny’ of 1857 and Private Jessica Lynch in the Iraq War). This struggle over the feminine body is perfectly in line with Islam’s hyper‐anxiousness to hide the female body and rigorously ensure monopolic possession over her. The third stage shows how Taslima Nasreen, a late‐20th century feminist from Bangladesh, speaks the unspoken and thereby attempts to subvert the normative representation of the muted women in her autobiographical novella, entitled Āmār Meyebelā. In thus examining the representations of the Muslim women, this essay seeks an alternative ‘third space of enunciation’ and takes a distinct political stand located outside of the axis of the dichotomy of the ‘Western’ gaze and the construction of the Islamic theologians.