Infidel

Well, since everyone enjoyed Larry's post on female genital mutilation, I'd thought I'd recommend a book that gives and interesting look into the subject.  Infidel  by Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a very interesting and engaging memoir about a Somalian woman who grows up in 
Somalia, Kenya, and Ethiopia, eventually ending up in Holland to become a member of parliament.  
She details her experiences growing up Muslim, her own genital mutilation, arranged marriages,  
integrating into Western culture, and finally giving up on Islam.  She does not hold back on detail or 
her opinion.  This works to create a very interesting read, but can be frustrating when it seems as 
though she generalizes her own experience to represent the experiences of all Muslim women in Africa.  
Either she or her editor wanted to use her experiences educate Westerners on "what happens" 
to women where she's from, but she's not writing about a group of women, she's writing about herself.  
Considering that most Somlian women don't leave the country and those who do don't end up as 
members of parliament, I would say her experience is anything but generalizable. If you can get past 
the "let me educate you Westerners about the horrors of the rest of the world" subtext, it's an exceptional
book about an exceptional person.  I definitely recommend it.

Apology for getting up on a soapbox last night.

Last night at book club we talked a bit about a woman in a book we all read (Zeitoun) who is Muslim and wears a headscarf. I'm afraid I may have kind of ranted at people while they were just trying to express their thoughts, so I wanted to share some resources/less heated thoughts:

1. Leila Ahmed is a respected scholar of Islam and Feminism. Here is a link to the chapter on veiling in her seminal work, "Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate", which is both essential and accessible reading on the topic.

2. Lawmakers in Belgium and Canada have been discussing limiting/banning the wearing of the veil. Here is an editorial critical of the Canadian law, and here is an editorial that supports a measure in Britain to ban the niqab.

3. Islam is a complex and diverse religion. Islamic law is based on the Koran (individual chapters of which are called sura) and the hadith, which are traditions about what the Prophet said or did during his lifetime. The hadith were passed down chains of oral transmission and traditionally, jurists (qadi) memorized hadith and their interpretations. To complicate matters, there is one major doctrinal split in Islam (Sunni or Shia; the debate is about how the authority to be the Caliph, or the Prophet's regent, is passed on) and some minor doctrinal splits (Twelver versus Seven Shiites, etc.) and different schools of law (4 major ones in Sunni Islam and lots of minor ones, which would affect how any qadi had learned to interpret specific sura and hadith) and different sects (Sufis, Kharijites, etc.) and syncretism with local traditions all over the world - so really, it is impossible to make any kind of blanket statement about what 'Islam' prescribes for women w/r/t clothing. There are almost as many versions of Islam as there are Muslims.

4. The sura that is most often cited as the basis for veiling charges believers (women and men) to behave modestly. Modesty is obviously a subjective matter. Ideally it would be up to any given believer to decide for him or herself (and only for him or herself) how to behave modestly.

5. There appears to be a relationship between being a majority Muslim place where women are not empowered (Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia) and being a place where women do not have a choice about veiling. I think mandatory veiling is a dependent variable and the important thing is advocating for women's right to education, to hold property, to vote, to run for office, to consent to marriage, etc. I think it is a distraction to talk about mandatory veiling (a symptom) rather than the rights that, fully exercised, will enable women to have meaningful choice about what modesty means for them as individuals.