Showing posts tagged politics

Recommended Reading on Islam and the Middle East

Working from a comprehensive bibliography of books on Islam in English as of 2003 compiled by Patrick S. O’Donnell (Adjunct Instructor, Philosophy Department, Santa Barbara City College, 2003), Dr. Abou El Fadl hand-selected the following recommended books because they met the following three criteria: 1) Dr. Abou El Fadl has read the book; 2) the book exhibits a “high quality of scholarship,” and 3) regardless of whether or not Dr. Abou El Fadl agrees with the views of the particular author, he considers it as “generally useful to read”.

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Her article, however, serves to assert white feminist privilege and power by producing a reductive understanding of racial and gendered violence and by denying Muslim women their agency.

from A Collective Response to “To Be Anti-Racist Is To Be Feminist: The Hoodie and the Hijab Are Not Equals” on the Feminist Wire which responds to another article on the Feminist Wire by Adele Wilde-Blavatsky in which the author writes of the hijab that it ”is discriminatory and rooted in men’s desire to control women’s appearance and sexuality, is not a choice for the majority of women who wear it. The hoodie, on the other hand, is a choice for everyone who wears it. The history and origin of these two items of clothing and what they represent could not be more different; like comparing the crippling footbindings of Chinese women with a ‘Made in China’ Nike trainer.”


I read this first article expecting a nuanced discussion of the differences between the Trayvon Martin and Shaima Alawadi murders—the equation of and connection between which I questioned and found to be problematic. Instead I found an article which reaffirms why Western feminism is often Eurocentric and thus is not very helpful to the feminist projects in the Middle East and beyond. With regards to ridiculous claims like those made by Wilde-Blavatsky, a myopic Western feminist vantage can be construed as no less than a hindrance to feminist progress.

(via matryoshhka)

(Reblogged from matryushka)
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There runs through the fundamentalist belief system a deep dread of ambiguity. disorder and chaos. Accordingly, the cult of masculinity keeps all ambiguity, especially sexual ambiguity, in check.. It fosters a world of binary opposites: God and man, saved and unsaved, the church and the world, Christianity and secular humanism, male and female. These tidy pairings keep life from slipping back into a complicated nightmare. Reality, thus defined, is made predictable and understandable, something deeply comforting to believers who have had trouble coping with the messiness of human existence.
Chris Hedges, American Fascists