Dervish

I’m having a curiously bizarre experience. I’m trying to find some
Muslim women who feel comfortable speaking on camera for a few minutes
about Old Testament women, and everyone is turning me down. At first I
thought it was because of being on-camera, but then I know plenty of
women who have been on-camera before. I know it’s not because it’s for
an interfaith thing, because plenty of Muslim women get involved in
interfaith stuff. Aside from the fact that it might be me (I’m easy to
say no to hehehe) I am starting to suspect it’s because Muslim women
don’t really relate to …. pre-Muhammadan female figures of
scripture. 

Basically, I’m talking Eve, Sarah, Hagar, Asiya
(the wife of Pharaoh), the mother of Moses, the Queen of Sheba and
Zulaykha (Joseph’s mistress).  Even though these women were pretty
amazing role-models (Bilqis, the Queen of Sheba is probably my
favourite) when I think about it, they don’t ‘come-up’ much when you go
to Islamic study circles, or hang around talking about Important Muslim
Women of the Past. You’re much more likely to get a discussion about
Khadijah, A’isha or perhaps Rabia (the women of the Prophetic and
post-Prophetic period).

I suspect I’m being turned down because I
asked them to talk on-camera about how they relate to these women, and
err…. I don’t think they do?  Is this a bad thing? Well, given that
Allah , subhana wa t’ala, did see fit to mention them all (with the
exception of Hagar, but she plays a major role in the pilgrimage story
and rites) I think it means at the very least, we need to be getting
some better quality sermons and Islamic lecture series!!

Woah - the Official Reporting Website of Australian National Crescent Sighting Coordination Centre looks way cool. And apparently, Eid will be on the 9th (according to the Moonies).

I grew up with Baha’i melodramatic pronouncements of the rolling up of the old world order, the unfurling of a new one in its stead, marked by cataclysmic events that would (variously, according to Baha’i lore) see the decimation of populations, a shift on the earth’s axis, blood and fire running through cities and so on.

When all these prophesied events did not happen by the year 2000 as most Baha’is of my parents generation thought would be the case, based on statements by Baha’i prophetic figures, many of us pointed fingers and did a Simpsons’ “ha ha”.

Nevertheless, maybe the Baha’is were on to something. I have to say, I strongly disagree with the current Baha’i narrative: that whilst the old world order is being rolled up, the Baha’i institutions are waiting patiently in the wings for the time when the various countries of the world say ‘Egads! Enuf of this war business, let’s hand over power and authority to those Baha’i chappies–they seem to know what they’re on about’ and a world Baha’i theocratic state results. Read the rest of this entry »

Are there any Muslim female artists out there in cyberspace, who read my blog?  I’m looking for an artist for an exhibition being held in Melbourne* on Women in the Bible, who is willing to produce a work on Bilqis, the Queen of Sheba. (Could be a painting, a calligraphic rendering etc.)

If you are such an artist, mashallah, any chance you could contact me to strike up a conversation about possibilities?

* hence, the need for a relatively local artist, given the insurance problems it might pose, shipping works from O/S.

Recently there has been a bit of a brouhaha in the Aussie news, over two papers that were presented at the NCEIS conference on social inclusion of Muslims.

Anyway, the two presentations that hit the news were not the ones talking about the role the media plays in stereotyping Muslims and contributing to the general alienation of Muslims and the rise of prejudice against us (surprise, surprise), but ones discussing that some Muslim women are getting the bum’s rush from some Imams, and that women are being treated as second-class citizens in mosques.

The issue of women in mosques is one I am intimately familiar with, given that a) I’m a Muslim woman disenchanted with my experience of mosques and b) my Master’s thesis was on the topic of Muslim women converts’ access to mosques. As part of that thesis I did an audit of mosque facilities in a variety of mosques in Melbourne (the ones named by my participants that they had attended). As such, I have a wide range of photographs documenting the difference in facilities between men’s and women’s spaces in Melbourne’s mosques. Not only do I have a thesis where I interviewed converts and their perceptions of access (largely disappointed) but I also have the photographic proof that most mosques subtly and not-so-subtly exclude women from mosques.

This is in complete contradiction to the Prophet Muhammad ’s (peace be upon him) approach to facilitating women’s access to mosques.  In his mosque there were no barriers between the men and the women. Women were not hidden away in basements, balconies or in side-rooms. They had full access to the main space, and participated fully in the prayer. We have numerous hadiths demonstrating that there were groups of women who studied in the mosque, performed retreat in the mosque, prayed for long periods of time in the mosque, participated in the Friday jum’a prayer, and that he specifically forbid women’s exclusion from the mosque.

Somehow, there was a shift in obedience to the Prophet’s spatial sunnah (to use Kahera’s term) to obsession with women as sexual fitna.  I guess it was unsurprising when it was exactly this argument that re-surfaced in response to the Mufti of Australia’s promise to address the discrimination of women in mosques. Adding insult to injury, was the intimation that as a convert my place in the community is worth less than someone who happens to possess Muslim parents. It was the moment I almost hung up my hijab and stopped calling myself a Muslim. Read the rest of this entry »

With my relatively new found interest in politics (I’ve slightly changed direction of my doctorate, so it’s more politics than sociology) I’ve been taking a keener interest in Aussie politics. Having said that, when it comes to local council elections, my voting pattern was entirely ignorant.  It was based on whose last names I liked the best (with the exception of one whose flyer consisted entirely of bashing the incumbent, so I put her last on my voting card). It seems in my section, the incumbents have been re-elected. For those interested in their own local councils, the current results are available at the VLGA Tally Room website.

This is Abu Yasmin’s second time voting, since he became an Australian citizen. (They don’t have compulsory voting in either England or Ireland). We took our daughter up to see what voting is like. She wanted to fill in the numbers on my ballot (which probably would have been as effective as my method).  I didn’t let her do that err…. but I did let her write the number 8 where I wanted the number 8 written, and put my ballot in the actual box.

I’ve just finished two days of the Global Terrorism Research Centre conference, where I presented a paper on Australian Muslims’ perceptions of extremism. As I was driving in, Mum rang and said “Friend and Friend are in Mumbai”. “That’s nice,” I said, thinking that I wouldn’t mind a nice holiday in India. “Do you know what’s going on in Mumbai?” “No, what?” I said. “The place is burning, they’ve taken Western hostages.”

So that was the start of my morning. By sheer coincidence, one of the planned speakers was a scholar with expertise in the history of inter-ethnic/religious violence and the 1993 Bombay bombings. So she gave us her perspective on the situation.

What was really important, and I agree with her 100%, is the historical ignorance and completely lack of knowledge that Westerners tend to have about anything that doesn’t involve Westerners. Inter-religious conflict and violence between Hindu fundamentalists and Muslim fundamentalists, and the deep despair, frustration and marginalisation the Muslim minority in India feels, only takes our interest when Westerners are involved.

One of the resounding themes of the conference, which saw a wide range of presentations of experts on terrorism, is that we ignore the local context of various areas of violence and conflict, at our peril. By just pinning everything to the bogeyman of evil al-Qa’idah (and evil they are, I agree) without understanding the roots of local rage, and the response of terrorism and suicide bombings as a deep-seated humiliation and powerlessness in the face of an assymetrical power differential–whether it is Christian, Hindu, Buddhist or Muslim terrorism and violence–means the lessons of history will never be learned.