Cont Islam (2007) 1:139–154

DOI 10.1007/s11562-007-0013-z

The Muslimwoman

miriam cooke

Published online: 12 July 2007

# Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2007

Abstract In the 6 years that have elapsed since the events of 9/11 Muslims have become
the Other and veiled Muslim women have become their visible representatives. Standing
in for their communities, they have attracted international media attention. So intertwined
are gender and religion that they have become one. I have coined the term the
Muslimwoman to describe this erasure of diversity. Some women reject this label. Others
use it to empower themselves and even to subvert the identification. In the process they are
constructing a new kind of cosmopolitanism. This essay asks how women can derive
agency from an ascribed identity that posits their invisibility and silence.

Keywords Muslimwoman . Identity . Straw affair

In the fall of 2006, British newspapers headlined a battle about the veil. Jack Straw, Leader
of the British House of Commons and former foreign secretary, had demanded that women
visiting him in his office in Blackburn remove the face veil, or niqab. Some applauded his
plaint agreeing that “the veil becomes more than a garment sanctioned by custom: it turns
into a hostile statement about the society in which the wearer lives” (Moore 2006, 24).
Others warned that the veil is a symptom and not a cause of rising tensions. The women
themselves countered that it was their religious duty to cover their faces and any attempt
to stop them infringed upon their civil liberties. At the same time in Egypt another battle
over the veil was raging with 130 members of parliament demanding the resignation of
one of Egypt’s longest serving ministers after he had called the veil “regressive.”1 How
is it that the veil upsets politicians in both Muslim-minority and Muslim-majority
countries even while it remains the loadstone of political Islam?
The Straw Affair is not an isolated event either in place or in time. In Paris, Istanbul,
Jakarta, Amsterdam and Cairo Muslim women, especially when they are veiled, recall
anxieties that go back to the nineteenth century colonial era. At that time, like today,
Muslim women’s appearance was inextricable from their surprisingly pivotal role in
both the Muslim and the Orientalist imaginary. The difference today is that it is no
1
Michael Slackman, “In Egypt, a new battle begins over the veil” New York Times 28.1.2007.
m. cooke (*)
Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
e-mail: [email protected]
140 Cont Islam (2007) 1:139–154

longer necessary for a woman to be veiled for her to be marked a “Muslim woman.”
This identification is all-encompassing; it erases individual identity and differences. In
the twenty-first century, Muslim fundamentalists, neo-Orientalists, Western feminists
and Muslim and non-Muslim states are all arguing about what is right and wrong for the
newly visible Muslim women. More and more Muslim women are joining the fray.
Recognizing their centrality to their society’s self-conception, they are looking for ways
to affirm themselves. Many are embracing and performing a singular religious and
gender identity even if their lives are as varied as the innumerable cultures they inhabit.
What has happened for such an essential primary identity to emerge?

A new primary identity

Identity is the reflex to recognize shared norms, worldviews and values, while
marking otherness. A function of both the individuals and the communities with
which we associate, identities are never singular but always changing. Sometimes
religion shapes who we are, but at other times it is nationality or ethnicity or race or
age, profession or gender. From time to time identities overlap and compete. For
most people most of the time, the flow between identities, or speaking positions,
appears to be seamless.2 It is the perceived identity of the interlocutor that
determines speaking position. Some elements may stop the flow: skin color,
language or a visually enforced collective identification like “veiled Muslim
women.”3 So intertwined are gender and religion that they have become one.
Veiled, and by extension even unveiled, women become the “Muslimwoman.”
In what follows I combine “Muslim” and “woman” into one word, Muslimwoman,
when these two words are used together to evoke or describe a singular identification.
The Muslimwoman is both a noun and an adjective that refers to an imposed
identification the individual may or may not choose for herself. The Muslimwoman is
not a description of a reality; it is the ascription of a label that reduces all diversity to a
single image. In creating this neologism, I am following Islamicist Sherman Jackson’s
use of the term Blackamerican that connects race and citizenship (Jackson 2005) and
womanist theologian Joan Martin’s “blackwoman” (Martin 2000) that links race and
gender. The veil, real or imagined, functions like race, a marker of essential difference
that Muslim women today cannot escape. The neologism Muslimwoman draws
attention to the emergence of a newly entwined religious and gendered identification
that overlays national, ethnic, cultural, historical and even philosophical diversity. A
recent phenomenon tied to a growing global Islamophobia, this identification is
created for Muslim women by outside forces, whether non-Muslims or Islamist men.
Muslimwoman locates a boundary between “us” and “them” and signals Muslim
women’s interstitial outsider/ insider status. As women, Muslim women are outsider/
insiders within Muslim communities where, to belong, their identity is increasingly
tied to the idea of the veil. As Muslims, they are negotiating cultural outsider/insider
roles in societies where Muslims form a minority or they are under threat.

2
For an analysis of the question of identity and speaking positions see cooke 2001.
3
“Veils in the twenty-first century are a mental shortcut to signal ‘Muslim woman’ – like afros in the 1970s
were used to signal ‘black power’.” Nancy Snow http://www.slate.com/id/2153013/ accessed April 11, 2007.
Cont Islam (2007) 1:139–154 141

The Muslimwoman identification may be disabling or empowering. Some women

reject this reduction to stereotype while others embrace it. Its uniformity across gulfs
of difference intensifies an awareness of a global community in which they
participate, a cosmopolitan consciousness that connects strangers who recognize an
unprecedented commonality in terms of religion and gender. Their political
consciousness qua Muslimwoman affirms the inextricable bond between gender
and religion that enables a negotiation of the outsider/insider boundary.
In today’s fight for their rights, some Muslim women are strategically deploying
the Muslimwoman identification in order to change it. In the process, it is becoming
what the sociologist Manuel Castells (1997) calls a “primary identity.” New
information technologies have shaken old certainties and compelled new allegiances.
In the network society,
meaning is organized around a primary identity (that is an identity that frames
the others), that is self-sustaining across time and space… The search for
meaning takes place then in the reconstruction of defensive identities around
communal principles … religion provides a collective identity under the
identification of individual behavior and society’s institutions to the norms
derived from God’s law, interpreted by a definite authority that intermediates
between God and humanity” (7, 11, 13)
In other words, new media produce radical connectivity across the globe and foster a
new kind of cosmopolitanism marked by religion. Cosmopolitanism is at once unifying
and diverse because the more people identify with and connect to each other the more will
their identities be hybrid and split among the multiple groups in which they act and want to
belong. Those threatened by such hybridity in Muslim women may try to cage in the
proliferating identities. The sign of the cage is the veil (whether mandated or forbidden).
The Muslimwoman, veiled or unveiled, has become the cultural standard for the
Umma, or global Muslim society. The religious and gendered exemplar confirms and
highlights the morality of the Umma, a God-fearing patriarchy where men protect
and women are protected. In such a moral economy, women define the border
between the pure and the polluted. The logic of the argument is that women are the
potentially outside that insiders must keep pure or purify in order to save the purity
of the inside. To uphold this moral regime, insiders must cooperate in maintaining
and monitoring Muslimwoman appearance and behavior.
Since the 1990s, the politics of covering has become a highly contested arena in
Islamic societies, especially when the state intervenes to ban the veil or to impose it.
In secular Turkey and Europe, women are claiming the right for the Muslimwoman
to cover, and they are being persecuted for their demands to wear the symbol of their
religion in public.4 It is not only in secular societies that the veil has become a

4
In 1997, the Turkish government made the veil illegal for adolescent school girls. AKDER was
established to prevent violation of women’s rights and “to promote social awareness regarding these
issues.” In1999 Merve Kavakci became the first veiled women to be elected to the Turkish parliament.
However, members of the Democratic Leftist Party refused to swear her in because she was veiled. In
March 2001 she lost both her seat and her Turkish citizenship (Ali 2004). Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk’s
novel Snow (2002) revolves around the prohibition for Turkish girls to cover, their brave insistence on its
moral and religious necessity and their consequent suicides in remote Kars. In February 2007 BBC
reported a protest in Zanzibar over the police ban on women driving while veiled.
142 Cont Islam (2007) 1:139–154

weapon in the war between women, Islamists and the state; in Egypt, for example,
women are insisting on their right to wear the recently forbidden niqab to
university.5 Conversely, in Indonesia, Afghanistan, Iran, and more recently in Iraq
Islamists have been telling women to cover.6 So general have the dress codes
become that in some countries they may apply to all women and not only to Muslim
women. Naming them cultural custodians, Islamist men invest women with
symbolic value that deprives them of individuality and agency. The Muslimwoman
becomes not just a standard but a substitute for all norms and values of the Umma.
At the same time that Islamists vie for control of women’s bodies, neo-
Orientalists bleat their compassion for the “poor” Muslimwoman who needs to be
saved from her men (see cooke 2002). In other words, Muslim women are today
caught between these two camps, each insisting on their foundational singularity.
Iranian cultural theorist Minoo Moallem argues that the more evident the diversity
among Muslim societies, the more Western societies project “Islam and Muslim
women as foundational and fundamentalist entities.” The Muslimwoman erases for
non-Muslims the diversity among Muslim women and, indeed, among all Muslims.
This erasure of diversity is mirrored within Muslim societies under threat where the
Muslimwoman becomes the emblem of the purity of her community. Under Western
eyes, an essential (usually negative) Islam is encoded by the oppressed Muslim-
woman; in Muslim societies under threat from non-Muslims the Muslimwoman
represents an equally essential (but this time positive) Islam. Moallem worries that
it is under the sign of a veiled woman that we increasingly come to recognize
ourselves not only as gendered and hetero-normative subjects but also as
located in the free West, where women are not imprisoned … Am I a Muslim
woman? Even to answer this question is to enter the discursive spaces of race
and gender in the conditions of postcoloniality. (Moallem 2005, 52–53, 55)
Some women are trying to appropriate and subvert the Muslimwoman
identification. But how can they derive agency from an ascribed identity that posits
their obedience and silence? How can they burst the cage Islamists and neo-
Orientalists have together erected around them over the past twenty-five years?
Since the success of the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, the cage has
tightened. Sunni and Shiite Islamists around the globe have been demanding the
implementation of Sharia with a special focus on women’s public appearance and
presence (or lack thereof). Recent misogynist Islamic legislation in Indonesia,
reflected in fatwas, or religious opinions, restricts the rights of women, and they

5
The President of Helwan University recently forbad women in niqab to enter the campus unless they first
checked in with an officer who could verify the woman’s gender. His justification was that men could
disguise themselves and enter the segregated women’s campus (“Debate about wearing the niqab in
Egypt” in Al-Hayat 21 October 2006, 4).
6
On January 14, 2004 the Iraqi Council declared that the Sharia would replace the secular civil family law
that had given women rights to divorce, choice in marriage and custody. The new system went so far as to
include mut`a, or temporary, marriage. Riverbend, the pseudonym for a young Iraqi woman blogger,
writes: “Women are outraged… this is going to open new doors for repression in the most advanced
country on women’s rights in the Arab world! … Please don’t misunderstand – any oppression to women
isn’t a reflection on Islam … no religion is clearer on the rights of women.” (Riverbend 2005, 187–190).
Cont Islam (2007) 1:139–154 143

have taken to the streets.7 Since 2004 Siti Musdah Mulia from the Ministry of
Religious Affairs has challenged the mullahs: Why are there so many fatwas related
to men’s rights in marriage and so few concerning women trafficking, abuse of
migrant women, polygamy, rape, abortion and violence against women? (Mulia
2004, 6) Mulia rails at these biological determinists who believe that gender equality
is “against the very nature of women as taught by Islam” (p. 7).
Muslim women everywhere are resisting those who would control their bodies.
While women from the tropical societies of Southeast Asia may seem to have little
in common with women in the Arabian deserts or in the cooler climes of Europe,
some are realizing that, ironically, the Muslimwoman cage might provide a platform
for action. This new complex primary identity must be deconstructed and opened to
contestation from within. When they insisted on the right to cover, the veiled women
who confronted Jack Straw in fall 2006 and the Egyptian, Turkish and European
women who are defying their governments’ proscription of the veil are transforming
the meaning of the Muslimwoman label.

Publicity after 9/11

From the outset of the twenty-first century, Muslim women have attracted
international media attention. Some high visibility cases include the Afghan women
who appeared in world headlines after 9/11 not only as victims but also as RAWA,
the long-term women’s resistance movement to the extremist rule of the Taliban. In
2003, the International Scientific Muslim Women’s Council was established to
provide a forum where Muslim women might address issues that cut across the
academic-activist divide. In Iran Shirin Ebadi became the first Muslim woman to be
awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In 2004, in Morocco, women and men were
successful in their call for gender-sensitive revision of the Mudawana, or family law.
In the Wahhabi Gulf State of Qatar the state university has appointed not only a
woman president, a woman vice-president and a woman dean of arts and sciences,
but also ‘A’isha al-Mann’ai the first woman dean of a Sharia College. In the past
year and a half in Kuwait women were finally enfranchised. In Kyrgyzstan, after
years of religious suppression under the Soviets Muslim women have been studying
and teaching Islam and even opening NGOs for Muslim women.8
Women are changing the debate about women, gender and Islam in the media but
also in literature. During the past 30 years, Middle Eastern and North African
women have published fiction and poetry about strong women who shake readers’
expectations. Most recently, the Palestinian novelist Khalifa (2002) was awarded the
Najib Mahfuz prize for Image, Icon and Covenant, and journalists deplored the
7
Women are protesting the “porno-action” bill before parliament that threatens to forbid all women’s non-
Islamic dress and any display of public intimacy. If passed, this bill would try to ensure that each Indonesian
woman, regardless of whether she is Christian, Confucian, Buddhist or Hindu, becomes a Muslimwoman.
8
Dr. Saltanat Musuralieva founded Hadisy, a “Progressive Public Association of Women” in Bishkek
5 years ago. This innovative medical practice combines health care for women and children, particularly
those suffering from HIV Aids, with Islamic education. She warned against teaching Islam in a vacuum
lest students become religiously fanatic. Hadisy is trying to balance religion and medicine and social
responsibilities (conversation in Durham NC July 31, 2006).
144 Cont Islam (2007) 1:139–154

lateness of this recognition for her 40-year defense of women’s rights in Palestine.9
From Saudi Raja ‘Alam’s Mecca-based magical realism to Lebanese Hanan
al-Shaykh’s tales of war, exile and alienation and Egyptian Nawal El Saadawi’s
attacks on religiously justified misogyny and Sudanese Leila Aboulela’s narrative of
religious awakening in exile and Syrian–American Mohja Kahf’s lyrical demands
for women’s equal rights to practice Islam, Muslim women writers are articulating
new ways of being strong religious and gendered persons. They want their readers,
like the men in their stories, to come to terms with newly empowered women who
live their sexuality, their sex and their religion in sometimes unexpected ways.
The information revolution of the past decade has had a huge impact on the
publishing field. Books that before might languish on back store shelves only to be
remaindered after a few years are now easily available anywhere and any time on
Amazon.com and other on-line bookstores. The global marketing of books has created
new markets and new bestselling authors. Some of these authors are Muslim women.
The new prominence of Muslim women writers has a troubling aspect.
Embracing the Muslimwoman label, some are exploiting its commercial
opportunities at a time when the insider’s exposure of Islam’s alleged inherent
misogyny sells. In a review of the Afghan Masuda Sultan’s My War at Home,
Joseph Berger writes of the growing numbers of “Muslim women who are offering
an insider’s view of Muslim life in a post-9/11 moment when many people are
curious about what drives Muslims, how do they operate behind closed doors.”
(Berger 2006, 9) Somali–Dutch Ayaan Hirsi Ali10, Sudanese–American Kola
Boof11, Saudi Raja’ Abdallah al-Sana (2005)12, Iranian Nafisi (2003)13 and Egyptian

9
e-communication with author 16 December 2006. In their citation the judges called the novel a
“narrative of loss par excellence. Sahar Khalifeh begins by invoking an absent space like that of the pre-
Islamic poet lamenting the ruins of his beloved’s encampment. … Woman’s agency is deliberately
obscured by the male revolutionary who seeks to liberate the plundered homeland with no success.”
10
In 2003, Ayaan Hirsi Ali collaborated with filmmaker Theo van Gogh to produce Submission, a film
“dramatizing what she saw as Islamic abuse of women by projecting quotations from the Koran onto the
naked bodies of several young women… For many Muslims, this was a deliberate provocation.” (Buruma
2006, 4, 176) On November 2, 2004 a young Moroccan called Mohammed Bouyeri gunned van Gogh
down while he was cycling to work and Hirsi Ali fled to the U.S. where she was welcomed with open
arms. She is at the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute. She has published two insider
books that reveal all. In Caged Virgin (2006), she includes the screen script of “Submission” pp.143–150,
and an interview with Irshad Manji in which both attack Islam, pp.89–93. What is more persuasive than
two Muslim women agreeing on the alleged inherent misogyny of their religion? She has been awarded
numerous prizes, including the Swedish Democracy Prize, the Moral Courage Award.
11
Kola Boof stormed the internet with wild stories about her relationship with Osama Bin Laden, and she
had herself photographed bare-breasted to give Americans the inside scoop about African Muslims (http://
www.kolaboof.com/feast.htm accessed 29 September 2006).
12
Al-Sana caused an international stir when she published Banat al-Riyad the first insider novel about Saudi
women’s lives. Written as a weekly blog posted after Friday prayers and often headed with an Islamic epigraph, it
is the story of four girlfriends in constantly foiled searches for love in marriage. The internet provides a
controversial vehicle for communication previously unavailable. In 2006 already the book was in its fifth printing.
13
A self-declared secularist with no formal training in Islam, Nafisi is the director of the conservative
Johns Hopkins Dialogue Project: Culture and Democracy in the Muslim World and the West. Her Reading
Lolita in Tehran (2003) was heavily underwritten by American neo-conservative organizations Bradley
Foundation (who also funded Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations) and the Smith Richardson Foundation
(thanks to Farzaneh Milani for this information).
Cont Islam (2007) 1:139–154 145

Miral al-Tahawi (2005)14 have mobilized the Muslimwoman as a marketing tool and
publishers in the West and in the Arab world are opening their arms to this new wave
of “insider stories.” Whereas Muslim and especially Arab women’s writings used to
be dismissed because these women could “only” write their lives and their lives were
not interesting enough to be written, today the Muslimwoman’s story is worth its
weight in gold. The more covered the Muslimwoman the more publishable her life.
It is enough to be born Muslim for an astute woman to be able to capitalize on this
newly lucrative identity. These stories elaborate the perceived singularity of
the Muslimwoman identification even while their authors present themselves as
the exception that proves the rule: I am a Muslim woman, therefore I know the
Muslimwoman.
Alarmed at the proliferation of these sensationalist life stories, other Muslim
women are writing their own counter-stories to right the record.15 Some are putting
together anthologies and edited volumes by and about Muslim women. They include
Nouraie-Simone’s (2005) On Shifting Ground: Muslim Women in the Global Era;
Afzal-Khan’s (2005) Shattering the Stereotypes and Husain (2006) Voices of
Resistance: Muslim Women on War, Faith and Sexuality. Afzal-Khan’s (2005)
introduction echoes other editors’ motives for producing such volumes:
I aim to weave together the different strands of conversation that have been
taking place between women from diverse Muslim-American backgrounds
since 9/11 … I hope too that something new and dynamic can emerge from this
recognition of a shared space and trajectory despite differences in outlook,
culture, temperament, expression and, yes, the different relationship we each
have to the concept of Islam and its place in our lives and identities. (p. 4)
In these volumes, contributors emphasize the overall commonality of Muslim
women within the diversity of their individual lives.
These publications have their corollary in the arts and the media. Since
9/11, Muslim women artists16, actors17, playwrights18, film producers and

14
Tahawi’s autobiography The Blue Eggplant (2005?) describes her transformation from a heavily veiled
sister in the Muslim Brothers movement to a woman who no longer considered herself to be a mere body
and a source of shame. She left the movement and unveiled (Al-Raya 18 October 2006, 41).
15
See, for example, Iranian Fatemeh Keshavarz’s Stars and Jasmine (2007) that details the misinformation in
Nafisi’s book and provides a corrective through a narration of her own cultured upbringing in Iran.
16
Muslim women artists in the U.S. in particular have been organizing exhibitions around their religion
and gender, e.g. the summer 2006 exhibition at the New York Museum of Modern Art (Conversation with
Salah Hassan at Duke University, 28 September 2006).
17
Egyptian actresses like Abir Sabri, Sabrine, Hanan Turk, Suheir al-Babli, Suheir Ramzi, Mona Abdel
Ghani and Hala Shiha were the talk of Cairo when they decided to veil and to choose a life of
contemplation. In “Egypt’s veiled actresses make a comeback,” Alain Navarro writes: “Egyptian actresses
who left the world of entertainment for a more “religiously correct” lifestyle are back on TV screens this
Ramadan, in a bid to reinvent their image more in line with the growing Islamic trend… Their choice to
return to entertainment while wearing the veil reflects the growing “modern” religious trend.” http://www.
kuwaittimes.net/spectrum.asp?dismode=article&artid=1045360703 (accessed 20 October 2006).
18
Afzal-Khan writes about “a whole ‘new’ category of playwrights to emerge and be accorded recognition
in post-9/11 USA (the irony of which is almost unbearable): Muslim-American Women.” (Afzal-Khan
2005, 15).
146 Cont Islam (2007) 1:139–154

directors19 and journalists20 have risen to prominence. Glossy magazines for Muslim
women are a brand new trend. Noor in Indonesia and Azizah in the U.S. (launched in
2002) target a middle class Muslim woman readership with high-fashion ads,
cooking sections and health and beauty tips. A recent addition is Hejab Fashion in
Egypt that markets itself as the “first veiled women’s” in order to distinguish it from
a “Muslim women’s magazine.” First published in early 2005, it provides new
design ideas for wealthy pious Arab women looking for fashionable modest
clothing.21 While Hejab Fashion is devoted to exquisite dresses and elaborate veils
(and how to wrap them in intriguing ways), Noor and Azizah are more political in
their overall goal. Although they refuse the label “Islamic feminist,” they do
emphasize women’s rights to education, to work, to full participation in the life of
the community and to control over their bodies that are usually shown covered. The
Noor reader will see men and women meeting together to discuss common issues,
e.g., investment strategies or how to manage the upcoming hajj. The Azizah reader is
given models of strong, beautiful women whose busy lives and successful careers
leave plenty of room for devotional practices.
Azizah was followed in January 2007 by Muslim Girl. Its founding editor Ausma
Khan, a former lawyer, “wanted to provide girls with an alternative to Cosmo Girl! and
Seventeen, where they would see fun stories about popular culture but … also provide
guidance and information to boost their self-esteem, develop their self-confidence.”
Telling stories of “real American Muslims,” Muslim Girl attracts not only younger teens
but also college-age girls and by April already its circulation was 50,000 (Keller 2007).

Post-9/11 piety

Sharia activism is another arena where women have sharpened the rhetoric against
Islamic institutions and practices shaped by men.22 Rejecting a sacralized language

19
Indonesian Nia Dinata’s 2006 film Berbagi Suami (Share a Husband) pastiches together the lives of
three polygamous men to show how destructive the practice is.
20
Some work in mainstream papers, e.g. Salima Ghezali who is the editor of La Nation, Algeria’s leading
French-language daily (Cheref 2006, 74). Other Muslim women journalists have a more gendered agenda
and they call themselves feminists. Like Zanan, some Iranian e-zines like Bad Jens and the California-based
Iran-Dokht are concerned “to increase the visibility of alternative feminine voices and ‘deconstruct
stereotypes’ in Iran and the West about the dominant images of passivity and victimization” (Skalli 2006, 52).
21
Their “About Us” page announces: “The success of the magazine is due to the services it caters to veiled
women. Over 100,000 female aging 18 to 55 find in the magazine the ideal and most convenient method to
window shop in the comfort of their own homes. By browsing through Hejab Fashion, readers can get a
practically good impression how the latest veiled fashion trends as well as the places where certain clothes are
available… A number of advertising pages in Hejab Fashion are dedicated to advertise about Hejab-related
products and services such as beauty salons, spas, hair care products, and scarves.” A frequently asked question
is: “What are the most suitable outfits to wear during the hot summer days, especially on the beach? Designer
Eman Fathy recommends wearing baggy pants made of cotton or any other natural fabric. A matching blouse or
long “tunique” of the same shades would be perfect. As for the colors, the designer recommends white, off-
white along with pale olive and sky blue. These shades will help you look glamorous while staying cool under
the sun.” http://hejabfashion.com/ (accessed October 17, 2006).
22
See Asma Barlas’ January 25, 2007 attack on the Saudi state’s control of the Hajj that robs women of their
ancestral place in the history of the Pilgrimage and their equal rights in its rituals http://www.theithacan.org).
Cont Islam (2007) 1:139–154 147

that invokes God or a single, normative Islam or the Qur’an23 to prescribe a

normative behavior and appearance for the Muslimwoman, some women scholars
are re-interpreting authoritative texts, including the Qur’an itself, that they deem
responsible for the misogyny pervading religious norms and values.24 Their feminist
interpretations are changing traditional understandings of what it means to be a
Muslim woman and in the process they are expanding the public space for
rethinking Islam and negotiating the exchange of sacred meanings. Anwar (2005), a
founder of the Malaysian network Sisters in Islam, writes:
If religion is to be used to govern the public and private lives of its citizens,
then everyone has a right to talk about religion and express views and concerns
on the impact of laws and policies made in the name of Islam… The fact that
Islam is increasingly shaping and redefining our lives means all of us have to
engage with the religion if we do not want it to be hijacked” (p. 248).
The reference to “all of us” includes women from across the Islamist-secular
divide, and each woman engaging with Islam to prevent it being hijacked reaffirms
this new primary identity as Muslimwoman.
It is not only self-avowed Islamic feminists who are rethinking religious and
gender roles and images. Religiously observant women who shun the limelight and
seem to ask for nothing more than pious, passive lives are compelling acknowl-
edgement of their membership in communities that until recently had blocked
women’s public presence. By linking piety with politics they are resisting pressures
to be obedient, silent wards of men.
Drawing on models from Islamic history, especially Zaynab the defiant warrior
granddaughter of the Prophet Muhammad, Shiite women in Iran, India, Syria and
Lebanon are making the connection between individual performances of “public
piety” and representations of modernity. The community that encourages women’s
public commitment to Islam is socially and spiritually modern.25 The importance of
women in the Prophet’s family so central to Shiite ritual and beliefs provides a
historical precedent for women’s empowerment.
Sunni women also are linking piety and politics. Sociologist Islah Jad argues that
the Palestinian women of Hamas have understood the implications for them of the
conflation of religion and nationalism. When “Islam becomes the core of Palestinian
national identity” women activists may be designated moral custodians whose place

23
“Extreme case formulations on the hijab (’It is clear in the Qoran’ or ‘the Qoran commands it’, etc.)…
are both rhetorical and ideological. They are rhetorical because they are calculated to win over audiences…
They reflect, without further need for any logical evidence, commonsense maxims pertaining to
(misogynist) orthodox discourses on women in Islam. These formulations are, furthermore, ideological or
hegemonic because they support, through religious consensus and public consent, existing socio-religious
power relations. They conveniently ‘close’ the polysemic meaning of Islamic Scriptures and de-legitimise
any alternative, non-misogynistic interpretations or ‘rethinking’ of religious tradition” (Dabbous-Sensenig
2006, 72).
24
In April 2007 Laleh Bakhtiar scandalized conservative Muslims by publishing a new translation of the
Qur’an that strove to be friendly to women. She is “recording an audio version. And some day soon she
hopes to add a Web page where other women also record themselves reciting the Quran-another break
from tradition, but one she feels is crucial to bringing new voices to her faith” (Ahmed-Ullah 2007).
25
Lara Deeb “The Women of Hezbollah” talk given at UCLA July 12, 2006.
148 Cont Islam (2007) 1:139–154

is in the home (Jad 2005, 175). Jad explains that the veiled members of the Women’s
Action Department are working on a new image: model mothers and wives on the
one hand and model political activists on the other. Within that context the veil
comes to be
seen as a signifier of modernity… For the first time, women became a strategic
concern for the national Palestinian movement, this time under the banner of
Islam… Veiling can also become an important political symbol employed to
forge new social modern (identity) and a concrete tool in opening new
possibilities for women within and outside the movement (177, 178, 181).
These activists demand greater equality and representation in the party. Other
women, like those in the Cairene women’s mosque movement, are flooding mosques
where they want to be seen as Muslim women.26 What that means will vary from
one person to another. Some may want to be imams, others merely to experience the
piety that constitutes true Islam, or submission. However, it is worth noting with
anthropologist Saba Mahmud that they have “significantly reconfigured the
gendered practice of Islamic pedagogy and the social institution of mosques”
(Mahmud 2005, 120). Some Islamist women embrace motherhood, while appreci-
ating the loophole Zaynab al-Ghazali provided: what if a woman is blessed to be
barren? (cooke 2001).
Embracing the Muslimwoman label, some choose “holy” violence as a means of
self-expression.27 After 9/11 Palestinian women gained notoriety for their partici-
pation in suicide operations. These istishhadiyat, like Iraqi women kamikaze after
2003, are not imitating men; they are demanding a “fatal equality” that will allow
them to protect men through a “spectacular act of self-sacrifice” (Jad 2005, 189–
193). In her testament given before she detonated herself, Dareen Abu Aisha wrote:
“the Muslim woman’s role is not less than that of our brother mujahidin. The
Palestinian women’s role is no longer just weeping for her husband, brother or
father, but she will transform her body into a human bomb.” The right to bear arms
on behalf of Islam has long been a bone of contention between women and religious
authorities: where does the armed woman fit into the Muslim imaginary?28 Since the
unmarked religious warrior is presumed to be male, these istishhadiyat unveil and
challenge the exclusion of women from this identity-confirming, citizenship-
conferring arena.
Muslim women are fighting with arms, with their bodies and with their tongues.
The Islamic blogosphere has provided a new space for women warriors’ voices that
before the mid-1990s were, at best, published by small presses, at worst, doomed to
boudoir drawers. From Palestine to Iraq and Iran, Muslim women are reporting to the

26
In Qatar during Ramadan of 2006, a record number of mosques had to construct new prayer places for
women (Abdallah Mahran “238 Prayer Places for Women during Ramadan” al-Sharq 19 October 2006).
27
On December 12, 2005 Newsweek magazine featured “Women of Al-Qaeda.” From Chechnya to Iraq to
Jordan to Palestine Muslim women are now more than ready to take up arms, or to carry bombs, whenever
the organization needs them” (p.36).
28
The Islamic scholar Nazira Zayn al-Din in 1928 reminds her readers that in pre-Islamic Arabia women
“went to war wearing coats of mail to aid their brothers and husbands defend fortresses and citadels”
(Zayn al-Din 1998, 161).
Cont Islam (2007) 1:139–154 149

world what it is like to live in a situation of total violence. Their dispatches come from
homes that have become the frontline. Articulate, highly educated and fluent in
English, the Iraqi Riverbend kept us abreast of her reactions to social and political
developments during the first years of the US invasion and occupation of her country.
Hers is a powerful multiple critique that recognizes the danger in (1) U.S. ambitions
that map on to British and Ottoman designs in the past; (2) the terrified American boys
and girls sent to serve Bush in the Middle East; (3) the “power hungry freaks” the U.S.
state was supporting; (4) the average Iraqi man in the street trying to wrest whatever
benefit out of a miserable situation; and, last but not least, (5) the criminal Islamist
groups that tried to control all, not only Muslim, women’s presence and appearance in
a country that used to boast the highest levels of education and employment for
women in the Arab world (17, 23). Even as she warns against these militant Islamists,
she is careful to contextualize these murderous groups within what Achille Mbembe
calls necropolitics, the politics of “chaos and disorder,” death and anomie that
characterizes the world we now live in and more than ever after 9/11.

Brave new e-world

The war on terror and the information revolution have created a new cultural climate
with serious implications for Muslim women around the globe. They are now able to
communicate experiences that before they might not even have been able to publish
let alone share with a global audience. Women are talking back to those who seek to
silence and marginalize their voices. The desire to talk back is not new, but the
possibility of being heard is new. The virtual space of the Internet is allowing for an
unprecedented anonymity that challenges and overcomes the former namelessness
and voicelessness of many Muslim women. This virtual anonymity functions like a
veil; it covers the face and disguises the voice. Muslim women can impose
themselves on the public square without passing through the usual channels that are
male-monitored. This new authority, so emblematic of the Internet, cannot be
silenced but only enhanced by the very attempts to silence. Each post condemning a
blog adds to the number of hits, draws attention to it and ultimately creates more
space for the blogger’s opinion. The more critics attack the blog the more opponents
will they in turn attract or even create. The blog and its ripple effects open up the
possibility for examining issues that may have never before been exposed to public
scrutiny. The sacrosanct becomes public property to be negotiated by all regardless
of qualifications. In the process, traditional custodians of culture and information,
those who considered themselves absolutely authorized above all others are losing
control. The new virtual veil empowers women who see but are not seen. They
speak and engage others without their interlocutors knowing who they are.
The change is so quick and so recent that many are still trying to deal with its
ramifications and with their evolving images and consciousness: “Our resistance has
made us different from our society’s definition of acceptable women,” wrote Azza
Basaruddin in a published e-conversation,

daring to remember, write and question, we stand alone, unpopular and sometimes
reviled by those who wish to keep us in the bondage of silence and oppression. By
150 Cont Islam (2007) 1:139–154

building solidarity through our different experiences, we are charting a struggle

that turns differences into strengths. By challenging our communities to turn
inward for answers and solutions, we hopefully will be able to define and seek a
world in which we can all flourish.” (Basaruddin et al. 2006, 156)

In her e-response to Basaruddin, Khanum Shaikh lamented the difficulty of

negotiating between desires, dignity and commitment to a “loving relationship with
Islam…
For the first time in my life, I hear myself referring to myself as a Pakistani
Muslim woman. Is it the context of Islamophobia that feeds my desire to
connect with the Umma? Is it the imperialistic wars against Muslims that propel
me to (re)create my own relationship with a religion I have personally been
warring with?” (158; my emphasis)

This quintessentially post-9/11 e-conversation touches on several important points.

First, whether they like it or not Muslim women are feeling compelled to take their
religion more seriously than ever before in their identification of self. Second, since
the creation of the Internet, Muslim women qua Muslimwoman have been forging
virtual relationships across continents and creating transnational communities in which
information can be pooled, problems can be aired and coalitions built to “define and
seek a world in which we can all flourish.” Third, and again whether they like it or
not, they are functioning in terms of a new complex primary identity: Muslimwoman.
So, here is at least one answer to the question posed at the beginning of this essay:
what has happened in the world for Muslimwoman to become a complex primary
identity? The change is connected with 9/11 as an axial moment, the globalized political,
cultural and economic conditions that enabled it, the rampant Islamophobia that
followed it, and the increasingly interconnected world it has engendered. Echoing the
words of Khanum Shaikh, Afzal-Khan’s (2005) amazed self-consciousness is eloquent:
When I was growing up in Lahore, Pakistan, in the late sixties and seventies, I
had no idea I was going to become a Muslim Woman … this label did not
envelope me then as completely as it has of late, in the post-9/11 USA …
Muslims in general, and the Muslim Woman in particular, have suddenly been
handed the starring role in the post-9/11 Drama of the New Century (pp. 1–4).
Although she is referring to American women what Afzal-Khan says applies to
Muslim women elsewhere.29 We are witnessing the power of circulating representa-
tions. The image of the veiled woman is plastered over the individual’s face that may
or may not be veiled. Like the Man in the Iron Mask, the individual who finds her
character and identity fixed by others can submit or strive to change the meaning of
the mask. The fact that women who cover their faces are coming to be seen as
victims (in Afghanistan), as disturbers of the peace (in Europe and Turkey) and as
dangerous (Palestine, Iraq and Chechnya) is an important first step in the decon-
struction of the static understanding of the Muslimwoman.

29
In his book about Hirsi Ali, Buruma writes: “the world had indeed changed since 9/11, and that world had
caught up with Amsterdam, just as it had with New York, Bali, Madrid, and London… (a Moroccan woman
said that before 9/11) I was just Nora. Then, all of a sudden, I was a Muslim” (Buruma 2006, 17, 137).
Cont Islam (2007) 1:139–154 151

Muslim women are everywhere asserting their visible presence in their chosen
community.30 Some meet in mosques, others at international conferences or
exhibitions, and most are in touch on line through email and online discussion
forums like “Wake Up” and “Islam Today.”31 Castells underscores the novelty of
information networks that emerged in the 1990s. Women Living Under Muslim Laws
(WLUML),32 Karama (a Muslim women lawyers’ network), and IREX (an
organization devoted to Muslim women entrepreneurs) are now linking women who
before 1994 had no idea of each other’s existence, and who would not have thought
that to be a Muslim woman was commonality enough to warrant connection. These
networks create a
transnational space for intellectual reflection on Islamic norms and identity. In
the process, (Muslim women’s) sense of identity and agency is changing… The
transnational has become a form of ‘public space’ that enables women to
transcend their isolation and derive inspiration for actions from their own local
realities… Trans-nationalism is not only a means of empowerment but it is also
a doorway to a redefinition of self-identity (Sharify-Funk 2005, 252–253; 264).
In a trans-local context differences can thrive and knowledge is quickly diffused,
through technology and also the physical networking provided by national and
international conferences that weave, in Castell’s colorful terms, “a hyper-quilt of
women’s voices throughout most of the planet” (Castells 1997, 137).
Transnational, trans-modern connections are daily forged and reinforced as Muslim
women become increasingly integrated into the fabric of public life across the globe.
These new networks blur the geographic, national, religious and ideological boundaries
that used to be so clear-cut. Under such circumstances it becomes imperative to
demarcate the disappearing lines between insider and outsider. Once delineated, these
lines need to be policed to keep the community pure. But where are these lines? How
can they be seen today? They must be marked by something and, in the absence of
anything better, the Muslimwoman becomes their place-marker par excellence. The
Muslimwoman represents simultaneously the boundary, the purity it preserves and also
a weapon in the war against the very line it serves to mark.

30
In Why I am a Muslim: an American Odyssey (2005), American lawyer Asma Gull Hasan claims the
right for Muslim women to affirm their faith even if they do not veil. “And ain’t I a Muslima?” demands
Halimah Abdulla, an African-American journalist who also refuses to cover and pleads for a generous
understanding of what it means to be a Muslimwoman (Abdulla 2006, 217–221).
31
In late January 2006 Gamma Gamma Chi Sorority, Inc., “the first Islamic based sorority” was
established. The main page of their website quotes sophomore Saba Berhie who thinks that living in a
Muslim women’s sorority house might “make it easier for young Muslim women to face the pressures of
American college life.” (http://observer.medill.northwestern.edu/301-wi06_sec03/03campus_faith/01main).
Newsletters also refer to their project to create a new generation of Muslimwoman leaders. In May 2007
they declared that their vision was by 2015 to FFhave chapters in every US region and several international
countries, insha'Allah__.
32
WLUML was launched in 1986 and with the arrival of the Internet went online in 1994. At first a
clearing house for information, it has become an arena, says Cassandra Balchin from the London office,
where “a common convergence (can accommodate) diversity in opinion… People in the network can agree
to disagree… The network requires a commitment to international solidarity and reaching out… This is the
network principle: local people know the most appropriate local strategies. This recognizes that your
strategy is not necessarily my strategy; however, we are interlinked” (Sharify-Funk 2005, 256, 261–2).
152 Cont Islam (2007) 1:139–154

Muslimwoman cosmopolitanism

Muslim women are today’s new cosmopolitans. They connect with each other across
frontiers of all sorts and destabilize roles they are expected to play as border markers
for their communities. They negotiate borders as places to erase but also to mark and
inhabit. This ambivalent location intensifies awareness of multiple belongings and of
cultural hybridity, while making their voices possible. And Muslim women are
speaking out. Committed to a trans-nationalism that remains rooted in specific places
and identities (i.e. to translocalism), they are espousing a cosmopolitanism that is
suspicious of the “potential for conformist pressures within the communities
celebrated by pluralists” (Hollinger 1995, 84–86). They “advocate an encounter
with people who are markedly different from and at the same time much like
ourselves – a complex encounter made in a sympathetic effort to see the world as
they see it and, as a consequence to denaturalize (their) own views” (Stanton 2006,
629). The basic assumption is that individuals can see the world through the eyes of
others and in so doing they can find “enough overlap in their vocabulary of values to
begin a conversation” (Appiah 2006, 57). Such conversations are not meant to
change others’ minds or to create consensus. Rather, they reach for an exchange of
ideas and views that can be argued and contested but never rejected outright. They
may agree about what to do even if their reasons for developing contingent common
platforms may differ.
Cosmopolitanism is more than connection to others; it involves conscience, self-
consciousness and receptiveness to differences that might instruct and perhaps
transform. According to philosopher Anthony Kwame Appiah, there are
two strands that intertwine in the notion of cosmopolitanism. One is the idea
that we have obligations to others … The other is that we take seriously the
value not just of human life but of particular human lives, which means taking
an interest in the practices and beliefs that lend them significance… no local
loyalty can ever justify forgetting that each human being has responsibilities to
every other… we need to develop habits of coexistence. (pp. xv, xvi, xix)
Cosmopolitanism is a way of living empathetically across differences by
connecting with other Muslimwoman cosmopolitans.
For the Muslimwoman, the nation is only one of several possible communities
that determine actions, desires and values. Iraqi girl blogger Riverbend is vivid in
her definition of civilization. It is based on a notion of cosmopolitanism that
mandates a triple commitment: to religious values that are not assumed to be
universal; to Muslim women’s rights to justice and dignity; and, finally, to others’
rights to their commitments, however different. On October 21, 2003 she writes “the
majority of Iraqis have a deep respect for other cultures and religions… and that’s
what civilization is. It’s not mobile phones, computers, skyscrapers, and McDonalds.
It’s having enough security in your own faith and culture to allow people the sanctity
of theirs” (Riverbend 2005, 113).
Muslimwoman cosmopolitanism works across borders to weave a hybrid cultural
system that disturbs the hegemony and desired homogeneity in others of both neo-
Orientalists and religious extremists. To counter this instability, both groups of
Cont Islam (2007) 1:139–154 153

antagonists must constantly resort to a homogenizing rhetoric that reinforces and

reproduces their own misogynist paradigm and asserts it to be natural, unlike the
unnatural hybridity of new Muslimwoman identities and desires. In the attempt to
cage in this diversity and to homogenize this hybridity such hegemonic discourses in
turn become hybrid, contradictory and thus susceptible to exploitation.33 When the
attempt to interpellate the Muslimwoman fails, when she refuses to be constituted as
a subject by those who hail her, she undermines their control and the reproduction of
their ideology.
Muslim women everywhere are constructing a cosmopolitan identity with local
roots that unites them in a “shared culture, diffused by electronic media, education,
literacy, urbanization, and modernization” (Castells 1997, 27). Afghan, Pakistani,
Saudi, Indonesian, Palestinian and American Muslim women are increasingly aware
of the connections between their experiences and those of Muslim women elsewhere
and they are demonstrating to the world how the Muslimwoman cosmopolitan can
belong to many different communities while retaining her roots and rights in each.
Whether it is marketed for profit or instrumentalized to create community, the
Muslimwoman represents a potentially powerful global identity. Women’s visible
assumption of an Islamic identity in the twenty-first century is projecting a
transnational imaginary in which they are full members of their religious and
political community. It is in terms of gender and religion that new connections
become possible and new meanings can be organized around this primary identity
that frames but also subsumes the others. The more women become active in
representing themselves and projecting alternative notions of how women should act
and look, the more control will they have over the Muslimwoman. This
cosmopolitan faith-based resistance to the hegemony of a neo-Orientalist/Islamist
imaginary seeks to “transform our worst experiences into new knowledge and
increased self-understanding” (Afzal-Khan 2005, 17). More than ever after 9/11 the
formerly fixed Muslim imaginary is changing albeit under the sign of Muslim-
woman.

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