Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

One name, many lives

 I think this is worth watching. Ethos, a Turkish TV series

I recall a colleague who a few years ago, pointing to photos of women wearing the headscarf, asked me: "Why are they still like this?" In an era of globalisation and a triumphing "liberal democracy" "liberating" everybody, my colleague, a white Westerner, thought, and probably still does, that those women are resisting "freedom" and the "free world", preferring "backwardness" and "submission."  "Today, behind the terrible shaming and violent treatment of a Muslim woman and her son, is the ongoing structural violence against Muslims and other people who speak out against inequality and injustice, couched in the corporatisation of everything (including war, which must be maintained for the secular system to profit)." French fear and loathing of Muslim women

These Muslims are causing us so much pain . When is it gonna end?

Another tweet read: “We are at war! The UK armed forces must go to the Islamic areas and should go to door to door and shoot them all." A record number of anti-Muslim attacks last year

American culture and the liberalization of hijab (You need free registration to read the piece)

Leila Ahmed

"The problem of pseudo-choice also demonstrates the limitations of the standard liberal attitude towards Muslim women who wear the veil: acceptable if it is their own free choice rather than imposed on them by husbands or family. However, the moment a woman dons the veil as the result of personal choice, its meaning changes completely: it is no longer a sign of belonging to the Muslim community, but an expression of idiosyncratic individuality. In other words, a choice is always a meta-choice, a choice of the modality of the choice itself: it is only the woman who does not choose to wear a veil that effectively chooses a choice. This is why, in our secular liberal democracies, people who maintain a substantial religious allegiance are in a subordinate position: their faith is ‘tolerated’ as their own personal choice, but the moment they present it publicly as what it is for them—a matter of substantial belonging—they stand accused of ‘fundamentalism’. Plainly, the ‘subject of fre...

Stay out of it Like Houda Sharawi, Jamila Bouhired, Nawal Saadawi, and thousands others, many more today are fighting all sorts of oppression. Fatma Ramadan (an Egyptian trade unionist) Narges Hosseini (currently detained for her protest against compulsory 'hijab') Tunisian women protesting against the IMF Iraqi women protesting against new law that would allow child marriage Western women, you who consider Arab and Muslim women unfit and want to "empower" them, and  claim "to defend human rights", stay out of it. Arab countries and people have had enough of  - imperialist states wars and destruction   - support of stability and dictatorship  - co-opting uprisings,  - hypocrisy  - the "rhetoric of 'freedom' and 'democracy' - marketing this or that Arab/Muslim woman to your public - promoting a Clooney or a Jolie as embassadors  Invest in a regime change at home, and in empowering women exploited in workplaces and co...

Politics at the tip of the clitoris

Imperialist feminism and liberalism

There is an irony in this, as Farris observes. The European feminists’ insistence that migrant women’s autonomy would be furthered by the work of domestic service defined as liberating the very household drudgery that these feminists had long sought to escape. There is both a racist and a sexist element to this, Farris says, because “they reinforce the conditions for the reproduction at the societal level of Muslim and non-Western migrant women’s segregation, traditional gender roles, and the gender injustice they claim to be combating.” The Culture Veil

"The point I try to make in that article is that the debate on whether Jews should be accorded full political rights in 1840s Prussia presents some striking similarities with the debate on Muslims’ integration into French society today. More precisely, my point is that the French state’s demand that religious minorities (and let’s be frank, Muslims in particular) respect the principle of secularism in the public space is reminiscent of Bruno Bauer’s position on the Jewish Question. Bruno Bauer believed that the Jews deserved to be granted political rights only if they stopped being Jews and embraced Enlightenment thought. In other words, he conceived of political emancipation as a kind of award that individuals receive only if they renounce their own religious identity and embrace the identity that the secular state deems as appropriate. Likewise, the French state demands that Muslims get rid of their religious/cultural practices if they want to show willingness to integrate into...

"[M]any of the arguments against Islamophobia in anti-racist circles turn out to replicate rather than subvert the underlying logics that attack, demonize and dehumanize Muslims. Challenging the Islamophobic far-right cannot simply be about upholding the same capitalist and imperialist — even if slightly less racist — stances that have destabilized much of the Global South in recent decades, furthering war and displacing Muslims who have travelled to Europe’s shores only to be met with an explosion of nativist hatred." The Problem with Liberal Opposition to Islamophobia Note: the 8% of the UK's Muslim population is inaccuarte. I have checked a few sources (BBC, wikipedia). In fact it ranges between 5% and 5.5% of the total population.