Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“From Iran to Turkey, from Egypt to Iraq, they kept writing, kept challenging, refusing to be erased .” Related Women and gender

“Two researchers from Stanford University, Vasiliki Fouka and Aala Abdelgadir, documented and analysed the ban's consequences in 2019. They found that the ban hurt Muslim girls' ability to complete their education and obstructed their access to the labour market. It doubled the gap between the percentage of non-Muslim and Muslim girls completing their secondary education in favour of the former.” Like hypocrisy, double-standard, complicity, racism, commodification, etc, the ban on the headscarf has been normalised . Related The law on theheadscarf The imaginary separatism of salafist women

Not deep or a bigger picture , but you get the idea that men and women who belong to a certain group or defend certain interests in a class society decide on major issues, mobilise men and women in uniforms, and they are backed by an army of pundits and scholars.

 

I think this is the best part in Sadiq Jalal Al-Azm’s essay The Importance of Being Earnest About Salman Rushdie : The self-enclosed universes of Hijab and The Grand Balcony exist and function against the background of a revolution taking place in the outside world. In both instances, the revolution forms a threat to the very existence of the bordello. In The Balcony , the revolution fails after destroying the Queen, the Archbishop's palace, the law courts, and the army headquarters. As the Chief of Police becomes the master of the new counter-revolutionary order, Genet transports Madam Irma and her clients out of the "house of illusions" to become the Queen, the Archbishop etc. in support of the new regime of repression. In the Hijab episode the revolution succeeds after destroying the old centers and symbols of Jahilian power. As its chief, Mahound, becomes the master of the new revolutionary order, Rushdie transports him and his "queens" into the "house ...

‘I am not even seen as a person’

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

"A Quiet Revolution" by Leila Ahmed I personally disagree with the word veil and hijab because they are not specific. They both mean a cover, but they don't specify what is covered. "Hijāb" in Arabic means "to cover"/"to hide". "Headscarf" is a more accurate term. 

"This image has also become a stereotype because it is simplistic in its pitting supposedly free sisters in the West against wretched victims in Arab countries. Muslim societies are assumed to have sweeping patriarchal structures, while it is claimed that Western societies are pictures of progressive modernity, says Swiss social anthropologist Annemarie Sancar. Neither of these absolute views are correct." The West's gleeful obsession with "oppressed Arab women" Further reading: Islam in Liberalism by Joseph A. Massad "In his analysis of the emergence of 'military humanitarianism,' David Chandler notes that the development of the NGO regime prevalent in the 1980s focused on 'capacity buidling,' 'empowering,' and 'civil society' (and this is of course in line with the democratisation ideas...that Muslims lack civil society and one has to be created for them to advance democracy), 'as they argued the need for a lo...

Why is the French left tearing itself apart over the pertinence of the term “Islamophobia,” even when this is one of the most visible forms of racism in France? No, we don't have the "right to be Islamophobic"

On veiling or unveiling, again France Choice?

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

"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...

English schools: on the footsteps of the French ones? Mr Courtney was referring to a speech in February in which Ms Spielman said: "School leaders must have the right to set school uniform policies in a way that they see fit, in order to promote cohesion." By "cohesion" Ms Spielman means conformity . What we are speaking about hear is the headscarf not the veil. The latter covers the whole face not the first. Banning the headscarf at school is considered

Rethinking Muslim Women and the Veil Published in 2002, but ...

Pseudo-secularism and the French Left