Muslim Assimilation and its Malcontents Rachel Kohn
https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/12/muslim-assimilation-and-its-malcontents-rachael-kohn/
I was recently called “Islamophobic” on Facebook by a Muslim convert I met once many years ago. The prompt was nothing I said about Islam, but about assimilation being the road to integration for Aboriginal Australians, as it has been for most other individuals and ethnic-religious groups in the West. It was a telling leap to make, given that for twenty-one years my program, The Spirit of Things on ABC RN, featured many Muslims, but perhaps the former community leader and school teacher remembered only the ones who rankled, those who advocated a modern, assimilated version of Islam and denounced some of its belligerent and oppressive expressions.
Marnia Lazreg is a Professor of Sociology at Hunter College and CUNY in New York, and when I went visited her in 2010, I remarked that she was the only faculty member without a photo of herself on her website. She told me that after writing her book Questioning the Veil, it was “dangerous” for her to be recognisable, given the resurgence of Islamist thinking in post-9/11 America. Her own mother took off the veil at the age of fifty after the independence of Algeria, and Marnia’s generation of students never thought of wearing the veil as they contemplated living a new kind of life, reflecting modernity. But Professor Lazreg’s writing about women and their desire to be free from the tyranny of a patriarchal Islamic tradition that confined them to full bodily coverage and the ambit of the home, was ironically problematic in mid-town Manhattan in twenty-first-century America.
Like Lazreg, a Canadian Muslim, Irshad Manji, was also imperilled by the publication of her book The Trouble with Islam Today, and when I interviewed her during a visit to Sydney in 2004, she had security around her at all times. Her book begins with her experience as a young bright student in a madrassa in Vancouver where she was punished by her teachers for asking questions about the Koran. Expected to recite the sacred text without understanding it, she questioned why Muslims are instructed to avoid Jews and Christians, when to her as a young Canadian they were friends and fellow citizens. As a highly successful young host on TV Ontario, where her boss was Jewish, she spoke and wrote about the irrationality of Muslim anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism. Consequently, her books are banned in many Muslim countries.
In stark contrast to the short-cropped hairstyle of Irshad Manji, whose cheerful and relaxed almost tomboy demeanour does not hide her lesbian sexuality, the be-robed and head-covered Professor of Koranic interpretation Amina Wadud, appears solemn and serious about the theological task of women’s reform in Islam. Like Irshad, who champions the Mutazilite movement of Koranic interpretation that freed it from a literalist reading and joined it to a Hellenistic philosophical revival in the eighth to tenth centuries in Baghdad, so the African-American convert to Islam, Wadud, looks to the past for grounding her theological reading of the Koran from a woman’s perspective. Having read her book Inside the Gender Jihad: Women’s Reform in Islam (2006), I was keen to speak to Professor Wadud when she visited Sydney and addressed a modest interfaith women’s group in the New South Wales Parliament House. At first she was reluctant to speak to someone from the media, but I reassured her as an academic in religious studies that I was not interested in taking a sensationalist approach to her subject. Nonetheless, she readily divulged how huge was the challenge of translating her academic authority to spiritual authority in the community, when she experienced bomb threats as she was about to lead an Islamic prayer service in New York’s Episcopal Cathedral of St John the Divine.
Just a few streets north of the Cathedral in Harlem, I arranged to meet Mona Eltahawy, the first Egyptian journalist to live and work in Israel for a Western news agency (Reuters). Early in the morning I waited on a corner for an hour, wondering if she had given me the slip. A police car kept watch, circling the block suspiciously. The restaurant where we were to meet was boarded up, abandoned. I realised it was a ploy in case anyone knew of our appointment. When Mona finally appeared, an hour late, we decided to meet in her apartment.
Assaulted and injured in Tahrir Square in Cairo during the protests, Eltahawy, who is now boldly recognisable with her flame-henna-coloured hair, has been among the more outspoken if not extreme anti-patriarchal activists, citing virtually the entire Muslim world as a prison for women.
For all her causes, Eltahawy has managed to keep ahead of her pursuers, but many other women who have attempted to break the rules of confinement and bring Islam into the modern world have ended up with a high price to pay. Mahsa Amini, the twenty-two-year-old who defied Iran’s modesty police in 2022 and was arrested for not wearing her hijab in accordance with government standards, died, according to witnesses, from a severe beating which resulted in a cerebral haemorrhage. The official government explanation cited “fainting and falling into a coma”. Protests followed, larger than the ones initiated by women in 2009, 2017 and 2019. Many died or were injured in those protests at the hands of the state police.
The pattern of risking one’s life for speaking out against the oppressive nature of traditional Islamic practices is nowhere more evident than in the experience of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whom I interviewed before a large audience in the Ros Packer Theatre in 2007. Her story is well known, from her origins in Somalia, attending Koranic schools there and in Saudi Arabia and Kenya, becoming radicalised as a young follower of the Muslim Brotherhood, escaping and becoming a Dutch citizen and later parliamentarian, working among refugees, where she documented the oppressive domestic conditions that Muslim women lived under even while enjoying the welfare and social benefits of Europe’s most free and open society, the Netherlands.
In 2004, Theo van Gogh, her collaborator on a ten-minute film, Submission, about violence towards women, was shot in broad daylight, had his throat slit and a knife plunged into his stomach with a note that said Ayaan Hirsi Ali was next. She went into hiding, and although she is now a more public figure, she has lived with high-level security ever since, much as has Salman Rushdie, the author of The Satanic Verses.
But there was more on that note attached to the knife that was plunged into Theo van Gogh’s belly: there was a threat issued to Western countries and to Jews. During my interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, bodyguards were everywhere, and on stage she was noticeably wired up for her protection. The level of security is not surprising since she openly spoke of the anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism endemic in the Muslim world. A kiosk just outside the theatre had been burned the night before. Was it a warning?
Women are not the gatekeepers in Islam, so it is not surprising that they feel more acutely the need to take control away from men who have dictated how they should live. Yet saying as much has not been for the faint-hearted. The Australian sociology and legal academic Susan Carland, who converted to Islam at nineteen, and wrote a thesis that became a book, Fighting Hislam: Women, Faith and Sexism, undertook a promising investigation into Muslim women’s attitudes. However, as it turned out, the progressive minds were mainly overseas, largely American, while Australian Muslim women preferred to utter their protests under the cloak of anonymity, fearing reprisals.
Assimilation to Australian values and norms of egalitarianism and freedom of conscience is therefore not going to happen smoothly and easily for Muslim Australians as long as they are beholden to the imams and sheiks who hold forth in the mosque and prayer hall, and appear opposed to contemporary interpretations of the Koran, along the lines of the Mutazilites of old.
And if so little has changed in regard to half of the Muslim population, its women, then how much less likely is it to change its attitude towards Jews and Israel, which recent events have shown is brazenly hostile. The day after Hamas stormed Israel, kidnapping, butchering, raping and torturing hundreds of men, women and children, the front page of the Australian Muslim Times was jubilant. That evening the forecourt of the Opera House in Sydney was ablaze with protesters chanting “Gas the Jews” and television footage showed sheiks punching fists in the air, declaiming, “I’m happy, I’m overjoyed” at the atrocities committed by Hamas against Israeli civilians.
Scenes like this would sicken the British Muslim Ed Hussain, who was a guest on The Spirit of Things in 2015. A proud promoter of a modern Islam, and the author of The House of Islam: A Global History, Hussain discovered when he lived and worked in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in 2005, that young Saudis in their twenties cheered the terrorist attacks on innocent civilians in France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Norway, Canada and Denmark, and were also dead-set on the elimination of Israel. They had learned from the Muslim Brotherhood proponent Shaikh Qaradawi in Qatar, whose lectures are broadcast in Arabic on Al Jazeera, that suicide bombings against Israelis are not terrorism but “martyrdom”. Hussain was so appalled by such attitudes, and what he called the default position of hating Jews and Israel in the fifty-nine Muslim-majority nations, that in 2007 he founded Quilliam, “a think-tank led by Muslims to research and renounce radicalism”.
Hussain’s most daring and clearly unachievable objective is to change the 1.7 billion Muslims’ attitudes to Israel: “The Muslim world’s treatment of Israel and the Jews, that beleaguered minority of only 20 million people, is among the greatest of tests for Muslim civilizational coexistence.” I heartily agree, and if that makes me “Islamophobic”, then it is a badge of honour I’m more than happy to wear.
Rachael Kohn AO is a broadcaster and writer on religion and spirituality
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