Feminist defense of Muslim women silenced those very women

Evidence

Feminist rejection of faith-based arbitration left no room to stand for women seeking to live a faith-based life, a schism that was clearly in evidence at a community forum to discuss Sharia. At a public meeting sponsored by Arjomand and the International Campaign to End Sharia, a group of young veiled women from a Somali youth group repeatedly asked questions relating to the need for religious tolerance, arguing that their Muslim faith and their Muslim youth group was a refuge from the racism they experienced in high school. Speaking of teacher and principal surveillance, police surveillance, and the media demonizing of Muslims, the young women argued that Sharia would be more applicable in their lives should they choose to use it for family issues. Most of their remarks were dismissed by the speakers on the platform on the basis that the young women did not know how fundamentalism operated. Dismissed as naive, and told that they had been coerced into wearing the veil, some of the young women chose to leave the meeting. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 357 (#expands, via linked claim)

As feminists deeply committed to challenging racism and Islamophobia and how it differentially impacts black and Muslim (and black Muslim) communities, we wish to open up a dialogue about how to build solidarities across complex histories of subjugation and survival. This space is precisely what is shut down in this article. In writing this letter, we emphasize that our concern is not solely with Adele Wilde-Blavatsky’s article but with the broader systemic issues revealed in the publication of a work that prevents us from challenging hierarchies of privilege and building solidarity. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 574 (#expands, via linked claim)

Moreover, the denouement brings Nazneen and her friends closer to that mode of independent individualism noted by Christina Scharff in her study of young Western women who reject feminism as a label, preferring to identify with choice and personal autonomy as opposed to collectivist action among women. Interestingly, Scharff finds that these young women’s sense of agency—and thus their assertion that feminism is no longer relevant to them—is juxtaposed against and therefore established through the argument that Muslim women in particular do not have such agency, being victims of patriarchal cultures and therefore more in need of the feminism these women have outgrown. Seen in this light, Brick Lane describes a journey by which its protagonist moves from multiculturalism through feminism to a final economically individualist position wherein the oppressed Muslim woman shakes off the shackles of patriarchy, tradition, and communal solidarity to arrive at the Promised Land of market independence. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 198 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Cassin used women’s status to justify withholding rights from Muslim colonies — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 270; Muslim women veil for varied personal-political reasons silenced by rescue discourse; Muslim women’s own activism gets read as proof of their subjugation (+13 more)

Broader Connections

• Feminist anti-Sharia campaigns silenced the Muslim women they claimed to protect #expands (0.95) — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 357
• A dominant group’s feminism can shut down solidarity by erasing Muslim women’s agency #expands (0.92) — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 574
• Agency claims about Muslim women prop up Western women’s rejection of feminism #complicates (0.72) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 198
• Islamophobia discourse weaponizes Muslim women’s oppression for a neoconservative agenda #complicates (0.72) — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 532