What (who) drives Muslim women

"Arab Spring", Anthropology/Sociology, CyberOrient, Gender and Sexuality, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Yemen


top, Leila Trabelsi in Saudi Arabia; bottom, Leila Trabelsi with Ben Ali in Tunis, pre-Jasmine Revolution

The West has long had a fascination with Muslim women, from the Oriental harem beauties of Ottoman seraglios to immigrants who wear niqab in Europe. As some critics have noted, perhaps those who laud or victimize the role of women in Islam (as though there could be “the” role), should look at the patriarchy in their own societies. The ability to go out in public with less of the body covered may be a sign of freedom in mobility, but it is not automatically symbolic of equality in economic or political terms. Ethnographic study for almost a century has illustrated the kinds of social contexts in which women and men are closer to being egalitarian, but there is no one factor (including religion) that is causal. The books and commentaries on women in Islam continue to proliferate and will into the foreseeable future. But what about the situation today within Islamic countries?

By today, I mean the totally unscientific sense of an arbitrary internet experience. In checking out several websites this morning to see what I might comment upon, several items caught my attention. First, a Yemeni website shows a photograph of Leila Trabelsi, the wife of the exiled Tunisian president Ben Ali; both are now living in Saudi Arabia (top picture, above). The picture is pregnant with interpretive possibilities. The former elegant first lady is now regaled in hijab while mouse-clicking her way through cyberspace. In that vast digital archive, she can easily come across previous pictures of herself, like the one shown below her new Saudi makeover look. So is one of these pictures of Leila more Islamic than the other? Does the veil indicate intent; does living in Saudi Arabia signify a closer relationship to Allah? Perhaps if we knew what websites she was surfing, we would have more clues. Continue reading What (who) drives Muslim women →

Tabsir Redux: Mahdi Madness and the 2008 Election

Election 2008, Iran, Islam and Christianity, Islamophobia

[Note: The commentary below was published as the presidential politics of 2008 were heading into the rhetorical throes of summer. Religion was all over the map, with Obama’s Christianity being questioned and his supposed “Islamic” past salivated by the right. This time around religion seems to be taking a back seat to the economy, perhaps in large part because Evangelicals do not want to remind themselves they are about to vote for a Mormon. But the sentiments discussed below are still quite alive…]

For some partisans, no matter who is elected President to succeed George W. Bush, it will seem like the end of the world. We are in the apocalypse silly season once again. Take Tim LeHaye, the doctrinal inspiration of the WASP-friendly Left Behind book series (Jerry B. Jenkins provides the verbal inspiration in sci-fi style); he has been preaching the politics of biblical apocalypse for years. Indeed, since the apostle John allegedly first had his vision on the island of Patmos, the world has been teetering in the end times. This world is always going to hell; Jesus must be coming soon. Bible-belting believers and bible-belching evangelists constantly look to the heavens with rapturous delight for the mother of all shock-and-awe shows to begin. Up go the faithful in the twinkling of an eye and then it is open tribulation season on the Jews that will make the 20th century Nazi holocaust look like a sabbath picnic. Fortunately, most of the world’s Christians look at such a naive-ity scene with alarm. “Even so,” it might be said, “do not come Lord Jesus.”

Reverends Tim LeHaye, Pat Robertson and John Hagee are not the only mega-mouths who know deep down in their saved souls that they will not be left behind. Ironically, they share theologically-maddened space with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the shi’a-evangelical President of Iran. As noted in a New York Times article today by Nazila Fathi, the Iranian President’s “high father” is Imam Mahdi, the hidden 12th “twelver” Imam who occulted well over a millennium ago, but whose reappearance has been looked for year after year in popular imagination. Ahmadinejad, who loves to wear his religion on his sleeves, says that Imam Mahdi guides his day-to-day decisions as a president. In gratitude, Ahmadinejad has sponsored an institute to prepare Iran for the Imam’s immanent return. This would be like Bush asking his faith-based supporters to create a special office in Homeland Security on Eternal Security Risks to those Left Behind. Continue reading Tabsir Redux: Mahdi Madness and the 2008 Election →

Timbuctu too…

Architecture, Ethics, Islamic Rituals, Mali, Saudi Arabia, Wahhabi, Yemen


A Tuareg nomad stands near a 13th century mosque in Timbuktu in this file photo [Reuters]

There is an old saw in English: cutting your nose to spite your face. The sorry lot of vigilante Ansar extremists have already desecrated several Muslim saints’ tombs in southern Yemen, but now come reports of lawless fanatics destroying saint shrines in the famed city of Timbuktu in Mali. Al Jazeera is reporting that many, if not all, of the shrines there on the World Heritage List have been damaged or destroyed. These are ritual attractions considered sacred by local Muslims for several centuries, not replicas of the Buddha or foreign idols. So who exactly do these fanatics hate? If you think they are doing this because they hate America and its freedoms, think again.

Iconoclasm has a long history that is hardly unique to the Middle East. The modus vivendi is the idea that if you don’t like something, just get rid of it no matter what other people think. Tolerance and dialogue might as well be Satanic in this twisted worldview. It is important to observe that in both the Yemeni case and now in Timbuktu the destruction takes place because of an almost total breakdown of security. No government, responsible or not to world opinion, is behind this action to such a sacred Islamic site. It is very much a replay of the Wahhabi wave that swept across Arabia with the sword of the Sa’ud clan. The Wahhabis, considered fanatics at the time by most other Muslims, wanted to turn back the clock to a narrow understanding of what they thought life was like in the time of the Prophet. Were ‘Abd al-Wahhab, who died in 1792 (just six years before Napoleon invaded Egypt and proclaimed himself a true Muslim come to rescue Egypt from its corrupt rulers) to come back from the dead and see the palaces, shopping malls and gentrification of the ka‘ba as these have evolved with the vast oil wealth of the Saudi elite, he would no doubt follow Balaam and curse the day he ever met Ibn Sa’ud.

Timbuktu, as a major African center of Islamic education, is also a rich treasury of Islamic manuscripts. Will these fanatics torch the handwritten copies of the Qu’ran, traditions and other religious books in the libraries? ‘Abd al-Wahhab is not about to be resurrected, but there is a need for a modern day Muslim Balaam to get off his ass and curse such sacrilege.

Islam Obscured reviewed

Anthropology/Sociology, Books You Should Read, Islam and Christianity, Islam: Introduction, Scholars

Review of D. M. Varisco, Islam obscured. The rhetoric of anthropological representation, Palgrave MacMillan, New York 2005.

by Estella Carpi, letturearabe di Jolanda Guardi, June 29, 2012

Anche a distanza di ben sei anni, vale la pena recensire il testo dell’antropologo Americano Daniel Varisco, considerate l’urgenza attuale di de-cristallizzare i discorsi sull’Islam, particolarmente nel contesto accademico italiano.

Attraverso una rassegna concettuale di eminenti studiosi tra i quali Ernest Gellner e Clifford Geertz, e la de-mitizzazione della sociologa marocchina Fatima Mernissi che ancora pecca di una visione monolitica dell’Islam, Varisco riesce totalmente, a mio avviso, nell’intento di decostruire il solo Islam univoco, omogeneo, aspettatamente coerente e destoricizzato che ci viene rifilato.

L’Islam che definirei “monolitico” tuttora pervade i discorsi dei più esperti: Varisco, attraverso il suo background squisitamente antropologico, invoca invece all’osservazione degli individui che si auto-definiscono “musulmani”, piuttosto che alla catalogazione di ciò che l’Islam teologicamente prevede. L’Islam, come qualsiasi altra religione intesa sia come istituzione che pratica culturale, può soltanto essere rappresentato.

Per demolire le tuttora ancor troppo diffuse stagnazioni dogmatiche e una comprensione campanilistica dell’Islam, è quindi necessario, sostiene Varisco, tener conto del fatto che additiamo costantemente ai misfatti compiuti dai musulmani con maggior indignazione, in riflesso appunto alla nostra lettura dell’Islam, inteso come insieme di valori e pratiche rigorosamente coerenti, rispetto a qualsiasi altra religione.

I musulmani sono invece “conservatori o comunisti, maschi o femmine, giovani e vecchi, ricchi e poveri, di buon umore o mal intenzionati”, che poco hanno a che fare con una logica islamica del “prendere o lasciare”, quale invece ampiamente diffusa nella letteratura al riguardo. Continue reading Islam Obscured reviewed →

Yemen’s Transition

"Arab Spring", Development, Yemen


Yemeni interim president Al-Hadi

Yemen’s transition: a model to be followed?

by Helen Lackner, Open Democracy, June 19, 2012

What is actually happening in Yemen? It is either presented as a ‘solution’ which could be a model for Syria, or as a ‘phoney’ change that only conceals continuation of the previous regime

In the current environment where the success of the ‘Arab revolutions’ to bring about genuine democracy to their countries is more than doubtful, there is value in examining in some detail the situation in Yemen. Where Egypt seems to be poised between a military or a fundamentalist regime, Libya is at risk of being divided between a multiplicity of various armed factions, Bahrain continues on its bloody confrontation between a minority regime and the demands of the majority of its people, early hopes for Tunisia are dwindling in the face of more aggressive fundamentalists and Syria is suffering civil war with a death toll of hundreds each weak, what is actually happening in Yemen? It is either presented as a ‘solution’ which could be a model for Syria, or as a merely cosmetic change which conceals a continuation of the previous regime.

After many months of procrastination, Ali Abdullah Saleh was forced to sign the so-called Gulf Cooperation Council Transitional agreement on 23 November 2011. While he attempted to continue ruling from behind the scenes, his power has been very dramatically reduced over the months. First, his former Vice President, Abdul Rabbo Mansour Hadi was elected president through an overwhelming popular endorsement on 25 February 2012 when more people came out to vote for him than had participated in the previously ‘contested’ presidential elections of 1999 and 2006. While the outcome was in no doubt as he was the only candidate, the fact that over 6 million Yemenis bothered to come out and queue to vote showed their desire for change and to get rid of the old regime – even if many of them were voting more against AAS than for ARMH – gave him a popular legitimacy which helps him develop a genuine power base which he previously lacked. Continue reading Yemen’s Transition →

The Road to Damascus

"Arab Spring", Syria, Turkey


What a modern day Saul might hope to see

About 2000 years ago a zealot named Saul witnessed a blinding light on the road to Damascus; it was both a name changing and life changing experience. The great epistle writer and first missionary went on to create early Christianity, at least in the canonical sense. There are more blinding, life-and-death lights now ablaze on the road to Damascus as well as in Damascus. This time no one would mistake them for signs of the divine. While the world watched as the Egyptian people elected a leader with religious convictions, the last entrenched dictator (sparing the kings and emirs who still live as though the 1001 Nights never ended) to the north is spilling the blood of his own people. Asad, the dentist turned family potentate, is more like a modern-day Nero than a latter-day hero. His siege mentality, propped up by Russian economic and political interests, is not viable in the long run, but how long can Syrians survive the short run?

The issue is not if Asad can survive, but how long the drama will continue. Obviously he continues to rule because he and his minority have the guns and few qualms about using them. In February of 1982 his father was pitiless in ordering a slaughter in the city of Hama in which perhaps as many as 20,000 were killed. Although in many ways the gaunt and lackluster Bashir is not the charismatic clone of his father, his modus vivendi for taking the life out of his enemies is the same. There may not yet have been a blinding flash of light strong enough to overthrow Asad, but there is plenty of handwriting on the wall. Shooting down a Turkish plane, when relations with Turkey are as low as they can be without conflict , is a no-brainer dumb move. As a member of NATO, Turkey could call on its security allies to pull another Libya. If Asad thinks that such a provocation would stop Turkish support for the defectors from his regime, he is either desperate or deluded. Continue reading The Road to Damascus →

Tabsir Redux: Is There a Middle East?

Bible and Holy Land, Books You Should Read, Conferences and Talks, Travel

[The following post is about a conference held five years ago, but the papers from the conference have been published in a new volume edited by the late Michael E. Bonine, Abbas Amanat and Michael Ezekiel Gaspar entitled Is There a Middle East?. This is a book well worth reading and owing.]

Is there a Middle East? At first glance we either have a very silly question or an occasion for an academic conference. In this case it was the latter at Yale University this past weekend. The Council for Middle East Studies of the Yale Center for International and Area Studies hosted a dozen scholars from various disciplines. Papers were given on the history of the term “Middle East,” its geographical borders in maps and mental templates, how the region implied has been imagined, colonially appropriated and the continuing relevance of the region in a world hooked on oil and stymied by regional terrorism. Continue reading Tabsir Redux: Is There a Middle East? →