Islam’s most visible male proponents are carrying suitcases of bombs, and its most visible females are performing another type of mission.
Iranian-American artist Shirin Neshat’s video installation “Rapture” shows a group of women traversing a long empty beach with a row boat anchored at a distant shore. The women reach the boat amid ululations. Their long black chadors get caught in the water and the wind. Only a few can board the boat while the rest push them out into the open seas.
Neshat’s women have now reached our shores.
Muslim women such as Homa Arjomand, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Irshad Manji, and Wafa Sultan are some of the personifications of Neshat’s poetic pioneers. Each crossed into Western shores dramatically: escaping by foot or train, forced into exile, or leaving everything behind to start a new life somewhere else. And each brings with her the memories and stories of sufferings endured.
These women are gripped by the word freedom. They insist their quest for freedom was the reason for their arduous journeys out of their native lands. And they are completely taken aback to find it curtailed in their adopted countries, especially towards their fellow Muslim women. The strength of Islam, so many miles away from their countries, shocked and alarmed these women into determined activism to change this Islam, which seems to follow them wherever they go, and which is forever pulling them back into the hooded, cramped lives they fled. No longer are they bearers of a message from distant shores, but reformers within their new locations.
These appalled women thrust themselves into a frenzy of activities that in turn propelled them into the limelight. Neshat’s women were finally given the chance to convey their messages to sympathetic ears. Governments, institutions, and individuals, both male and female, accepted them with open hands, hearts and ears, and even tried to offer solutions.
“No woman-hostile Sharia in Ontario”, precipitously declared Premier Dalton McGuinty to Homa Arjomand’s “No Political Islam” petition. The result was no arbitrations for any groups with the disbanding of the decade-long Ontario Arbitration Act traditionally designed for Catholics and Jews, two groups which have peaceably lived within Canadian society for two centuries or more.
Hirsi Ali insists that the West downplay one of its hallmarks, Christianity, in order to enter into a secularized unit to subjugate a totalitarian-inclined Islamic world, especially against its women. By declaring that only a West dependant on reason rather than religion can tackle this, she demands a solution that would throw out one of the prime Western traditions – that of Judaeo-Christianity – which has historically been successful in defeating previous Islamic threats. Her Enlightenment-biased views allow her to boldly state “ The enemies of reason within the West are religion and the Romantic Movement”, as though Western tradition prior to the Enlightenment (which she gets chronologically wrong by putting the Romantics into the fray) is merely an amalgam of religious fanatics and sentimentalists.
Canadian Muslim Irshad Manji is trying to put the her clearly incompatible lesbianism and Islam together in one basket using the Koran as a supporting document. Of course, this only becomes possible in the tolerant West, since Islamic countries continue to deny and defy this association. Yet, even in the West, hers is a hugely contentious issue. Once again, a Muslim woman is supporting fundamental changes in a Western society’s traditions in order to have her behavior sanctioned under a “reformed” Islam.
The Syrian-American Wafa Sultan’s most poignant remark is that every Muslim woman that she knows would rather to leave behind the misogyny she experiences in her country for a “free”, albeit Muslim, life in the West. Implicitly, she is saying that Western countries should open their doors to these women in their quest for freedom from misogyny (but not necessarily from Islam).
All these women are pleading that their Western compatriots help them reform Islam and support their fellow Muslim women in achieving their dreams of transformed lives in the West. Each of them is using the rhetoric of freedom of the individual, freedom of expression and a simplistic concept of secularism to justify her appeals.
But our duty as Westerners is not to reform Islam, nor to accommodate Muslim women - those very women who will have male and female Muslim off-spring, thereby turning our countries into what they left behind. Our responsibility is to make sure that Islam is kept at a distance, which includes Muslims. This may be a harsh rejection of the pleas made by the Hirsi Alis and Wafta Sultans, but they more than anyone else should understand our predicament. And if they don’t, how different are they from their male counterparts, who are aggressively pushing into our societies to change the West into an Islamified entity? We can never be sure if our assistance to these multitudes of Muslim women would alleviate their plight, but making drastic changes in our own societies in response to their grievances will only damage us.
Another striking video by Shirin Neshat is of a singer. Muslim women are not normally allowed to perform before an audience, but this woman circumvents that order by singing into an empty hall. Her Western film audience is as symbolically absent as are her barred Muslim followers. We cannot understand what she is singing while watching the footage, and they are unable to hear what she’s singing for their absence in the auditorium.
In the end, our attempts at understanding may ultimately be in vain. Even Muslim women cannot clearly articulate, and listen to, their own quandaries and dilemmas.