On the Claims of Yassmin Abdel-Magied, Part I
I’ve seen a few people sharing the video of Yassmin Abdel-Magied’s on-air argument with Jacqui Lambie by now, always without commentary. In it, Yassmin Abdel-Magied makes the claims that Islam is one of the most feminist religions (to her), that culture is separate from faith, and that sharia is just praying five times a day. In a separate video, she expanded a little bit on that. We’ll talk about the three claims made in the first video first, then go into the video where Abdel-Magied explains sharia.
The claim that Islam is “one of the most feminist religions” is bizarre and incredibly uncomfortable for me, as a person who has experienced a lot of violence as a Muslim within Muslim communities by other Muslims that was justified as being explicitly Islamic in nature. It is for this reason that I would discourage people from white-knighting on behalf of Islam using arguments such as this, especially if they are not Muslim, as this is very clearly a conversation that should be happening within the community before it ever leaves it.
It is impossible to make a positive claim about the philosophical and social nature of any religion with such certainty, especially when its adherents are so great in number and variety is very questionable and should be questioned at every iteration. There is no range of True Islam™ aside from what Muslims have actually practiced and interpreted throughout its history, and there is no One True Islam™ because of the extent of this range.
When people say things like, “Islam is one of the most feminist religions”, what they are really saying is, “the Islam I personally practice and believe in is one of the most feminist religions”. It inherently includes a claim about the existence of One True Islam™ and what they think that One True Islam™ is. This is the road to takfir. Takfir is not only extremely unwise, but it is also haraam to say a Muslim is not really Muslim without great evidence.
Besides just the general lack of wisdom in them, claims such as these always neglect to note that a few changes in interpretation could result in (and have historically resulted in) wildly oppressive effects, and because there is no one clear or proper interpretation of Islam, there is no way to assert that “Islam is one of the most feminist religions”. No, not even because Islam theoretically allowed women to own property and divorce of their own will — we don’t let any other group off this easily, on the basis of theoretical rights that don’t necessarily play out in practice. Speaking of that, we need to talk some other time about how Khadija is constantly promoted as a shining example for how Islam elevated women, despite the fact that she was already a rich woman who owned her own successful business before she converted and got married to one of the most powerful men of that time. We don’t base all sociological and historical analysis of a demographic on the members of that demographic who are the most prosperous and have the most choices. That’s not how it’s done.
Abdel-Magied may be totally fine with it and her version of Islam/what she’s practicing may cohere with her idea of what feminism is. But even feminism is not just one thing — there are tons of different kinds of feminisms. There are tons of different kinds of Islam. I’ve seen a few videos such as this make the rounds, and I’ve never seen someone from a minority sect in them (in my experience anyway — let me know if you know of any Muslim communicators in the West who are not Sunni).
Abdel-Magied is a Sunni Muslim, and as such, holds a great amount of privilege within Muslim communities. A good portion of what is oppressive in Muslim communities, such as sectarianism, probably has not affected her to a significant and negative extent, especially in the West. If people can say white feminism isn’t real feminism because it excludes women of color, then people proclaiming Islam is feminist before rushing to protect and support Ahmadis (~1% of Muslims worldwide) and Shias (~10–20%) should raise a lot of alarms. But alas, a lot of Western feminists who want to defend this don’t even know what Ahmadis are. There are even more sects than just the three I’ve mentioned here. You could say, “Abdel-Magied is an Australian of Sudanese/Egyptian background, she doesn’t have exposure to Shias and Ahmadis very much, it makes sense that she wouldn’t talk about them!” — so then why is she trying to speak for Islam and its practices at large as if it’s one unified thing?
I want to know — where does all the critical theory go when we start talking about Islam? Y’all never need to know anything about a Muslim woman defending Islam aside from the fact that she’s Muslim even though we all know through ~intersectionality~ that there are a shit ton of other identity and material factors that can entirely flip how a person receives and responds to their environment. We have no problem talking about how everything is social construction, but you throw Islam into the mix, and all of that just evaporates.
Another claim she makes in this video is that culture is separate from faith — except it’s not. Religions arise from specific cultures and then seek to establish universal truths. If you believe that the truths we all assume to be true, such as gender or sex or race and so on, are socially constructed, then religion is for sure socially constructed as well, and so the culture that a religion is practiced in is inseparable from the religion itself. That is, unless you believe that all religion is divinely inspired and exists outside of humanity and culture and society (and it doesn’t). Religion is always transmitted with and by culture.
Another thing that I take issue with re: the “culture is not faith” is how it interacts with and reflects the racial/ethnic hierarchy in the Muslim world. Growing up, it was really clear that Muslims who spoke/understood Arabic and/or lived in the Middle East were seen as purer, better Muslims, with a better claim to holiness than South Asian or Black Muslims who didn’t live in or close to the holy land, and therefore better humans overall. The argument that all the bad things practiced in Muslim communities come solely from the cultures and never from the religion (even though there was a specific culture that begat Islam in the first place) is a reiteration of that ethnic/racial hierarchy — “these Muslims who are not as pure as us are defiling our Islam”. The claim is that the bad parts of Muslim-majority cultures worldwide are remnants of converted cultures — “these Muslims have not given up enough of their previous cultures.” It’s part of what allows places like Saudi Arabia and Qatar to subject South Asian and Black workers to horrific labor and human rights violations.
This last point needs to be made more salient, I think. Because a lot of people don’t realize — Islam came to my homeland (and the homelands of a lot of other groups/people) through imperialism and colonization. There is cultural imperialism still going on. Islam does not have the same meaning to all Muslims or people of Muslim background. For some of us, it entails centuries of oppressive and sexist/racist/etc hegemony. There is no way that any one thing can be said about Islam and its social applications at large. It’s fucked up to try to elevate and perpetuate this kind of singular utopic narrative over these voices. The Narrative of a Unified Ummah is not based in reality.
Yet another thing that I take issue with is the “sharia is just praying five times a day” argument. Sharia including five daily prayers does not preclude other non-personal things from also being part of sharia. Sharia is a whole code of conduct to live by, from banking/fiscal regulations, to dress code, to who you can marry, to specific ways to wash yourself before prayer. If Abdel-Magied chooses to avoid or not practice certain aspects of it (in order to follow the part of sharia that says to follow the law of the land), that’s her own business, but sharia is more than just personal conduct. Even besides that, there are many parts of sharia that seem to contradict each other, depending on madhhab (school of jurisprudence), and people reconcile inconsistencies in different ways.
Something I want to make clear: Lambie was talking about the fear that laws implemented in Muslim countries could be implemented in Australia, but laws in Muslim countries are not inherently sharia. Many laws that are on the books in Muslim countries are not sharia, and there are many parts of sharia that are nowhere to be found in legislation in Muslim countries. There is a distinction between the two. However, sharia is intimately involved with the law in nearly all Muslim-majority countries. For example, proposed domestic abuse laws in my country of birth — Pakistan — were defeated for years and years because every time they came up, religious authorities came down with immense pressure solely on the grounds that laws against domestic abuse went against sharia. The reason this fear isn’t relevant in Australia isn’t because sharia never has anything to do with the law of the land. The reason this fear isn’t relevant in Australia is because there is an established intent of separation between religious institutions and the state (although certainly not satisfactorily enacted — they should really fix that if they really want secular pluralistic government).
Jacqui Lambie protested, “What about equal rights for women?” In turn, Abdel-Magied argued that that is “completely separate from Islam”. Lambie proceeded to very purposefully point out some bungled-up banality about being half-pregnant. Abdel-Magied continued by saying something I agree with and then to support it, she said: “Islam, to me, is one of the most feminist religions. We got equal rights well before the Europeans.” …Is that what “feminist” means now? Doing better than medieval Europeans? Did she not say that Islam was completely separate from equal rights for women? How do you not realize that having progress (and what is considered feminist) in Muslim communities revolve around what white people did is literally the most Eurocentric thing ever.
Muslim feminists: sharia has nothing to do with the law of the land
Muslim feminists: but also it radically changed the law of the land by allowing capital to be held by half the population
In the video of the entire panel (and not just the share-worthy outburst), Abdel-Magied stated that she knows no other real culture, so I can somewhat understand why she would make these claims. She doesn’t realize her view of Islam is inseparable from her experience in Australia, as an Australian, no matter how much she is Othered by the other residents of Australia. I know the experience of migration is a difficult one to parse, as someone who migrated to the United States as a child (although as a 7-year-old and not a 1-year-old). However, in asserting that she experienced culture separately from religion, Abdel-Magied unintentionally posited the Australian-ness she grew up in as a neutral culture unaffected by her Muslimness and her Muslimness as a neutral theology unaffected by her Australian-ness.
I want to also discuss Abdel-Magied’s position as a hijabi (the appropriate term would be muhajjaba, but hijabi is more prevalent) lending an authority to her words that isn’t afforded to non-hijabis, and the fact that no one believes the experience of non-hijabi Muslim women is just as authentic or Muslim as that of hijabis. Y’all continue to uphold certain definitions of what it means to be truly Muslim, even though in Muslim communities, hijabis are generally respected a lot more and seen as purer, more moral, and more honest than non-hijabis to begin with. And if a person who wants to adhere to and defend all the most visible religious norms receives better treatment for it in her community and gets asked to be on tv shows outside her community, then of course she’s not going to resist against it, of course she’s going to center her experience, as she’s being crushed in between two different sets of pressures. The situation seems much rosier to her than it actually is for a lot of other people. She probably doesn’t even notice the other people while she’s talking over them. The entire community would prefer that they say nothing at all. God forbid they have to make some changes.
It’s interesting to note that, in service of the claim that Islam is one of the most feminist religions, Abdel-Magied cites that Muslim women don’t take their husbands’ last names. This is a cultural phenomenon. It makes sense for Abdel-Magied to cite this, because after all, Islam did arise from a very specific Arab culture. But she then does the same thing she’s accusing others of doing — conflating culture with religion. It’s unavoidable, because religion never ₑᵥₑᵣ ᵉᵛᵉʳ ever exists without culture, not even from its point of inception. The “original Islam” that Abdel-Magied continuously refers to throughout all this never existed without cultural baggage.
Further, while Abdel-Magied is definitely correct that Arabic naming conventions (I’m going to assume that’s who she meant by “we”, as if all Muslims use Arabic naming conventions or something) don’t have women taking their husbands’ names, there is an element of dishonesty here. In Arabic naming convention, women take their fathers’ names. The implication of Abdel-Magied’s claim was that patriarchy in Islam (but actually, she just meant Arab cultures — guess all cultures where Islam is present are Arab culture now) is not as much A Thing™ because see, patrilineal naming conventions aren’t used! Except they are, just not in “the European way”. There isn’t even just one standard European family naming convention, for the record. Greek, Nordic, Russian, and many Slavic cultures still do not have the same family naming conventions as the British. And for what it’s worth, last names, patrilineal or otherwise, weren’t present at all in Europe until about the 11th century either — men or women. It doesn’t mean they were somehow more egalitarian before they adopted patrilineal naming conventions. Lots and lots of places and cultures still don’t use last names. It’s not conclusive evidence for the presence of gender equality.
Those of us who have been hurt by the dynamics within Muslim communities, that are validated using scripture, are always gaslit and shut down by people exactly like this who don’t want to hear it and so proceed to proclaim it wholesale as “one of the most feminist religions”, even when those of us who have Muslim background and intimate association with Muslim communities disagree, both because of what we ourselves have experienced and what we have witnessed.
I get that we’re trying to intercept concern-trolling about Muslim women being used to provide cover for Western powers to intervene and/or bomb and/or generally be aggressive and no one wants to contribute to that. But they would do that regardless, so this narrative doesn’t actually help the issue. Jacqui Lambie, despite having been countered with this narrative publicly, is not going to change her views nor does she even believe this narrative.
It’s not necessary to make claims like this to defend the Muslim community. The bigots don’t even believe you and you only make it more difficult for those of us within the community who are already silenced and continue to be suppressed.
Continue on to Part II!
