Left and Right
I heard two women with opposing views engaged in a yelling match on national TV. Jacquie Lambie and Yassmin Abdel-Magied (if you’re interested http://iview.abc.net.au/programs/qanda/NC1703H002S00#playing). They were talking about Islam and Muslims. Lambie felt that Islam poses a real threat to women, some of which has been actualized and Abdel-Magied felt Islam has been unfairly targeted and that othering Muslims actually exacerbates threats to Australia’s national security. But I have seriously paraphrased here. Do watch the episode, or at least the part where these two women engage.
Lambie appeared to have completely undone any credibility, to the thinking person at least, by her shout-y and therefore incomprehensible non-arguments. Though shouting the word ‘sharia’ can bring about a few rallying cries from a populist fuelled crowd, it’s not exactly an argument. Also, if she had information on Sharia beyond just knowledge of the word, using it there might have been helpful in forwarding her argument beyond the excited and excitable viewers. Lambie, much like Trump, presents as unrefined, inarticulate, brash and bombastic-perhaps a new shift in political dialogue. Perhaps measured speech and diplomacy in communication is now viewed with suspicion, associated with that much demonized ‘professional politician’.
Lambie’s acknowledgement that her anti-Islam sentiments were ‘hateful to a minority’ which suggested her following sotto voce statement might well have been ‘and they don’t matter’ was also concerning. Cause for further concern, well, actually, confusion was her statement that Muslims who believe in Sharia law should be deported. First off, how would she do that? How to filter those Muslims who do believe in and follow Sharia from those who do not? A questionnaire in the mail? And secondly, such a move would be divisive and such divisiveness plays into hands of extremist group recruitment propaganda: forcibly relieve a people of an identity and they go about in search of a replacement. ‘Other-ing’ a community within the greater framework of a nation has never yielded positive results-economically or politically, if history is to be believed.
My bigger frustration was with Abdel-Magied. I do not give a lot of credence to arguments made by Muslim feminists because I think that is a contradiction in terms, in and of itself. But her hysterical statement of Islam being ‘the most feminist religion’ completely discounted her from any valid, fact-based discussion on Islam and women’s rights. She simply trotted out the same defensive rhetoric every moderate Muslim appears to trot out, which is frustrating because that’s a woman actively taking a stand against women’s rights.
Yes, Islam may have awarded women rights to divorce and property before women were given these in Europe, but the rights of Muslim women have not progressed since that point. That the vague verses of the Quran leaves it open to interpretation is, to my mind, a key failure in keeping Islam feminist. The interpretation is driven by the interpreter and if the interpreter is a misogynist then the verses can be weaponized against women. Therefore, Abdel-Magied’s argument attempting to distinguish culture and religion, attempting to distinguish ‘her’ Islam from what it is seen as are all moot.
All Abdel-Magied’s arguments highlighted for me was her own cognitive dissonance about what she thinks Islam is and what it actually does to women. Her cloistered and distilled view of Islam-an Islam sieved of all culture and distorted/misogynistic interpretations exists as a carefully protected bubble. It is possibly this bubble of #notinmyislam that allows moderate Muslims to distance themselves from Islam related atrocities (and not just in conflict, but the day-to-day atrocities against women) and therefore not take responsibility for or action against it.
