How muslim woman brought me to the online world
I was at the end of my BA in Social Science and had to write a thesis to end my course and get my degree. At the time I got to know the muslim world and decided to research with muslim woman from my city. But the problem was: I didn’t know anyone.
As going to the Mosque is not a rule to muslim woman, it was hard to approach these woman, so I decided to search for online groups of muslim woman on facebook. The idea was to find some woman to get to know in real life and be closer enough to do an ethnography about how it was to use hijab in a non muslim town / country, as Curitiba / Brasil.
It was 2015 and terrorism had reborn as a stablished “problem”, so it was common that muslim from everywhere got threaten and suffered from prejudice. In Brazil it was not different. As a major christian country, non-christian religions are commonly left out of the public scenario and it reflects on violent acts to those who follow them — this happens with muslims, jewish and followers of afro-brazilian religions like candomblé and umbanda.
With this research thesis I intented to show how these woman are as much a subject as non muslim woman are. To do so I got familiar with five or six women from different backgrounds and ages and understood the place that religion and its clothing had in their lives.
By this relationship I could trace some parts of their identity as muslim and as brazilian and related all that I saw and experienced with them with the philosophic theory of oriented machines ontology, as created by the philosopher Levi Paul-Bryant.
As a key result I got my BA degree. But also I realized that anthropology and the internet had more in common than my professors and college made me believe at first. With that in mind, I started to explore.
You can access the text of my BA thesis, in Portuguese, here.
