re:[Marxism] Hijab and my opening thoughts on other Muslim-related stuff

["M. Junaid Alam" <mjunaidalam@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hijab does not mean veil, it means headcovering, like the one Little Red
Riding Hood wears.

Coming from a  Muslim background myself, I feel somewhat ambivalent -
and feel the American left, myself included, is currently ill-equipped
theoretically and empirically - on a lot of the current issues under
discussion on this list recently, ie. what is the nature of the Iraqi
resistance, Islamic resistance more broadly, the historical development
and spread of Islam, the issue of misogyny in Muslim societies, etc.
It's dawned upon me that a rigorous examination of these issues has
become necessary to effectively counter right-wing attacks and
accusations, for which of course they make no preparations but merely
open their mouths and let venom fly. The typical liberal response of "oh
well all people and religions are good and let's not stereotype" is not
an effective antidote.

I am not religious, and in my middle-class Pakistani background, no one
in my extended family wears the veil. In Pakistan middle-class women
drive around and go shopping and what not pretty freely from what I
recall. I suspect there is something conservative about Arab society
quite apart from Islam; once I had an Arab girlfriend - who of course
wasn't _supposed_ to have a boyfriend, for whom taking off her headscarf
in front of me was at first very difficult.

Clearly, it is necessary to get a firm grasp on these issues by reading
some history and gathering up the pertinent facts. I am starting off
with Verso's 'No-nonsense guide to Islam' by Merryl Wyn Davis and
Ziaddun Sardar.

Clarity on these questions is made more difficult by the obvious
overlaying of biases and ulterior motives of various commentators
batting for imperialism. It's no different than say Conquistadores 500
years ago citing the sacrificial rituals of the Aztecs as justification
for exterminating them: on the one hand there are obviously internal
problems, but on the other hand they are exaggerated and compounded by
external interference.

As Frantz Fanon once wrote in reference to Algeria around 1960:

"It is the white man who creates the Negro. But it is the Negro who
creates negritude. To the colonialist offensive against the veil, the
colonized opposes the cult of the veil. What was an undifferentiated
element ina homogenous whole acquires a taboo character, and the
attitude of a given Algerian woman with respect to the veil will be
constantly related to her overall respect to the foreign occupation. The
colonized, in the face of the emphasis given by the colonialist to this
or that aspect of his traditions, reacts very violently. The attention
devoted to modifying this aspect, the emotion the conqueror puts into
his pedagogical work, his prayers, his threats, weave a whole univese of
resistance around this particular element of the culture."

This is a dynamic worthy of serious exploration. The entire Islamic
question is one of the most pressing questions today and will remain so
for at least the next half century. Demographics alone dictates that
Europe will become heavily Muslim - hence the spectre of Islamicization
raised by its conservative politicians - and that the Jewish majority in
'67-bordered Israel will vanish. It will be a severe loss for humanity
if the political and intellectual vanguard of Islam, ie. the
anti-imperialist resistance, does not develop along progressive lines
and remains in its current reactive mode of fundamentalism.

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