In an old parable, some people gather in a dark room in which there’s an elephant. They’re asked to describe it. One, who can touch only the elephant’s trunk, argues the elephant is like a tree branch. The one who can only feel its tail claims the elephant is like a rope. The people begin to argue amongst themselves about what is correct, and the parable reveals its wisdom when someone lights a candle and all see the elephant – and their incomplete perception – for what it really was.
Such judgements, that are as adamant as they are ignorant, are nothing new to humanity. But they play out with startling frequency when discussing Muslim women.
The latest antics of Femen at a French Muslim conference allegedly discussing wife-beating and proper womanly pursuits are a case in point. Running on stage in front of the two shocked male speakers after tearing off the abayas they had worn as a disguise, they stripped to the waist with slogans such as “I am my own prophet” and “no one subjugates me” scrawled across their naked torsos. They then shouted at the crowd until they were forcibly removed by security.
What is most troubling about this event is not the outrageously condescending attitude of Femen, nor the reported appalling sexism of the some of the Muslims involved: it is that these two voices are once again propped up as the only two in the conversation. It is as if one can only be either a Muslim who loves misogyny as a religious duty, or an orientalist feminist who hates Islam. There is no other option.
Forcing the discourse into such a binary is not only myopic, but factually incorrect. I’ve researched the way Muslim women fight sexism within the Muslim community, and to the shock of many non-Muslims, my research showed that far from being a recent practice borrowed from the west, Muslim women had been standing up for themselves since the advent of Islam.
Aisha, the prophet’s wife, lacerated her male contemporaries with, “You make women worse than animals?!” for believing (wrongly) their prayers were nullified if a woman walked in front of them during worship. It was a woman who challenged, and beat, the second Caliph in a debate in the mosque about women’s financial rights in marriage. And today, lawyers like Asifa Qureshi use blisteringly strong sharia arguments to fight against rulings that punish rape victims in Pakistan and call for the stoning of women in Nigeria.
Far from seeing Islam as a barrier to liberation, a majority of the women in my investigations use Islam to help them in their fight against sexism and shockingly, many named Muslim men (husbands, fathers, teachers) as some of the biggest supporters of their endeavours.
When I’ve told non-Muslims about my findings, they were often baffled, even infuriated. The belief that women can pursue advancement and emancipation as Muslims will be dismissed by many as a kind of “false consciousness”, so certain are they that there is only one way to understand the issue.
But this is simply a function of people’s own fumbling in the dark over a small piece of elephant, all the while trumpeting their grasp of absolute truth.
Of course the scourge of sexism exists within Muslim communities and societies, just as it does in every community. The very fact that there are Muslim women fighting against it proves that we are not in denial. Yet Femen, for all its self-righteous stripping and screaming about women’s rights, is actually in the same ideological camp as the misogynist Muslims they rail against.
Both reinforce the idea of a “real” sexist Islam, an idea to which the broader public conversation so often unquestioningly gives support.
But the stories of Muslim women, in my research and beyond, show there is a third way, and there always has been. It’s a belief in an Islam that is egalitarian and empowering to women, and is strongly rooted in authentic, classical interpretations of the faith.
It isn’t just the Islam of a lucky few women who grew up in the west in the last 50 years, but women and men through Islamic history in countless Muslim communities across the planet who firmly believed that gender justice was a divine mandate. And if people actually spoke to Muslim women, instead of about them, as the incident at the conference in France perfectly encapsulates, this would be known.
And so while the fable about the elephant raises an important point about opinions based on limited information, I have to wonder: what if instead of someone lighting a candle but still ultimately relying on their own opinions, the people asked the elephant: tell me who you are?