by Helen
Fri Sep 1st, 2006 at 09:10:30 AM EST
I went looking at Johan Hari's site for something entirely different and found an essay on Shazia Mirza, the muslim comedienne. (http://www.johannhari.com/index.php). It chimed with an article in the Independent today regarding Hammasa Kohistani, a young muslim woman who was the recent Miss England. (http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article1223137.ece)
Excerpts below
In 2001, as the world began to come to terms with the great gash in the New York skyline, a small tinder-dry Muslim woman wandered onto the London stand-up circuit. "My name is Shazia Mirza," she announced. "At least, that's what it says on my pilot's license." Wearing a hijab, she lived in a pincer movement of prejudice - feared from the outside for being a Muslim, and oppressed within the community for being a woman. She was determined not to be bullied into silence either by racists or by men who try to impose the values of a nineteenth-century Pakistani village in twenty-first century London. Instead she joked about everything from the Queen to Primark to how good Allah would be as a judge on Pop Idol, and asked the audience, "Does my bomb look big in this?"...........
Shazia is part of a wave of heroic rebellion by Muslim women that can be witnessed - slowly, tentatively - across London. Shazia used to be a teacher in Tower Hamlets, where I live, and she would see Muslim girls rebelling against the chafing medieval codes of their fathers every day. "They would arrive at school peel off the hijab, put on make-up, and head down the pub to get pissed," she explains. "They would snog their white boyfriends behind the staff room. But I would look at them and feel so sad, because they are forced to live a double-life. Come 3.30 they put the hijab back on and they're carted off to the mosque to rote-learn the Koran for three hours. They would come in the next day exhausted, having not done their homework, and they would say, `My parents say the Koran comes before homework.'"
Shazia understands this better than most: her parents are, she says, "fanatics." She was forbidden to leave the house throughout her teenage years except to go to school. "I'm a woman, and I couldn't stand the repression. I wanted to go swimming, do ballet, ride horses, tell jokes. I was allowed to do all those things until I went through puberty and then it was all taken away from me, and I couldn't stand it...................................
Tens of thousands of Muslim women are kicking back against Islamic fundamentalism. They have immigrated from countries where there has never been a feminist revolution, so they are having their feminist revolution here, on our streets. Shazia comments, "I always wanted to be like my white friends, who had abortions, herpes and chlamidya. And my mother would say, `Wait until you are married, your husband will give you all of that.'"
These brave, brilliant women are the key to breaking the back of Islamic fundamentalism, since without them the fanatics literally cannot reproduce. But these men are not going to give up their patriarchal privileges any faster than Western men did. ........................
But Shazia comes from a pakistani community rapidly acquiring a reputation for patriarchal backwardness, she has to fight for the right to breathe.. Here's an interesting counterpoint of an afghani woman who cannot imagine having to wear the hijab
She won the title, and became the first Muslim Miss England in the history of the contest.
Then aged 18, Ms Kohistani, the daughter of Afghan refugees who fled the Taliban, had no idea just how much the beauty crown would change her life, not least because it came just two months after the Tube bomb atrocities of 7 July. The timing meant her role was politicised from the start, and she found herself unwittingly placed in an ambassadorial role for modern Islam.
That was never more evident than yesterday, when Ms Kohistani criticised Tony Blair for stereotyping the Islamic community in the wake of the London bombings. Her strong views and willingness to voice them have highlighted the tensions inherent in being both a Western beauty queen and a Muslim. While liberal Muslims from across the world hailed her as their mascot, her modelling career was met by frostiness in orthodox Islamic quarters.......................
But it can be difficult as well. In interviews, people always ask me questions about being a Muslim and about politics. At first it was quite rewarding and I enjoyed it. But after the first 200 interviews, I realised that it was all about me being Muslim. I won a beauty contest, not a politics degree."......
"Tony Blair addressed Muslims in particular, telling them that they need to sort out the problem within." she said. "That was a huge stereotype of the Islamic community and many feel penalised, and placed under the 'fundamentalist' category. Even the more moderate Muslims have been stereotyped negatively and feel they have to take actions to prove themselves...............
Meanwhile, Ms Kohistani does not limit her observations to the shifting nature of Muslim identity in Britain. After a year of travelling the world as Miss England, she has met world leaders including Shaukat Aziz, Prime Minister of Pakistan, and exchanged views with a diverse range of Muslim women.
"Shaukat Aziz told me it was women like me that would make the world aware that there are so many more kinds of Muslim women out there than the stereotype that the Western media has of them in a burqa," she said. "Whenever we see images of Afghan women, they are in a burqa but there are so many women who don't look like this.
"My own grandmother never wore a burqa. When people see me, they can't believe I'm from Afghanistan because I'm not covered up.
So, just as in so many other parts of the world, social progress is dependent upon the emancipation of women, Liberated women will educate their sons to expect more than mere servility. Educated women are less likely to raise children in poverty, they are more flexible economically. In Islam, as elsewhere, women are doing it for themselves...cos the men aren't helping.
