Echidne of the Snakes takes a look at overlooked assumptions about religious codes of dress or conduct…
So you may have read that Nicolas Sarkozy is proposing a debate about banning the burqa in France, by which he appears to mean banning those Islamic methods of veiling which cover the face (the Afghan burqa with a grille in front of the eyes and the niqab, common in Saudi Arabia, which leaves only the eyes visible). I found reading the comments threads attached to posts on this topic at feministing.com and at feministe very interesting: Intersectionality in practice!
Except that this reveals one problem with intersectionality: by focusing on women and Islam we lose sight of the men and Islam, we lose sight of the long tradition of religious interpretation by men, and we lose sight of the question of women’s roles in the three Abrahamic religions. Though intersectionality does help bring into light questions about colonialism and racism or xenophobia.
Later in the post she distinguishes layers of interpretation, the key ones for me being the text of a rule and the decisions about what they should mean in practice.
In Judeo-Christian tradition we read Biblical verses about, say, Sodom or Onan where the text itself is plain… but not necessarily clear... and choose to decide what we should do about it. In those cases we decided the first was about homosexuality instead of impiety and dishonesty or, even more improbably, that the second was about masturbation, about which the Bible is otherwise silent, instead of insuring patrilinearity, about which it’s obsessed. (And about Onan — it’s odd ‘wingers don’t beat on that passage as being about contraception instead. It’s possibly a good thing — better to have them wigging out looking for hairy palms than condoms or the pill. But I digress…)
Anyway, just as Judeo-Christians have our interpretations that are flavored by (non-textual) culture, surely interpretation of texts of Islam must be subject to the culture of those who interpret it.
And if that interpretation is permitted only of one sex in a gender-constructing culture then even if your texts condone oppression of sub-groups such as unbelievers, foreigners, or women there remains a deep, deep risk that the dominant interpreters for their unexamined convenience will unjustly burden those they subjugate.
For instance to oblige women to cover themselves rather than to oblige men to chill with the coveting business.
The conclusion then is that even for “traditional” women-domineering faiths such as Judaism, Christianity,and Islam it is a responsibility of the pious to engage with, absorb, and genuinely practice, say, feminism to the fullest possible extent or risk straying from their faith and sinking into apostasy.
And if even unreconstructed patriarchs ought to incorporate feminism…
(Signature: composed on a hand-held — pardon any typos.)
