University Place

Religion, Migration, and Feminist Theory

– I’m Dr. Janet Hyde, and I’m the director of the Center for Research on Gender and Women. And I’m very excited to announce the third in our series of distinguished faculty lectures here. Now, let me turn to introducing Dr. Friedman. Susan Friedman currently holds the title of Hilldale Professor of the Humanities and is professor of both gender and women studies and English. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Swarthmore College with a double major in English and Greek. And she earned her PhD in English literature with a minor in comparative literature from the University of Wisconsin- Madison. So she’s one of our very proud products.

I won’t list them all because I think you’d probably rather hear from her than from me, but she did earn the Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of Wisconsin Madison in 1988 and the Perkins Prize for Best Book in Narrative Studies in 1999. She’s also the winner of an ACLS fellowship and an NEH fellowship. Her earlier two books were on the literary figure HD, or Hilda Doolittle. And so they’re two books on that topic. Then, most recently, she has a book from 1998 with the title Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter. Today, we’re hearing a talk on the project that is her next book. And so the title is Religion , Migration, and Feminist Theory: Muslim Feminism and Women’s Diasporic Writing. Please join me in welcoming Susan Friedman. [APPLAUSE]

– Hello, everybody, and thank you so much for this opportunity to talk with you about my very much research-in-progress. I have to first thank Janet Hyde for this opportunity.

It was her idea to have a lecture series of gender and women studies faculty once a month, and I’m really very apologetic that I missed the first two. Ellen Samuels and Janet herself gave lectures in this series, and I was out of the country or doing something for the institute. So I hope to make Myra’s talk a month from now. Janet suggested that what would be most helpful is either that we give a broad overview of our field or that we speak in somewhat general and informal terms about our current research. Well, to talk about my whole field, I don’t even think I could begin to do that very well. So I am taking her up on the suggestion that I talk about my current research. I should say that this project grows out of a previous project, particularly on modernity. I have a book called Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time , which is coming out this summer, and I’ve done a lot of work on migration and diaspora and on contemporary women’s writing. I co-edited and co-founded a journal called Contemporary Women’s Writing, so I’m very interested in the category itself. And, also, this book project, which I’m going to tell you about, grows out of teaching I’ve done here at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

It’s working with students on ideas about Islam. Muslim women’s writing about our current events in today’s world that really inspired me to continue with this kind of research, and once I do that research, I want to emphasize it’s going to feed back into the classroom. So, I’m a great believer in the great and rich relationship between active researchers and committed and dedicated teachers. Let me give you my outline for the talk for today, just briefly here. I’m going to begin with what the issues that my research is coming out of, talk to you about the book project kind of in general, and then I’m going to talk about how I think these issues contribute to a very important feminist concept, that is the concept of intersectionality, which I’ve provided, by the way, my working bibliography is up here on the table if you want a bibliography on intersectionality. I’m going to talk to you, then, about how I have worked through the ideas of how to even think about religion and intersectionality, and then focus on the novels of Leila Aboulela and Randa Jarrar. If I have time, I’ll do a kind of coda on the new direction of my newest ideas that have a lot to do with the recognition that if you’re going to talk about religion, you have to talk about secularism. So I’m working through. I would emphasize these ideas are very, very much in process, and any suggestions that you have, questions, will no doubt help me a great deal. So, this new research is very much driven by our location in the 21st century, especially by 9/11 and the rise of Islamophobia in the context of terrorism in the 20th century.

I’m just going to show you a cartoon I picked out of the New York Times in 2010. This is a cartoon from Switzerland. Switzerland was in the process of convulsive political fighting about whether or not one mosque should be built. Okay? So you can see that the minarets, the minarets in the picture are in the shape of missiles, and look at the figure of the woman who is in full niqab covered entirely so that the covered woman comes to stand for the convulsions about the presence of Muslims in Europe. Even looking at the image a little bit closer, you can see you have the shape of the woman and then you have the phallic shape of the missiles. So the way in which gender is thoroughly integrated with issues about religion and issues about fear of the religious other and conflict over religion is present in this cartoon. Well, one of the things that certainly happened to me after 9/11 was to realize that the very few texts by Muslims that I taught in my classes were not enough. Neither was my own knowledge enough. I didn’t know enough. I didn’t know hardly anything about Islam.

I was completely ignorant. I knew a lot of Christianity and Judaism. It’s been part of my research. It’s been part of my teaching. But the third Abrahamic religion I knew next to nothing about. And it seemed to me what is the responsibility, in a time of tremendous global conflict over religion, what is the responsibility of educators? It’s to educate ourselves first, and it’s to widen the horizons of our students to try to increase and expand an understanding of what underlies any of the conflicts that take place in the world. I have a deep belief that the humanities, in particular, can bring great understanding for what motivates people, what people imagine, what people fear, what people desire, and so I felt that I had a task in front of me, to get educated myself, particularly in the midst of the Iran-Iraq war, that it was in a country that didn’t know the difference between Shia and Sunni at the beginning of the war, that it was absolutely central that I educate myself and somehow or other integrate these issues into my teaching and ultimately my research. Certainly, the broader context for these issues is the heightened migration in the late 20th and early 21st century. The heightened interconnections of all peoples in this particular phase of globalization in part because of the movement of peoples but also in part because of the digital revolution. What is the role of cultures, I ask, in this period of heightened migration and diaspora? And, secondly, I’m extremely aware that there is a renewed, in the 21st century, renewed significance of religion in all the major world religions, not just Islam.

This is not just about Islam. I may have started there with my own ignorance, but it was a full recognition that there is a rise of religious activity, thinking, belief, conflict in all of the world’s religions. And, in particular, what we’ve seen, certainly since the 1980s with the rise of the moral majority in the United States, the rise of fundamentalism in all of these religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, Christianity, all of these religions had a rise in fundamentalist activity and a rise in instances of violence attached to all these religions across the board. All the religions. So, as a response to the new, I see this rise of fundamentalism as a response to the new interlocked modernities of the 21st century. And I believe, I deeply believe that there is a need for feminism to engage significantly with the meanings and significance of religion in today’s globalized world. Therefore, my new book project, which has the provisional title of Sisters of Scheherazade: Religion, Diaspora, and Muslim Feminisms. Now, for those of you who don’t know the story of Scheherazade, let me review it just very briefly for you. It’s the frame narrative of One Thousand and One Nights, which is a collection written down about 1,000, in the Christian era, of oral tales from Persia, from Iraq, from other parts of the Middle East at it’s part of the great Abbasid empire of that period. And Scheherazade is the daughter of the prime minister, basically, living in Baghdad.

And the king is kind of a mean guy, and he wants a new virgin every day to marry. So he marries a new girl every day, kills her, and then gets a new wife every day. This sort of, you know, ISIS is doing a little of this now. Okay? They marry the women, then rape them, okay? So this is not irrelevant, okay? So Scheherazade said she’s going to save her people by marrying the king, and she will tell him a story every night but she doesn’t finish the story. Okay? She leaves the ending until the next day. So he has to leave her alive so he can hear the end of the story. Okay? This is the power and desire behind narrative. We want to know the end of the story. Scheherazade transforms the king into a humane person capable of engaging, the text says, with people from far away and with women through the power of narrative. Well, Scheherazade has entered, well, let me say that, yeah, give you a picture here.

This is the cover of Fatema Mernissi’s Scheherazade Goes West , and on the top is the image of a western vision of Scheherazade where, in western art, she is typically presented as a seductress in a harem. Very sexual figure. But in Middle Eastern art, she is portrayed as a learned and clever woman. And, in fact, in A Thousand and One Nights she’s very well educated, and she’s committed to this process called Ishtihad, which is the Arabic word for reason, to know things by reason instead of authority. Scheherazade is enormously important for contemporary Muslim feminisms in all parts of the world. They all refer to her. And, in part, this is because Scheherazade represents not only the power and cleverness of women in the face of open violence, but also the power of the word over the sword. And that is how she is invoked very much today. That we can resolve our problems through the word, not the sword. Okay? Not terrorism, but through the word.

So she becomes a very important figure in contemporary feminism. Just to read from one of Mohja Kahf’s poems. Mohja Kahf is a Syrian American poet and novelist. This poem, in her book called Emails from Scheherazade, opens: “Hi, babe. I’m Scheherazade. I’m back For the millennium and living in Hackensack, New Jersey. I tell stories for a living. You ask if there is a living in that. You must remember: Where I come from, Words are to die for. I saved the virgins From beheading by the king, who was killing Them to still the beast of doubt in him.

I told a story. ” She goes on like this. I would like in this book to focus on women’s writing in particular, in part because the journal Contemporary Women’s Writing insists that that category, women’s writing, is still a viable category in the face of a lot of doubt as to whether it is. So I have a commitment to the legitimacy of the category women’s writing, and that in women’s writing what we found in editing this journal is that people writing about women’s writing were not always writing about gender. And women writers care about a lot of things other than gender. And so we were publishing a lot of articles about things that did not necessarily touch on gender. Some of them did, some of them didn’t. So part of the commitment to women’s writing is to argue that women should always be at the table. Whatever is at issue, whatever is at stake, make sure women are included. They’re going to have a variety of different views.

So, at this point, I am going to focus, probably, on women’s writing, but I’m very taken with a number of men who write with great sensitivity to issues of gender, religion, and migration issues, men of Muslim background. So I have a lot of favorite novels. I don’t know whether I’ll change my mind on that. But at this point, here’s a tentative, a brief abstract of the book that I envision to look at. The book will antithesize the heterogeneity of Muslim feminism. What I want to do is look at writers who come from some sort of Muslim background and/or have some kind of Muslim commitment, and show how the heterogeneity difference among all these different ways of advocating and thinking about women and gender, and that they actually go on a spectrum from secular, highly secular Muslims to highly Islamist and political Muslims, and with many points in between. So part of what I want to do is sort of be able to position somebody on a spectrum. I’ll tell you about the outline of the book a little later. Oh, okay. These are the chapters of the book.

I’m going to focus on a genre called the Bildungsroman, which is the novel of development. This is a particular very influential narrative form in the studies of the novel, and what this kind of narrative does is, in some ways, emphasize the identity issues, the development of the individual in relationship to family, community, and nation. So that’s the Bildungsroman tends to do that, and what Muslim women writers have done with diasporic version of the Bildung is very interesting. So, I will use a comparative framework in studying these novels in part to kind of emphasize the divergence. So to be Muslim does not mean to be a single thing, but in fact to be highly divergent. The topics that I’ll use in this comparative study is, first, looking at diasporic memory, religious difference, and the legacies of empire. So this chapter will deal with Ahdaf Soueif, her book Map of Love , and Elif Shafak Bastard of Istanbul. Both of them look at empire issues, but Soueif writing about Egypt and Britain is thinking about Egyptians who were colonized by the British, by the French, and by the Ottomans at the same time. Whereas, Elif Shafak is looking at the Armenian, very bravely as a Turkish writer, looking at the Armenian genocide. So she writes from the position of the empire, that is the Ottoman empire, and it’s dissolution and what it means in the present, whereas Ahdaf Soueif is writing from the position of the colonized.

So I put the two together. Both of them deal very profoundly with issues of religion and memory. The next chapter will deal with the issue of the Quran vocation and secularity, secularism. Leila Aboulela, a Sudanese Scottish writer, and Randa Jarrar, a Palestinian Egyptian Greek American writer, I’m going to talk about later. But they both, for both of them, the Quran figures actually centrally. Then I’ll move on to the topic of piety, the state, and the family. What is the relationship to family to religion to the state? In particular, by looking at the growing up fictions, memoirs of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and Mohja Kahf’s Girl in the Tangerine Scarf. Then, finally, a chapter that deals with marriage rebellion and popular religious practice. Monica Ali and Samina Ali, an Indian and a Bangladeshi British and American writers who deal with, particularly one of them deals with arranged marriages and homosexuality, and the other deals with arranged marriages and affairs that women have. So, central to these kind of comparative studies is my belief that’s already stated in this book chapter that’s coming out.

Okay? So this is the one thing that will be published soon. Absolutely central to it is the concept of intersectionality and what I hope to have the book contribute to intersectional theory. Within gender and women studies, intersectionality is widely known. Myra here has a chapter of a recent book on intersectionality. Keisha Lindsay, I don’t see Keisha here today, but she’s, oh, Keisha teaches a whole course on intersectionality. And our students, when we say the word intersectionality, they just might groan because they’ve heard it so many different times. And the concept of intersectionality, which did begin in gender and women studies, has also spread widely throughout many disciplines and cultural studies and in the social sciences, but it is not quite as widely known in migration and diaspora studies or in religious studies. I don’t see a lot of uses of the concept of intersectionality. So, what does it mean, intersectionality? It means, what it has come to me, well, let’s say I wanted to go to its origins. Where’s, oh, yeah, it was a term introduced by Kimberle Crenshaw, an African American lawyer who, in 1989, introduced a term for a concept I have to which existed in women’s studies certainly back into the ’90s and in women’s history way back, way back, way back, and that is the idea that you can’t understand a woman just by thinking about her gender.

That you must look at other systems as they form, women’s experience, women’s identity, women’s existence within institutional, within culture and so forth. So, Kimberle was interested particularly in race and then race and class. So she wants to know how gender systems interact with race and class systems. And so what she was picking up on is earlier feminist theory which was certainly pioneered by women of color on the concept of multiple oppression. So women are not oppressed, men either, by a single system of oppression but always by multiple systems which interact with each other. So this was an absolutely key principle taught in all gender and women’s studies courses in the ’90s through this century. Nina Lykke, from Sweden, her particular statement is just one sample statement. According to this definition, intersectionality can be considered a theoretical, a methodological tool to analyze categorization such as gender, ethnicity, race, class, sexuality, age, generation, disability, nationality, mother tongue, and so on, how they interact and in so doing, produce different kinds of societal and unjust social relations. Okay, that’s a very common definition. Do you notice that religion does not exist in that set? And, in fact, as feminist theory has expanded, that list has grown, say from race and class to sexuality to disability to national origin, and then there’s always a so on or an et cetera.

So religion relies, for the most part, in feminist theory in the category so on. Not theorized, not understood, not dealt with sufficiently. So I had to think, why is that the case? There’s a whole field in gender and women’s studies on the study of gender and religion, women and religion. Wonderful stuff in that field. However, it’s not particularly, with a few exceptions, dealing with intersectionality. So religious studies might deal with women and gender, but it’s not dealing with intersectionality. Feminist theory deals with intersectionality but not religion. So it seemed to me that by focusing on these Muslim diasporic women’s writers, I might be able to bring two discourses together and teach us something. Well, by reading the novels, I have to say it’s the novelists who teach me theory. I don’t develop the theory and then plunk it on the novels because the novelists tend to think in very complex ways that hold contradictions in play.

And this is what I began to learn from reading some of the writers I put on the board here, that religion functions differently than other categories, like race, national identity, class, disability, sexuality, in intersectionality. It functions differently and I think it’s because the discourse of intersectionality has developed around the question of power, and it’s developed around the question of oppression. All right? Power over. Certainly that was Kimberle Crenshaw’s, all of her writing does that. But if you look at all the definitions on that bibliography I have there on intersectionality, you’ll see that people emphasize the intersection of different systems of power, different ways in which people are victimized. Religion is sometimes a question of oppression, and there is a lot of wonderful work in feminist religious studies that deals with ways in which the institution, the symbols, the practices, etc, of religion have been very oppressive for women. No question about it. But religion is sometimes not a question of oppression. It might be very tightly and closely tied to someone’s belief system, to their important cultural practices, to their aspirations, to their hopes, to their whole sense of identity. And so in some ways sometimes religion is very much about empowerment, or it might be about the combination of oppression and empowerment.

So sometimes it’s a mixture. I have felt, then, that by introducing religion into an understanding of intersectionality that we recognize ways in which intersectionality as a theory and as a method might need to change. That it shouldn’t, whether we’re talking about race or class or sexuality or age or disability or religion, that we might not always look to structures of oppression. But we might look, for example, I learned this from my African- American friends. African-American culture is a source of great richness and love and power. It’s not just all about oppression. So I think our very concept of intersectionality has been too limited, and that religion here is a wonderful kind of pivot or wedge into helping us rethink these categories. So, I do believe that feminist intersectionality needs to become more nuanced in its discussion of power and the multifaceted components of identity and how they interact and how they work. So, when I got to this point in my study, I thought, okay, I’m on a roll. I’m really doing well here.

But what on Earth is religion? What is it? And how are we to think about religion if we want to have it intersect with class and race, disability, age, national origin, so forth, so on? How do we think about it? I must say that I did some reading in religious studies, as much as I had time for, and I really wasn’t satisfied. Some how or other it wasn’t helping me think about how I would need to think about the dimensions of religion in order to understand how it’s operating in these novels or how it’s operating specifically for Muslim diasporic women. So I’ve tried to do my own theorizing about what I think religion is, and to have it theorized religion across the board, not just Abrahamic religions but any kind of religion. And so I’ve posited three component parts that all religions have. On the one hand, they have something which in the article I call theology, but that’s really a bad word because it has the word God in it, and not all religions have God. But it has an -ogy, that is it has some sort of belief system that I would generalize has something to do with a realm that’s beyond the human. Some kind of spiritual and/or sacred and/or divine and/or something beyond the material and the human, that every religion has some set of ideas, okay? So that’s kind of an idea structure in all religions. Secondly, all religions articulate through cultural practices. And in religious studies today, actually, there’s much more emphasis on this kind of an anthropological approach to cultural practice of religion. Do people pray? Do they have behaviors around eating? Do they have behaviors around clothes and dress? Do they go to certain places? Is religion part of communal thing? Is it individual? What is the cultural practice? How is religion actually practiced? So there are many, many different questions there.

I forgot to say, in the belief system, sometimes these ideas are embedded in sacred texts, texts that have power within the society, the Bible, the Quran, the Vedas, and sometimes it’s oral, but there’s a belief system out there that functions. Okay? Then there’s the cultural practice of a religion, and the third component is the institutional formations. All religions seem to have institutional formations where certain people have or are understood to have more authority, certain kinds of power. There might be institutions on how to educate people into the belief system and the practices of the religion. They might actually have buildings. They might have banks, like the Vatican. There are institutional formations that are part of every religion, even animist ones who have the least form of institutionalization, I think. So if we want to think about religion, we want to see how these three component parts, the belief system, the cultural practice, and the institutions, how they interact. So these parts are always interacting, they’re always changing, and they’re always particularizing, they’re always being articulated through a specific time and place. In the essay, I tried to come up with 10 principles, kind of axioms, that you need to think about for religion that talk about how these three things might interact.

And I won’t go through all of them now, but I’ll just mention to give you kind of an idea. And I have to admit I was kind of playing with Luther’s 10 theses on the door. So I tried to get it to come out to 10. I’m sure I’ll abandon this in the book. But, nonetheless, it does represent, in terms of process, my attempt to think through a category like religion that is not just specific to one religion or not even just specific to the three Abrahamic religions. So all religions are fluid. They’re not fixed. They’re not a fixed essence. They’re always changing through time, and they vary across space. That’s one axiom.

Another axiom is that religions tend to participate in both the local and the translocal. So we have a worldwide Catholic church, we have worldwide Ummah in Islam, but religions articulate and have very specific conditions at the local level. So that relationship between the local, the global, local or translocal is always something that we can look at. There is always a relationship to the secular. And, as I said, this is something I’ve just begun to really try to be more systematic about. But, in particular, there’s always some kind of relationship to whatever state power exists. So it might be a state religion or it might be an oppressed religion within a given state. The Shia in Pakistan, for example, have a relationship to the Sunni government in Pakistan. So there’s always some kind of connection to state power. You need to look at that question.

All religions have conflict. Terrible conflict. One of the books I’m interested in is called When Religion is Evil , and it goes through all the world religions and shows how all of them have done really evil things. So the book doesn’t say religion is evil in and of itself in essence. Religion has the capacity to do terrible evil. All of them. Okay? So we see the Buddhists killing the Muslims in Myanmar today. Peace-loving Buddhists, they too can. We know about the Christians. But there’s also conflict between religions, conflict within religions.

Conflict is a part of religion. How does it work? Another axiom is, again, there are always religious authorities, how do they exercise their power? How do they get it? How do they exercise it? How do they deploy it? Who is hurt by it? Who is empowered by it? Another axiom is that all religions have powerful expressive symbolic forms. It might be dance. It might be music. It might be some other form of performance. It might be narrative stories, symbol. It might be very corporeal in the body. But there’s always some kind of expressive symbolic form associated with religion. All religions are syncretist. They always blend themselves with other religions, even when they think, like the Taliban or ISIS, that they are being pure to a certain religion.

If you study religions, you can see the role of syncretism, that is the melding, the intercultural relations that bring together aspects of different religions. Notre Dame, Paris, Catholic institution, sits on top of the temple to ISIS. All right? So it’s just very common. Finally, well, two final points is that religions, all religions tend to articulate along a spectrum that we might say from Orthodox to Heterodox or a cult, from legalistic to mystical, from fundamentalist to non-literalist or symbolic, from intolerant to tolerant. Religions, particularly on the left-hand side of that binary, tend to produce concepts of heresy, apostasy, infidel. The people who are not us are somehow or other of the devil, of the evil forces in the world. Maybe that’s not true of all religions, but a lot of religions have that concept. And, finally, in thinking about religion, we must always think of how it is both related to and distinct from everything else in society. From all the institutional formations, the economy, the government, education, the military, every other institutional formation of society, all other parts of culture, religion is both a part of and yet distinct from. So when we think about religion, we don’t want to see it as a world apart, which, I have to say, unless you’re doing the sociology of religion or even the anthropology of religion, if people are interested in theology, it’s like religion doesn’t exist in the world.

That’s my concern. So we always want to keep remembering that there’s probably an economic dimension to the story of religion, but religion cannot be reduced to the economic. So we don’t want to be reductionistic, but we want to see how it relates to other parts of how the social order functions. So these are the ways in which I’ve been trying to theorize religion in general before I take it back to thinking specifically about Muslim feminisms, which are produced, by the way, in any of the countries of the world where there are Muslim populations, there are Muslim feminisms, but also Muslim women’s diasporic writing. That is, women who are engaged in some form of migration, what they write about. So I’m dealing with both of those categories. So what I’ve seen is, and what the book will certainly argue, is that there is a spectrum of Muslim identities and affiliations that go all the way from secular Muslims to very Islamic or political ones. And the examples I want to just mention, just as an example of this, Zainah Anwar in Malaysia has founded this group called Sisters in Islam, which has now been declared against the law in Malaysia. But they had published a lot of these kind of little pamphlets on violence against women, sexual harassment, birth control, procreation issues, women’s health, all kinds of wonderful pamphlets, and Zainah Anwar argues that Muslim women have a right to read the Quran for themselves. And so she invokes this concept of Ishtihad, she invokes Scheherazade to say women can read the Quran and interpret it for themselves, that the Quran has very few Muslims who will challenge the Quran as a revelation of Allah.

They don’t challenge that. It is a revelation. What they challenge is who has the right to interpret it. So, the Sisters of Islam say women can interpret the Quran, and she has a circle of women just like Elizabeth Cady Stanton who came up with a women’s group, produced a women’s bible in the 19th century where they went through the bible and interpret it for their own sake. This is what the Sisters in Islam do. But they’re quite observant. They can position themselves very much within the religion but against the religious authorities, the institutional formations of religion which exclude women. Somebody like Irshad Manji, her book The Trouble With Islam Today: A Muslim’s Call for Reform in Her Faith is by a Canadian lesbian of Indian Ugandan Canadian descent. All right? She was actually born in Uganda, expelled with her family when Idi Amin expelled the Asians, came to Canada. She is a TV personality, quite a well known figure in Canada, and for many Muslims an absolute heretic.

I mean, this book can really upset some Muslims. But she never gives up on Islam. She says my faith has run away from me, but I will always be a Muslim. Most of us, Muslims, aren’t Muslims because we think about it, but simply because we’re born that way. It’s who we are. So we have that kind of notion of being Muslim is a part of an identity. I’ve had Catholic friends who say the same. I’m a lapse Cat. I don’t go to Mass. I don’t care about all that stuff, I don’t like the pope, but I am a Catholic.

Particularly Irish or Polish. You know, I’m a Catholic. So this has been very common, obviously, for Jews. There are many very observant Jews, but there are many, many, this whole tradition of secular Judaism where you aren’t any less Jewish because you don’t believe in certain parts of the theology but it is your heritage, it’s your being. The same phenomenon exists among Muslims. So that’s one of the ways that we can see this kind of diversity. I’m going to talk just a little bit longer now, because I’m watching the clock up there, about two writers who exist on very different points on this spectrum on questions of Muslim identity from secular to very observant, extremely observant. Leila Aboulela and Randa Jarrar. So, let me tell you a little bit about these two writers. Both of them are migrant or diasporic writers, but exhibit very different positions on the spectrum of Muslim feminisms.

However, a closer look of their underlying similarities helps us to rethink the place of religion and feminist intersectionality and also in diaspora. So both novels have a kind of build-on plot, that is the story of development from childhood to adulthood with initiations and into the vocation of life, the adult vocation, and initiations into sexuality. And all of them have some form of integration into the larger social order, both of these novels. These are components parts of a –. So, but Leila Aboulela, who is the Sudanese Scottish writer, author of The Translator writes a build-on plot which is entirely pious and modest. There’s a courtship plot at the very center between a Sudanese woman in Aberdeen, Scotland, and a professor, Scottish, white Scottish professor of Islam whom she translates for. She’s the translator. And it’s a courtship plot between them that is so modest, most of the courtship takes place on the phone. Okay? So. .

. Not only Leila Aboulela herself is an observant Muslim but so is her protagonist in this novel. And in A Map of Home , Randa Jarrar, this is the woman who is– her father’s Palestinian, her mother is Greek Egyptian. They lived in Kuwait. They were forced out of Kuwait. They came to the United States. That’s her particular background. She’s in the US now, since high school basically. Her novel, A Map of Home , is a queer novel. It’s bisexual, and not only does the growing up girl masturbate, but she has roaring sex with girls and roaring sex with boys.

It is the most immodest, indiscreet novel you could imagine. Students love it. [LAUGHTER] It’s great to teach. And so we have these two that are extraordinarily different, right, in terms of the build-on plot. However, central to the build-on plot in both novels is Islam and especially the Quran. So, in the novel that breaks every single stereotype of Muslim women, of Islam, of that kind of a background, plus the novel that fulfills every stereotype in many kinds of ways, have the same kind of attachment to a Muslim identity and to the Quran. Where the Quran does not stand for misogyny. This is where I have to say if we cannot pay attention to the ways in which some people relate to their religious tradition, not just as a source of oppression, but as a source of tremendous spiritual being, if I can use that term. So the Quran then is not a misogynist power but is a central part of the protagonist developing identity. And The Translator , which is a story of a courtship between Sammar and Rae, Sammar being the woman from Sudan who migrated to Aberdeen with her medical student husband who suddenly dies in a car accident and she’s left alone.

And she becomes attached to this man that she’s translating for, and they begin to share their life stories, both difficult life stories, over the telephone. All right? Not in person. He brings her back to life, and evidence of her being back to life is that she goes out and buys a whole bunch of very colored head scarves, beautiful silk head scarves, and wears them. So she begins to decorate herself again, but covering up. Okay? So you’ve got to see the contradictions here. However, there is a prohibition in Islam. Women cannot marry outside the faith. Men can marry non-Muslim women because it’s assumed, of course, the children will follow the status of the father, but women may not marry outside. It’s really a big deal. So she wants him to convert so that they can get married, and she says to him, “Just say the shahada publicly.”

If you say three times, “Okay, I bear witness, there is no god except Allah and Muhammad is his prophet. ” If you say that three times with witnesses, you are Muslim. That’s all it takes to convert. All right? And it’s called the shahada. She says, “If you will say the shahada public, then we can get married. ” And he says, “I have to be sure. I would despise myself if I wasn’t sure. ” She says, “But people get married that way. Here in Aberdeen, there are people who get married like this. ” “We’re not like this. You and I are different. For them it is a token gesture.”

She thought, “It is clear now. It is so clear. He does not love me. I am not beautiful enough. I am not feminine enough. ” He will not convert for her. So what she needs to learn in the novel to grow up, so to speak, is that the importance of saying the shahada from the heart. She needs to move out of a womanhood dependent solely on being feminine and beautiful, being a wife and a mother, and so she has, in fact, been a poor Muslim because she asked him to cheat.

She asked him to say the shahada without meaning it. So he is the one who acts, in some sense, as a good Muslim. No, I should only say the shahada if I mean it. So we’ve got an ironic reversal here. And she goes back to the Sudan and lives under the thumb of her mother-in-law, who is her true oppressor in the Sudan, and lives a very pious and a completely quiet and dead life until she comes to recognize that she needed to let him convert for his own sake, not for hers. And once she realizes that, magically he converts. He’s off somewhere. He’s converts and he comes to the Sudan and finds her, and they get happily married. If you read this as an allegory, this is an allegory of the west’s over-rationalism because he just is interested in, as a scholar, he’s interested in Islam. He’s not, you know.

But he needs to learn it from, he needs to see the superiority of Islam, according to the novel. So if he stands for Europe and she stands for the Muslim world, all right, the west needs to marry Islam. It needs to convert. So, in an allegorical sense, the novel is a little, for me, a little troubling. But it’s certainly, the way it’s written in terms of the power of the true spirit of Islam, as the last of the revelations. Okay? Moses, Jesus, these are earlier revelations. The last and final and most superior revelation according to this point on the Muslim spectrum is Islam, and you can see this in how the marriage plot and the conversion plot completely sit on top of each other. A Map of Home engages directly with recognition in ways in which Islam engages in the oppression of women, particularly with the father’s beating of his family and justification of it with passages from the Quran, the father’s desire to control her sexuality and her future, the highly observant cousin who destroys all her Wonder Woman decals. There’s a wonderful Wonder Woman sequence in this book. But the novel, on the other hand, is framed by the Quran in a very central way.

So in spite of all its resistance to aspects of, and its kind of immodest narrative, the novel begins with the Quran contest in which our protagonist, who’s name is Nidali, her father gave her a male name, Nidal, which means struggle. The mother was furious about that so he added the I to make it a female name. She’s still furious about it. Nidali decides she wants to enter the Quran contest which is ostensibly just for boys. But the Surah, the verse that she recites, “For every hardship, there is ease. With every hardship, there is ease. When your prayers are ended, resume your toil and seek your lord with all your favor. ” That Surah actually is a very good explanation of the novel except for the last bit about the lord. Okay? But this whole kind of notion for every hardship there is ease, this is actually the rhythm that structures the novel. So of course Nidali recites the Surah from the Quran with such spirit and such– I mean her father has beaten her just to get her to say it correctly.

He’s been beating her. So there’s a lot of hardship. The ease is she says this and it’s a kind of gesture towards the meaning and significance of the Quran, and she wins the contest, of course. And at the very end of the novel where she is in the process of leaving home to go to college and she wants to become a writer, so this novel is also a quinceaera, a story of the development of the artist. Again, the novel ends with a quotation from the Quran. “I want you to write. Don’t you ever, ever, ever in your life forget us. ” Okay? So you’ve go to write home. A diasporic statement. You’ve got to write about your home.

And this is the image that the novel concludes with. The Luqman Surah is Surah 31, known as the Pen Luqman Surah. “Baba recited from Luqman, ‘If all the trees on the Earth were pens and the seas replenished by seven more seas were ink, the words of God could not be finished still. ‘” And so mama reaches over in the car and takes a pen, I won’t tell you the story of the pen, and she thinks it’s a dangerous pen, she thinks it’s a CIA pen, and she throws it out the window. “I catch the pen now and listen to all our stories. ” All right? So this is the statement of, this is the kind of writer I will be. “I will leave home, but I will write about home”, and it’s the Quran that gives her a sense of artistic vision. This is what I mean about how, I mean just to conclude here, that the implications for feminist theory and feminist understanding of intersectionality is that we can’t, we simply cannot work with a model which just looks at intersecting systems of oppression. That’s just not going to get us, if we want to really add religion to the, take it out of the nether space of so on and add it and think about how it interacts with sexuality, with class, with national origin, with race, if we want to really take those interactions seriously and put religion in the mix, we have to stop thinking about intersectionality as always the story of intersecting, interlocking systems of oppression, or axes of power as it’s sometimes called. We have to open up the concept in different kinds of ways.

I’m going to stop here and not talk to you about secularism because I’ve talked for a long time. And if there’s time for questions, I would be most delighted to hear them.

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