Book Reviews

Muslim Women

Sajida S. Alvi (Editor), H. Hoodfar (Editor), S. McDonough (Editor),
The Muslim Veil in North America: Issues and Debates. Women's Press
Buy this book from Amazon.ca

Salima Bhimani (Author)
Majalis al-ilm: Sessions of Knowledge. Reclaiming and Representing the Lives of Muslim Women. TSAR Publications
Buy this book from Amazon.ca

Reviewed by Heiko Henkel

Seeking to bring to bear the particular experiences of Muslim women living in Canada on the ongoing debate on the role of Islam in liberal multicultural society, The Muslim Veil in North America and Majalis al-ilm are engaged in a delicate double conversation. They aim at countering the Western stereotype of the passive and oppressed Muslim women that has become emblematic in liberal representations of Islam, while the authors seek to counter the often male dominated interpretation of the Islamic tradition, both in Muslim communities and in Islam’s scholarly literature.

The Muslim Veil is a collection of essays by mostly Muslim, female Canadian scholars in cooperation with the Canadian Council of Muslim Women. The volume offers a timely and valuable introduction to the controversial issue of the Muslim headscarf, or hijab, focused on the Canadian context (the volume’s title is thus somewhat misleading). It is a tremendously interesting and readable book, which should be of interest both for a general public and for an academic audience. Much of the book’s success stems from the decision of the editors to juxtapose two thematically distinct but complementary parts. The first part of the volume documents veiling practices in everyday life in Canada. After a useful introduction by Homa Hoodfar, P. Kelly Spurles offers the reader an ethnographic account of veiling practices in a Muslim school in Toronto , R.A. Meshal discusses a survey among Canadian-Muslim about their veiling practices, and Shiela McDonough compiles testimonies of numerous Muslim women. The chapters show the complex and often highly self-reflective reasoning of Muslim women and the diverging motives for their decisions to wear, or not wear, the headscarf. McDonough’s compelling account of Canada’s own not too distant history of debate over women’s rights, their proper roles in public life, and political suffrage nicely contextualizes contemporary Canadian anxieties about the Muslim headscarf debate.

The second part of the volume consists of three substantial investigations into Muslim history and the scholarly Islamic tradition with the aim to reconsider systematically the issue of the Muslim headscarf from a Muslim perspective. The essays thus offer scholarly advice on how the issue has been addressed historically by the Islamic tradition. Perhaps more importantly, the essays themselves are case studies in contemporary Muslim reasoning on the issue. As such, all take their vantage point from a re-reading of the pertinent passages of the Qur’an, discuss various classical and more recent authorities on the topic, and on that basis develop their own arguments on the issue of the role of the Muslim headscarf in the Islamic tradition.

McDonough notes that from the outset the aim was “to create something that stimulates thought, rather than stir[s] up hostility and divisiveness.” And indeed, The Muslim Veil in North America is an immensely positive book. The Muslim headscarf is shown as part of an “adaptive strategy” (Hoodfar) in which Muslim women bring their commitment to and knowledge of the Islamic tradition to bear on negotiating dignified lives both vis-à-vis Canadian society and the demands of Muslim communities. Claiming Muslim women’s “agency” in their interpretation of the Islamic tradition emerges here as the crucial link that mediates between the often conflicting demands of liberal multicultural Canadian society and the demands made by Muslim communities with reference to the Islamic tradition.

The volume’s positive agenda, however, is also one of its limitations. Tensions and contradictions that emerge in chapters are seldom addressed or followed up. At several points in the book, for example, the authors describe the decision of young women to wear the headscarf and to take up “pious” lifestyles as testimony to their “agency”. And yet, it is very clear from the context provided that this agency is profoundly shaped by the demands made by their families and the particular moral framework they impose on these women’s lives. I don’t mean to suggest that the authors should have been more forthright in criticizing the moral frameworks sometimes imposed by Muslim families on their daughters. But a more critical investigation of the headscarf’s role might have explored more closely the matrix of powerful institutions in contemporary Canadian society (families, communities, public spheres, schools, universities) that shape the “agency” of the volume’s protagonists, and of which the institution of “pious dress” is one aspect.

One of the defining characteristics of the Islamic tradition in recent decades has been the emergence of national and transnational Muslim public spheres. Greatly increased literacy, the spread of professional middle class sensibilities, and widely available media of communication (books, journals, tapes, radio and TV channels, and the Internet) have lead to the democratization of Muslim knowledge. While “ordinary” believers have now unprecedented access to a virtually unlimited range of interpretations and to investigating the rich heritage of the Islamic tradition by themselves, traditional forms of authority, have become increasingly challenged. The Muslim Veil in North America is a case in point. Established interpretations of religious authorities are challenged on the basis of individual re-readings of the Islamic tradition: both in the case of the young women who quire knowledge of the Islamic tradition as a way to gain agency within Muslim families and communities and in the case of the volume’s editors, who bring their scholarly expertise to bear on their re-interpretation of the place of women in the Islamic tradition.

Salima Bhimani’s book Majalis al-ilm: Sessions of Knowledge is another case in point. Bhimani offers a spirited interpretation of the Islamic tradition’s inherent plurality. Ordered as a sequence of “sessions of knowledge” which “are about resistance and challenge to reductionist, racist, sexist, and orientalist messages about Muslim women and Islam” Bhimani weaves her own re-reading of the Islamic tradition together with the testimonies of eight Muslim women she interviewed for the book. Despite her commitment to “participatory knowledge creation,” and her claim that through the book “we are taking hold of our own power to represent and speak for ourselves,” however, Bhimani’s voice remains dominant. This in itself is not, perhaps, a problem. But given that Bhimani’s references to the Islamic tradition and to contemporary scholarship remain incidental, I remain unconvinced that the book fulfils its promise to be “an educational and media tool for non-Muslim Western and Muslim audiences.”

This review originally appeared in Canadian Literature #189 (Summer 2006), The Literature of Atlantic Canada. (pg. 151 - 152)

***Please note that the articles and reviews from the Canadian Literature website (www.canlit.ca) may not be the final versions as they are printed in the journal, as additional editing sometimes takes place between the two versions. If you are quoting from the website, please indicate the date accessed when citing the web version of reviews and articles.