WoodTurtle, who is amazing and fabulous, (AND JUST GAVE BIRTH TO HER SECOND CHILD, subhan’Allah!! Inappropriate announcement? Suck it, patriarchy! …That has to do with the post. You’ll see) graciously invited me to guest post. If you are interested in reading, please follow the link.

The title of this site is a play on the femme fatale. And a reclamation.

The femme fatale is nearly always a deadly feminist. Naturally in stories constructed by patriarchal societies she is ultimately destroyed by her own sexuality. Because how dare she seize control of her own sexuality and weaponize it against men… only men can weaponize women’s sexuality that isn’t even theirs to weaponize!

But not this time.

The femme fatale, the real woman and not the one created by patriarchy, is neither devious nor self-objectifying without necessity of survival. She is affectionate in the realm of truth, knowledgeable of herself and wholesome in her approach, she loves women, and feels deeply, laughs often.

And that is why she is fatal.

Islam, like most religions at conception, was produced to liberate the oppressed before it was seized by oppressors and weaponized against those who had discovered a restoration of freedom and rights through it. The most striking, recurring incident of this confiscation of perspective and unashamed hypocrisy is the application of verse 2:282 (which calls for two female witnesses in the absence of a male witness in testifying for financial bonds) to all court situations, financial or otherwise, and even to the configuration of courts in social and legal contracts, such as marriage. This, despite the fact that the Qur’an outlines different requirements for court in different situations, so to apply one to all is absurd. Though verse 2:282 “adopts” the female perspective and recognizes that during Revelation women were barred from financial familiarity and accordingly demands the presence of a second female witness so that the first is not threatened or intimidated by the men present in the court who believe they are more qualified than her or are angry a woman is allowed among them, Muslims have developed the sense that this must mean that a woman’s witness is half of a man’s witness, and at the most extremes, that a man is worth twice as much as a woman. Yet the verse makes no such equivalency, nor does it apply this configuration to any court setting other than financial contracts; yet in practice it has been applied to every other court setting.

Scholars are not responsible for the reception of their interpretation in the masses. It is the responsibility of each Muslim to educate her or himself. However, since scholars have monopolized interpretation and placed themselves as intermediaries between Muslim women and God, I will not withhold the responsibility that is engendered in such confiscation of power: thus this widely accepted misconception is an example of how male scholarship is dishonest and male leaders are failures. If, from your interpretation, Muslims are under the impression that a man’s testimony is equal to the testimony of two women, or are neglecting to grasp the qualification that this court arrangement is only for financial matters, you have failed as a religious leader. If you don’t want that accountability, don’t create a monopoly on interpretation.

But, since we are so inclined to apply one configuration of court to all configurations of court, let’s look at another arrangement: the court for the allegation of adultery, in which the woman’s word is the last.

And those who cast it up on their wives
having no witnesses except themselves,
the testimony of one of them shall be
to testify by God four times
that he is of the truthful,
and a fifth time, that the curse of God
shall be upon him, if he should be of the liars.

It shall avert from her the chastisement
if she testify by God four times that he is of the liars,
and a fifth time, that the wrath of God shall be upon her,
if he should be of the truthful. (Qur’an 24:6—9)

These verses were revealed to prevent men from slandering innocent women, which we can infer was (and still is) a regular occurrence. (It’s quite telling that men are so paranoid about false rape allegations; pathetic, it’s because they’ve been falsely accusing women of adultery in fits of jealousy since the dawn of time.) With the objective of making this as difficult as possible, the Qur’an demands a man produce four witnesses to accuse his wife of adultery; or, in the absence of four witnesses, he may swear to God she is an adulteress four times. And then, to seal the testimony, one more time. But the woman is excused if she then swears four times, and then finally once more, that he is a liar. If she did indeed commit adultery, the wrath of God is upon her, but she is discharged of any worldly chastisement, and the court is dismissed.

Not only this, but as the preceding verse states, the testimony of a man who gives it falsely is to never be accepted again.

Why not apply the dynamics of verse 24:9 to all settings of court, since apparently applying 2:282 to all testimonies—even marriages—is a valid practice of Islamic law? This inconsistency is unforgivingly hypocritical, and once again is a failure of male scholarship.

When the female perspective of a disadvantaged position in society is acknowledged and assumed in the Qur’an, it is read as validating male privilege rather than noting and checking it. Yet here is an instance when the Qur’an privileges the female testimony, the testimony of a woman over a man, and yet verse 24:9 is not read as validating female privilege as the will of Divine Ordinance.

Most of the Quran’s provisions (from inheritance, to divorce [in which men are obligated to provide for their wives for three months afterward in case they are pregnant], to female infanticide, to testimony) are absorbed in preserving women’s interests, so that when the Qur’an notes male privilege it is only recognizing that men have power unjustly, not condoning patriarchy or authorizing this power. Yet it is consistently read as such, from testimony to the infamous “degree” men have over women noted in verse 4:34. If the Qur’an were a patriarchal text, or a text that advocated patriarchy, it would not constantly take the woman’s perspective to regulate male behavior. It would not assume the female perspective in demanding that husbands provide fully for their wives because of the lack of economic freedom for women in patriarchy, it would not assume the female perspective in demanding that orphaned girls are provided for by their guardians and guaranteed an inheritance just as “useful” orphaned boys, it would not assume the female perspective in demanding that women have the option of being supplied provisions by their ex-husbands three months after divorce (I will also write more on this but read Khadeeja’s post) in the event they are pregnant, it would not assume the female perspective in giving women the last word in allegations of adultery and discrediting the testimony of a false man for the rest of his life, it would not assume the female perspective in forbidding burying girls alive, and it would not assume the female perspective in a number of incidents that it does and use it to regulate male behavior.

Nahida, you have not been writing. Did you think you could just post a couple of entries involving pictures of badass women holding guns and provocative poetry, and we wouldn’t notice you haven’t actually been writing? Tried to pull a fast one, did you? I AM ON TO YOU, WOMAN!

Well in my defense it is finals week; of course, that is a shoddy defense (shhh!), considering I don’t really study. I have tried. But I daydream every fifteen minutes. So it’s not that I don’t have time to post… it’s that if I spend time writing instead of studying, which I am not going to do anyway, I will feel anxious thinking I could be studying. Even though I won’t anyway. It’s all very complicated. Not really.

But I assure you I have been working hard! Here is proof:

Pictured: Your author fastidiously clasping her hands over a textbook.

Not pictured: Aforementioned textbook. Suspiciously.

Why does your author have a dreamy expression on her face, as though she is thinking of sea monsters instead of classes? Do not ask her. She will lie.

I will return in less than a fortnight! *kiss*

Although I have a few favorites when it comes to poetry, I refrain from sharing them here unless they are related to the site. This one is, religion-wise. I came across it recently, and it made me stop. Neither because of the craft and language (there was nothing particularly striking about it that made me swoon), nor because of the composure (no ardent feeling of reverie)… but because of the proposal it presented. A radical proposal. Or at the least, a gently endearing one; relieving, affectionate.

Ecclesiastes II:I
Richard Wilbur

We must cast our bread
Upon the waters as the
Ancient preacher said,

Trusting that it may
Amply be restored to us
After many a day.

That old metaphor,
Drawn from rice faming on the
River’s flooded shore,

Helps us to believe
That it’s no great sin to give,
Hoping to receive.

Therefore I shall throw
Broken bread, this sullen day,
Out across the snow,

Betting crust and crumb
That birds will gather, and that
One more spring will come.

My heart must have faltered for a few seconds. I flipped to the back of the anthology for a note from the author regarding this particular poem, but found only commentary on the form: “A correspondent delighted me in saying that this is not only a poem but a midrash. The poem uses the haiku as a stanza, rhyming the first and third lines. It is a form that offers both fluency and emphasis.”

I flipped back to the page.

Helps us to believe
That it’s no great sin to give,
Hoping to receive.

…That it’s no great sin to give…

hoping to receive.

FOX News is not fringe. It is mainstream.

I knew this was happening the minute the Equal Pay Act in Wisconsin was repealed.

Did you think it would stop at legalizing rape and challenging Roe vs. Wade?

They voted against the Violence Against Women Act, they filibustered the Paycheck Fairness Act, they have persistently attacked YOUR healthcare, and they WILL take your vote.

After all, they have already taken your voice.

I don’t usually consider myself partisan, but any woman voting Republican is OUT OF HER FUCKING MIND.

These are the SEXIST hypocritical MONSTERS who invaded Iraq with the arrogant pretense of “saving Muslim women”!

P.S. Abusive control freak who attempts to forcibly prevent his wife from practicing her God-given right to vote supports Scott Walker. Big surprise.

Religious leaders during sermons often advise their congregations not to love this world, explicably sensing that love of this world will replace the love of God. While this is a justifiable claim—people enraptured in the material often experience emptiness which they attempt to fill with more material, believing they are achieving what the material superficially represents (love, social acceptance, etc.) rather than the useless thing itself—I would argue there is not enough emphasis, if any, in loving the world while accepting that it is fading fast. It was, after all, created by God.

Fully aware of my imminent death, I often feel resentful when I listen to religious leaders preach about the insignificance of this world while advocating engrossment in spirituality and religious reflection. This is a very privileged position. It’s easy to be so very spiritually aware! when one is a man, unburdened by the fucking barrier in his face. Women who preach the same are often very well-off, have reached a point of respect and acceptance in the structural sins of religious institutional hierarchy by consistently agreeing with the interpretations of men, and thus perpetuate discriminatory beliefs in their bubbles of safety while appealing to other women in their spiritual virtue. Women, after all, have the statistical inclination of being more spiritual than men.

If a male religious leader describes his own spirituality (and how he really *feels* God) and preaches about tolerance and acceptance while maintaining a barrier, I am particularly indignant. It is one of the vilest aspects of liberal religious hypocrisy. Fostering a mosque environment that is hostile to women, whether through a barrier or other devices of intense segregation and / or underlying sexual fear, while simultaneously appeasing to others (including Muslims themselves) to convince them that Islam is not a unjust faith is enraging. I’d much rather pray behind the man who delivers uninspiring speeches and quietly eliminates injustice than the one who is all talk on the glory of God and fails to work hard. I want to hear a laundry list on want needs to be done—we have to paint downstairs, there is a drought in the next county, a part of the church across the street broke down and we are leaving now to help rebuild, etc.—and to see him at these places with sweat on his forehead, than listen to him gasp at how we must love Eternity. The former is quietly endearing. The latter, meant to be, leaves me resentful. Meditate on Heaven? Easy for you to say. There’s a fucking barrier three inches in front of my nose.

Admittedly I’m a very spiritual woman, but I feel incredibly arrogant to concentrate on this while there is work to be done, especially when it involves preaching to persecuted women. I’m baffled when other women who consider themselves anti-feminist can do this. In Islam there is a perception of the “benevolent” patriarchy: that in exchange for a woman fulfilling her “role” the men in her life will protect her. Anti-feminist women have not been personally exposed to disadvantaged, impoverished, or abused circumstances to realize this is a lie. There is no benevolent patriarchy. What are men protecting you from? Themselves. And they will become condescending as soon as you stop parroting their interpretations that perpetuate sexism and privileges them. You’ve been placed in a position to teach other women by the same system that oppresses these women, as a mark of tokenism, shielded from the harshness of this reality. Will you exchange your soul—the freedoms given to you by God—for the artificial safety offered by men?

As “enlightening” as I find these heartfelt sermons on how only God can fulfill us so there is simply devastation in loving this world, I often suspect they are a device of superficially heavenly radiance to attempt to overcompensate for the utter lack of justice in Muslim communities, depending on whether the man who is spouting them is highly patriarchal, or else maintains a “liberal” persona while conveniently preserving a barrier or deriding Islamic feminism. Both engender my suspicion. I don’t mind them from communities who have evidently walked the walk.

Shuffling through Safiyah’s blog, I found a post that resonates with me: “There is a reason why there are no Islamic monks,” she writes.

“We are meant to keep our both feet firmly on the ground, even if our heart longs for our final Home. Islam teaches us to be involved in our communities, to care about others, to marry, and to not lock ourselves away somewhere.

“We made you to be a community of the middle way, so that (with the example of your lives) you might bear witness to the truth before all mankind.” (Qur’an, 2:143)

True, we shouldn’t get caught up in this world and all its splendor, but we shouldn’t hide from it either. We have a responsibility to make this world a better place, to give charity, to want for others what we want for ourselves, while we worship God and strive towards His mercy and forgiveness.

Be quick in the race for forgiveness from your Lord, and in the race for a garden wide as the heavens and the earth, prepared for the righteous- (the righteous are) those who spend whether in prosperity or adversity, who restrain anger and who pardon all people. For God loves those who do good.(Qu’ran 3:133 –134)

The worshippers of the All-Merciful are they who tread gently upon the earth, and when the ignorant address them, they reply, “Peace!“ ( Qur’an 25:63)

*Obviously she is not writing in the same context as I am, so I want to be clear I don’t intend in any way to misrepresent her view.

This post has been brewing unexpressed for a while, and her post made me think exactly of this; credits to her.

When I was a child (of around eight) I attempted to keep handwritten journals, with several pages carefully torn out if they contained any spelling or grammatical errors. While an unfortunate neurosis, this particular fixation on perfection was one I eventually overcame.

More poignantly, rummaging through an old journal I discovered under my bed, I remembered that I consistently wrote myself a life and friends I never had in reality. My thoughts and contemplations were true, but the events were not. We went on a road trip today, I wrote on one occasion. It was so beautiful. I saw a bird building its nest, and it had a long white wispy tail that glistened like snow in the sunlight. When it took flight it vanished into a different realm, hidden from us. (Forget the road trip and the bird; I had never even actually seen snow in sunlight.) I really wanted to believe it, had tried to convince myself. What child doesn’t wish for hidden powers? Particularly when she spent the year yearning for school, because in the long summer afternoons when children played she would be confined to her room? What wrenched my own heart were the more realistic lies: My friends and I went to the movies followed by an entire dialogue chronicling nonexistent friends and mischievous episodes that never took place, the kind one reads in books. This was forced (I was much more prone to writing thoughts in journals than events) and I eventually ceased the practice, fearing that if I picked up the journal in my older / forgetful years I would believe the realistic fiction, having forgotten, and deceive myself into rendering a falsehood to be truth. I deeply valued the truth.

Your younger self was merely a passionate dreamer, I wrote for a future me, swallowing hard on the truth, sentimental, overly melancholy, never strenuous enough to have accomplished anything, or to have ever awoken. She was never particularly easily sociable; contrarily, she’s initially introverted. She never acquired a significant number of friends, but was very close to the few she had. She had a gentle heart; she tells herself she is brave.

At this the wave of a sob partially rose somewhere within me.

Cataloging every aspect of my identity and beliefs somehow made me feel more grounded, as though recording the definition of myself established me to existence. At point one I even took to noting my physical appearance in paranoia, as to connect myself into the world. Yet I’ve noticed that for a large portion I only ever wrote of the past or the nostalgically of the future–nostalgically of the future—and rarely recorded myself in the present, evidently the moment when I existed the least.

Maintaining a sense of selfhood was a trivial practice; I’ve noticed the only true continuity I can ascertain within myself is a perpetual sense of general displacement, that I’m not grounded by anything but the anchoring fact of existence, like a sentient spirit that would otherwise drift away. I’ve come to terms with this. It is not an unhappy state, but a neutral one.

Consider the following passage,

Women attended the mosques as men attended. Hind bint Usayd ibn Hudayr al-Ansariyyah learnt surah Qaf from hearing the Prophet recite it in the prayer. Ibn Jabir and Uthman ibn Abi l-Atikah says: Umm al-Darda was an orphan under the guardianship of Abu l-Darda; she used to come to the mosques with Abi [sic?] l-Darda in two garments [i.e. her head was not covered] and she prayed in the men’s rows, and used to sit in the circles of the teachers learning the Qur’an, until Abu l-Darda asked her one day to join the women’s rows.

This is almost an instructive demonstration of the accommodating attitudes towards women from which we’ve strayed: this orphaned girl was allowed to pray in the men’s rows, until her guardian asked her to pray in the women’s rows—because, I’m hypothesizing, she had reached an appropriate age of womanhood—whereas the contemporary attitude compels young girls who can pray to be separated from their guardians (if male). Only babies and toddlers are allowed to stay with their fathers, such is the urgency of sex segregation and the perceived threat of women engendered by the immature insecurities of patriarchal men. Contemporary masjid culture is fearful and sexist.

The introductory book (to encyclopedia volumes) from which the passage itself is taken, al-Muhaddithat: the women scholars in Islam, is authored by a man who in the first pages dismisses the feminist assertions insisting that historical aberrations from honoring scholarly participation from both sexes have resulted in the deficiency of objectivity and consequently the oppression of women. Amusedly, he compiles his work with the intention of objectivity, but already betrays himself in this impulsive statement, particularly as it is followed by the disclaimer that he is not familiar enough with feminist positions to thoroughly assess them and critique this claim.

In a single framework of presentation, the intellectual dishonesty of reporting past principles that contrast starkly with the approach toward women in a contemporary age, while simultaneously claiming that feminists have no evidence of deviation, is exposed. Indeed, it was once true that the mosques were built around women for the purpose of catering to matrifocal requirements.

On a different note, previously in my comment section I asked for evidence that during the age of the greatest scholars women occasionally prayed sans hi’jab; evidently, I’ve found it.

I was ten years old on 9/11. Counting up until last year it was the halfway point of my life. I remember that, being ten, and denying myself the luxury of tears. I didn’t have to try hard not to cry: I simply couldn’t. It would have been, I felt, ridiculous for me to cry. After all, I was seen as responsible. People would be confused, uncertain of my intentions or sincerity. It would only have provoked rage.

To grieve, openly, publicly, and to in turn be comforted, was a privilege granted only to True Americans™.

And so, aware of who I was and immeasurably humbled by the immensity of others’ grief (whom I believed were much more deserving and worthy of shedding tears), I was silent. I endured hearing the most hateful things about Muslims, unable to protest, and simultaneously unable to grieve. The grief, unexpressed, weighed on my jaw, blurred my tearless vision as I waited wide-eyed, and rested heavily in my mouth.

A couple of years following the atrocity, people were still referencing the event to justify Islamophobia. The blame comes only out of their grief, naturally, I told myself. I did not believe it was appropriate etiquette for me, in the midst of “someone else’s” tragedy, to burst into defensive arguments, considering that innocent civilians had just been murdered in name of my religion and the sensitives that now surrounded Islam. If I were a true Muslim this would have come effortlessly, a gentle slide, as easy as dissolving mist, a merciful drop of rain from the heavens, radiating from the heart, like the first time. But now it was hard. Apparently I am not that true enough of a Muslim, for this virtue to come so easily, an admission that makes me want to cry.

It was not Islam that kept me from defensive arguments, but feminism, which places the reality of violence (eg colonialism) before the defensive arguments of those who comply with the interpreted ideology committing it (eg The Catholic Church). And when, in another decade, Breivik shot and killed children in Norway, I thought now, it is appropriate of me to grieve.

And then a comment telling me I was making too much of it, and another, and another. Unbearable explanations about how this was a “lone wolf”(how many “lone wolfs” do you need for there to be a pack?) and how he couldn’t possibly have been a “true Christian” (who is blaming all of Christianity?) and equally grating defensive lines about how he’s fringe and not really mainstream, extraneous clarifications about how the right wing there is different from here (as though I weren’t aware), and finally a reference to 9/11. Imbued with the conception that I am not an American, but an Other, and had it coming.

At the last one, shock dried my brimming tears instantly. They evaporated, as though they’d never existed. The grief recoiled, something closed.

It’s very telling, who is or isn’t allowed to publicly grieve at the expense of the comfort of others. May I have a human moment please, without these bombardments… I would ask, but I don’t know what I’d cry over anymore. Everything is jumbled up now, from waiting for so long.