Berkley Center

It can be seen in both the statistics found on development websites and in my everyday experiences in Jordan that life for women in the Middle East is much different than in many Western countries. If you look at the websites, you will see how women’s literacy is lower, their unemployment rate compared with men in their countries is higher, and many parts of the region are plagued with honor crimes, child marriage, and female genital mutilation. As for my everyday experiences, I see fewer women walking in the streets than men (those I do see are often covered at least with a hijab, if not a niqab, the former covering just the hair and the latter covering everything but the eyes), and I have to be careful at whom I smile or what I say in a taxi so as not to send the wrong message. Many people in the West look at these issues and automatically blame Islam, citing them as evidence of the evils and backwardness of the predominant religion in the Middle East.

The truth of the matter is, the prejudices behind these practices predate Islam and exist in every single society. While non-Muslim women in the United States may not wear a hijab, the same objectification and sexualization of women can be found in the media, on the streets, and apparently at Tombs Trivia Night, though definitely not as amplified as in the Middle East. Coming here has given me firsthand experience with the issues here, but when I think about why these issues exist and the prejudices behind them, I can see that these same ideas exist on a different scale at home in the United States. Islam is not the problem that these societies face, and in fact many women are proving that it could possibly be the solution.

Many Muslim scholars today are looking at the Islamic faith, specifically at the Qur’an, to add a female interpretation to the long history of almost entirely men interpreting what the Qur’an says and how its words affect the law and society. They look at the specific wording of the Qur’an, determining when masculine versus feminine verbs and pronouns are used to figure out whether God was speaking about just men, just women, or both, in various passages. These scholars look at the hadith and research their sources and their context to disprove the validity of various hadith which people use to advocate against women’s rights.

Islamic feminism, though it only became a popular topic in the late twentieth century, is not a new concept. Fatima Baraghani lived in the first half of the nineteenth century, born into one of the most prominent families in Iran, and later joined the Bab movement, which among other things fought for women’s rights. Baraghani is perhaps most famous for appearing unveiled among men, much like Huda Shaarawi, an Egyptian feminist pioneer who symbolically removed her veil on a return trip from an International Women’s Suffrage conference. The point of mentioning these two women is not to say whether veiling or not veiling is more in line with feminist principles, but rather that these women broke through patriarchal boundaries long before Islamic feminism became the scholarly topic that it is today.

In fact, the issue of covering deeply divides Muslim women and feminists. Some women believe the veil to be oppressive, the result of objectifying women to the point where they have to cover themselves so as not to seduce men who are not part of their family. And on the other hand, others will argue that they are not fully Muslim without the veil, and that they choose to wear the niqab both to show their devotion to God and to empower themselves so as to not be subject to the looks and catcalls on the street. At the University of Jordan, the vast majority of the female students veil, and a high percentage of those students can be found wearing the niqab. At first, this was surprising to me because of the reputation in the United States of university campuses being more progressive than most other parts of society, but it is not just those who are more conservative or more religious who wear the veil—there are many different reasons why women would choose to do so.

It can be easy to look at a society or a region or a religion and automatically make assumptions about it, especially when the correlation between the issues women face in the Middle East and the prevalence of Islam is so high. It is easy to look at a veiled woman and assume she is oppressed or to look at the other problems in the region and assume they are based on religion. These generalizations that I am making of course do not tackle the whole issue, since women’s concerns in Jordan are much different from those in its neighbor, Saudi Arabia. And in no way am I trying to make women’s concerns in the Middle East seem more trivial than they are by saying we experience the same types of discrimination even in the United States. The point is that before people in the West criticize the Middle East and Islam, they need to look at the very roots of the problems and then look to their own society, where I am sure they will find that the same types of prejudices exist around the world.