A commenter pointed out a storify in a comment and I took a look at it. What I saw made me curious about the person behind it so I looked at her Twitter and that led me to her blog. Her most recent post there is titled So, What’s It Like Being a White Muslim, Anyway? The title is symptomatic of the post itself.
It’s a stupid title, because Islam is not officially unwhite, and because it represents a category mistake. It’s getting to be a boring trope to point out that Islam is not a race, but all the same, it’s not, even though it’s true that Muslims are often treated as a despised racial group. Islam is not a race and “White” is not a religion.
Ok but one gets what she means. Islam is not in fact a race but Muslims are mostly de facto non-white; a Muslim who is white is usually a convert or possibly a child of converts; there are social and political issues one can talk about. Yes. But one can talk about them well, or one can talk about them badly. This blogger, who calls herself Ms Muslamic and The Hijabinist, does not talk about them well.
I can divide my life neatly into two phases: the phase where I was Average Cis White Girl and the phase where I became Hijab-Wearing Muslim Woman.
Does it jump out at you the way it jumped out at me? It’s just one, introductory sentence, but she replicates it repeatedly – the thing that jumped out at me.
She didn’t stop being Cis or White when she converted to Islam. Why does she oppose Cis White Girl to Hijab-Wearing Muslim Woman? Why isn’t it Cis White Girl as opposed to Cis White Hijab-Wearing Muslim Woman? (I won’t quibble with girl/woman, since at least the chronology matches.)
The replications:
As a White cis woman I’d experienced misogyny and sexism, but the way I get treated now is considerably worse than anything I encountered back then…
This transition was made worse by the fact that Cis White Feminism does not (in general) support or respect Muslim women. When I converted, I went overnight from having Cis White Feminism speak for my experience and respect my input to having that exact same feminism ignore me, marginalise me, silence me and patronise me. I stopped being an intelligent, independent person who was welcomed into the global sisterhood and started being a rescue project for Orientalist feminist do-gooders. The change was jarring. But thankfully when I got pushed out to the margins I discovered a whole bunch of other people who had also been pushed to the margins by mainstream feminism and we bonded on twitter and now it’s awesome. So you can keep your Mean Girls Cis White Feminism because it’s not helping me anyway.
…
I’m not asking for some kind of special treatment or implying that I somehow have it worse than other people. Fighting oppression is not a zero-sum game. You can recognise that my experience has been difficult and painful in a number of ways without also implying that the experience of Muslim PoC is less worthy of attention. Nobody deserves to be dehumanised by society as a whole. Nobody deserves to live in fear because of their religion. Likewise I think I can say “Hey, being a White Muslim has its own particular set of complicated problems” without implying that I’m more important than women of colour, trans women, women with disabilities or other women pushed to the margins of mainstream Cis White Feminism.
What’s she doing with this? I think she’s trying to make the case that feminism isn’t intersectional enough…except of course for feminism that is intersectional enough, which would be feminism that isn’t “White” or “Cis”…and it’s actually somewhat tricky to find any feminism that is explicitly officially White, though it’s less tricky to find feminism that’s explicitly officially Cis. But still, one gets the idea, not least because it’s an idea that’s been around as long as second-wave feminism has – that a lot of the most visible feminism tends to be middle-class and all that goes with it, and thus not very good at addressing class and race and the other ways people are marginalized. (Funny though that the blogger doesn’t include “straight” or “heterosexual” among her axes of marginalization. I wonder why that is; I wonder if it was conscious.)
One gets the idea, but it’s still a very tendentious, and in my view unfair, binary. It loads the dice.
Another thing about that first sentence I cited.
I can divide my life neatly into two phases: the phase where I was Average Cis White Girl and the phase where I became Hijab-Wearing Muslim Woman.
“Became” is an odd word to use. One doesn’t just “become” a Muslim, the way a girl becomes a woman over time. One decides to be a Muslim; one converts, in short, to Islam. It’s not passive, it’s active. It’s not something that happens to you, it’s something you make up your mind to do. That’s all the more the case with the “Hijab-Wearing” bit. She’s in the UK, so she’s not in a place where the hijab is forced on all Muslim women.
Obviously all this is more or less peripheral; my real objection to her post is the usual one: that it treats criticism of Islam as racism and thus taboo, while I think Islam should be wide open to criticism along with all other religions, because religions are systems of ideas that make massive claims on people. But the rhetoric of this move is interesting.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)