Inside the Gender Jihad: Women's Reform in Islam (15 page)

Personal Narratives from the Trenches of Academia

As an instructor of religion at Virginia Commonwealth University, a southern, state-run academic institution in Richmond, the capital of the confederacy, I share the pedagogy of all members in my department. We use the academic approach to Religious Studies, which conforms to the phenomenological method of examining religions in the classroom and relies upon the benefits of that approach in exposing students to a diversity of worldwide faiths, practices, and beliefs, historically and currently. In fact, that approach, and its distinction from a purely confessional theological approach that aims at indoctrination, is the subject of my first lecture in each class. This is indispensable as the starting point in order to set the stage for maintaining diversity and objectivity for both Muslim and non-Muslim students in these classes. It emphasizes that students are subject to a single standard of evaluation based on the research focus presented in each particular course. The uniform measurements of evalu- ation are also outlined in the course syllabus.

Although I use the academic approach along with my colleagues, other department members sometimes enjoy the opportunity to
veil
their religious identity as a valuable asset to this approach in religious study. While I also relish that opportunity to use the academic approach, I am unable to hide my identification with the particular faith system I teach, because of my overt style of dress. For more than thirty years I chose to wear the tradi-

tional Islamic
hijab
,
or head covering, and long clothes.
10
The percentage of

tenured Muslim women in Islamic Studies is already extremely low. The

The Challenges of Teaching and Learning
61

percentage of tenured Muslim women in U.S. academia in
hijab
is also very low, with some increase only in the last decade. It is nearly impossible to find tenured Muslim women in
hijab
in the area of Islamic study in U.S. academia. Perhaps the constitutional conclusion in France in 2004 about the consequences of all external symbolisms of religions is supported in

U.S. academia regarding Islamic instruction. Despite First Amendment protections it seems that in order for someone to teach the academic approach to Islam, one must either be non-Muslim or remove all symbolic associations with the faith.

Furthermore, the styles I wear were influenced by the Asian and African cultures where I have traveled the most. Recently, I have noticed how much I have conformed to wearing more solid or muted colors. Otherwise, this flamboyant advertisement greeted students even before class discussion opened and had its impact on students, as I will detail from my teaching in general courses such as Introduction to Religious Studies, Religion in America, and Comparative Religion. The truly effective learning experience takes the learner from her starting place to a place where she can begin to grasp the breadth of a new or unfamiliar subject matter independently. A curriculum cannot stand without proper acknowledgement of the learner. Short of undressing, I did begin to make accommodations with regard to other student sensitivities in my teaching.

I have been teaching Islamic courses primarily to undergraduate students for over a decade and a half, mostly at this southern university. This was an interesting experiment in many general lessons about teaching Islam in the context of U.S. academia. My thoughts on the subject have gone through several metamorphoses in all this time, and I have continued to adjust my teaching goals and pedagogy to achieve greater relevance and efficacy. Nevertheless, it is dismaying to continually face the same problems anew each semester on my own campus or during occasional visits to other campuses across America.

In summary, the characteristics of my identity in relation to the academy has the following three main features: (1) I am not only Muslim; I see all of creation through an Islamic perspective. The worldview of Islam helped me to understand more about the workings of the whole creation when added to my having grown up Christian and to a year living as a Buddhist. My experiences in learning and teaching Islam freed me from the constraints that ultimate Truth resides exclusively in one religion rather than accepting the sacred as permeating the whole world. (2) I grew up Christian, but also poor, black, and female in America. As a Muslim, I have traveled

62 inside the gender jihad

extensively for work, research, and human rights issues. I often feel
more
comfortable abroad than I feel in the U.S.A., the country of my four- hundred-year ancestry. (3) Although I obtained my Ph.D. from studying Islam in a U.S. university, my first professional teaching experience was in Malaysia, with little more than half its population non-Muslims. In that

multicultural

context the relatively peaceful coexistence of religious

diversity encourages mutual respect for religion as an essential character- istic of human well-being. This helped me develop the spiritual confidence to evaluate my teaching on proficiency in the discipline. This confidence has been undermined in the context of teaching against a mainstream of mis- information, antagonism, and exoticism. When I returned to the U.S.A. and began teaching in a university climate hostile toward Islam – exacerbated by the popular negative media sensationalism that forms the basis of general public information – teaching became rather bleak. Unfortunately, Muslims themselves further exacerbated the negative by participating in some recent violent and extremist global events like September 11. Con- sequently, I mostly teach students who have been raised with intensely negative viewpoints on Islam. “Indeed, a University of Massachusetts study (Morgan, Lewis & Jhally, 1993) found that the more people watched

television, the less they knew about the issues at [they] supported the [Gulf] war.”
11

stake and the more

Instead of simply sharing information about a particular faith system, I struggle to create a space for appreciating its uniqueness. It differs from Christianity, a reality for one-third of the world’s population but with a larger percentage in the Bible belt context of the southern U.S.A. Indeed, my teaching is up against this and the presumption of white supremacy. A kind of insulation is created whenever a culture has no need to be openly exposed to other cultural realities. Teaching Islam here often goes up against certain comfort zones, creating hostility.

Before tenure, I was required to teach two “Introduction to Religious Studies” courses each semester. In teaching this course I learned how to remove generic references using Islamic examples. For example, in discus- sions about the hero, one of my colleagues (not religiously obvious – but coincidentally a white female Baptist and ordained minister) shows her class the Malcolm X movie. If I showed this, discussions would center on race and Islam, interfering with the main goal of the lesson: the universal charac- teristics of the hero in human civilization. I eventually discontinued any critical analysis of representations of religious ideas, metaphors, or symbols if they came from the Christian tradition. For example, since the cross is

The Challenges of Teaching and Learning
63

just two pieces of wood, two-thirds of the world’s population would not know that it is the key to their protection against Count Dracula, who would otherwise suck the blood out of their necks! Even this was not seen as the joke I intended, to demonstrate how religious symbols are ordinary objects empowered in context by the investment of sacred meaning.

As a Religious Studies academic advisor I assist potential and declared majors and minors. Before one semester, an African-American student was adamant that she would only take classes about Christianity taught by Christian instructors. I informed her that all instructors teach our courses using the academic approach to the studies of religion, not the confessional approach. Furthermore, other instructors usually do not include infor- mation about their personal religious affiliations. Although they span from Marxist atheists to ordained ministers, because there is nothing recog- nizable that distinguishes their religious or ideological preferences, it is easier for the students to focus attention on the subject of the lesson and away from the agent of that subject.

After my third year review, the dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Sciences referred to the evidence that student evaluations consistently ranked African-American female university instructors lower than their white and male colleagues. I already fell into a disadvantaged category for academic evaluation. Although I share some handicaps with other Islamic Studies instructors in U.S. academia, as indicated above by Said, as a female Muslim of African descent, my instruction of Islam in a Religious Studies program in the patriarchal, racist, and xenophobic southern U.S.A. faces challenges not yet documented, but surely of particular disadvantage. After I attained tenure, I would discontinue teaching the Introduction to Relig- ious Studies course for at least six years.

These are some of the ways in which what Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz calls “invisible invisibility” occurs: when people do not even know that they do not know you, and “when those values, traditions and customs intrinsic to

being non-Christian are not valued, not remembered, not celebrated.”
12

“This is part of the broader experience of every oppressed group: they must know about the oppressor’s culture, but the oppressor need know nothing about them.”
13
Meanwhile, “oppressed people need to know as much as possible about their oppressor in order to survive,”
14
and they are forced to give up certain aspects-of-being essential to their own cultural experiences and identity development because those aspects are disadvantageous for assimilation into the dominant culture or for participation in the dominant discourse. Western postmodern mastery over religious and theological

64 inside the gender jihad

discourse is just another form of cultural imperialism.
15
As I stepped into that box of privilege, most of what I said had the effect of shards of glass ripping against that solid cushion of insulation. The more insistent I became with attempts to articulate this divergent reality, the more deadly the shards became.

The American Academy of Religion

I have tried to share these experiences in a number of public forums focused on the teaching of religion, such as the American Academy of Religion (A.A.R.). The first presentation I ever gave about teaching Islam in U.S. academia was entitled “Teaching Afro-Centric Islamic Studies in the White Male Christian South,” for the historic “Black Women in the Academy” conference, held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1994. I had only been at V.C.U. for two years at that time. That presentation was eventually edited for publication.
16
In reviewing the still vibrant optimism I had while writing that article, I ashamedly confirm that some academic environments challenge instructors to lift up to greater heights, while others suck the life and spirit out of one’s intellectual endeavors and thwart the potential of their creative contribution.

The A.A.R. sets the standards for the study of religion in the U.S.A. As with other national level professional groups focused around a particular discipline in the academy, it is a Religious Studies institution that inten- tionally endeavors to offer the best formats for exchanging ideas. I have appreciated being in the company of both Muslim and non-Muslim, male

and female Islamicists,
17
and academics from broader interdisciplinary

fields of Islamic Studies, not just Religious Studies, and have especially enjoyed the company of those in other fields that intersect with Islam in their studies or addresses related to theological and practical issues. I have benefited from the Islamic Studies sections of the A.A.R. in finding a collegial environment for mulling over ideas about Islamic Studies in the academic setting of the U.S.A. Simultaneously, in attempting to contribute ideas about the
study
of Islam, including research and critical contributions to the study of Islamic reform, as well as helping to contribute in the intel- lectual formulation of those reform theories, experiences with the A.A.R. are widely varied. So far, the A.A.R. has not been the ideal place for devel- oping scholarly ideas about gender and religion in the context of Islam.

The Challenges of Teaching and Learning
65

The overwhelming majority of Muslim Islamic

Studies scholars in

America are male and either white or transnational. The overwhelming majority of scholars of women and religion in America are non-Muslim. The unique but beneficial idea of creating space for the academic approach to a budding potential to form Muslim Women’s Studies originated within

the A.A.R. over the past decade and fell within negotiating the context of those two existing sub-groups of Islamic and Women’s Studies
1
.
8
To date, the roads between Islamic Studies, Islamic reforms, and gender have met

and found greater support outside the A.A.R. in forums set up by individual universities or institutions across the U.S.A. or in international human rights forums. Two A.A.R. experiences set the context for my comments on personal location and Muslim Women’s Studies. One of these experiences occurred before the tragic “terrorist attack” on September 11 2001, and the other occurred after it.

There is glaring evidence that 9/11 affected Muslims in general as well as Islamic Studies in particular in the context of America. On the one hand, it has generated more interest in learning about Islam. This has led to an increase in academic positions for Islamicists at U.S. universities, and for researchers in a plethora of pro- and anti-Islamic institutions, nationally and internationally. Yet on the other hand, the simultaneous expediential increase in negative media stereotyping of Islam and Muslims outstrips these efforts at the level of the general public learning about Islam, as they face continually distorted ideas about Islam in modernity. Students in my undergraduate classes have helped to substantiate the claim that teaching and learning about Islam is a contested area occurring against the sur- roundings of negative public images and media reporting.