29 Nov Islam and the veil in the classroom

I could not be prouder of my students this week.

This entire quarter has been about building up the tools to speak about the ‘veil’ and the War on Terror. What struck me, after i was asked to teach the class, is that most of the students were 9 or 10 when 9/11 struck. Their entire lives as political beings has been colored by the events that have followed that day. Their ‘enemy’ is so different from the ‘enemy’ that i grew up with.

I am a child of the Cold War. I grew up on an F-16 fighter jet base – the last scramble site before the refueling station at Rota, Spain, for the Middle East and North Africa. I grew up with Neun und Neunzig Luftballons. We knew that at any moment the Russians, or Soviets could be on their way across the border. But i also grew up with ‘terrorists’. My father was pulled out of ICU in Landstuhl Hospital when the Marine barracks were bombed in Beirut. That was a turning point for those of us with tight ties to the military. School was often interrupted for bomb threats – we were shuffled out to the football field while men (always men) in bomb protection suits went to save the day. But that also meant that my bus was met by a Humvee-mounted M-16 at the front gate every morning. That the Def Con level (that Americans only learned about in 2001) was an important part of our daily plans.

Their enemy is unknowable, but somehow representable through the very heavy mark of ‘the veil’. So how to begin to address this?

What struck me was their willingness to admit to and to problematize their own single-sided view of ‘the veil’. They tackled it with a maturity that absolutely floored me. They struggled to really confront their own pre-conceived notions about what ‘the veil’ is and how they perceive it. Over the quarter, we have slowly begun to unpack what it means to be “at war” as well as what it means to be “at peace.” They have read about women who have gone into battle, women who have written about being in battle, women who have struggled to be taken seriously, to disrupt common tropes about their ‘weakness’, ‘fragility’, ‘incompetence’, and their sex and sexuality.

We opened the class with a short discussion on Orientalism (i used the Youtube video of Edward Said explaining how he came to Orientalism) then moved on to confronting the Five Orientalist Frames of Islam (a list that i borrowed from Deepa Kumar’s article Framing Islam: The Resurgence of Orientalism During the Bush II Era, Journal of Communication Inquiry, 2010). What emerged was a brilliant discussion led by the students problematizing everything from what ‘oppression’ means to universalim. And in the meantime, the worked through individualism, cultural relativism, and sacrifice.

Repeatedly, students stated that they went into this week’s readings with a single notion of the ‘veil’ as a form of oppression, but that they came out of them, at the very lease, simply more confused, and definitely more cautious in their framing. I cannot express my absolute admiration for their self-reflexiveness, their honesty, and their willingness to struggle with such a complex topic. I have got to be the luckiest grad student / instructor alive.

Next up – (En)gendering the War on Terror! Oh, this class is way too much fun!

Their readings were:

Grace, Daphne. 2004. Selections from: The woman in the muslin mask: veiling and identity in  postcolonial literature. Sterling, VA: Pluto Press: pp. 8-36

Fluri, Jennifer. 2009. “The beautiful ‘other’: a critical examination of ‘western’ representations of Afghan feminine corporeal modernity.” Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 16 (3): 241.

Mitchell, Katharyne. 2006. Geographies of identity: the new exceptionalism. Progress in Human Geography. 30(1): 95-106.

Freedman, Jane. 2008. The headscarf debate: Muslim women in Europe and the ‘War on Terror.’ In, Krista Hunt & Kim Rygiel, eds., (En)gendering the War on Terror: war stories and camouflaged politics. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 170-189.