Feminism has gotten a lot of press (and maybe a bad rap) recently, even more so from a religious perspective.
I do not count myself as a feminist, but I feel that I embody many feminist thoughts... just that I prefer a softer way.
Fighting Hislam combines all my comfort and discomfort about feminism and presents them through the lens of religion: Islam. I love the different perspectives from different women from all different walks of life. Some aspects of the book can be dry, but I felt the pain and courage of every woman interviewed.

Susan Carland's phd thesis became this book. She interviewed women from different Muslim communities in (English language speaking world) U.S., U.K. and Australia to get their take on sexism in Islam. This book has different points of view because these women come from different communities and their experiences are different.

I cannot urge people enough to go and read this book. Like Nasty Women, this book talks about issues that are at the forefront of most conversations taking place in 2018: Islamophobia, sexism, and feminism. It was upsetting to read the ladies stories about what they have to deal with on a regular basis, and it just made me so angry that we, as a society, aren't doing more!

Susan Carland's book 'Fighting Hislam' is a study of sexism and gender issues in Muslim communities. She talks to twenty three Muslim women from Australia and North America, about their fight for a better understanding and fairer treatment of women. Cartland looks at the uphill struggles that most of them face, the treatment by other Muslims in reaction to their work and how non Muslims see feminism and women's rights in Islam. It's interesting to look at the different ways these women, of varying races, backgrounds and ages fight for equality and their God given right's within Islam. I thought the book was accessible and discussed a topic that many women face, regardless of their faith. I think my only criticism would be that I hoped that there would be more mention of cultural influences and traditions that create inequality for genders, instead of looking mainly at Islam, which in my experience treats genders equally, which is what the women interviews also say.

Published on www.groovefm.co.nz

The Muslim community that is portrayed to the West is a misogynist's playground; within the Muslim community, feminism is often regarded with sneering hostility.

Yet between those two views there is a group of Muslim women many do not believe exists: a diverse bunch who fight sexism from within, as committed to the fight as they are to their faith. Hemmed in by Islamophobia and sexism, they fight against sexism with their minds, words and bodies. Often, their biggest weapon is their religion.

Here, Carland talks with Muslim women about how they are making a stand for their sex, while holding fast to their faith. At a time when the media trumpets scandalous revelations about life for women from Saudi Arabia to Indonesia, Muslim women are always spoken about and over, never with. In Fighting Hislam, that ends.

I have to say, up front, that I really struggled with the timing of this book. Not so much the actual release date but the climate to which it has been released into. My nightstand is groaning with books at the present, so I took me a little while to come around to this one. In the meantime a bomb had just gone off in Manchester at a major concert and there were multiple attacks of civilians in London and in France involving cars, trucks and all manner of weapons. On our TV's the new cop show Hyde/Seek had just started. Its plot line predominantly dealt with terrorism.

Dial up Netflix or and other cable provider and Homeland or Designated Survivor is top billing on the watch list. Fear of Islamic extremism is behind every story. Add to that regular column inches, internet and radio feeds coming at us 24/7 and it's no wonder we Westerners are feeling overwhelmed. We want peace. We want this, this, this Islam/Muslim thing, this threat, these 'attacks' to just all go away. But we can't escape, no matter what we do. When it gets so deep that even our fiction is infiltrated we cannot look objectively any more.

Add to the mix the Kiwi/Aussie experiences of Afghanistan. Both nations have troops over there 'helping' to restore peace and justice to that part of the world and fighting the Taliban model of sexism and oppression, particularly again women. And it is this mode; that colors the brush that we dip into the tar. So this is why we of the Westernized Pacific think that all Muslim women are equally oppressed. That Muslim men are sexist pigs and do not respect their wives, sisters and mothers as they should. It's just so easy to write off the Muslim community as a misogynist’s playground. Yet within the Muslim community and outside where it is also perceived as such, feminism for Muslim women is often regarded with sneering hostility.

This may be true in the extreme cases, argues author Susan Carland, who actually converted to Islam, as opposed to being born to it, and feels she is in the best position to offer a more balanced view on the subject. The role of women in Islam is most definitely a hotly debated topic, she acknowledges, both among Muslims and non-Muslims alike. But a Muslim women’s perspectives is rare, often excluded from mainstream discussion for a variety of reasons. Some of these are because we, as Westerners chose to ignore or look past these voices. Sometimes it is convenient to look at them as victims of a medieval (emphasis on Evil) system,. one where these women must be rescued. Modern feminism has always come from the point of view of the oppressed and the downtrodden, the restricted and the unspoken, so it's makes sense that we should identify Muslim women as slaves to the Hijab.

But we, in the West are, in fact, simply laying our own moral, ideological and political blankets over a culture and religion that we do not really understand, argues Carland. OK, her book is not the first to raise this. Beyond Veiled Clichés by journalist Amal Awad also dug deep to explore life from the perspective Muslim women living in both in the Western and Arabic world. As an academic, Carland chooses to go even further offering a new twist on feminism whereby religious beliefs and laws can co-exist in harmony with women’s rights.

he Muslim community that is portrayed to the West is a misogynist’s playground; within the Muslim community, feminism is often regarded with sneering hostility. Yet between those two views there is a group of Muslim women many do not believe exists: a diverse bunch who fight sexism from within, as committed to the fight as they are to their faith. Hemmed in by Islamophobia and sexism, they fight against sexism with their minds, words and bodies. Often, their biggest weapon is their religion. At a time when the media trumpets scandalous revelations about life for women from Saudi Arabia to Indonesia, Muslim women are always spoken about and over, never with. In Fighting Hislam, that ends.

People don’t realise the influence culture has on faith, she argues, through examples and through the voices of some of her own interviewees. Sh notes that within Australia, where this book is set, the Muslim community is incredibly diverse. "It’s so multicultural and yet we’re all clumped together [but] if you look at the countries of origin,"she argues they often practice Islam in very different ways." Somali Islam she notes, is practiced in a very different way and understood in a different way to practices in Indonesia, Afghani Islam or in Saudi. Effectively, she's saying, that to us, Westerners, the impression is that Islam is a monolith. Which is not the case.

One of the main intentions of this book was to change opinions. Or at least to open the discussion. Now that's extremely hard, given our current political climate. As I outlined above, we Westerners almost revel in the painted doom that's been painted and into that paint pot we include the oppression of women who must endure within those confines. We don't ask the questions the Carland has, we don't even look up to notice. We are scared. And even if we did, could we? We white and middle class would be hypercritical and far too patronizing. We would judge with our west-feminist eyes and our post-colonial spyglasses. We wouldn't listen but we'd interpret.

Nothing much has changed, argues Susan Carland. Carland is a lecturer and researcher at Monash University's National Centre for Australian Studies. She has been listed as one of the 500 Most Influential Muslims in the World, and as a 'Muslim Leader of Tomorrow' by the UN Alliance of Civilizations. She was a co-creator and presenter of the ground-breaking television show, Salam Cafe and is an ambassador for Possible Dreams International. She is a good spokesperson for this debate, indeed. She knows the territory and ii anything, it’s harder for Muslims living in the west today than it once was. And that goes for the conversation about gender equality and Islam. No, we really haven't moved on from 9/11, And Our views of Muslim women are even more archaic. She highlight the Victorian fantasies of Harems, kept as sex slaves by Turkish Sultans. Women who veiled their faces to create an 'allure' but were never chaste and pure like Western Women. They were women to be rescued from debauchery and abuse. The 'allure' has faded but the need to be 'saved' seems to remain, Carland says. She wanted to get an 'in my shoes' perspective so when interviewing Muslim women, as a Muslim woman, she asked the "Why do you wear hijab?" "Do you feel oppressed?" "Does your husband make you wear that?" "Why does your religion command FGM?”

“The stereotype of Muslim women is that they’re meek and submissive. So they’re seen as a weaker target. It’s Muslim women and kids in Muslim school uniforms who are more likely to be targeted with Islamophobia. Her findings are both surprising and acceptable. There are some women in her interviews that talk abut the benefits of sisterhood. This is true of many African variants. Women work and cook together and spend many hours in the exclusive company of other women. In doing so they have company, friendships, strength. They learn skills, make bonds and are in no way as vulnerable as they may be living as individuals in society 'equal' to men. It's hard to know if sexism and particularly abuse is higher in Muslim society, as compared to Western or even indigenous communities. it is high in Maori and Pacific societies, especially when women are separated from the other women in their whanau and community due to Urbanization. Anthropologically, this could be said to be true for nearly any society. By the same token, women who remain close knit due to the confines of Muslim laws and practices are really no different to Western Women who through a need for friendship form book clubs or Women's Societies or Plunket support networks or any other.

And the Ha jib, Carland argues, is both a perceived tool of oppression and a veil protecting independence. To some of her interviewees it protected them from the scrutiny of other men. The opposite of the leers young women endure when wearing skimpy clothes, for example. Yet, whilst wearing the Hijab in a Western place like a shopping mall or a park, they are the opposite of anonymous. They stand out, not as an admired individual, as a women dressed in punk gear or quirky, colorful clothing, or even dressed as a clown. No they stand out as a women enslaved to our perceptions.

These are but two pints Carland makes in her book. She has many more. Her tone is sometimes critical of the Western view. She holds no truck for our terrorist views or our obsessions with their consequences. She is not the enemy, she thinks. She's also honest about the fact she didn’t write this book to win fans. Interestingly, even though she wants to speak out and reveal the soul of her interviewees - some in America, some in Australia and some elsewhere - she, herself is furiously private. She's also personally uncomfortable with the media spotlight her husband, television host Waleed Aly’s fame has brought upon her and her family. Ally is Australian writer, academic, lawyer, media presenter and musician. But more importantly, he's a co-host of Network Ten's news and current affairs comedy twist program The Project. which has a high profile in Australia.

None the less, Carland is driven by obligation, as a teacher first. Her ambition is to educate as many people as she can and to enrich the public conversation about women and Islam. In this book she does it well. As I said at the start this is a topic that is very hard to discuss at the present, without taking sides. Add to that the debates about immigration and you've got a smoking safari to contend with. But if you really want to push all that aside and take a brave leap at objectivity then give this a go. You won't necessarily agree with everything and at times you'll shout "That's not Me!" Isn't it?

“There is this assumption," Carland points out, "that you all think the same thing, you’re all of one mind on these issues … It shows the desperation of the media and politicians to say ‘all of you people, who speaks for you?’ They can’t let go of this idea that someone should speak for all of us. No single person does”. Here's a new voice in the conversation.

Fighting Hislam
Susan Carland
Melbourne University Press
Publication Date - 1st May 2017

This book was written to quash to (un)truisms about Muslim women: the first, that women are always oppressed by their religion; and, secondly, that women’s liberation can only come through the rejection of Islam. The writer, a western convert to the faith, speaks of people’s reactions to her research, outlining how they would inevitably think that, when she told them that she would be researching women and Islam, she would be talking of victimisation and oppression. They would assume that any activism would take the shape of a rejection of Islam. In the face of this, the author has interviewed Muslim women from; Australia, North America, and Egypt who fight oppression from the inside of their faith, using Islam and Islamic scriptures as a tool in their struggle.
Her interviewees speak of; their relationship to their religion, use of Islamic scripture within their fight for equality, the attitudes of other Muslims, their treatment at the hands of Islamic leaders, their feeling towards the west, their attitudes concerning feminism, and how modern day western thought and apprehensions about Islam affect their lives. These interviews give a challenging, but inspirational, view of the lives of those women fighting to gain a footing in their faith, showing that women can, and have, played a role in Islam, challenging, both; the western ideas concerning their faith and the believes, of some of the adherents of Islam, concerning the role of women. This is an academic work but is accessible to an interested non-academic reader. The writing is clear and there is an absence of academic lingo. If you have an interest in; Islam, faith, gender, activism, scripture, colonialism and/or feminism, you should read this text.

Posted today 13/06/2016 at https://vikzwrites.wordpress.com/2017/06/13/fighting-hislam/

This book is about a PhD dissertation about female genital mutilation done by the author, mainly investigating the way Muslim women fight sexism within Muslim communities (and outside of them too). And do, do you ask? Because even today, Muslim women are humiliated at every turn. Why a Muslim woman can only teach women and not men or why a Muslim woman has to sit behind the men in a classroom and never beside them is beyond me.
But luckily, there are women fighting for a change and Susan Carland is one of them. She interviewed 23 influential Muslim women: theologians, activists, writers, bloggers, married, never married, single, widow and even divorced women. The majority of them were born and raised as Muslims but some of them were converts to the Islam.
She asked them about their motivations, why they’re criticized, the sources of discouragement or even about their struggle to get a leadership position, and all their answers are here.
I really enjoyed reading this book. I knew all of this was a problem but I didn’t know that their struggle was this big. Works like this book must be encouraged and appreciated. Susan was smart when it comes to the way she approached the women she had to interview and her questions were made with a propose.

Thank you Netgalley and Melbourne University Publishing for the book.

4.5★
Muslim feminism. An oxymoron? Many people would assume so, because the prevailing view of non-Muslims seems to be that Islam classifies women as something less than men. Well, no. In fact, many of the world’s great religious texts have appeared to favour men, but probably because they’ve been translated and interpreted by—you guessed it—men.

I think the male is usually the default position in language. Things have changed, changed to the point that when I once said something about “A farmer, when he . . . ” and my son interrupted and said “or SHE” I realised that his teachers were bringing their students up to date with the real world, and I was the one lagging behind. The irony is, that my husband and I were farming together, and we both identified as farmers. Then again, my father called all dogs “he” and all cats “she” although language was his field. Maybe his field should have been like our literal fields and included animals. 😊 But I digress.

So when a religious text says that “a man may not . . . ”, it doesn’t get translated or interpreted as “a person may not . . .”. That’s a failing of history and language, but it’s gradually (grudgingly) being corrected. As for the religious side of the argument, Carland knows her stuff.

“Classical Islamic law affords women the same right and obligation to an education as it does to a male, the right to financial independence (in both earning and spending, including owning property, entering contractual agreements and initiating enterprise), the right to keep her name after marriage, the right to sexual satisfaction from her spouse, the option to use contraception if she desires, the right to divorce, the right to initiate and refuse marriage, the right to be a religious authority equivalent to men, the right to social and political participation, and the right to financial maintenance from her husband, as well as viewing her as a spiritual equal to men. It even states that a woman is not required to serve her husband food or clean his house.

Despite the rights and status that Islam confers upon women, many in the West have associated Islam with the oppression of women since a least the eighteenth century.”

Raised in a Baptist Christian family, Susan Carland was a reasonably typical Aussie kid who converted to Islam in her teens. She’s a well-known public speaker and commentator in Australia, often sought to represent Muslim issues. She’s also married to a very high-profile political commentator, Waleed Aly, who is a popular television presenter. So she’s neither a typical Aussie nor a typical Muslim.

[My Goodreads review features a photo of the author.]

What she is, however, is bright and well-spoken. She decided to write her doctoral thesis on this subject and has expanded it into a book. She interviewed many Muslim women, some converts, some born into Muslim families, in the United States and Australia, collecting material and opinions, and she presents her results here. It still reads like an academic paper, and I won’t pretend to have read and absorbed all the facts and figures.

But I am interested in the basic premise, which is, I believe, that sexism is not part of the Muslim religion but part of an old-fashioned culture. It may be tradition that men are given all the power, but that’s not what’s taught in the Qur'an (also known as the Koran). That goes back to what I said earlier about translations and interpretations.

“I’ve had similar exchanges—too many to count—with non-Muslims over the course of my research. Commonplace is the firm conviction that sexism against Muslim women is rife, most often coupled with the utter disbelief that women who challenge sexism could exist, let alone that there are many of them, that they are not a new phenomenon, and that Muslim men often support them in their efforts.”

Muslim women are caught in a double bind when fighting sexism, because they’re basically damned if they do and damned if they don’t. If they do fight it, they are criticised by both people who think that they’re going against their religion (they aren’t) and outsiders who think they are confirming that Islam is a sexist religion (it isn’t).

But if they don’t fight it, then they are not only seeming to confirm the mistaken views about Islam in their own communities, their silence is also confirming those views to outsiders.

There are many Muslim women who have been combating sexism in their communities with the support of men. “Actually, many of the women listed their husbands, or another Muslim man like their father or imam, as their greatest supporters.”

Carland points out that the term “feminism” is usually considered to be a Western influence, and Muslim women don’t want to or need to think of their striving for equality as anything to do with another culture. This is their issue, their struggle, and it’s been going on for generations.

“In addition to being perceived as inherently Western and colonialist, feminism is also seen in much of the Muslim world as closely tied to secularism—generally understood to mean anti-religion—and thus Western feminists are viewed with a deep sense of wariness.”

Most recently (1 June 2017), The Conversation published an article called “Indonesian Muslim Women Engage with Feminism”.
https://theconversation.com/indonesia...

This is an excellent introduction to what is becoming a mainstream topic, and I thank NetGalley and Melbourne University Publishing for providing a copy for review.

I will leave you with a few more excerpts from (now Dr!) Susan Carland’s work.

**“Nahida told me about the permanent sense of unease she experienced over what she was taught about Islam and women, on the one hand, and what she felt to be true, on the other. And that this created an unbearable tension. ‘The male-centric Islamic studies I had been taught since I was very young were constantly at conflict with what I recognised as the truth that provided foundation for my values,’ she told me. ‘In order to reconcile and find answers I ventured into exegesis and discovered to my amazement that the extracted interpretations that had disturbed me with their sexism were completely un-Islamic and unfounded.’”

**“ . . . verse 4:34, which is sometimes understood to mean a husband can beat his wife. Of tackling this verse, in particular, Laleh called it ‘a remarkable period of research’, and went on to discuss how her studies into the Arabic lexicon and other uses of the term daraba (the key term in the verse) in Arabic, plus investigation into the sunnah (the way of the Prophet Muhammad) led her to truly believe the correct understanding of that term was ‘go away from’, and not ‘beat’, as had previously been understood.”

**“ Laleh explained this belief using a religious motivation: ‘There’s a very famous tradition of the Prophet that says “whatever my community has consensus on, cannot be wrong”. So for 1400 years they [men] have been saying how there’s consensus on this and consensus on that, but they have not taken half the population into account. Where is the woman’s voice? That’s why Muslim women need to be active so they can challenge things like this.’”

This book fills a sizable hole in the genres of feminist- and Islamic-related literature by covering ground which has been neglected by other authors in these fields. Where other authors have tackled "women's issues" within Islam from a non- or ex-Muslim perspective, Carland addresses the issue of sexism experienced by Muslim women in a way which gives agency to Muslim women themselves, with respect to both their gender and their religion. This unique way of framing the debate tackles one of my biggest pet peeves; namely that religion (Islam in particular) and socially progressive ideas and movements are mutually exclusive. It also highlights the importance of hearing Muslim women's voices in their own right, while also not ignoring the entire issue as "not my problem" (an attitude which is prevalent within current mainstream feminism).
As this was first a PhD dissertation, the language is quite academic and the beginning of the book waded through a portion of typical statistical necessities required by academic study. Overall, this was an informative and enlightening read.

‘The wider community thinks the Muslim community is a monolith… ‘

I was intrigued by the title of this book, interested to read what Susan Carland has to say about sexism and faith. But first, a little about Dr Susan Carland. Susan converted to Islam when she was aged 19. She had explored other religions, but felt an intellectual connection to the Islamic faith. Dr Susan Carland is a sociologist and lecturer at Monash University in Melbourne, and ‘Fighting Hislam’ began life as her PhD thesis. Susan Carland married Waleed Aly in 2002: they are arguably the most recognised Muslim couple in Australia.

In this book, Dr Carland draws together the experiences of twenty-three Muslim women, of their individual fights against sexism. Sixteen of the twenty-three women involved are from North America, the other seven are from Australia. While these are well-educated, articulate women, their experiences are different as are their approaches to dealing with sexism. Two of the women involved have since died.

What I found most interesting about this book is the diversity of the views expressed. While none of the Muslim women I know personally are either oppressed or part of a harem, the clichés persist. Muslim women are often identifiable by the way they dress (as were, I recall, Catholic nuns in the 1960s and earlier). And I’m old enough to remember when most Christian women covered their heads in church. The point of my digression? Simply that we ‘other’ people based on assumptions we make which are often based on clichés or partial information. Many assume that no woman would choose to cover her hair and, if she does, it is because she is forced to. And this assumption becomes for many of us the basis of our ‘knowledge’ that (all) Muslim women are oppressed.

‘There is a saying among Muslims: you don’t read the Qur’an, the Qur’an reads you.’

This saying goes a long way towards explaining the different ways in which the Qur’an can be interpreted by individuals as diverse as the Persian poet Rumi, and the leader of the Islamic State. These different interpretations also a part of the reason why Muslim women need to fight against sexism. The important point Dr Carland makes is that the sexism arises from different interpretations of Islam, that sexism is not an inherent part of the religion.

Dr Carland describes the different boundaries that Muslim women need to negotiate when trying to address sexism: if they speak out, do they give the Islamophobes more fuel against Islam? How will they be viewed within their own communities where, frequently, feminism is seen as a western influence (and therefore probably suspect)? Is faith enough?

I finished this book wondering about the future. Some of the fight against sexism in Islam is similar to battles fought (and still being fought) in the community more broadly. Equality may have been achieved in some societies in relation to some aspects of life, but the battle continues. And the answer? Alas, there is no single answer: the community is too diverse for a single, simple answer. But I can hope that the conversation continues. This is a book to read and reflect on, to discuss with others. For my own part, I saw many similarities between the roles of Muslim women and the roles of women more generally over the past four or five decades. Far more similarities than differences.

Note: My thanks to Melbourne University Publishing and NetGalley for providing me with a free electronic copy of this book for review purposes.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

I am afraid that this was yet another book that I just couldn't get into at the moment! I was interested in the subject, but this is a thesis and I think that I just found it a bit heavy-going.

I received this from Net Galley in return for an honest review.