Category: Blog

The M1 was its usual unmoving self as I trekked north to Pretoria last week. The monotony of the staccato traffic flow on our roads is these days only interrupted by a generous helping of over-zealous football themed marketing. There’s no escaping it folks. The World Cup, like an untimely Armageddon, is drawing precariously close. And if it does happen to fall short on any of its lofty objectives at least it’s united us all- in gridlock.  My trip to Pretoria was however no footballing matter. A women’s forum from Laudium, a suburb to the west of the capital, had invited me to share my experience as a magazine editor and then discuss opportunities for the empowerment of women. I took the liberty instead to speak about the place of young women in South African Muslim society.

It was no call to revolution, a well worn topic, but one I feel that needs to be addressed from within South African Muslim contexts. The subjugation of women is not created by scripture or law it is created and maintained through ideology. Ideology is a lot like common sense, the sort of things we take for granted, care not to question. So, young women grow up desperately coveting the attention of men, equating their self-worth to their cup size, feeling less than whole unless they are made the object of a man’s attention because the pervasive ideology is one that promotes the looks and marriagabilty of a woman above her grey matter. I warned that in a society where the media is lambasted for everything from a rapacious taste for fast food to fast cars and even faster living, the media cannot alone be held responsible for spinning disconcerting ideologies . Social norms are not created on the back of a cover girl alone, we are all responsible, I argued, for the girl who is forced into a sexual relationship to maintain the farcical obligation of having a boyfriend.

I sought to stress the importance of education, of the re-evaluation of social norms and the dire need for critical thinking. When I stopped talking and faced a group of women who wore matching expressions of bewilderment, I was afraid I had misread my cue. But then, someone volunteered, ‘That was inspiring,’ and my traitorous head burst at the seams with such delectable food for vanity. My delirious glow of self-congratulations was however short-lived.

An Apa¹ replaced my haze of complacency with a burning anger as she countered, ‘Well, if your girls don’t go to school then they don’t have to experience all these things,’ and someone else furiously asked, ‘ But how can you deprive them of an education?’ She replies, ‘The threat of peer pressure is worse than the lack of an education!’ I stepped in and tried to explain that peer pressure is unavoidable, manifesting itself in various places, including the home and in many instances can also be positive. She, though, was doggedly determined to be unmoved. I had to remember to bite my tongue being a guest of this forum. And a very inspiring woman, a spritely minded 70-something, said to her, ‘So tell me your daughter’s at home and does what?’ And she says, ‘You can spend 200 years learning Quran and Sunnah and you won’t be done.’ According to this Apa-at-large secular knowledge and Islamic knowledge are like oil and water, inadmissible by nature.

At this point, I think, everybody in the room was praying she just shut up. No one there agreed with her but everybody was too afraid to further engage her.  Someone else then asked me a question, deftly redirecting the conversation in an effort even the most astute diplomats would be proud of. While we were served cake and Pepsi, Apa got up, excusing herself citing a dentist appointment. The relief her departure brought was much sweeter than the finest confectionery. It is easier to believe people like her don’t exist. It’s easier, on the mind and purpose to believe women are uniformly unshackled of such ignorance. Yet she was there. Real. Proof that there is more than one ideology we need to be rid of.  Still, it amazes me that though she can lambast pursuits of ‘secular knowledge’, relegating it to the annals of impermissibility she remains a witting beneficiary of someone’s university-going. Because even though educational institutes are dens of iniquity and vice we need to have our teeth fixed.  But will the hypocrisy of it all ever be realised?

1. Apa: A kinship term from Indian parlance for an older sister, commonly also used to refer to female teachers in Indian Muslim educational settings in South Africa.

Mogamat Zain Benjamin, better known as Hadji Bucks, presides over a small island of Islam in the suburbs of Cape Town in a house shiny with peach tiles and illuminated Koranic scripts which he fires up with a remote. It is full of women in hajibs, who pad about with bare feet, bringing refreshments, some curtly dismissed as not being quite right. He has 10 children, five daughters and five sons and, after much deliberation and the aid of a calculator, it is estimated that there are 31 grandchildren.

Are all the children from one mother? The answer: not exactly. But they were all brought up as one family.

In his 70s, Bucks is a ladies’ man, smelling of sweet cologne. He says: “I just love girls,” as his wife sits benignly by, engrossed in a hospital drama on an oversized plasma screen.

(Full Article here)

The image of the lascivious Arab, opulent in his capacity for violence and decadence is promulgated by Western media, blurring the lines in the minds of Westerners between Arabs and Muslims. The rapaciousness of Arab men for women, have fuelled many a film, book and opinion about Arab culture. Orientalism is the term used to describe the blurriness between what is ascribed to Arabs and Muslims in Western media. In the extract above, Bucks is a Muslim man living in Cape Town. Far, far from the Middle East and the usual haunts of Arab men wielding swords and spitting out women like used bubblegum, Bucks is a South African Muslim. He’s typecast here as a man of decadence with harem like sensibilities.

Lin Sampson is one of the most talented writers in the country. Her features on the more colourful facets  of Cape Town life are witty and informative without pandering to the banal. She is one of those rare writers who brings forth the sort of objectivity that charms one side of the coin while mocking at it for the other. Her characterisation of Bucks though, I find  unfortunately Orientalist and irrelevant.  The reader is left puzzled about there being ‘barefooted women in hijab padding about his house, bringing refreshments, some curtly dismissed as not being quite right.’   What is being dismissed for being not right, the women or the drinks?  Is the ambiguity accidental?

Sampson simply regurgitates the women are chattel theme of Orientalist discourse. The assumed powerlessness of a Muslim woman is conveyed by describing Benjamin’s wife as ‘benign’. Sampson only sees these women against the image of Bucks, not as people in their own right. Bucks’ life, however fraught with a bevy of women at his beck and call should not be relegated to a scene from the Arabian Nights. Granted, Bucks is a rather interesting character but why then not compare Bucks to Hugh Hefner? His deepfreeze jam-packed with crayfish and the mammoth plasma screens would compare well with the toys of the Playboy mansion. But instead his Muslimness, conveyed by his frequent trips to Mecca and the remote-controlled Koranic scripts qualifies him to be seen as a randy, old Arab.

While issues of integration have come to dominate discourse about Muslims living in Europe, South African Muslims conversely are well established in mainstream society.  To suggest however that Bucks presides over an ‘island of Islam’ is rather perplexing. It further entrenches misconceptions of Muslims  relegating them to a league of otherliness. And Bucks? Well, he’s just trying to win a singing competition, by any means necessary.