farzana hassan's
UNVEILED
reviewed by
BETSY L. CHUNKO
_________________________________________
Betsy
Chunko holds graduate degrees in both art history and literature.
She earned her PhD from the University of Virginia and currently
teaches at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY.
.
In
Unveiled,
Muslim commentator and activist Farzana Hassan describes how
she came to question the dogma of conservative Islamic principles
from the inside. Essentially, she offers a long meditation on
a clear question: Where has critical thought gone in the Muslim
world since the end of European colonial occupation of India
and the Arab world?
Told
in three parts, the text opens by exploring the alienation North
American Muslims suffered from the non-Muslim majority following
9/11. In effect, this alienation, Hassan argues, led to ‘push
back’ from Muslims who felt themselves marginalized in
a Western world increasingly suspicious of their doctrine and
political, as well as religious, intentions. While 9/11 is the
backdrop for increased attention to the Muslim world by non-Muslim
parties in North America and Europe, it is also the background
for Hassan’s own reawakening as a practicing Muslim. She
describes the process through which she came to critically engage
certain tenets of her faith. This book is, in many ways then,
both a memoire of her life -- from her childhood in Pakistan
to her move to North America -- and a political position document.
While
its potential audience is diverse, the message of Unveiled
is coherent. “Religion is as much a lived phenomenon as
it is a matter of belief,” she believes. It is for this
reason that practices such as honour killings have led Hassan,
by her own admission, to lose “the solace I used to derive
from my faith.” Historically, she connects the rise of
oppressive measures and retrogressive sharia laws to the ascendancy
of Islamist military dictator Ziaul Haqq’s in Pakistan
in 1977. As a Pakistani woman, Hassan is nonetheless able to
consider the circumstances surrounding this event with impressive
moderation. In fact, the triumph of Unveiled is in
the tone she sets. She is not emotional or emotive. She is not
whipped to a frenzy at any point. There is passion here, but
she is, above all, rational, steady and measured. She puts a
completely temperate face on large-looming questions of doctrine
and culture in order to construct a message that might resonate
at once with practicing Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
Some
of the main issues Hassan treats regard interpretation of the
Koran, jihad and women’s rights. She asserts
continually that, where modern Islamic practice fails to meet
the expectations of moderate Muslims like herself, culture independent
of religion is to blame. As such, she disagrees with the notion
that to be Muslim is somehow incompatible with Canadian or American
identity. She also questions the apparent lack of religious
tolerance many contemporary Muslims show, comparing this with
the tolerance she experienced herself as a young girl in convent
schools in Lahore and, later, Massachusetts. The question of
Islamic heresy prevents many would-be Muslim moderates from
practicing tolerance, she argues. As a liberal activist, a mother
and a practicing reform-minded member of the faith, she seeks,
throughout, to blend logic with personal experience, history
with contemporary social commentary, all while reflecting on
what it means, in her opinion, to be a tolerant, informed and
yet still, by her own definition, pious Muslim today.
“Piety,”
she argues, “can be a good thing.” However, she
argues that “enforcing it with such implied coercion cannot
be healthy.” She suggests that the Muslim social body
is not at its healthiest -- is not even capable of experiencing
full health -- until it becomes more introspective, more open
to moderation and tolerance. It is a problem, she asserts, that
what “is or isn’t biddah (i.e., an unwarranted accretion
to the faith) is now left to the more fundamentalist custodians
of the faith.”
Hassan’s
book argues, to this end, for a greater polyphony within Islamic
communities. She believes reform must come from the inside:
“We need liberal Muslims to step up to the challenge and
grasp an opportunity here to defeat the Islamists in their proliferation
of an oppressive ideology.” Likewise, she encourages non-Muslims
to remain conscious of the goals of fundamental Islamists. Hassan
argues for an end to retributive forms of Islamic justice, for
an increase in Muslim women’s visibility (literally and
figuratively), and against outrageous faith accommodations.
This
is timely. In the Foreword, Tarek Fatah describes the “guilt-ridden,
bleeding heart white liberals, eager to please the so called
victims of ‘American imperialism’ inside America
and the West.” North American Muslims were indeed victims
of a kind of generalized culture of fear that began to boil
among non-Muslims following the senseless calamity of 9/11.
But, as Fatah cautions, Islamists who “were able to convince
the liberal-left in US and Canada that they were the true inheritors
of the civil rights movement” merely “put on the
mask of Dr. King’s legacy.” Few people, including
moderate Muslims, were able to see through this act of deception
carried out in the name of multiculturalism, interfaith pluralism
and basic human rights.
Meanwhile,
the anti-Western narrative imbuing so much fundamentalist rhetoric
within the faith is, as Hassan shows, based on an inherent disdain
for the threat of reform the liberal Western discourse engenders.
Whereas multiculturalism in Canada and the US allows subcultures
to thrive, narrow fundamentalism as it is being experienced
by many in the increasingly conservative Muslim centers of power
dispossesses those with alternative visions for the expression
of their faith. In the end, Hassan identifies tolerance, religious
and social, with communal rejuvenation and urges practicing
Muslims to modernize.
by
Betsy L. Chunko:
Trial
by Ink (book review)
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