Larycia Hawkins, a political science professor in the US, announced last month that she was going to wear a hijab “in solidarity with our Muslim sisters”. This was in the face of growing anti-Muslim hatred, and more American women followed suit. As a result of saying Christians and Muslims worship the same God, Hawkins was suspended by her college.
It was an unlikely alliance, but the idea of standing shoulder-to-shoulder with other groups of women facing struggles ought to set the tone for Muslim women in 2016.
Building alliances is going to be crucial to changing the narrative around Muslim women that too easily states that they need “saving” from being “oppressed”. Instead women – Muslim and otherwise – need to see that their struggle is shared across the same fights of autonomy, poverty, freedom from prejudice, employment, health and so on. Some of these very basic human needs have yet to be met for hundreds of millions of women whatever their faith.
Much of this work of building solidarity will need to be done from the ground up. The demonstration of “solidarity through hijab” is a novelty and one that has received criticism, which undeniably shows that alliances can be powerful in leeching hate out of the woodwork and then diffusing it. In joining forces there is strength, and those who hate women’s collective strength will try hard to keep divisions entrenched.
Some of the work of solidarity building will require existing movements to collaborate. For example, a great deal of focus in 2015 was put on highlighting endemic racism with campaigns such as #BlackLivesMatter. Muslim women’s groups would do well to ally with those fighting oppression of other kinds. But they also need to show sensitivity that some of those they ally with will be subject to multiple forms of oppression. Black Muslim women have, for example, been too often overlooked.
In the short term we will see greater recognition of Muslim women’s spending power. Too often, studies of attitudes and behaviours regarding Muslim women are tied to theological beliefs. At the behest of businesses, what we will finally start to see are investigations of aspiration, culture and lifestyle in the coming year.
This help move us beyond the tired arguments about hijabs, niqabs, burkas and bans on some or all of them. They are tired tropes, trotted out by lazy Islamophobes and batted away by increasingly weary Muslim women who simply wish things could move forward. I predict there will be some green shoots in the conversation but alas I fear that we will for the foreseeable future keep looping back to head coverings.
Undeniably, one of the greatest challenges will be tackling the growing anti-Muslim hatred globally. Muslim women continue to bear the brunt of verbal and physical attacks. This is a difficult problem to address, requiring investment and hard grind in creating networks of voices of Muslim women, of speaking to power, but being themselves represented at high levels of authority as well as constantly challenging the hatemongering.
Last year was one in which Muslim women’s voices have been cranked up and in which solidarity has begun. Let’s hope there’s more solidarity and more progress to come.
Shelina Zahra Janmohamed is the author of Love in a Headscarf and blogs at www. spirit21.co.uk
