Amani Al-Khatahtbeh: Muslim Girl
Sep. 2nd, 2018 08:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bibliogrammaAmani Al-Khatahtbeh, the founder of MuslimGirl.com, a prominent website created by and for Muslim women, has written a memoir about growing up as an American-born Muslim, the daughter of refugees from Jordan and Palestine, in a post 9/11 world. It’s an account that’s both deeply saddening and angering, and a celebration of the determination of a young woman to survive despite the violence and hatred directed toward all Muslims because of the actions of a radical minority.
The wave of Islamophobia that swept the West following the terrorist attacks on America in September 2001 were perhaps to be expected. Racism is always close to the surface in the West, and one of the characteristics of racism is that whatever wrong may be done by one member of a racialised group is held to be a general fault of all, while any good is seen as the act of an exceptional person, someone who ‘isn’t like the others.’ Before 9/11, racism against the peoples of the Middle East had been muted - they certainly weren’t white, with all the privilege that entails, and the stereotypes were many and varied, but they had not been actively criminalised, the way black people in North America had. 9/11 changed all that. Suddenly, the image of the Muslim from the Middle East became that of a fanatical terrorist, bent on committing violence against all white nations and their citizens.
Al-Khatahtbeh was only a child when this change happened around her. With the exception of a brief period when her father attempted to move the family to a place of greater safety, returning to the US after a health crisis which nearly killed her mother, Al-Khatahtbeh grew up in a hostile environment where her sense of her self as a Muslim, as a child of immigrants and refugees, sometimes her very right to exist was challenged.
She writes movingly about the effects of this constant devaluation of herself, about the sense of inferiority that overwhelmed her, making it almost impossible for her to speak up for herself or even ask for her due. At times, she even denied her Identity as a Muslim to avoid the response of those around her.
It was in part the time spent among her cousins, attending a Jordanian school and living among fellow Muslims who might idolise the US in some ways, but had not had to face the consequences of being a young Muslim in an Islamophobic society, learning about the history of Islam, that helped her reaffirm her pride in her religion, not just as a personal choice, but as a part of her identity, that helped bring her to the decision, as an adolescent, to make that identity visible by wearing the hijab. She writes about the symbolism of the hijab:
“With that decision, I inherited the entire history to which the hijab has been tied, and carried it on my head like an issue for public debate.
Throughout time, the headscarf has evolved to symbolize autonomy and control over Muslim women’s bodies. An empowering rejection of the male gaze, colonialism, and anti-Muslim sentiment, it can just as easily be twisted into a disempowering tool of subjugation and repression through its forced imposition. In any given time period, the headscarf would be at the center of a tug-of-war between people and their governments, between colonizers and colonized people. During the French colonization of North Africa, the veil became an object of extreme sexualization, with white men writing literature fantasizing about ripping the scarf off sexy Arab women’s heads—an act that became, in their minds, the most gratifying assertion of power. Edward Said taught us of the orientalized depiction of Middle Eastern women as seductresses hidden behind fictionalized harems—forbidden spaces kept for women only—that were a figment of the white man’s imagination, an imagery that colonizers would stage for postcards to send back home to Europe. Today, some governments are just as eager to mandate its wear in public as others are to forbid it. In all cases, any decision to intervene in how a woman dresses, whether to take it off or put it on, is just the same assertion of public control over a woman’s body. Iran’s honor police enforce that all women wear a headscarf in public, while today’s French laws forbid the veil in public schools. It’s funny how, in our patriarchal world, even two entities at the opposite ends of the spectrum can be bonded by their treatment of women’s bodies. Sexism has been employed in many ways throughout history to uphold racism.”
Al-Khatahtbeh began developing the Muslim Girl web presence with some friends while still in high school, spurred by the lack of media representation and Internet presence of young Muslim women. Though she would work for several mainstream media outlets after university, Muslim Girl became a larger presence in her life and she began to be sought out for the Muslim women’s perspective. The latter part of the book is as much a critique of the representation of Muslims in the media, and the ways that has affected the lives of Muslim men and women in America as it is a personal memoir. She writes about the narratives of terrorism, violence, barbarism, and gender inequality that have dominated the public images of Islamic peoples in America and around the world. She talks openly about being afraid, at times, to go out in public as a hijabi. She writes about the ways in which the Trump campaign - the book was written before the election, although it’s clear that she expected he would win - aggravated the situation, inciting a new level of violence against Muslims.
“Trump discovered that milking anti-Muslim sentiment, with complete disregard to the dangers it poses to our very lives, keeps him in the spotlight and gets him more airtime. Since his ascension to the national stage, I have been receiving press requests around the clock during his media circuses to explain, again and again, “the current climate for Muslim women.” By the time the Muslim-ban comments came, I had run out of different palatable ways to say, “Our lives are under threat right now”—ironically, not from ISIS extremism or the brown men that our society is raising pitch forks against, but from our own Western society itself.”
But there have also been breakthroughs, and Al-Khatahtbeh, through her work with Muslim Girls and her activism a a voice for Muslim women has been a part of these. She ends this memoir, which contains much of her pain and fear, and that of other Muslims in an Islamophobic world, with an acknowledgement of all this, and with hope.
“I think of the little girls we were and the little girls we could have been, and the little girls who never were and what little girls will be if we have anything to say about it. I think of how our generation is a fateful one. We were the little girls who had our voices robbed of us. We were the little girls who had our bodies and our homelands ripped apart while our hands were tied behind our backs. We were the little girls who were told to sit down and shut up while our world betrayed us. We are rising up—we are the ones reclaiming our voices, the ones talking back, and the ones reminding the world that no, we haven’t forgotten. We grew to become our own saviors.”
The wave of Islamophobia that swept the West following the terrorist attacks on America in September 2001 were perhaps to be expected. Racism is always close to the surface in the West, and one of the characteristics of racism is that whatever wrong may be done by one member of a racialised group is held to be a general fault of all, while any good is seen as the act of an exceptional person, someone who ‘isn’t like the others.’ Before 9/11, racism against the peoples of the Middle East had been muted - they certainly weren’t white, with all the privilege that entails, and the stereotypes were many and varied, but they had not been actively criminalised, the way black people in North America had. 9/11 changed all that. Suddenly, the image of the Muslim from the Middle East became that of a fanatical terrorist, bent on committing violence against all white nations and their citizens.
Al-Khatahtbeh was only a child when this change happened around her. With the exception of a brief period when her father attempted to move the family to a place of greater safety, returning to the US after a health crisis which nearly killed her mother, Al-Khatahtbeh grew up in a hostile environment where her sense of her self as a Muslim, as a child of immigrants and refugees, sometimes her very right to exist was challenged.
She writes movingly about the effects of this constant devaluation of herself, about the sense of inferiority that overwhelmed her, making it almost impossible for her to speak up for herself or even ask for her due. At times, she even denied her Identity as a Muslim to avoid the response of those around her.
It was in part the time spent among her cousins, attending a Jordanian school and living among fellow Muslims who might idolise the US in some ways, but had not had to face the consequences of being a young Muslim in an Islamophobic society, learning about the history of Islam, that helped her reaffirm her pride in her religion, not just as a personal choice, but as a part of her identity, that helped bring her to the decision, as an adolescent, to make that identity visible by wearing the hijab. She writes about the symbolism of the hijab:
“With that decision, I inherited the entire history to which the hijab has been tied, and carried it on my head like an issue for public debate.
Throughout time, the headscarf has evolved to symbolize autonomy and control over Muslim women’s bodies. An empowering rejection of the male gaze, colonialism, and anti-Muslim sentiment, it can just as easily be twisted into a disempowering tool of subjugation and repression through its forced imposition. In any given time period, the headscarf would be at the center of a tug-of-war between people and their governments, between colonizers and colonized people. During the French colonization of North Africa, the veil became an object of extreme sexualization, with white men writing literature fantasizing about ripping the scarf off sexy Arab women’s heads—an act that became, in their minds, the most gratifying assertion of power. Edward Said taught us of the orientalized depiction of Middle Eastern women as seductresses hidden behind fictionalized harems—forbidden spaces kept for women only—that were a figment of the white man’s imagination, an imagery that colonizers would stage for postcards to send back home to Europe. Today, some governments are just as eager to mandate its wear in public as others are to forbid it. In all cases, any decision to intervene in how a woman dresses, whether to take it off or put it on, is just the same assertion of public control over a woman’s body. Iran’s honor police enforce that all women wear a headscarf in public, while today’s French laws forbid the veil in public schools. It’s funny how, in our patriarchal world, even two entities at the opposite ends of the spectrum can be bonded by their treatment of women’s bodies. Sexism has been employed in many ways throughout history to uphold racism.”
Al-Khatahtbeh began developing the Muslim Girl web presence with some friends while still in high school, spurred by the lack of media representation and Internet presence of young Muslim women. Though she would work for several mainstream media outlets after university, Muslim Girl became a larger presence in her life and she began to be sought out for the Muslim women’s perspective. The latter part of the book is as much a critique of the representation of Muslims in the media, and the ways that has affected the lives of Muslim men and women in America as it is a personal memoir. She writes about the narratives of terrorism, violence, barbarism, and gender inequality that have dominated the public images of Islamic peoples in America and around the world. She talks openly about being afraid, at times, to go out in public as a hijabi. She writes about the ways in which the Trump campaign - the book was written before the election, although it’s clear that she expected he would win - aggravated the situation, inciting a new level of violence against Muslims.
“Trump discovered that milking anti-Muslim sentiment, with complete disregard to the dangers it poses to our very lives, keeps him in the spotlight and gets him more airtime. Since his ascension to the national stage, I have been receiving press requests around the clock during his media circuses to explain, again and again, “the current climate for Muslim women.” By the time the Muslim-ban comments came, I had run out of different palatable ways to say, “Our lives are under threat right now”—ironically, not from ISIS extremism or the brown men that our society is raising pitch forks against, but from our own Western society itself.”
But there have also been breakthroughs, and Al-Khatahtbeh, through her work with Muslim Girls and her activism a a voice for Muslim women has been a part of these. She ends this memoir, which contains much of her pain and fear, and that of other Muslims in an Islamophobic world, with an acknowledgement of all this, and with hope.
“I think of the little girls we were and the little girls we could have been, and the little girls who never were and what little girls will be if we have anything to say about it. I think of how our generation is a fateful one. We were the little girls who had our voices robbed of us. We were the little girls who had our bodies and our homelands ripped apart while our hands were tied behind our backs. We were the little girls who were told to sit down and shut up while our world betrayed us. We are rising up—we are the ones reclaiming our voices, the ones talking back, and the ones reminding the world that no, we haven’t forgotten. We grew to become our own saviors.”