feminish

Muhajababes is great. A young woman took it upon herself to wrangle time off work and spend money she didn’t have to dive alone into the heart of six Middle Eastern countries to meet the young women and men affected by her pro-Iraq-war politics. Awesome. And then - what’s even more nails - Allegra Stratton chiselled three months of investigative adventuring into a book not only vividly heaving with everyone she met, but lit up with expedient shards of political history, and drenched in the very 21st century youth culture she’s checking out - with allusions, I’m embarrassed to confess, I didn’t always get. It’s not often you find a politics/current-affairs book whose chapter-headings read like album tracks: “Requiem for Zen”, “Wasta“, “Gezzing”, “Fulla Pink”…..

I recommend anyone to read Muhajababes because I guarantee you’ll feel, in addition to being knackered and over-inputted (not more than after a crazy fun weekend with friends), absolute relief. The young lads and lasses Muhajababes introduces us to are just very human and very real - as confused and independent-minded and soaked in telly, media, music and politics as us lot in Europe. They’re not, as the Daily Mail would have us believe, a culturally-alien gulf apart - and I even mean that of the teenage ‘martyr’ who let Allegra touch his Hamas card. Instead, as the strapline would have it - the young ‘uns of the Middle East are ‘cool, sexy and devout‘ - a thoroughly modern and reassuringly liberal combo.

And if the Muhajababes aren’t sure whether to veil, it’s not so very different from me not being sure whether to wear make-up. Mascara, lipstick, eyeliner - they’re a big question for me that I’m continuously re-answering: it’s about gender and it’s about independence and it’s also about other-people’s-views-of-women. And it’s not at all clear which is more empowering, wearing make-up or not wearing make-up; veiling or not-veiling. I’m glad that the lasses of the Middle East are negotiating their own naughty/nice (gender conservative/gender radical) route through 21st century culture. (There was I thinking I was radical wearing a trouser suit to the Westminster newsroom one day and flip flops and a tomato-red felt skirt the next…) The appeal of down-to-earth 21st century-style Islamic teachers who offer -moderate- spiritual relief from culture-consumption-overload, their teachings simultaneously translated into half a dozen European languages, even rang a few Immanent Grove bells…

I’m relieved because reading Muhajababes I really saw the dynamic impermanence of mainstream culture in the Middle East. Things are changing weekly, monthly, and people are constructing - negotiating- their own path through the soup. I’m uncomfortable with conservatism, unbreakable mores and cultural fear-of-change. And I think, at some level, I’d thought it was there in the daily-lived Islam of the Middle East. But the people Allegra met were not like that. In so far as they were, for example, religious, they were so freely and pro-actively, appropriating the teachings for themselves in a critical way (using the gems of modernity while they’re at it - bit of texting here, webbing there, bluetooth for him, DNA test for her). If millions of under-25’s across the Middle East are following the ’sheikh of chic’ Amr Khaled (and changing their lives as a result) it’s not because he’s just another old important imam they have to respect (he isn’t), but because he’s got straight-talking wisdom (of a sort) about the things that matter: masturbation, porn, or growing flowers in your tower-block…

The picture of the young Middle East I got in Muhajababes was relieving - but it’s the story of the old liberalism/communitarianism chestnut. You can have limitless choice in a liberal set-up: go to whatever churches or mosques you like, drive a car, die your hair purple or cover it in silk, and from that liberalism opt into whatever sets of communitarian rules you like (for example, opting into rules that say go to this particular mosque, don’t drive a car, and only cover your hair in, say, blue nylon that doesn’t go with your eyes). But what happens when everyone hops from liberalism’s choices onto the same restrictive communitarian bandwagon? What becomes of freedom-of-choice then when, for example, 85% of women in your country have veiled? Who’s protecting the right-to-choice of the other 15%?

Maybe it’s hard to be a feminish/feminist and oppose international actions to protect this liberalism (which was, at one level, what the Iraq war was all about). I s’pose I just think that armed interventions are different from peaceful ones.

Muhajababes is great. A young woman took it upon herself to wrangle time off work and spend money she didn’t have to dive alone into the heart of six Middle Eastern countries to meet the young women and men affected by her pro-Iraq-war politics. Awesome. And then - what’s even more nails - Allegra Stratton chiselled three months of investigative adventuring into a book not only vividly heaving with everyone she met, but lit up with expedient shards of political history, and drenched in the very 21st century youth culture she’s checking out - with allusions, I’m embarrassed to confess, I didn’t always get. It’s not often you find a politics/current-affairs book whose chapter-headings read like album tracks: “Requiem for Zen”, “Wasta“, “Gezzing”, “Fulla Pink”…..

I recommend anyone to read Muhajababes because I guarantee you’ll feel, in addition to being knackered and over-inputted (not more than after a crazy fun weekend with friends), absolute relief. The young lads and lasses Muhajababes introduces us to are just very human and very real - as confused and independent-minded and soaked in telly, media, music and politics as us lot in Europe. They’re not, as the Daily Mail would have us believe, a culturally-alien gulf apart - and I even mean that of the teenage ‘martyr’ who let Allegra touch his Hamas card. Instead, as the strapline would have it - the young ‘uns of the Middle East are ‘cool, sexy and devout‘ - a thoroughly modern and reassuringly liberal combo.

And if the Muhajababes aren’t sure whether to veil, it’s not so very different from me not being sure whether to wear make-up. Mascara, lipstick, eyeliner - they’re a big question for me that I’m continuously re-answering: it’s about gender and it’s about independence and it’s also about other-people’s-views-of-women. And it’s not at all clear which is more empowering, wearing make-up or not wearing make-up; veiling or not-veiling. I’m glad that the lasses of the Middle East are negotiating their own naughty/nice (gender conservative/gender radical) route through 21st century culture. (There was I thinking I was radical wearing a trouser suit to the Westminster newsroom one day and flip flops and a tomato-red felt skirt the next…) The appeal of down-to-earth 21st century-style Islamic teachers who offer -moderate- spiritual relief from culture-consumption-overload, their teachings simultaneously translated into half a dozen European languages, even rang a few Immanent Grove bells…

I’m relieved because reading Muhajababes I really saw the dynamic impermanence of mainstream culture in the Middle East. Things are changing weekly, monthly, and people are constructing - negotiating- their own path through the soup. I’m uncomfortable with conservatism, unbreakable mores and cultural fear-of-change. And I think, at some level, I’d thought it was there in the daily-lived Islam of the Middle East. But the people Allegra met were not like that. In so far as they were, for example, religious, they were so freely and pro-actively, appropriating the teachings for themselves in a critical way (using the gems of modernity while they’re at it - bit of texting here, webbing there, bluetooth for him, DNA test for her). If millions of under-25’s across the Middle East are following the ’sheikh of chic’ Amr Khaled (and changing their lives as a result) it’s not because he’s just another old important imam they have to respect (he isn’t), but because he’s got straight-talking wisdom (of a sort) about the things that matter: masturbation, porn, or growing flowers in your tower-block…

The picture of the young Middle East I got in Muhajababes was relieving - but it’s the story of the old liberalism/communitarianism chestnut. You can have limitless choice in a liberal set-up: go to whatever churches or mosques you like, drive a car, die your hair purple or cover it in silk, and from that liberalism opt into whatever sets of communitarian rules you like (for example, opting into rules that say go to this particular mosque, don’t drive a car, and only cover your hair in, say, blue nylon that doesn’t go with your eyes). But what happens when everyone hops from liberalism’s choices onto the same restrictive communitarian bandwagon? What becomes of freedom-of-choice then when, for example, 85% of women in your country have veiled? Who’s protecting the right-to-choice of the other 15%?

Maybe it’s hard to be a feminish/feminist and oppose international actions to protect this liberalism (which was, at one level, what the Iraq war was all about). I s’pose I just think that armed interventions are different from peaceful ones.