Safety in irrelevance: gender segregation
Cross-posted from Koonj.
This Eid, we both made it to Eid namaz. Late.
They were in tashahud when I got in. Why, you ask, is bad Koonj late for namaz? Well, Muslims need to meet expectations. They are always late. Except when WE are a few minutes late. THEN, they start namaz on the dot at 8, and you come in at 8:07 and they're done.
Back to Eid namaz.
When namaz ended, the khutbah started and many women promptly started talking, and socializing. At first I thought, you know, I should be all "ladies, chup karo, listen to the khutbah." Then *I* tried to listen to the khutbah and couldn't make head or tail of what was going on.
The sound quality was appalling. Whatever I COULD hear of the muffled words sounded fairly pedestrian. The same repetition of formulae, the same up and down rhythm of argument, the absence of good humour, the total absence of the sound of a smile, - ho-hum, how many past khutbahs does this sound like? Maybe if they let women khateebs in, we'll hear something new.
And of course, there was no way of lip-reading to understand the imam better. Why? They had put up this 3 foot high plastic partition between the men and the beautiful fitnah-filled women.
When we entered the gym-musalla (it was a community center), we could see the men. When we sat down on the cold plastic-covered floor, we couldn't see anything except a sheet of plastic. Aesthetically, most appealing, of course (NOT). Eid day, big festival, important day after month of fasting - and yay, I get to sit facing a sheet of white plastic and meditate. So why won't the imam shut up so I can meditate? I can't hear him anyway. I can't lip-read. I can't feel like a community. So quiet; let me reflect!
There is method in this madness, they assure us. We can't see the men and we are safe.
Safe? Safe from fitnah. Safe from sexual feelings about the balding bespectacled doctor. Safe from becoming irresistibly attracted to the tubby grocery store wallah. Safe from hearing a pedestrian khutbah. Safe from feeling like part of a complete community.
Safe from being like the Jews and the Christians in their mixed-gender congregations. Safe from interacting with a person of the opposite gender and asking them how they are. Safe from inspiration. Safe from beauty in our surroundings. Safe from poetry in our social arrangement.
Safety seems to be the name of the game in our communities.
We play it safe. We play to the tune of the conservatives. The conservatives want segregation: we offer it up. We play conservative roles. We are Other People in our individual lives, but in Official Islamic Spaces, we play the same roles. What else is it to be two-faced?
All of us talk to both men and women; all of us shop, work, study, with men and women.
But we go to community spaces and pretend. "Oh no, I don't see men. I am pure of gender. We have no gender. We have too much gender. We have no sex. We have too much sex in our minds." Hai hai. Brother so-and-so glanced over to find his wife. Sister so-and-so reached over the partition to grab her kid. Tauba tauba.
Safety - but is it a bad thing?
Then I met up with a woman here the other day. She's a convert, a beautiful person. She hates the mosque. She hates going to community spaces. The segregation kills her soul. It makes her feel cheated. Why do they do this? It's not the Islam she learned. The Islam she learned is about love, connection, wisdom, engaging with life in harmony and clarity. It's about community. It's about being who you are, no matter where you are. It's not pretending here, and pretending there. It's not irrational and obscurantist.
She thought she'd left that stuff behind when she converted. Then she shows up at the
house of God and there it is again.
And then I remember my days at Indiana, BEFORE women became more integral to the community and MSA. They thought they were playing it safe. The Gulf men and women were happy in "their" community. They didn't see college kids except for the grad students. They didn't see any mixed gender socializing, so it wasn't a part of their world. And the whole time, some young men and women at college were experimenting, playing dangerous games, not a part of their religious community, confused, isolated. Safety was in the masjid, the masjid attendees thought: keeping the masjid "pure" of anything that didn't belong in Riyadh, keeping the masjid "pure" of America and "American" ways, - and American Muslim kids.
We play it safe because it's already like this - so why change it? Otherwise, there would be so much change. So much renovation and reconstruction of mosques. So much discussion. So much listening to people in quiet corners. So much listening to people who haven't been around. So much listening to people who you know, just don't seem important to us. So much "dangerous" mixing of men and women.
I've talked about this before, I know. I've talked about how we must bring our religious lives into conversation with the here and now in many ways.
Some of you want to drop it already. "Let's just keep things the way they are. Why rock the boat? Why change anything? Everything is okay. The ultra-conservative brothers and sisters are happy, and the miyana-rau brothers and sisters are tolerant of the setup." The "moderates" (this term has been hijacked, but I refuse to let a central Islamic notion be appropriated by Islamophobes) - the moderates don't love the setup, but they are suave and mild-mannered. Some might they are complaisant, pliable, easygoing. They do not ask for change. They do not ask for relevance. Heck, some might say they are smug, unaware and unconcerned.
Khuda tujhe kisi toofan se ashna karde
Keh teray behr ki maujon me iztiraab nahin
(May God introduce you to a storm,
For there is no turbulence in the waves of your ocean!)
We organize our spaces as if we were not in the US in 2006, as if we were not ethnically mixed communities.
And we THINK we are playing it safe.
By not thinking about the way we segregate and organize our spaces, we are opting not for safety but for DANGER.
We are in danger of being irrelevant to our context. The masjid is in danger of becoming, not a spiritually energizing space but a spiritually enervating experience. We are welcoming some of those who are already there, but we are driving away the others.
This lack of fitnah is fitnah.
I'm in favour of single-sex spaces too. Oh yes, I don't think men are so special that we need them in every space we occupy. And I'm a fan of single-sex spaces for men too where they may exchange the occasional grunt away from women. This is why we have parties. We have parties at people's homes. People who choose to always gender-segregate. So why does the common space of the masjid need to be ruled by the tastes of a minority of Muslims?
Yes, I said it. A minority. Count votes if you like. It's the majority - people who hide in the shadows; people who simply go back home never to return to the masjid again. And the people who know where they live. The people who have children here. The children who grow up here.
It's a simple thing. Those who prefer gender segregation can have segregated spaces or segregated mosques, or content themselves with segregated parties. It's no big deal. We have to sit in musallas that we do not like - they can get their preferred spaces, and we can have ours too.
We live double lives. You and I can pretend, we can play double roles like a B movie from the 70s. But Raihana, Sinan, Hanif, Mariam, Heba, Mahtab, Jannah, Diyanah, Leyna will ask us difficult questions one day. Raihana will be confused about why things are so different between the mosque and school. She will want to know WHY she can't do this and that in the mosque but she can at home.
Is it bad for ammi to talk to men? No. Then WHY? "Because my dear beti, we pretend. Because we're trying to be nice to Uncle Chaudhri and Auntie Sakeena. Because that's the way things are, and we just go with the flow."
She will want to know why ammi is a spare wheel in the mosque, why she can't contribute to the public sphere in the mosque, why she and ammi are invisible, but abbu is in the public sphere.
Raihana will want to know why the mosque has 1/3rd of the men's space for women. Why, when women AND children mostly share that space? I counted the musalla spaces in the mosque the other day. It was about 30+ for women, and 100+ for men. Now this is not a "sister-we-are-helpless" issue: this is a structural feature that we have CONSTRUCTED. We have put it in place, and we are ruled by it. The women's musalla was clogged with activity and children during Ramzan. Why the assumption that women will not be there? Because they don't attend the prayers outside of Ramzan? Well, do the men?! I went for maghrib one day: there was ONE man reciting Quran by himself. The door was locked. I had to hammer on the front door to be let in.
Why can't my religious space be a family-friendly one? Why is it the ONE place I can't share baby-labour with the father? Why is it the one place we can't function as a family unit?
My platitudes won't convince Raihana. I want her to dislike contradictions between word and deed, so why should I support them in the community? I don't want her to get to the point where the cognitive dissonance about her community alienates her from it.
I don't want her to learn to pretend.
I don't want her to learn that the religious space is irrelevant rather than essential to her life.
This safety is danger.
posted by koonj at
05:37
