From this NYT article:
…This month, Professor Mattson, a 43-year-old convert, was elected president of the Islamic Society of North America, the largest umbrella organization for Muslim groups in the United States and Canada, making her a prominent voice for a faith ever more under assault by critics who paint it as the main font of terrorism. She is both the first woman and, as a Canadian, the first nonimmigrant to hold the post.
To her supporters, Professor Mattson’s selection comes as a significant breakthrough, a chance for North American Muslims to show that they are a diverse, enlightened community with real roots here : and not alien, sexist extremists bent on the destruction of Western civilization. Some naysayers grumble that a woman should not head any Muslim organization because the faith bars women from leading men in congregational prayers, but they are a distinct minority.
“The more Americans see Muslims who speak English with a North American accent, Muslims who were born and raised here, who understand this culture, the more it will cease to be a foreign phenomenon but something local and indigenous,”said Mahan Mirza, a Yale doctoral candidate in Islamic studies who recalled the classroom scene above from the master’s program at the Hartford Seminary in Connecticut.
At the annual Islamic Society conference in Chicago where her election was officially announced to the thousands of Muslims in attendance, women rushed to have snapshots taken at her side.
“When I see her, I just feel that there is this beam of light on her,”said Reem Hassaballa, 30, of Chicago, a teacher and a mother of three.”She is a very good role model. If it can happen in a little convention like this, hopefully it could happen in the whole Muslim world. She could be the start of something bigger.”Ms. Mattson sees both pluses and minuses in the fact that her election is being viewed as a watershed. The Islamic Society of North America is a 20,000-member group representing all manner of organizations, from student clubs to professional associations for doctors and lawyers to mosque boards to political activists. Her immediate predecessor was a religious scholar who often wore the flowing white robes and stacked turban of his native Sudan. …
Thank you for posting this.
You’re welcome!
This is very interesting news and welcome at that.
But if I understand from the picture, she wears a head scarf? Why? Neither the Koran nor Islam demand head covering. That’s a cultural artifact from regions in the Middle East & North Africa (same as female circumcision) and would hardly be part of her own culture. So that undermines a bit the message shes’s supposed to bring about helping other Western folks realize that Islam can be present with local “roots” (as much as any other religion) to people of this culture and not be just about importing “alien customs” (terminology from the article above, not mine).
It’s a minor point overall, to be sure. It may very well be an unfair bias on my part, but having women cover their heads — whatever their background — just drives me nuts. And she doesn’t even have the excuse (which I do accept for other women) of it being part of the culture she grew up in.
It’s all very complex…
It is indeed all very complex. What counts as being part of ‘one’s culture,’ is not easy to identify insofar as we live in the age of globalization from above and below. Think, for instance, about those from Asian societies adopting imported fashions and clothes from the West (to be sure, some of it manufactured in their respective countries). It may be the case that Professor’s Mattson’s headscarf is intended as a sign or symbol of solidarity with Muslim women in Europe who have freely chosen to wear same by way of proclaiming their identity both as Muslims and as citizens of European states like, say, France. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_law_on_secularity_and_conspicuous_religious_symbols_in_schools and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_veil_controversy_in_France
Cf. the following from Paul Silverstein’s article on the French law, ‘Headscarves and the French Tricolor,’ from Middle East Report (January 2004):
If international protests have scripted the French law within a war of
religions, French Muslim demonstrators have opposed the law under the French state’s own rubric of human rights and citizenship. On January 17, 2004, exactly one month after Chirac proposed the law, over 20,000 French Muslims — mostly women wearing various forms of hijab — took the streets of Paris, Lille, Marseille, Mulhouse and other cities to protest the
legislation. With their spoken, worn and carried “signs,” the women insisted
on the headscarf as a universal — not religious — right. Countering the
discourse linking the “veil” to the subjugation of Muslim women, they
insisted that their decision to wear the hijab emerged from their own free
will. Up to 10,000 rallied in Lille at a gathering organized by a group of
French Muslim women called the Collective for Free Choice. Women marching in the equally large Paris demonstration alternated between chants of “Chirac, Sarkozy, we chose the headscarf” (Chirac, Sarkozy, le foulard on l’a choisi) and “Not our fathers nor our husbands, we chose the headscarf” (ni père, ni mari, le foulard on l’a choisi). In like fashion, protesters throughout the country parodied the anti-headscarf positions of Neither Whores Nor Downtrodden with banners bearing some version of “Neither Forced Nor Downtrodden” (ni forcées ni soumises) or “Neither Duped Nor Downtrodden” (ni dupes ni soumises).
Alongside these evocations of freedom of choice, the protesting women
embraced their simultaneous identity as Muslims and French citizens.
Demonstrators throughout France carried French flags, marched with bannersevoking “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, Laïcité,” released
blue-white-and-red balloons, and even wore headscarves emblazoned with the French tricolor. They faultlessly sang the “Marseillaise,” including, as
reporters remarked with amazement, verses seldom heard at national
celebrations. The women likewise staked out their religious citizenship,
declaring themselves to be “proud to be French and Muslim.” Protesters in
Nice intoned, “We, French Muslim women, we defend the republic, liberties
and laïcité,” while at the same time letting Chirac know that “we don’t want
your law.” In perhaps the most evocative display of citizenship,
demonstrators throughout the country waved their national identity cards
while chanting some version of “one headscarf = one vote.” Beyond a reminder to politicians of the importance of the Muslim vote in the upcoming regional elections, the gesture was a poignant illustration that citizenship –French and Islamic — is always a sacred affair.
As Ron Greaves reminds us, ‘ The surprise is that whereas once Muslim women removed their veils as an indication of their emancipation, since the latter half of the twentieth century, many, especially amongst the young and educated, have adopted the veil as a symbol of resistance and cultural authenticity or as a conscious symbol of their Islamic identity.’ Greaves also cites a study done over twenty years ago by Yvonne Haddad that identified a number of reasons and motivations for wearing the veil: religious, psychological, political, revolutionary, economic, cultural, demographic, practical, domestic…. In short, while the veil may, at a certain time and place, signify that sort of compusion associated with a particular cultural tradition and therefore may not at all be directly linked in the first instance to the Qur’anic concern with ‘modesty,’ it’s very hard to proffer any useful generalizations on this score. Perhaps the best thing to do in our case is ask Professor Mattson why she has chosen to wear a headscarf.