So much for sisterhood: conversion, appropriation… and is there a difference? (II)

Wikipedia defines cultural appropriation as “the adoption of elements of one culture by members of a different cultural group, especially if the adoption is without the consent of the originating culture, and when the appropriating group has historically oppressed members of the originating culture.” It goes on to explain that appropriation is not the same as acculturation or assimilation, and that it is made possible by very unequal relations of power.

Basically, it occurs because people from the dominant culture assume that they have the right to take whatever it is that they please from wherever. They unconsciously see the entire world and everything and everybody in it as if it were their own personal all-you-can-eat buffet, so they are therefore entitled to help themselves as they wish. This is possible because the group they belong to has disproportionate access to resources, political and economic power, as well as social status, especially when compared to the group that they are appropriating from. And because of this differential in power and status, the appropriating group gets to enjoy and manipulate these “exotic” and “cool” cultural elements as it pleases without paying the price that the originating group would, and without regard for its cultural or religious meanings.

How do white converts relate to such relations of power?

What salvation looks like: I didn’t die before this

I have not had the time or the energy to blog recently. Partly due to the situation with ISIS.  What is there to say in the face of such everyday horror, and every time there is an explosion you worry that someone you know might be dead?

And partly due to things going on in my former extended family network, as well as at work. Tiresome nonsense, that boils down in both cases to the unwillingness of a conservative former cultie Muslim dude (who knows that I was once a conservative Muslim and what sort of group I was a member of) to treat me with basic respect, while also not having the courage to be honest about what he is doing.

Hyper-conservative family dude plays tiresome, manipulative headgames that end up dragging innocent and unwilling others into the fray, and then when called on it, denies that he is doing anything. Work dude is patronizing and covertly undermines me, while being clever enough to do so in ways that leave no hard evidence.

Because I’m apparently hell-bound, a sinner who doesn’t even have the humility to admit that the conservatives’ ways of looking at the world are morally superior or to play the “inshallah someday I’ll have strong enough iman to re-hijab and bow down to the scholar-gods again” game. No, I’m not playing that game. Life is too short to live a lie.

It gets depressing and emotionally exhausting to deal with. Especially since I understand all too well where they are coming from.

Like a cluster bomb

I often read blogs belonging to others who are at various points on the recovery-from-a-highly-conservative-religious-movement process. Partly, because sometimes I run across things or stories that helps me think more clearly about the issues that I am trying to sort out. Partly, because some of these bloggers are damn good writers. And partly… to feel less alone.

Recovery for me is rather like dealing with the aftermath of a cluster bomb. It’s not just the initial dropping of the bomb that you’re dealing with….
(http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Demonstration_cluster_bomb.jpg)

Much of what I read, I can identify with up to a point. But it’s rare—very rare—for me to read anything online and to feel that it describes my situation so well that it is almost as if I am seeing my reflection in a mirror. All the same, that is what reading Lynn Beisner’s post, “Why I Don’t Tell People I was in a Cult” was like for me.  (I found it via Libby Anne’s take on it.)

Lynn writes:

“How can you tell someone the truth about your past when there’s a good chance they won’t believe you?

I am part of a minority group that I call “People with a Big Story” for lack of a better term. People with Big Stories have two things in common. First, something has happened in their lives that is so outside the range of the ordinary that it seems unbelievable to most people. The second thing is that this unbelievable event impacts their lives so greatly that they cannot keep it private.

For People with a Big Story, the most private and painful part of our lives, the stories we would want to share only with those we trust the most, cannot be hidden from people who know us. [….] What makes my sojourn in the cult different from other traumatic life events is that it created such a gaping hole in my personal history that I do not have a choice to keep it private. What makes it necessary for me to tell the Big Story is not the trauma of drills or the physical abuse that I survived. It is all that I missed…..

You cannot know me very well without having to know this. You would be surprised at how hard it is to go more than a few good conversations with a person that I like without hitting on a subject where an honest response would require knowledge of The Big Story….

“As my shaykh taught me…”

On the last post, Bebe g commented:

“…We were even taught by our pakistani sheik that all white people where naturally evil and would never convert to Islam because they naturally have dark hearts. But he was quick to marry a white woman 1st chance he had. Good thing I never believed him.. To many people who are donned leaders of the community and are followed by the ignorant non reading locals….”

Hoo boy, did that part of her comment trigger memories! Things that people’s shaykhs taught them. Or, things that people claimed that their shaykhs had taught them, anyhow. Things that people we looked up to as “scholars” and “shaykhs” taught us, and that we felt that we had to believe. Things that people claimed to know because they were following the Sufi path….

My earliest memory of that sort of thing falls into the latter category. We were visiting the family of a friend of my ex. This friend (and his family) were from the same ethnic background, but that was about where the similarities ended, because the friend (unlike my ex) was a devoted Sufi who followed a shaykh from back home. (My ex told me later that this shaykh was a charlatan who was well known for his shady financial dealings and lavish person lifestyle… but anyway.) While we were at my ex’s friend’s house, we met another of that shaykh’s murids. When the murid realized that I am a convert, he immediately wanted to know what my ethnic background was.

I replied that my mother’s side of the family is originally from X, and my father’s side from Y.

The murid loudly objected, telling me: “No, you are only what your father is, not what your mother is! Your essence can only come from your father.”

Some unhelpful things to say to survivors of religious abuse (convert edition)

Well, nobody forced you to join that group/mosque/community (or to marry that person). You chose to join it (or, to get married).

In other words: What happened is at least partly caused by you. So, stop blaming the group/mosque/community/your abusive spouse, and focus on what you did wrong.

But the thing is, sometimes religious authority is misused. And sometimes adults do get drawn into things against their better judgment. Female converts in particular have often been pressured by people who supposedly had “Islamic knowledge” into getting involved in controlling or cultish communities—“satan attacks the one who is alone,” and all that—and even into marriage with people that they hardly knew.

Saying this sort of thing handily shifts accountability for whatever happened away from the shaykh/mosque leadership/community leaders or husband—meaning, away from those who had more knowledge and power, and who the convert was led to believe that she had to listen to “Islamically”—and onto the convert herself. And what it sounds like to the survivor is something like this:  No matter how badly you may have been treated, your life just don’t count nearly as much in the greater scheme of things as the reputation of that group/mosque/community/man does.

Accountability

Blogging my way through Badawi’s “Status of Woman in Islam” is bringing all sorts of things to the surface, I am finding. And thinking this stuff through is quite exhausting.

One issue that keeps coming to mind as I blog is the question of accountability in various conservative Muslim communities that I have known.

As I experienced and observed accountability, in theory, everyone is accountable—to God on the Day of Judgment, and to their fellow believers if they were acting wrongfully. But the reality? In practice, the more powerful someone was and the higher status they had in the community, the less they would ever be held to account.

Back in the ’80’s where I was living at that time, there was little if any accountability of imams, community leaders, organizations, or even of fund-raising efforts. Public financial statements or yearly forensic audits? Nah. Accountability to the community or transparency in decision-making for mosque boards? Unnecessary. Fair elections, even when a Muslim student organization’s official constitution mandated them? Lol.

Musings on Muslim identity (I)

As God says, “Fa-aina tadhhabun?” (Where are you going?)

*   *   *   *

In the beginning, it seemed quite simple: belief that God is one (as opposed to belief in a trinity), belief in the prophets with Muhammad as the last, reading quranic passages in my personal prayers more frequently than Bible verses… I couldn’t even pretend to fit into any Christian church any more. My religious beliefs, my ritual language, were undeniably becoming more and more Muslim.

But that was before I had encountered a Muslim community. I had met individual Muslims—most of whom were students who weren’t very practicing, although a few nonetheless plied me with dawah literature. But they were not an organized conservative community, with clear ideas of who was “in” and who was “out,” or an interest in policing what people believed or did. So at that point, gradually becoming a Muslim was primarily about my own individual, private spiritual practice.

Once I married my ex, however, the specter of community slowly began to rear its head now and again.

Timeless values?

Sierra’s recent post, “We thought modesty made us timeless” brought back a lot of memories. Because that was pretty much how we thought about wearing hijab—and about a lot of other things.

Thinking through the romanticized views of “the past” that we had, I wondered why? What exactly was the attraction? How did we acquire such a rose-colored view of “the past,” and then decide to hold it up as some sort of ideal?

The apologetic pamphlets and books on “Islam and woman” that we had access to in the early ’80’s and 90’s tended to have two main approaches to the question of how the conservative Muslim teachings that they were pushing as “Islam”, full stop, related to the place we actually lived (North America).

Conservative group or cult?

Ki sarita—I guess it’s a question of degree.

A commenter (Ki sarita) asks: Why do I call a highly conservative, insular, patriarchal Muslim group that I was involved in a cult? And, how is the group that I was in different from other conservative, neo-traditionalist Muslim groups out there?

Well, first of all, it took me a long time to be able to call the group that I used to be in a cult. Naming that is part of my recovery process.

And second, I guess it’s a question of degree as to whether a group is just hyper-conservative and inward-looking or a full-blown cult. The group I was in didn’t start out as a full-blown cult, and a lot of its teachings weren’t all that different from other very conservative groups or leaders that I had encountered before.

The group I was in was a cult, for several reasons:

• The leaders interpreted Islam for the members.
• You couldn’t question the leaders or you would be publicly humiliated or pushed out of the group.
• No one could question the amount of knowledge that the leaders had, or suggest that there were others in the wider Muslim community who might be more qualified in some ways.
• There was a lot of pressure to conform, and those who didn’t were made examples of.
• Being part of the group meant adopting its worldview, and seeing everything through that filter, all the time.
• The group demanded a large time-committment from the members.
• There wasn’t much privacy in the group. A lot of decisions that would ordinarily be up to individuals or families were seen as the business of the group (and especially, of its leaders).
• We weren’t supposed to attend other Muslim groups’ events or even have friends outside the group unless our intention was to recruit them to join our group.
• We lived inside our group’s bubble as far as possible, and kept our children inside it too. They did not really have friends from outside it. We weren’t supposed to send them to public schools, or even to other Muslim schools.
• We believed that only us (and a few highly conservative, hierarchical groups similar to ours) were rightly guided, and every other Muslim or Muslim group was varying degrees of lost.
• We believed that our leaders had unique spiritual powers.
• There were teachings that wouldn’t be made known to outsiders, or even to members of the group who hadn’t been in it long enough or who weren’t seen as sufficiently committed.
• The group would fund-raise from the wider Muslim community for projects and programs that were intended to primarily benefit our group’s members, but would-be donors would be led to believe that this was for the benefit of the wider Muslim community.
• State or local laws were ignored and treated as irrelevant as much as possible. We weren’t supposed to vote, or have any stake in the social or political system of “the kuffar.”

There are other things as well, but this will do….

 

Thinking your way out of neo-traditionalism (I)

Or (for an alternative title): Up From the Bottle Dungeon.

The bottle dungeon at St. Andrews Castle, Scotland, looks almost ethereal in this photo, due to the floodlighting installed for the sake of tourists…. Ah, isn’t Tradition (TM) just transcendently beautiful—at least when viewed from above, by those who aren’t subject to the full weight of its harsher dictates.

Years ago, I remember reading about bottle dungeons in Scottish castles. These are underground, bottle-shaped prisons, with only one possible entrance, source of air or light—a narrow shaft leading to a hole in the ceiling, which would have been far above the prisoners’ heads. Prisoners would be tossed into the dungeon, or let down on ropes. Escape was well-nigh impossible, except with outside assistance. And I wondered what sort of people those lairds and their families were, calmly going about their daily lives while prisoners suffered and moldered away below.

Looking back at my former life as a neo-traditionalist and how difficult it was to even begin to see my way out of it, I am reminded of bottle dungeons in more ways than one.

As a neo-traditionalist who was also heavily involved in a Muslim neo-traditionalist group (which turned out to be a cult) for some years, I lived in an almost entirely self-referential world. It was built like a fortress. Built to last. And that was not accidental.

It was a mental prison that was self-sustaining. And oddly enough, it was incredibly hard to leave, mentally and psychologically speaking—even once I began to recognize how much harm it was doing to myself and my children, as well as to dear friends of mine.

One of the reasons why this world-view not only drew us in, but was so very durable was its emphasis on certainty and knowledge. We wanted certainty. And what was more, we believed that any faith worth the name should be able to deliver it. We also felt as though we were under siege from the wider society, so we wanted our beliefs reaffirmed. So, we were primed for leaders who would provide affirmation and promise certainty.