Setting men up to lose

A lot of the posts on this blog deal with the impact of certain hyper-conservative interpretations of Islam on my life, as well as on the lives of other female converts that I have known. I have repeatedly blogged about the difficulties of trying to recover from living in certain very restrictive and stifling situations, and trying to (re)build a life for oneself and one’s (often confused and sometimes troubled) kids.

But one angle of these situations that I haven’t really dealt with is the impact on (some) men. On my ex, for instance. On some of my friends’ exes. On conservative, often immigrant, Muslim men, who became “born again Muslims” after living for a time in “the West” as young male refugees or students. And for that matter, on some of our now-grown sons, who were raised in very conservative, insular and controlling Muslim communities.

One reason I don’t deal with this subject much is for much the same reason that I don’t write about the 1 percent. I mean what—the problems that are consuming you at the moment are that your butler quit, and junior has started spouting  some kind of lefty nonsense about how rich people should pay more taxes? Do you even have a clue how many people in the world would love to have your “problems”?? It’s not just the male privilege that these conservative Muslim men have that tends to leave me thinking that I don’t have much to say about their situations, it’s that unlike many women exiting rotten or abusive marriages or trying to distance themselves from toxic community dynamics, these men usually have considerably more power.

More on converts and downward spirals

In the last post, I discussed the downward spirals the female converts can get into, and the ideas found in some conservative Muslim discourses about women’s roles that can promote this.

Are there any solutions? I can already hear the puritanical “do it by the book” types pontificating about this: As we’ve been saying, all sisters, including convert sisters must have a wali in order to get married! Or: Sisters should know that it is their Islamic right to be financially supported by their husbands, and if they allow themselves to be cheated out of their Islamic right, then they only have themselves to blame!

Translation: she had problems because she was Doing It Wrong. She either didn’t know The True Islam (TM), or lacked enough taqwa to put it into practice.

That sort of claim is not really an answer, so much as a conversation-stopper. Nobody is supposed to be bold enough to ask how getting some man who might not really know much about her (like some overworked mosque imam), or even a man whose supposed concern for her welfare might not be disinterested (such as a reputedly pious brother married to her best friend, who is secretly on the lookout for a younger, more attractive second wife) to act as her wali would necessarily protect her from getting into a bad marriage.

Nobody is supposed to notice that many of the reasons that getting into bad marriages can be so destructive to female converts is due to the way the system itself is often set up, what with so much emphasis on women in particular getting and staying married, and such limited options for exiting bad or even abusive marriages. Instead of proposing that there needs to be less pressure on women to marry, and more access to family counseling and female-initiated divorce, the solution is supposed to be more patriarchal control of women by not allowing them to get married without a man’s permission.

Converts… and downward spirals

Recently, Muslim converts—particularly, white, middle-class female converts from North America—are in the news again, thanks to the attack in Boston.  And not in a good way.

I’ve been too heartsick to blog about it.

The (white, female, North American) convert responses to this latest situation that I have so far been able to find online deal with two main issues: the stereotypical media portrayals that imply that there is a connection between putting on hijab and becoming radicalized, and media portrayals that imply that female converts who marry immigrant Muslims don’t have agency. In other words, these converts don’t want to be put in the same category as Katherine Russell. They don’t want people making assumptions about why they converted, or why they wear hijab (for those who do), or what their relationships with their husbands are like.

Well, that’s understandable. In the more than two decades in which I lived as a conservative, hijab-wearing Muslim, I had to put up with a lot of assumptions about why I converted, why I wore hijab… and I had to deal with patronizing dismissals of my agency. And not only from non-Muslims, I might add. The stereotypes about female converts—that we don’t really know anything about Islam, and/or that we were motivated to convert by emotion or a desire to please a Muslim man—were not uncommon among the immigrant Muslims that I dealt with. So, enough with the stereotypes already.

But. To my mind, rejecting such stereotypes shouldn’t be the end of the discussion. It should be the beginning. And now that we’ve done that, can the discussion move on to more important things than headscarves and alleged initial reasons for converting. Things like what resources there are that might be available to converts who find themselves getting in way over their heads.

Becoming super-Muslimah-mommy

In the last post, I discussed a number of reasons why I (and many of my convert friends) found conservative Muslim arguments in favor of women being stay-at-home wives and mothers convincing, and highlighted some of the ways that deciding to stay home limited our ability (and even, our inclination) to make independent, adult decisions on a whole range of things.

In staying home, we became financially dependent. And, we didn’t chart our own courses as wives and mothers either—there were not only our husbands to answer to, but also various conservative, insular and often quite intrusive Muslim communities. For those of us who became involved in Muslim cults, that goes double.

I became financially dependent, despite the fact that my ex wanted to have both the comfort and convenience of a stay-at-home wife (and mother), AND the benefits of a wife who also brings in some money—though, one who would work in a way that wouldn’t ever inconvenience him. I tried to do that by babysitting from home. That was supposed to be the ideal balance between the need to generate income, and the “need” to be at home with my kids full-time, without in any way falling short of my wifely responsibilities to cook, clean, etc, or my moral responsibilities to wear hijab and avoid working alongside or closely interacting with men. I also hoped that it would protect me from job discrimination and the type of dismissive treatment that often is experienced by people in low-status jobs. After all, I was working at home….

I never thought I’d be dealing with teenagers

Oddly enough, it never crossed my mind when I (and my convert friends) were having multiple children as our small, insular conservative Muslim and extremely pronatalist community vigorously encouraged us to, that… we’d be dealing with a boatload of teenagers and their typical teenage problems down the line.

Oh, a few people tried to tell us that, of course. That these cute babies would be teenagers soon enough, and night feedings and teething and all that sort of thing would seem like a picnic compared to teenage shenanigans. But we would either look at them blankly, or feel smugly superior to them. Because our kids weren’t ever going to be teenagers.

After all, this is what The Cult taught: Historically, there is no such thing as a “teenager”—there were children, and then there were adults. A child is a child until he/she reaches puberty, and then he/she is biologically an adult. “Teenagers” are a modern invention, caused by a godless, indulgent consumerist society, family breakdown, peer pressure, advertising and a lack of discipline in childhood.

Therefore, parents could avoid having their children turn into teenagers by raising them correctly, by instilling the fear of God in them, by teaching them to take on as many adult ritual and behavioral responsibilities as possible when they were still young, and by carefully sheltering them from the wider society. Because if we sheltered our kids, they would never get the idea that supposedly typical teenage behavior is in any way normal or acceptable, so they would be much less likely to act that way. And if we kept them securely inside our conservative, insular Muslim bubble as much as possible, then community expectations that they act maturely would be constantly reinforced, and it would be that much harder for them to be rebellious “teenagers.”

Telling sad stories

Why do I tell sad stories about my past life, on my blog and sometimes IRL?

For sure, they aren’t easy to listen to or read. For that matter, they aren’t easy to tell. I do not like to relive them. I also worry about being rejected by friends when I tell them. After all, there is presumably a certain point when enough’s enough. Most people like to be around friends who make them feel happy, not friends who seem to be consumed with sad things that happened in the past. So I try not to tell them too often IRL.

Sometimes, I tell them because it’s like a poison that is taking me over. A poison that I am trying to expel. Maybe if I write it or speak it, it will leave me for once and for all. Maybe it will be like vomiting—you feel awful before you do it, you feel awful while doing it, you feel awful afterwards… but then ultimately, whatever-it-was that disagreed with you is gone, and you feel better. Maybe I can finally shed these awful memories, and somehow become like everyone else. Like, not haunted. Normal.

Well, that’s the hope. But so far, it hasn’t worked.

Sometimes, I tell them because they still bother me. It’s like the thorn in your foot that left a bit of itself behind even when you pulled it out. A bit that’s too small to see, but it still hurts. Yes, the story is in the past, but it still haunts me, because there is something about it that I can’t figure out. Usually, why things happened the way they did. Sometimes, I can’t figure out if a particular person who acted a particular way was in the wrong or not. Or what the incident should or should not have told me about his or her personality or priorities. So, I tell the story hoping that someone will know the answer. Someone whose judgment is better, who knows more about human beings and what is or isn’t acceptable behavior than I do.

No, I don’t want pity. I want insight.

I am not the only person who tells these stories. My kids do too. But they do not usually tell them as sad stories. To them, these are odd, sometimes funny, yet strangely disturbing stories.

Female convert bodies as “public property”

An ongoing experience in my life as a North American convert has been that (some) born Muslims feel free to make assumptions about what my life must have been like before I converted. And some have felt the need to voice such assumptions, or ask really nosy questions, that a woman from their own immigrant Muslim community would never be asked.

Ok, I think I need one of these to wear to the next Muslim event I go to… maybe with a matching hijab. If there is a way to get the letters to flash different colors, that might work even better to stop the insulting assumptions or nosy questions in their tracks…. Let it never be said that converts don’t have style! 🙂
(http://www.zazzle.com/chaste_girl_by_wait_wear_tee_shirt-235881091431049945)

In other words, my body became an object of scrutiny in a way that it had never been before. Public property, in a sense. Somehow, my sexual history had become every Muslim’s rightful business. Even a Muslim I hardly knew (or even, had just met!) could at any time feel free to ask about it, and jump to conclusions.

When I was a wide-eyed teenager, and then a twenty-something, and I encountered these sorts of attitudes, my first instinct was to blame myself. Presumably, I wasn’t modest enough, or something was somehow “wrong” with me that other Muslims could see, and that had led them to make such assumptions. After all, I had grown up in a culture (’70’s small-town white North America) that labeled and judged girls and women according to their presumed sexual experience (or lack thereof), and being labeled negatively was simply presumed to be the fault of the girl or woman in question.

After I encountered other female “Western” converts who had had this experience as well, I put it down to ethnocentric prejudice and stereotyping: that basically, some immigrant Muslims have fixed ideas of what all “Western women” (by which they usually mean white women, primarily) are supposedly like.  Presumably, derived from watching too much bad American tv.

In the past, I tried ignoring it as much as possible. After all, as Lynn Jones points out in her book, Believing as Ourselves (which has a chapter about this very issue, entitled “The American Harlot”) people will make assumptions, and there’s nothing we can do about it. So the best thing is not to take it personally.

But this sort of thing has long bothered me for a number of reasons. First of all, it’s really, really insulting. Given the attitudes that many of the people asking these sorts of questions or making these sort of assumptions have about a woman having sex before marriage, what they are saying in effect is: “So… are you morally depraved? Have you committed an unforgivable sin that will stain you forever?”

Unpacking “choice”, and the fish-trap effect

In discussions of hijab in North America, the issue of “choice” is often raised.

Women who wear hijab in North America (and elsewhere) often state that it is their “choice” to wear it. Muslim men who support this practice also often claim that “women choose” to wear it. And those who disapprove or of or oppose the wearing of hijab often try to cast doubt on whether or not women “really are free to choose” to wear it or not. While this never-ending debate has the potential to raise some important issues, it seldom manages to, in my experience.

Partly, because the word “choice” is being used to mean different things. Those who say that they “choose” to wear hijab might mean that they personally decided to wear a scarf today, because they felt like it, but they might not wear one tomorrow. Or, they might mean that they gave the issue of whether or not to hijab a lot of thought, read up about it, talked to their friends, and finally made the momentous decision that they will wear it, each and every day. Or, they might mean that they were raised with the expectation that they would wear it, and voluntarily went along with their parents’ wishes.

Age differences and differing maturity levels–more on (some) convert marriages in the ’80’s

In the last post, I mentioned that there was a significant age difference between me and the man I married.

There was even a wider difference in our levels of maturity and life experience.

I was at the tail end of my teens, and had been raised by parents who were pretty conservative in a number of ways, in a small town. In otherwords, I was quite sheltered. And since this is way before the internet, what that meant was that I didn’t have much knowledge of ways of life in other parts of my country (let alone the world), except through what I had read—in school textbooks, or in our small-town library. (Our access to TV, movies, etc was very limited, because my parents didn’t think it was good for us—and living in a small town without a movie theatre, and few channels available on TV didn’t help matters.) My parents’ marriage had been in trouble for years, and it finally ended in divorce, but they had kept us in the dark as much as possible  about their disagreements, and to my knowledge, there was no violence. I hadn’t traveled much, either, and when I had, it hadn’t exposed me to much that was very different from what I had grown up with, in terms of world-views or cultures. I had never lived on my own, or anywhere but with one or the other parent, before getting married.

The man I married couldn’t have been more different. His childhood hadn’t been sheltered at all. He had grown up very poor, in a multi-ethnic region with a high level of ethnic and sectarian tensions. He had been born into a context in which the ethnic and sectarian discrimination directed at him was openly practiced and regarded as “normal.” He spoke several languages, and understood some of a couple more. He had grown up in a polygamous home, with a significant level of domestic violence. He had been politically active against the dictatorial regime in his homeland, at great risk to himself and his family. He had been drafted and done his military service. He had then traveled abroad to study, and had lived on his own or with friends for years.

This dramatic difference between life experience, degree of maturity, and family background raised no red flags for his friends, or for the conservative Muslims we soon would be regularly interacting with. In fact, what I observed was that what raised red flags were situations in which immigrant Muslim men married North American converts who were close or the same in age. Not that this happened very much in my community, but when it did, concerns were raised about how well the marriage was going to work.

Adventures in recovery: early marriage

Today, I happened to glance at a review of “Girls,” a new TV series featuring several white, North American young women in their mid-twenties from fairly privileged backgrounds who are rather awkwardly making the transition from university student to full-time employment and independence. The reviewer commented that twenty-four is the age that people learn how to do things such as shoulder the mundane responsibilities involved in being an tenant and a dependable employee, as well as to learn about oneself and others through dating and relationships.

And I asked myself, “What was I doing at age twenty-four?”

That was so long ago. And anyway, I usually date things by the births of my kids, not by my own age. What was I doing when I was twenty-four?

Nothing that the young women on the show are doing, anyway. By the time I turned twenty-four, I had already been married for over four years, and I was a mother to boot. I had never lived independently–I went straight from my father’s house to my husband’s. While I had some paid work experience, I had never had a full-time “real” job. As for dating and relationships… nada. I had never done that. Instead, I had married a man that I barely knew. His idea, not mine–he had pushed hard for marriage within a month of meeting him, insisting that his religion (Islam) doesn’t allow dating.

We had an “Islamic marriage.” Looking back, I now realize that what it actually was was a so-called urfi marriage rather than a typical, run-of-the-mill Muslim marriage–but that’s a subject for another time. I will just note that this type of “marriage” is highly controversial among Muslims, and with good reason. But the point here is that as far as the conservative Muslims we would soon get to know were concerned, there were really only two controversial things about our marriage: the irregular nature of our (urfi) marriage, and the fact that I didn’t belong to the right race/ethnicity or religion at that time, having not yet converted to Islam. (We managed to rectify the first “problem” several years later, once we had scraped twenty dollars together in order to pay a marriage officer to marry us “Islamically,” complete with a written contract.) But none of these Muslims thought that I had been too young or immature to get married.

Early marriage, especially for girls, was strongly encouraged in the Muslim communities I was involved in during the ’80’s and ’90’s. There were several reasons for this.