The Chicken or the Egg?

A recently-held conference in Montreal, titled "Muslim Women at a Crossroads: from Integration to Segregation" brought forward some interesting insights into the misunderstandings and reactions to outward events that impact on peoples' lives in Canada, likely a fairly good reflection of life outside the Muslim world in general for Muslim women.

Interesting data was presented, which indicated that Muslim women are professional to a greater degree than their Canadian-born counterparts, resulting in a greater number of Muslim women accomplishing a higher level of academic professionalism. Yet these same women, academic and professional high achievers, have a comparatively higher unemployment rate than other women, and they tend not to become politically involved, even to the extent that they exhibit a lower voter turn-out than their average counterpart in society not of a Muslim background.

Muslim women feel hard pressed in Canadian society, because of suspicion and a lack of regard experienced in the last few years, it was also pointed out. And because of suspicion from among the general population and the types of discrimination they face they have begun to withdraw from social inclusiveness. There is a dangerous trend to disengagement with the society at large, and that is troubling for everyone.

The fact is the more Muslim women withdraw and hold themselves apart, the less opportunity for all others with whom they share this society to become better acquainted with them personally. Personal contact is still the only and best means by which individuals begin to understand and accept one another; there is no adequate substitute.

When Muslim women, as part of the withdrawal process begin to take on visible baggage of the hajib and other cover-ups they begin to make themselves truly invisible and ripe for social backlash. This attitude to shut oneself away from the mainstream has a truly deleterious effect since hiding oneself in public with the use of the niqab, for example, demonstrates an unwillingness to openness, to discourse, to social acceptance.

Muslim women feel targeted, they are offended by the suspicion they've been exposed to as a result of the truly civilization-shattering effects of militantly fanatic Islam and their tenuous relation to it as bystanders. Little wonder they feel like withdrawing from a society suddenly become hostile to their obvious differences. On the other hand, there weren't always such obvious differences.

Muslim women have lived in Canada for an awfully long time. It's true there has always been the potential for discrimination and native-born Canadians of less visible ethnic and cultural roots have a tendency to mistrust what they don't know. I'm Jewish, and I've always been irritated by people who would approach me and insist on knowing where I was "really" from; my response that I am a Canadian, born and bred, simply failed to satisfy my interlocutors.

I've even had the most unpleasant experience as an adult, living in a new community, being shouted at on my new street by a teen-ager who kept repeating: "Paki, go home!". It isn't at all difficult for me in particular to feel compassion and the pull of sisterhood at the unfairness, stupidity and mind-numbingly alienating effect of it all.

But here is an educated Muslim woman, Alicia Hogben, executive director of the Canadian Council on Muslim Women, and during the course of a CBC radio interview I heard today she explained that as a long-time resident of Canada (50 years, she emphasized) she has seen an obvious and puzzling change in Muslim women and their position here. Fifty years ago, she said, there was integration and acceptance of diversity.

Then, she said, about three decades ago, things began to change, Muslim women began to look inward, take up a greater interest in Islam, begin to accept a more conservative view of Islam and Koranic interpretations. A gradual withdrawal began, and continues to this day. Well, that being said, this movement to separatedness most certainly predates the current crisis in Muslim-West relations.

Saudi Arabia has long been busy doing its best to influence the Muslim diaspora by using its great oil wealth to fund mosques and community centres abroad. It has also long embarked on a very active programme of sending its Wahhabist-conservative version of Islam abroad, embedding extremely conservative religious leaders in those funded mosques.

The end result of this is obvious, has been so for quite a long time, and certainly pre-dates the advent of the Western world's impasse with fundamental Islam, and jihadist Islamists.