Muslim Women

After the atrocity’s committed during the Second World War, the citizens of the world cried out for a universal code of ethics. On December 10th 1948 the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted a universal declaration of human rights, thus setting a new standard for all nations to follow. According to Article 18 of that declaration “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship, and observance”. People, and women in particular, who are born in different parts of the world have different cultural, as well as religious identities. It is time for education on, and a universal understanding of, the identity differences of Muslim women to be made universally accessible, and understood. Although the ultimate result was the near obliteration of an entire race, and a worldwide war, the groundwork was laid in a much quieter manner. The Nazi party slowly began working their ideals into society. First espousing the sovereignty of the German race and then planting the seeds for the loathing and contempt that would follow for all other races. Near the end of the Second World War Adolph Hitler described Jewish people as “something aggressive” the same words that French president Jacques Chirac recently used when petitioning Parliament to pass a law banning the wearing of hijab in France?

Piety for Muslim women is an internal source of agency, which motivates their social presence and fulfills their political commitments. In spite of the prevalence of Orientalist views on Muslim women for centuries, a new space has opened under transnational feminism in recent years to re-consider their socio-political interpretations. The present paper discusses the situation of women in West Asia, where global terrorism has emerged with a recently developed counter-terrorism outlook among Muslim women. Defending the Shiite sanctuaries in Syria and Iraq against the Takfiris symbolically embodies this counter-terrorism ideology, for which hundreds of Muslims have sacrificed their lives. This study explores the ideas and ideals of Shiite Iranian and Afghan women who have lost their husbands in Syria or Iraq fighting against the ISIS. Deep semi-structured interviews depicted their definitions of “martyrdom” as a new and transnational identity. In addition, the analysis of their understanding of opportunities and challenges, within the family or at a social scale, revealed five major themes: a) transnational solidarity of the Islamic Ummah, b) the significance of jihadi culture to preserve the global peace, c) strong Shiite leadership/Wilayat-al-Faqih, d) motherhood a simultaneous opportunities and challenges, and e) intersectionality of motherly challenges for Afghan women.

This paper looks at how Muslim women with an Iranian background and now living in Canada perform their identity through wearing the hijab. This was achieved by observing the behavior of six members of this community on Facebook using Erving Goffman’s stigmatization theory. The observation reveals that women who wear the hijab are more likely to identify themselves as Muslim-Canadian while those who have abandoned the hijab after immigration are more likely to identify themselves as Iranian-Canadian. Moreover, the results show that while Goffman’s theory is very useful in trying to understand the stigmatization of the veil after the 9/11 attacks as well as other extremists’ attacks, the pressures that this created on Muslim women, as well as the behavior of some women in dropping the veil in order to ‘pass’ such stigmatization, his theory is of limited use in understanding the more complicated performance of women who kept their hijab in spite of the challenges they faced.