Initially, I was relieved that the lecture was canceled for the sake of integrity of scholarly discourse at Princeton. I have to admit sympathizing with the leaders of the campus Muslim Student Association (MSA): Debunking misinformation about Islam for acquaintances whose views are saturated by far-right-wing contributors is tiresome! On the other hand, Darwish’s perspective is precisely one that students at Princeton might benefit from engaging in a different context.
Allow me to elaborate.
Nonie Darwish, a middle-aged, Egyptian-American spokeswoman and immigrant to the United States, has found her niche after Sept. 11, 2001, writing books and speaking out against Islam from her perspective as a former Muslim woman. Darwish founded and leads a political organization in support of Israel and, among her other accomplishments, is a regular guest at American college campuses, occasionally in conjunction with “Islamo-facism Awareness Week” — a campaign advertised on its website as “the biggest conservative campus protest ever”.
Prior to the scheduled event with Darwish at Princeton, the board of Princeton’s MSA was forming its own protest strategy. Through an e-mail to the MSA listserv members were collaborating to “gather in protest at the event, dressing in white to express our solidarity with one another and the peaceful message of Islam. We will speak our minds by holding signs and assert our discontent by standing with our backs to Ms. Darwish.” Clearly there is a discontinuity in the integrity of campus discourse on Islam if such symbolic action is the primary medium for expressing collective displeasure. I am not informed of the behind-the-scenes conversations, but now that the nerve is exposed, vested clubs on campus have an incentive to collaborate.
Students need to leave tautological debates to the television talking heads and, as individuals in an intellectual community, clearly name our own political objectives and then listen with wit and empathy to alternative perspectives. In this manner, we will understand better how identity allegiances are constructed and deployed. In other words, I would have been more at ease with the proposed protest if the e-mail from the MSA had continued: “We will circulate extended critiques of Darwish’s work and will collaborate with the student organizers from the Whig-Cliosophic Society and Tigers for Israel to co-sponsor a forum for dialogue after the event.”
Dialogue of this sort — likely on a more sustained basis — would be invaluable for students who welcome the call to be public-opinion leaders. In this context, it is worth investing critical energy into discussing how rhetoric pertaining to Islam has been mobilized within elite American political circles over the last decade.
As for Darwish, she has aligned herself politically and religiously with a salient far-right agenda within an American media and power elite. Darwish’s manipulation of un-sourced claims is ostensibly tailored to serve her relatively narrow range of political interests and specifically to raise the emotions of a political base.
I was myself only recently introduced to Darwish’s writing through an chain e-mail from a long-time elementary-school teacher in rural Pennsylvania, a middle-age Caucasian woman, with the subject-line: “Celene — Please tell me how much of this is true”; I am her source on all things Islam, second only to Fox News. The article is sarcastically titled “Joys of Being a Muslim Woman”; its internet circulation is far-ranging, from ourjerusalem.com to cafemom.com.
In it, Darwish criticizes “the Muslim faith” for the now-common laundry list — child marriage, forced marriage, polygamy allowances, permission for wife-beating, the husband’s right to unilateral divorce, the impossibility of proving rape and honor killings — the last of which, according to Darwish, is “the right of the family” over the female family member who was raped. As one might expect, Darwish provides no empirical context, no informants and no indication of sources. Yet, internet commentators on this piece generally seem to accept its veracity, many remarking on the incivility of Muslims at large.
Granted, it is never pleasant to be collectively insulted! To put liberal arts training to use, however, it may be entirely appropriate to concede that, if placed carefully into the appropriate historical context and subjected to a high degree of adjustment and parsing, a few aspects of Darwish’s commentary could align with concerns expressed by Muslims themselves in localized contexts.
While Darwish’s blanket statements about “Islam this” or “Muslim that” are not useful, I would urge other American Muslims or parties with background or interests in Islamic studies or critical feminism to look for that grain of insight in the critique that Darwish brings. Rather than immediately dismissing Darwish as just another outspoken Islamophobe, one should consider the intellectual challenge she poses in light of pre-modern Islamic textual-legal heritage and Muslim reforms in the area of personal status law.
As a Muslim university student, and as an advocate for feminism, understood to be the critical approach to systems of power and domination within social structures, my own agenda here is to provide commentary on — and an alternative to — the discourse elevated by Darwish and like-minds via the mobilization of a particular race, class and religious perspective within post-9/11 American political climates.
Celene Ayat Lizzio ’08 is a Master of Divinity Candidate at Harvard Divinity School. She can be reached at clizzio@hds.harvard.edu.
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