RIBBON UP
Am I not a woman?
I have spent days with the well-known phrase of the abolitionist Sojourner Truth repeatedly crossing my mind.
Are we women who are born into Muslim families?
We are human beings?
Can we aspire to equality like any other woman?
Is it possible for us a full freedom, without more conditions than those established by law for all citizens?
These questions may seem absurd, but they are not in light of some surprising phenomena that we are seeing in recent times.
Little could I have imagined a quarter of a century ago, when I discovered the fierce rage of Nawal El Saadawi, that today I would meet supposedly expert voices, in the media, academia and various administrations, defending the misogyny of which it has cost us so much escape.
Or that the promotion of our machismo would count on the complicit silence of some very belligerent feminists against the interference of the Church, but suspiciously silent in the face of Islamism's attacks.
This is where the question should be repeated: are we not women?
There are men, Spanish by birth, some with no known religious confession, other voluntary converts to Islam, who dedicate themselves to proclaiming the egalitarian virtues of the doctrines spread by Muhammad.
In what is an amazing triple jump of mansplaining, they allow themselves the luxury of: 1) telling us what it is to be a Muslim woman and what the machismo that we suffer consists of consists of;
2) very patiently explain to us how we have to be feminists, and 3) describe ourselves, so that we understand it, the racism we suffer from.
It is a pity that Rebecca Solnitno had the pleasure of meeting these men who tell us things.
It is to be appreciated his show of so much patience and generosity to instruct these poor and ignorant Moritas.
On the other hand, we also have Spanish women who deserve all our respect because they have dedicated some years to studying us: they were not born in a Muslim family, they have not lived in a Muslim country, but they know that to respect us, and not fall into Islamophobia They have to clarify, consider all points of view, analyze the matter from different perspectives, and so on.
That after so much investigation they end up defending the same misogyny as always will be a simple coincidence.
What difference does it make that some Muslims tell them that discrimination, even though it is dressed in super-inclusive postmodern discourse, is discrimination.
They have chosen, among all, the Muslims as God intended, those who meet the necessary requirements to have the right to speak: believers, Islamists, covered and submissive to patriarchal norms.
Of course, these exemplary blackberries are granted the right to express their discomfort as long as they do so within the community.
That is to say: that machismo, when you are Muslim, like dirty laundry, you have to wash it at home.
Be silent, be careful, deny your own reality because they, the experts in us, have given themselves the right to speak for us.
We will have to thank them for their paternal protection.
For these experts, dissenting voices do not exist, ex-Muslims, neither.
There are no women thinkers, no journalists, and no secular feminist movements in Muslim countries.
There are no young women giving their testimony, nor brave women recounting the consequences of their rebellion against machismo, claiming their right to be free.
When asked about these testimonies, the kind experts on us, argue that they are exceptions, personal experiences.
And it is that when the issue to be discussed is machismo in Islam, it seems that it is not necessary to accredit knowledge about feminism.
That one of the most well-known slogans of this movement is that "the personal is political" is not something that is taken into account if "the personal" has to do with a religion alien to one's own reality.
To pontificate on the oxymoron called "Islamic feminism" it seems that the only textual corpus that must be kept in mind is the religious one.
They do not find any contradiction in drawing on the fundamental sources of our millennial patriarchy to speak of feminism.
Better to listen to the speeches of the long-bearded theologians, who tell us how well women are in Islam, than to read Simone de Beauvoir.
For these weighted experts, with a sense of justice far above those of us who simply refuse to accept being relegated to being second-class citizens, for them, girls, if they are daughters of Muslim families, do not deserve to grow up. Equally, neither that their bodies be censored, nor that they be educated to submit to what Emilia Pardo Bazán called "forced maternal labor."
That they are victims of violence for wanting to escape the fate of mothers and wives does not seem like information that casts doubt on their highly academic research.
They do not care to know that there are girls in Spain, today, not in the 19th century, not in National Catholicism, but in democracy, who live by measuring the length of their sweaters because if they teach too much, if they wear too tight clothes, if a lock of hair escapes to the cloth that hides it, they will be punished.
Nor are they concerned that some may never learn to swim.
Or that thousands of girls are pushed into early marriages, because the cult of virginity and honor are an unbearable pressure from which they try to escape as best they can, even if it is by getting into the wolf's mouth.
They speak and write as if Nawal el Saadawi or Wasilah Tamzali had never existed, had never written or spoken.
The only voices that they take into account are those who have no problem assuming as identity the oppression that has lowered our existence.
The accomplices of the patriarchy who repeat without blushing manipulations and falsehoods about the supposed equality prevailing in the religion invented by Muhammad.
They, the veiled ones, protected and promoted by certain sectors of the left and a pseudofeminism capable of renouncing its principles at the minimum of change, they are considered representative.
Despite the fact that the identity they claim to defend was far from that of their own mothers, lifelong Muslims who never believed that a piece of cloth could contain the depth of their faith.
Despite the fact that, in some cases, they have been recruited, trained and indoctrinated by organizations with a political religious project, declaring themselves to be sympathizers of the Muslim Brotherhood, they cite Ibn Taymiyya, forerunner and ideological beacon of modern fundamentalist movements.
And it is that some connoisseurs of Islam in Spain, in recent decades seem to have as their main objective to contribute to the general ignorance that the population has about the matter, assimilating, without any complex, religion with its more conservative, reactionary or political manifestations .
Re-Islamization, in this case, no longer needs imams or mosques, it has the approval of academics, relativist feminists and certain sectors of the left.
Let's apply this logic in reverse: let's establish that in order to talk about women's rights in Spain, a rereading of the Bible must be done and let's consider that the only representative voices on feminism issues are those that belong to Opus Dei, and that opinion of the most reactionary bishops will have to be taken into account if they do not want to incur Christianophobia.
Absurd, right?
Najat el Hachmi
is a writer.