{"id":203,"date":"2006-09-08T21:51:20","date_gmt":"2006-09-09T01:51:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/2006\/09\/08\/women-of-islam-excluded-from-mecca\/"},"modified":"2006-09-11T12:55:12","modified_gmt":"2006-09-11T16:55:12","slug":"women-of-islam-excluded-from-mecca","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/2006\/09\/08\/women-of-islam-excluded-from-mecca\/","title":{"rendered":"Women of Islam: Excluded from Mecca?"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was a pleasure arriving at work today. I was greeted by a new coworker studying for her JD with a professor I regard as progressive.* She is always handsome, but today her hijab<\/a> was pink. I couldn’t help but notice. I hope Allah will not find her immodest**. The only jewelry she wears is a ring professing her faith. She speaks English as well as I do except when she wants to emphasize something. Then she speaks better than I do – quite nuanced. We talked a bit about her studies. Then I asked her about the Saudi family considering excluding women<\/a> from Mecca. The tension between discipline and nuance on one hand and anger on the other was quite dramatic, but not at all like my neighborwomen in Dorchester.<\/p>\n

I was touched by American feminism in college and graduate school followed by working and politicking in Cambridge for 17 years. I am tempted to say that I think the men of the Saudi family have stepped in something or stepped on something dear to themselves, but that would be crude. So I won’t. I don’t know if I get voice an opinion in matters Islamic, but if asked …
\n* The TRIM petition, which was a very limited response to the loss of rent control, was very well crafted, but Mike Turk felt that past successes [real or imagined] entitled him to operate in executive capacity. That’s just not the way to build a volunteer organization. And people remembered the gross mismanagement of the breakaway Cambridge SOCC.
\n** One year at Lamont I had a regular who won Islamic Woman of the Year. She always wore black from head to toe. She appeared rather serious, but when I remarked on her celebrity, she giggled – a lot like the stereotypical schoolgirl. I was surprised. Then I felt something shift within me. It was a prejudice shattering.
\nI cannot hold the images of the Islamic women I have met at Harvard together in my head with one young mother of a four year old I saw on TV. She had made a videotape, crossed the border into Israel, made her way into a gathering, and blown herself up. “Religion” is not an adequate explanation. There has to be more, much more, for her to “voluntarily” desert her child.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was a pleasure arriving at work today. I was greeted by a new coworker studying for her JD with a professor I regard as progressive.* She is always handsome, but today her hijab was pink. I couldn’t help but notice. I hope Allah will not find her immodest**. The only jewelry she wears is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":168,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[927],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-women-of-islam"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/168"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}