Linguist gathers accounts from ten Muslim women to support research

“I felt bad in public, I didn’t want to go out […] I went through a period of panic because I couldn’t stand the judgmental looks.” With this account, young Khadija (fictitious name) described the experience of leaving home wearing the Islamic veil. The daughter of a Lebanese father and a Brazilian convert mother, the 25-year-old Muslim woman began wearing the veil by choice, but decided to take it off ten years later due to the prejudice she suffered. Her own daughter was the main motivator for her choice. Khadija didn’t want her daughter to go through the same situations when expressing her faith. “Who am I kidding? That’s between me and God,” she said.

As in the case of Khadija, similar incidents also marked the narratives of Aisha, Zaynab, Salma, Hagar, Umm Salma, Alia, Mariam, Fátima and Hafsa. These ten Muslim women live in Foz do Iguaçu, a city in Paraná with a large Arab community, and told their life stories to linguist Fernanda Pereira. The stories served as the basis for the doctorate that Pereira defended at the Institute of Language Studies (IEL) at Unicamp, looking for signs of subjectivation in the discourse of these women that would allow us to understand how they position themselves in relation to religious practices and the non-Muslim “other”.

In her analysis, the author concluded that there is a space-time relationship, constructed by the so-called ideological apparatuses of the State – such as schools, the media and religion – that influences these individuals’ perception of themselves and produces exclusion and Islamophobia. “We have the illusion that the secular and secular State respects all religions, but this neutrality does not exist. Parliaments and the legal system are permeated by the religious system. In the West, they have the Judeo-Christian discourse as their standard, so Islam does not fit into this. It is always seen as the enemy, backward, negative,” comments the researcher.

This space-time relationship can be seen in the daily life of the Islamic community. Just as with churches in environments dominated by Christianity, the Muslim space is permeated by the presence of mosques, while daily life is guided by calls to indicate the time of prayers. However, unlike Western religions, Muslim society has a predominantly homosocial culture, in which men relate to men and women relate to women. In this dynamic, the living environments are also separated, something that, for these women, is seen as synonymous with respect, security and freedom.

“In Muslim countries, there are places where you cannot enter because you are a woman, but there are others where you cannot enter because of symbolic force, because, although women are allowed to enter, there are only men inside,” explains the linguist. “However, talking to women who are Muslim and researchers, I discovered that these female spaces are very lively, happy, with parties and music. For them, being in separate places represents comfort, acceptance and respect. These are differences that are part of the constitution of these subjects in this space and time,” she comments.

An important marker detected throughout the interviews was the way in which the interviewees identify themselves in their discourse – we, us, them, Brazilians – depending on the place they are talking about. The Arab-Muslim women from Foz do Iguaçu live in a kind of in-between, as they do not identify themselves entirely as Brazilian nor as Lebanese, Palestinian or Moroccan. This is because, when they are talking about Brazil, they consider themselves Arab-Muslims, but when they talk about Muslim countries, they refer to themselves as Brazilians.

Part of this is related to the attacks of September 11, 2001, which marked a turning point in which the city’s Arab community began to be viewed differently. Although this type of discrimination already existed, the attacks intensified hate speech against Muslims, including the idea that they were not Brazilian. In this context, wearing the veil – an indisputable marker of the Islamic faith – draws attention to these women and fuels attacks against them. “Although Brazil is a welcoming country towards foreigners, this is not true in the case of Muslims, for whom the city is a hostile space. This is part of their daily lives. When there is a traffic accident, people see the veil and tell them to go back to their country. This is seen in their children’s schools and in the media,” she points out.

Intimate choice

For many Westerners, a woman wearing the Islamic veil conjures up the image of a person oppressed by religion and family. However, the Quran never required the use of the veil. In reality, this is a conduct of devotion and modesty recommended by the sacred text, but which will only be accepted by Allah if it comes from the voluntary desire of the faithful. It is, therefore, a woman's intimate choice regarding her religiosity, a choice that may even cause concern in the West, but which is not seen as a real issue by Arabs.

Cases, Pereira points out, such as those in Iran and Saudi Arabia, which force women to wear the veil, are examples of how states, in many places around the world and at various times in history, have used the tools at hand to control women's bodies. However, the researcher claims, the same can be said of nations like France, which, under the justification of secularism, controls these bodies when it prohibits these women from wearing the veil. For this reason, Muslim thinkers such as Asma Barlas, Saba Mahmood and Fatima Mernissi criticize Western feminism and fight for a more egalitarian society based on what the Koranic text itself says.

“These philosophers argue that Western feminism is in this place of injunction of freedom, dominance and subversion where if there is a force wanting to dominate you, you will want to subvert it and do the opposite. They, however, believe that there are other ways of living beyond this binary logic. So there is resistance in devotion. There is even resistance in submission. The word Islam means to be submissive to God,” notes the researcher.

This perception is echoed in the statements of the interviewees themselves, for whom there is no sexism in Islam. Many chose not to wear the veil due to the hostility they encounter in Brazil, but a common thought, even among less traditional young women, is that one day they will wear it again. This is the case of Fátima, a 23-year-old architect who was born in Foz do Iguaçu. For Fátima, wearing the veil in Brazil represents an act of resistance. “The problem with people is that they confuse culture with religion […] Women in religion are treated in a completely different way than in a sexist society. Women in religion are like polished diamonds. Society is the one that tries to justify this sexism with religion,” explains the young woman.

For Pereira, stories like those of Fátima and Khadija show that it is necessary to open our eyes to different perspectives of the world, which is what she tried to do with her thesis. In her master's degree, the specialist had already analyzed images of protests by the radical feminist group Femen, which has an openly anti-religious and Islamophobic stance. It was while reading texts to support these analyses that the researcher first came into contact with the debate on the use of the veil in Islam, which led her to change her stance and choose this new subject as the theme of her thesis. “Nowadays, we are in this movement of social networks, responsible for creating bubbles and making us only see what we agree with and find beautiful. So the exercise of my thesis, for me, was to get out of this bubble,” she concludes.