Final Project for Islamic Civilizations 178

In this project, I created a paper puppet of a woman. She is covered with splatters of paint that are spreading and melding across, attempting to gain control as the dominant colors. The puppet is a representation of how the bodies of women in Islam are metaphorically instrumentalized and turned into the battleground for competing ideologies. Whether the Western “plight for their Muslim sisters” or the fundamentalist “symbolic space…for sanctity and honor,” the bodies of women have become the backdrop against which such ideological battles occur (Haq, 1996). Yet these reductionist imaginings of gender in Islam fail to comprehend the complex experiences of women in Islam. This concept also ties into the larger question that we have discussed about what the ‘real’ Islam entails, and it seems to be whichever voices are the loudest and well-funded: whichever colors can spread the quickest across the paper puppet. Yet almost inevitably, that voice is rarely the one of the woman in question.

Also when discussing issues of gender in Islam – a key question is “Which women?” The puppet has an anonymous face, but the impact of status is crucial. For example, elite women in high-powered political families or of high socioeconomic live very different realities from those in rural villages, one of the criticisms of the Women’s Action Forum in Pakistan (Haq, 1996). Elite women from political families have held the highest political offices in the countries of Pakistan and Bangladesh, but the everyday concerns and realities of women from the lower classes do not closely align.