Does My Religion Make Me Look Fat? The Connection Between Piety and Body Image

Paul O'Donnell
Freelance Religion Journalist
Posted: October 26, 2010 08:10 PM
Huffington Post

Reading a little Scripture instead of a woman's magazine can make you feel better about how you look. No brainer? Here's more: A recent study of nearly 300 Jordanian teens and their moms suggests that religious belief itself insulates young women from the impact of media hype about the female form.

The study, conducted in the summer of 2009 by Dr. Teresa King and two of her students, surveyed students at Yarmouk University in Irbid, Jordan, on their feelings about their bodies, from hair to feet, and compared their responses to those from students at Bridgewater State University near Boston, where King teaches. Both groups were also asked about their religious beliefs. The preliminary results show that the Jordanians, who were measurably more engaged with their faith, were also more satisfied with their shape. "In almost all nuances they reported feeling better about their appearance," King told me in an interview.

King and her students, Heidi Woofenden and Kaitlyn Baptista, presented their findings in New York at a conference titled "Hidden in Plain Sight: Pleasures, Policy and Politics of Muslim Women and Their Bodies," sponsored by the Muslim Women's Institute for Research and Development.

Religiosity and positive body image have been correlated in earlier studies. What made the Yarmouk University study remarkable is that, like most women in Jordan, those who participated in this study cover their hair and much of their skin whenever they leave the house.

Not that wearing a hijab -- the covering of women's bodies favored by many Muslims -- means students at Yarmouk cared less about media images of women. Like teens everywhere, the Jordanians rabidly consult television and magazines for information about how to look and dress at a higher rate, the researchers were surprised to find, than their American counterparts. But, said King, "for some reason they are not internalizing the media's message."

The study made no statistical link between the hijab and positive body image. Indeed, says King, "in America, we get the opposite ... The more you don't like your looks, the more you cover up" But one slide, citing one covered woman's gratified escape from the media's relentless attention to body size, suggested where attitudes about the hijab might be heading, especially as the practice moves West.

In a roundtable that preceded King's talk, the hijab dominated the discussion. None of the mostly Muslim teachers and activists in the room argued for or against covering women's bodies. The audience laughed when one young woman told how non-Muslims often assumed she was brainwashed because she was covered. The group nodded thoughtfully when a woman in a black turtleneck and slacks said Muslims assumed she was not a faithful Muslim because she wasn't in a hijab.

Instead, the participants in the roundtable agreed, all women's dress has to be understood in the context of the surrounding culture. Shqipe Malushi, who counsels both Middle Eastern women and U.S. military personnel on Islamic cultural issues, explained that she has no problem expressing herself while wearing an obligatory burka in Afghanistan, but feels imprisoned by traditional Muslim dress elsewhere. Modesty, said Malushi, should even be understood in the context of the person. Rebuked at a recent lecture by a man who wanted to know why she wasn't covered, Malushi said she replied, "How do you know I'm not?"

What this discussion of the hijab presumes is choice: In the United States, women can escape demands to cover themselves or demands not to, fashioning a new set of meanings for an ancient practice. Elif Kavakci, a fashion designer whose head covering was subtly spangled with sequins, grew up in Turkey, where traditional dress is heavily discouraged. Kavakci told the conference that she decided to cover herself at age 12, "because nobody was going to tell me what to do." After moving to Dallas as a young woman, Kavakci felt liberated to wear the hijab "as a personal act," she said. "People would ask if my hijab was religious or fashionable. It was both."

SOURCE: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-odonnell/faith-and-fashion_b_772359.html

Serving Two Masters: Shariah Law and the Secular State

By STANLEY FISH
The New York Times
26 October 2010

A few weeks ago, the Cardozo School of Law mounted a conference marking the 20th anniversary of Employment Division v. Smith (1990), a case in which the Supreme Court asked what happens when a form of behavior demanded by one’s religion runs up against a generally applicable law — a law not targeted at any particular agenda or point of view — that makes the behavior illegal. (The behavior at issue was the ingestion of peyote at a Native American religious ceremony.) The answer the court gave, with Justice Antonin Scalia writing for the majority, was that the religious believer must yield to the law of the state so long as that law was not passed with the intention of curtailing or regulating his or anyone else’s religious practice. (This is exactly John Locke’s view in his “Letter Concerning Toleration.”)

“To make the individual’s obligation to obey . . . a law contingent upon the law’s coincidence with his religious beliefs” would have the effect, Scalia explains, of “permitting him, by virtue of his beliefs, ‘to become a law unto himself.’” And if that were allowed, there would no longer be a single law — universally conceived and applied — but multiple laws each of which was tailored to the doctrines and commands of a particular faith. In order to have law in the strong sense, Scalia is saying, you can have only one. (“No man can serve two masters.”)

The conflict between religious imperatives and the legal obligations one has as a citizen of a secular state — a state that does not take into account the religious affiliations of its citizens when crafting laws — is an old one (Scalia is quoting Reynolds v. United States, 1878); but in recent years it has been felt with increased force as Muslim immigrants to Western secular states evidence a desire to order their affairs, especially domestic affairs, by Shariah law rather than by the supposedly neutral law of a godless liberalism. I say “supposedly” because of the obvious contradiction: how can a law that refuses, on principle, to recognize religious claims be said to be neutral with respect to those claims? Must a devout Muslim (or orthodox Jew or fundamentalist Christian) choose between his or her faith and the letter of the law of the land?

In February 2008, the Right Reverend Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, tried in a now-famous lecture to give a nuanced answer to these questions by making what he considered a modest proposal. After asking “what degree of accommodation the laws of the land can and should give to minority communities with their strongly entrenched legal and moral codes,” Williams suggested (and it is a suggestion others had made before him) that in some areas of the law a “supplementary jurisdiction,” deriving from religious law, be recognized by the liberal state, which, rather than either giving up its sovereignty or invoking it peremptorily to still all other voices, agrees to share it in limited areas where “more latitude [would be] given in law to rights and scruples rooted in religious identities.”

Williams proceeded immediately to surround his proposal with cautionary safeguards — “no ‘supplementary’ jurisdiction could have the power to deny access to the rights granted to other citizens or to punish its members for claiming those rights” — but no safeguards would have satisfied his many critics, including Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who declared roundly that there is only one common law for all of Britain and it is based squarely on “British values.”

Prompted by Williams’s lecture and the responses it provoked, law professors Rex Ahdar and Nicholas Aroney have now put together a volume, to be published in 2011, under the title “Shari’a in the West,” a collection of learned and thoughtful essays by some of the world’s leading scholars of religion and the law. The volume’s central question is stated concisely by Erich Kolig, an anthropologist from New Zealand: “How far can liberal democracy go, both in accommodating minority groups in public policy, and, more profoundly, in granting official legal recognition to their beliefs, customs, practices and worldviews, especially when minority religious conduct and values are not congenial to the majority,” that is, to liberal democracy itself?

This is exactly the question posed by John Rawls in a preface to the second edition of “Political Liberalism,” his magisterial account and defense of liberal political principles: “How is it possible for those affirming a religious doctrine that is based on religious authority . . . also to hold a reasonable political conception that supports a just democratic regime?” The words to stumble on are “reasonable” and “just,” which at once introduce the requirement and indicate how hard, if not impossible, it will be to meet it: “reasonable” means confirming to rational, not religious, principles; “just” means respecting the equality of all, not just male or faithful, individuals.

With these concepts as the baseline of “accommodation,” accommodation is going to fall far short of anything that will satisfy the adherents of a religion that “encompasses all aspects of public and private law, hygiene, and even courtesy and good manners” (A. A. An-Na’im). In liberal thought these areas are the ones in which the individual reigns supreme and the value of individual choice is presupposed; but, as Ann Black explains, “Muslims do not conceptualize Islam in terms of the Westernized sociological categorization of religion which places the individual at the centre of all analyses.”

And so, perhaps predictably, the essays in Shariah in the West tack back and forth between the uneasy alternatives Williams names in his lecture — “an assumption on the religious side that membership of the community . . . is the only significant category,” and on the other side secular government’s assumption of a “monopoly in terms of defining public and political identity.” These assumptions seem to be standing obstacles to the ability of secular Western states to think through the problem presented by growing Muslim populations that are sometimes militant in their demand to be ruled by their own faiths and traditions.

On the one hand, there is the liberal desire to accord one’s fellow human beings the dignity of respecting their deepest beliefs. On the other hand, there is the fear that if those beliefs are allowed their full scope, individual rights and the rule of law may be eroded beyond repair. It would seem, at least on the evidence of most of these essays, that there is simply no way of “finding a viable path that accommodates diversity with equality” (Ayelet Shachar), that is, accommodates tolerance of diverse religious views with an insistence that, in the last analysis, the rights of individuals cannot be trumped by a theological imperative. No one in this volume quite finds the path.

Except perhaps theologian and religious philosopher John Milbank who puts forward, the editors tell us, “the striking argument that only a distinctly Christian polity — not a secular postmodern one — can actually accord Islam the respect it seeks as a religion.” The italicized phrase is key: the respect liberalism can accord Islam (or any other strong religion) is the respect one extends to curiosities, eccentrics, the backward, the unenlightened and the unfortunately deluded. Liberal respect stops short — and this is not a failing of liberalism, but its very essence — of taking religious claims seriously, of considering them as possible alternative ways of ordering not only private but public life.

Christianity, says Milbank, will be more capable of deeply respecting Islam because the two faiths share a commitment to the sacred and to a teleological view of history notably lacking in liberalism (again, this is not a criticism but a definition of liberalism): A “Christian polity can go further in acknowledging the integral worth of a religious group as a group than a secular polity can.” Christianity can acknowledge the worth of Islam not merely in an act of tolerance but in an act of solidarity in the same way that Christian sects can acknowledge each other. If you are a Catholic, Milbank explains, “and you do not agree with the Baptists you can nevertheless acknowledge that, relatively speaking, they are pursuing social goals that are comparable with, and promote a shared sense of human dignity” as defined by a corporate religious identity. Liberalism can acknowledge individual Muslims or individual Baptists or individual Catholics, but the liberal acknowledgment detaches these religious believers from their community of belief and turns them into citizens who are in the things that count (to liberalism) just like everyone else.

“Liberal principles,” declares Milbank, “will always ensure that the rights of the individual override those of the group.” For this reason, he concludes, “liberalism cannot defend corporate religious freedom.” The neutrality liberalism proclaims “is itself entirely secular” (it brackets belief; that’s what it means by neutrality) and is therefore “unable to accord the religious perspective [the] equal protection” it rhetorically promises. Religious rights “can only be effectively defended pursuant to a specific and distinctly religious framework.” Liberal universalism, with its superficial respect for everyone (as long as everyone is superficial) and its deep respect for no one, can’t do it.

If that is so, then the other contributors to this volume are whistling “Dixie,” at least with respect to the hope declared by Rawls that liberalism in some political form might be able to do justice to the strongly religious citizens of a liberal state. Milbank’s fellow essayists cannot negotiate or remove the impasse he delineates, but what they can do, and do do with considerable ingenuity and admirable tact, is find ways of blunting and perhaps muffling the conflict between secular and religious imperatives, a conflict that cannot (if Milbank is right, and I think he is) be resolved on the level of theory, but which can perhaps be kept at bay by the ad-hoc, opportunistic, local and stop-gap strategies that are at the heart of politics.


SOURCE: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/25/serving-two-masters-shariah-law-and-the-secular-state/

Shariah law is often not what Muslim judges say it is

Written by
Rafia Zakaria
The Indianapolis Star
23 October 2010

The Supreme Court in the United Arab Emirates ruled Monday that a man has the right to discipline his wife and child as long as it does not leave any marks -- a decision that came in a case where a man slapped and kicked his wife and daughter.

The decision overturned a lower court's judgment that the man was guilty of abuse and subject to a fine. The court justified the reversal by saying Islamic law, or Shariah, allowed the man to discipline his wife and daughter provided he had exhausted all other options.

The case is typical in that it represents the ease with which male judges in rich Arab nations take it upon themselves to justify male violence by packaging it as Islamic doctrine. These judges promote the deception that their edicts are entirely divine and completely unchallengeable by capitalizing on crucial misunderstandings about the meaning of the term Shariah and the divinity attached to it.

The confusion exists in the United States, too, where ballot initiatives to ban Shariah will be before voters next month in Oklahoma and Louisiana. But in Muslim countries such as Pakistan, Shariah is used to justify all manner of barbaric practices that have more to do with political theater than Islamic theology or jurisprudence.

If Westerners associate Shariah with wife-beatings, amputations and beheadings, the often-illiterate masses of the Muslim world are similarly duped into believing they must silently acquiesce to such barbarism if they want to be good Muslims. In the example of wife-beating, no mention is made of the fact that the entire ruling relies on a translation of a single Arabic word in the Quran that has been contested by several scholars.

Because the term Shariah has multiple meanings, opportunities for its misuse abound both in Western and Muslim political contexts. Literally, "shariah" means the path to water and, symbolically, the collective effort that Muslims must apply to discern God's will. It is also used to refer to Islamic law.

Here lies the trick: While two sources of Islamic law are divine, the remaining two are indeed human. However, this second aspect, the fact that large parts of Islamic law are subject to questioning, contention and disagreement, is often omitted by conservative Arab countries that espouse literal readings of the Quran and are committed to denying the plurality and diversity of Islamic law.

But Muslim women are refusing to be silenced. A global movement of Muslim women called Musawah is challenging edicts like this one and calling on reform to Shariah.

The movement is drawing attention to the central principles of justice, compassion and love that are at the core of Islamic belief and promoting the belief that violence against women has no place in Islam.

These women present a serious challenge to chauvinistic clerics and Taliban bandits who use Islam and women's bodies as a playground for their political ambitions.

The real battle, these women show, is not against Shariah but rather about who gets to define it.

Rafia Zakaria lives in Indianapolis and is associate editor of www.altmuslim.org.

SOURCE: http://www.indystar.com/article/20101023/LIVING09/10230374/Shariah-law-is-often-not-what-Muslim-judges-say-it-is

Tangled Tale of American Found in Afghanistan

By ALISSA J. RUBIN
Published: October 11, 2010
The New York Times

KABUL, Afghanistan — As an American military patrol walked through a rural, Taliban-dominated district of Kandahar Province recently, a man wearing local clothes came toward them shouting, “Don’t shoot, I am an American!”

He asked for their protection, saying that he had been abducted by the Taliban and held for months but had finally managed to escape, according to Western officials in Kabul.

That is one version of his story.

It is not the one told by local villagers, elders and Taliban in the Zheri District of Kandahar. They say that he sought out the Taliban and was treated less as a hostage than as a supporter, and that he openly traveled with them on motorcycles around the district. A tall African-American, he cut an unmistakable figure, they said.

Much remains mysterious about the man, identified as Takuma Owuo-Hagood, not least his motivations for going to Afghanistan. The Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Mr. Owuo-Hagood entered the country June 23, a little more than three months before he surfaced.

He is now back home, in the Atlanta area. Family members reached there said Mr. Owuo-Hagood, a 25-year-old husband and father, was a baggage handler for Delta with business aspirations. They said that he had tried to make money traveling to China and Turkey to buy clothes for resale back home, and that he had been drawn to Afghanistan by revelations of its untapped mineral wealth.

“He thought that might be a good place to seek out business opportunities,” said his father, Mikell Hagood, asserting in a telephone interview that his son had not been a willing guest of the Taliban.

“I am just happy that he is back home and praying that he got some valuable lessons from this,” Mr. Hagood added. “And praying there will be good coming out of it.”

Western officials in Kabul say they remain uncertain of Mr. Owuo-Hagood’s motivations. An internal memorandum circulating among Western officials cautiously says that Mr. Owuo-Hagood “traveled to Kandahar and was then ‘abducted’ and held for several weeks.”

“On Oct. 2,” it continues, “he ‘escaped’ and flagged down U.S. forces in RC-South.”

The American Embassy would say little other than to confirm that a private American citizen sought assistance from United States forces on Oct. 2 in southern Afghanistan and that the embassy flew him to Kabul and returned him to the United States.

“We are pleased that this individual has been safely reunited with his family,” said Caitlin Hayden, the embassy spokeswoman. “We do not feel it is appropriate to provide further details.”

Ms. Hayden said she could not say whether he had been in custody.

After arriving in Kabul, Mr. Owuo-Hagood made a call to his family. But after weeks without any further word, the family contacted the State Department, his father said.

“They said they would look for him,” he said. “I was praying for the best and fearing the worst.”

Mr. Owuo-Hagood apparently went to Kandahar in late June or early July and found his way to a bazaar held each week on the outer perimeter of Kandahar airbase. He befriended a merchant from the Taliban-held districts west of Kandahar city, according to both a local government official and a Taliban commander. It is unclear whether he actually went into the bazaar, which is within the base’s perimeter or met the merchant just outside.

He asked the merchant to take him to the Taliban and the merchant hid him under a burqa and then put him in a vehicle with at least two burqa-clad women and drove away.

“We heard from elders and villagers that he left the airport with an Afghan colleague from Pashmoul in Zheri District,” said Haji Agha Lalai, a member of the Kandahar provincial council who is from Panjwaj District, adjacent to Zheri. “The American went in a burqa with women so that he could not be seen.”

“First they went to the colleague’s house in Pashmoul and then they went into the Taliban,” he said.

Mr. Owuo-Hagood’s rationale for seeking out the Taliban is hard to gauge; it is also unclear whether he was motivated by ideological or other reasons.

The Taliban were excited and even boastful about his arrival in their midst in Zheri District, an area that Gen. David H. Petraeus described recently as an entrenched Taliban safe haven.

A Taliban commander from the area, who is related to several of the Taliban who lived with Mr. Owuo-Hagood, said that the visitor said he was a convert to Islam.

“He said to them, ‘I am very much interested in learning about Islam and I want to live side by side with Muslims,’ ” said a Taliban commander from Zheri, who goes by the name Mullah Basir.

“This black American was telling the Taliban, ‘We were told untrue information about the Taliban and the Muslims and now that I have come to you, I see that the reality is different,’ ” said Mullah Basir, adding that the Taliban appeared to believe him.

They also believed he had military knowledge that could help them — although whether he actually did is unclear. The information the villagers and the Taliban commander said he gave did not seem particularly insightful.

“He was giving the Taliban a lot of information on a military level,” Mullah Basir said. “For example, where you have to shoot the American.”

“Like they wear bullet-proof vests,” he said, “so you have to shoot a part that is exposed, that your bullet can penetrate and the other thing was how to shoot on a helicopter, you should shoot on the front, not the back, and he was helpful in explaining maps and directions.”

A landowner named Mohammed from the Sang-i-Sar area of Zheri described seeing him in the villages dressed in Afghan garb.

“I saw him on a motorbike with other Taliban, wearing a turban and shaalwar kameez,” said Mohammed, referring to the Afghan tunic. “Other villagers told me he was American.” He said Mr. that Owuo-Hagood had an American gun that fired “big bullets with flames,” and that “the villagers were saying he was teaching the Taliban how to fire rockets into the American base.”

Mr. Owuo-Hagood’s father said that sometime in August, he received an e-mail supposedly from his son, but written by someone whose first language was clearly not English, saying he was “under control of the Taliban.”

The Hagoods wrote back that he was “a family man and that he had wife and daughter,” said the father. “We told them it was Ramadan to please be forgiving and emancipate him.”

A few days later, a brief message arrived, this one apparently written by Mr. Owuo-Hagood. It said that he was “learning the language” and memorizing chapters of the Koran. He said that the Taliban suspected him of being an American soldier and planned to detain him until they could verify that he was not, his father said.

Then, a few weeks ago, Mr. Owuo-Hagood phoned to say he would be released soon, and asked his father to explain his absence to Delta.
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Ruhullah Khapalwak contributed reporting from Kabul, and Dan Frosch from Denver.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 11, 2010

An earlier version of this article said that family members reported Mr. Owuo-Hagood trying to make money by traveling to Turkey and India to buy clothes for resale back home. In fact, they said he traveled to Turkey and China.

A version of this article appeared in print on October 12, 2010, on page A13 of the New York edition.

SOURCE: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/12/world/asia/12taliban.html

Sharron Angle: Muslim Law Taking Hold In Parts Of U.S.

CRISTINA SILVA | 10/ 7/10 08:03 PM | AP
HUFFINGTON POST

LAS VEGAS — U.S. Senate candidate Sharron Angle told a crowd of supporters that the country needs to address a "militant terrorist situation" that has allowed Islamic religious law to take hold in some American cities.

Her comments came at a rally of tea party supporters in the Nevada resort town of Mesquite last week after the candidate was asked about Muslims angling to take over the country, and marked the latest of several controversial remarks by the Nevada Republican.

In a recording of the rally provided to The Associated Press by the Mesquite Local News, a man is heard asking Angle : "I keep hearing about Muslims wanting to take over the United States ... on a TV program just last night, I saw that they are taking over a city in Michigan and the residents of the city, they want them out. They want them out. So, I want to hear your thoughts about that."

Angle responds that "we're talking about a militant terrorist situation, which I believe it isn't a widespread thing, but it is enough that we need to address, and we have been addressing it."

"My thoughts are these, first of all, Dearborn, Michigan, and Frankford, Texas are on American soil, and under constitutional law. Not Sharia law. And I don't know how that happened in the United States," she said. "It seems to me there is something fundamentally wrong with allowing a foreign system of law to even take hold in any municipality or government situation in our United States."

Dearborn, Mich., has a thriving Muslim community. It was not immediately clear why Angle singled out Frankford, Texas, a former town that was annexed into Dallas around 1975.

Responding to the same question, she also drew comparisons between the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the Nazi Holocaust. She said the property owners behind the proposed Islamic community center near ground zero should move it in deference to the people who died there.

"There was, in Auschwitz, I think it was Auschwitz, it was at least a prisoner of war camp, where the Catholic Church owned some property and they were going to build a church there. They had every right to do it but they stepped aside and said, no, we are going to allow the Jewish people to make a monument because they lost lives," she said. "They had a responsibility to be sensitive to what had happened there and it is exactly the same thing as 9/11. Ground zero, we have a responsibility to be sensitive to the loss of a nation, to the loss of families, to the loss of life that happened there."

Angle seemed to be referring to a Roman Catholic convent at the Auschwitz death camp that Pope John Paul II ordered moved in 1993 in response to Jewish protests.

Others, including the Anti-Defamation League, the nation's leading Jewish civil rights group, have evoked the relocated convent while voicing opposition to the mosque. But the ADL also has stressed that 9/11 and the Holocaust are separate, incomparable events.

Angle's campaign did not answer questions about her statements.

"I'm pretty sure that she did make it clear that there had been incidents in the news, but there is nothing widespread, and that we have freedom of religion in this country," said spokesman Jarrod Agen in an e-mail.

Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Washington-based advocacy group, called Angle's statements "bizarre."

"This seems to be an example of incoherent bigotry. It is pretty clear that she has something against Islam and Muslims but she is so incoherent you don't know what she stands for," Hooper said. "The proper response would have been, 'American Muslims are citizens like anyone else. They are free to practice their faith,' not seeming to agree that Muslims are somehow seeking to take over."

Dearborn Mayor Jack O'Reilly called Angle's comments "shameful." He said tea party groups inaccurately spread the word that his Detroit suburb was ruled by Islamic law after members of an anti-Islam group were arrested at an Arab cultural festival in June because a Christian volunteer complained of harassment.

"She took it as face value and maligned the city of Dearborn and I consider that totally irresponsible," he said. "If she wants to come here, I will take her on a tour. I will show her we follow the Constitution just as well as anyone else."

Angle, a Southern Baptist, has called herself a faith-based politician. Among her positions, she opposes abortion in all circumstances, including rape and incest and doesn't believe the Constitution requires the separation of church and state.

Angle is in a dead-heat race against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who has also said the community center, which would include a mosque, should be built elsewhere. A recent poll showed Reid and Angle tied in the high-profile campaign.

Reid's campaign said Angle's comments advances its ongoing campaign to portray her as outside mainstream America.

"The fact that Sharron Angle believes American cities have been taken over by militant terrorist organizations that are ruling our citizens under Sharia law shows a terrifying lack of connection with reality and a willingness to subscribe to conspiracy theories that demonstrates she's far too extreme and dangerous to represent Nevada in the U.S. Senate," spokesman Kelly Steele said.

SOURCE: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/08/sharron-angle-muslim-law-_n_755346.html