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 This month marks the 50th anniversary of Barbie – the iconic blonde doll that can either be the "must-have" little girl's toy or the antithesis of every feminist's ideal.
Despite minor controversies such as the fact that if a woman were to attain Barbie's body shape she would be so underweight as to render herself infertile; or the talking Barbie who would articulate such profound utterances as "Can I ever have enough clothes?", "Maths is hard!", and "Wanna have a pizza party?" (and presumably immediately afterwards stick her plastic fingers down her throat and cause herself to vomit in order to preserve that famous 20 inch waist), it seems that little has diminished every little girl's desire to own one, with Mattel opening a 6 floor Barbie emporium in Shanghai this month. Barbie's life appears to have mirrored the rocky path trodden by women in modern western society. When the first Barbie was produced, feminism was in the last stages of its first wave. As First Wave Feminism gave way to Second Wave and then Third Wave Feminism, Barbie's range of occupations changed from fashion model to diverse roles like NASA pilot, Formula 1 driver and UNICEF Ambassador. If you permit me a brief digression to enlighten those who are not familiar with the lexicographical lint scraped out of the navel of feminist philosophy, it is easiest to remember that First Wave Feminism fought for the right to vote (suffragettes throwing themselves under horses), Second Wave Feminism fought for equal opportunity (rather cross women in the 1960s supposedly burning articles of intimate feminine apparel). We are now living in the age of Third Wave Feminism and its accompanying Post-Feminism. The Third Wave is epitomised by the Riot Grrrl Movement (aka "girl power"). What sets it apart from its predecessors is that it appears to have no set goals but rather seems to be fighting to allow women to be as stupid and self-destructive as the worst behaved men in society. Gone is the opposition to pornography and prostitution or the hatred of derogatory terms (which are now reclaimed and "embraced"). Third Wave Feminists appear to campaign and fight for women's rights to casual, drunken sex acts in vomit-strewn pub car parks; to drink to excess (they appear to have had success with this goal as young women are now 7 times more likely to die from alcohol-related liver disease compared with 30 years ago), and have completely schizophrenic views on the importance and value of sexual relations - on one hand it is such an emotionally insignificant event that women should be encouraged to engage in responsibility-free sex, and on the other hand it is such a psychological minefield that women are not autonomous enough beings to consent to the act and all responsibility resides with men. Gone also is the interdependence between feminism and literature. The best Third Wave Feminism can come up with is "The Bridget Jones Diary" and "Sex and the City". It is with this background that we see the emergence of the Third Wave Feminist Barbie. Forget Barbie Doctor, Barbie Dentist or Astronaut Barbie - this 50-something toy with a mid-life crisis has ditched the hapless Ken and undergone a makeover with "Totally Stylin' Tattoos Barbie" complete with tattoos and a tattoo gun – all aimed at girls from 4-9 years old. It seems that Barbie is hip, hop and happening and she has the tramp stamps to prove it. I feel that it can only be a matter of time before we have "Totally 'Up For It' Barbie" with her own Chlamydia Screening Test Kit as an optional accessory. One is put in mind of the hadith of the Prophet (peace and blessings upon him) which states: "Among the things that people have found from the words of the previous prophets was: 'If you feel no shame, then do as you wish.'"
(Al-Bukhari) On to this desolate wasteland of faded morality and lost innocence enter western Muslims. One would assume that any right-thinking Muslim would steer well clear of an ideology like feminism that is so internally conflicted that it goes though a complete metamorphosis every decade, but to some of our misguided sisters "Islamic Feminism’ is just what every Muslim woman needs. "Muslim Women's Rights" has always been a gift to the Islamophobes that just keeps on giving. I remember back in the 1990s when this issue first became more prominent in the west there was a great deal of work done to try and change the irritating "veiled victim" mythology present in popular perception. For a while it seemed that every article about Islam, every lecture, every book was just banging on about women's rights in Islam – until it became rather passé. And yet, despite all those lectures discussing inheritance rights, hijab, roles and responsibilities of women, here we are 20 years later being shown feminism as if it were a natural evolutionary process rather than an irrelevance to Muslim women who are sheltered by Islam's own core of laws and rights. Most of the proponents of feminism within Islam are Muslims themselves – Amina Wadud immediately springs to mind, with her continual stunts attempting to lead prayer. She is joined by her fellow American Asra Normani who most recently wrote an article defending that ugly piece of pulp fiction, "Jewel of Medina". In Malaysia there is the group Sisters in Islam and in the UK we can rejoice in our own prominent Muslim feminist Baroness Haleh Afshar who has said of her faith in the past that: "However, no human being - and certainly no man - has the right to define for me what my understanding of God is." I wonder if she includes the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) in that statement. Statements like that coupled with her fierce opposition to the hijab beg the question as to why she is given any sort of prominence as the voice of the modern Western Muslim woman. When one sees the rise of Islamic feminism throughout the world one cannot help but re-look at what I believe to have galvanised and motivated most of them – The RAND report on Islam. This week marks the 6th anniversary since it was launched on 18th March 2003. The RAND Corporation is a global think-tank based in the US that leans heavily to the right and has been accused of being overly militarist in its thinking. A quick look at its list of participants indicates its political leanings as well as its mighty organisational clout. In 2003, it commissioned a report entitled "Civil Democratic Islam – Partners, Resources and Strategies" which was authored by Cheryl Benard – a prominent feminist author and senior analyst with RAND who incidentally is also married to Zalmay Khalilzad, who was George W Bush's Special Envoy and then Ambassador to Afghanistan until he left to become the US Ambassador to Iraq, a position he held until 2007. He currently is the US Ambassador to the United Nations. Benard's report should be compulsory reading for every western Muslim. It first divides Muslims into groups like Secularist, Modernist, Traditionalist, Sufi depending on their views of various issues. After doing this it sets out its stall by proposing that the only way to "deal" with Islam is by promoting Modernists as role models and leaders, criticising traditionalism, encouraging journalists to highlight any reports of misdeeds by institutions that can be linked to traditional Islam, and promoting the idea that religion and politics can be separated in Islam without endangering faith. The list goes on. She attempts to undermine Islam by quoting from notorious and largely discredited Islamophobes like Ibn Warraq and Mabrook Ismaeel, who is a Submitter, with statements like "there is little doubt that hadith is at best a dubious, flawed instrument" and when speaking about how Muslims teach children about modesty: "This premise - that a person who is socialized to feel inhibited and neurotic about sexuality is more likely to act 'appropriately' in this sphere is [sic] an adult - clearly depends on one's definition of what constitutes appropriate conduct." Or in this excerpt Benard relates her own take on the origin of the Quran: "It is widely accepted that at least two suras were lost ... Modernists point out that some may also have been falsely or inaccurately recorded. To traditionalists, however, who revere as infallible and divine each letter of the Quran and even the paper it is printed on, that notion is anathema." The hijab comes in for a special mention in its own Appendix entitled "Hijab as a Case Study". Benard states that the hijab is not analogous to any other symbol of religion like the Sikh turban or the Jewish yarmulke as it is "neither a neutral lifestyle issue nor a religious requirement. It has become a political statement." Benard then attempts to link the hijab to various acts of brutality against women and infers without a shred of evidence that it is an issue forced on women by fundamentalists. Since the first publication of the report RAND has gone on to publish another report, "Building Moderate Muslim Networks", which continues with the theme to "divide and conquer" Muslims in order to destroy Islam. All this, however is not news. We have always known that there are certain elements in Western governments who wish to obliterate Islam from the hearts of Muslims. What makes it troubling is that a mere 6 years after the publication of the first RAND report we have seen how in the small area of woman's rights the goals and flawed belief system that RAND seeks to promote amongst Muslims appears to be taking hold, like the idea that hijab is a political rather than religious issue. Benard has identified women's rights as a fault line amongst Muslims that can be exploited to the benefit of those hell-bent on quelling Islam and Muslims. She would like nothing better than to transform Muslim women into Barbie dolls – plastic figures with hollow heads, defined by their looks and destined to alter according to the ebb and flow of popular culture. With all its talk of the first, second and third wave feminism, the unspoken truth is that feminism has betrayed western women. Whilst it gave them the vote, rights of ownership and equal opportunities, when it came to providing a moral compass on how to live your life in the post-religious west, all that feminism could muster was a blurred template formed from the detritus of male society. In Islam women have the best of both worlds. We have been granted our rights by the Creator of the universe who has also shown us how to live so that we are not left to squander our lives in a futile attempt to satiate our never-ending desires. If we look back to the lives led by the first generation of Muslim women we see that they were not only fulfilled on a professional and personal level but they were also supported by a society that acknowledged and supported the difference between men and women. Opponents of Islam who seek to "fix" Islam by introducing the western concept of feminism would be better advised to save their resources and fix feminism first. To those Muslim sisters who make a living role-playing the exasperated best friend of Muslim women – rolling their eyes in fond vexation at our own folly of clinging to "backward" notions of hijab, modesty and chastity – I would advise them to reflect well on the motivation of their actions and whose agenda they are fulfilling by carrying them out. For the rest of us women, caught between the west's scorn and pity and some of our own brothers and sisters who earnestly tell us that we can discard vast tracts of our religion, we should reassure ourselves that our rights and responsibilities are not man-made but God-given and we should not cast aside this gift like an unwanted doll and start looking around for something better, and above all we should reflect well on the verse of the Quran that states: "Surely the men who submit and the women who submit, and the believing men and the believing women, and the obeying men and the obeying women, and the truthful men and the truthful women, and the patient men and the patient women and the humble men and the humble women, and the almsgiving men and the almsgiving women, and the fasting men and the fasting women, and the men who guard their private parts and the women who guard, and the men who remember Allah much and the women who remember - Allah has prepared for them forgiveness and a mighty reward."
(Quran, 30:35)
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JumahPulses 
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