This past weekend, in a Paris suburb, two topless young women from the feminist organization Femen stormed the stage at the Salon Musulman du Val d’Oise, or the “Muslim Salon of Val d’Oise,” sending two conservative imams scurrying, visibly flustered, from the podium to the back of the stage, where the women earned the wrath of Muslim attendees, including one man who brutally kicked an activist after she was shoved to the ground.
For all the hoopla over the bare-breasted protesters, there are liberal and progressive Muslims, like me, who believe that the vulgarity and inappropriateness wasn’t what was expressed by the women protesters. Instead, it was the tenor of the imams on stage—Mehdi Kabir and Nader Abu Anas—and their supporters who advocate interpretations of Islam that are used to justify marital rape, domestic violence, and, ironically, exactly the kind of assault the Femen protesters endured at the feet and hands of men.
The clash underscores the deeper conflict between the secular and progressive ideals of not only the West, but many Muslims who want an interpretation of Islam that is compatible with modernity, and the regressive, ultraorthodox beliefs of Muslims like the conference organizers, who promoted the event with the hashtag #SMVO. Femen is a feminist organization started in Ukraine and now based in Paris.
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Relatively unknown in the U.S., the Salon Musulman du Val d’Oise, which was held for the third time this year, with a theme of “women,” is notorious in France among experts on national security, religion, and Islam. It’s particularly popular with ultraorthodox followers of a rigid and regressive interpretation of Islam, called Salafi, promoted and exported to the world by the government of Saudi Arabia. French members of the Observatory of Secularism Val d’Oise had protested the conference—albeit less dramatically, in a letter—worrying that invited speakers contributed to “incitements to violence.”
“I can clearly see that a significant number of practicing Muslims are either irritated or denouncing Femen for appearing topless to disrupt the recent conference in France,” said Eshmael Darman, an Afghan mental-health specialist in Fremont, California. “While I’m not supporting Femen and their tactics, I am strongly criticizing womanophobia in the mainstream religious communities. Those who criticize Femen entirely ignore that the mere fact that a conference is held about ‘women’ is misogynistic and simply means it is to explore, what: whether women are human or not? If they are, how much human? 10 percent or 80 percent? Maybe 85 percent? Now maybe we shouldn’t beat them, but if we do, how? By stick? Perhaps by just slapping them?”
He added, “One can go ahead and say, ‘Shame on Femen,’ but I think it is more appropriate to say: Shame on those who are obsessed with the hair and eyebrow and skin of a woman at the time when the world is offering hundreds of brilliant philosophers, artists, and scientists, and the New Horizons space probe is exploring beyond the solar system.”
While there are some reports that the imams were arguing in defense of women’s rights in Islam when they were interrupted by the activists, what many of us know is that too many religious leaders in Islam, like in other patriarchal religious communities, do a tap dance to make arguments like “equity” versus “equality,” and men and women being “complementary” to each other, rather than the religion needing to be “complimentary,” in giving women “equal” rights. Further, to justify gender segregation, they argue “separate and equal,” and advocate for the full-face veil to “protect” women. I call another argument “the 4:34 dance,” referring to the controversial part of the Quran—Chapter Four, Verse 34—often invoked to allow “beating” wives “lightly.” Many other Muslims, like Muslims for Progressive Values, a liberal Los Angeles-based organization, advocate for zero tolerance to domestic violence of any kind. Earlier this year, the group launched an #ImamsForShe campaign, borrowing on the popular #HeForShe social-media campaign, this one promoting imams who preach zero tolerance to emotional and physical abuse against women.
A Change.org petition, “We protest the Muslim Salon of fundamentalism,” to ban the event collected about 10,500 signatures by early Tuesday, even before the confab had ended.
The petition protests one speaker in particular, Nader Abu Anas, and includes a link to a speech in which the ultraorthodox French imam says “virtuous” wives “obey” their husbands and, repeating a faulty hadith (or saying by the Prophet Muhammad), the wife who refuses her husband’s sexual advances without “good reason” is punished because “angels curse her all night.”
Meanwhile, the other speaker on the stage, Mehdi Kabir, has been quoted stating at a sermon two years ago that a “disobedient wife” will be “cursed by the angels of Allah.”
For some, the Femen activists are topless “angels.” Despite all their controversy, they raise serious issues that we need to confront in our Muslim communities, in a way that kicking them while they are down will never resolve.
