.

Engaging Surrender

I really enjoyed Engaging Surrender, and part of me wants to celebrate its successes here, but that paper would be much less interesting. What seemed most lacking in this book was an inside/outside construction of reality. That is, while Carolyn (as she refers to herself throughout) devotes much energy to portraying the empowerment of women through feminist exegesis, she fails to analyze how changes enforced by the community might affect these women negatively.

Carolyn might argue, as Noah, my presentation partner did, that feminist exegesis is not merely internal and has a great effect on both the women and men of the community through tafsir. I would agree with her as I did with him, to an extent, though without more responses from other members of the community (especially the men), it is hard to judge that impact. The author repeatedly emphasizes that Islam is constructed by the community in which it is practiced, and the practice of feminist exegesis through tafsir shows how women have power to help shape that construction. I would add that, to some degree, this is true within every religion; if it were not, conversion would be a very short-lived thing. But the process of community and ideological construction is not a one-way flow, and the movement of ideas from the individual minds of the women the rest of the community is only a part (of unknown size) of said construction. Equally (if not more) important is the way that individuals change in response to the community.

"Regardless of its limits, Islamic exegesis acts as a mediating discourse empowering women, like Safa, who feel powerless." (p. 186) I am fully prepared to agree with this, but would like to understand more clearly exactly what "empowerment" is. Is it just internal feelings of agency? I would argue that, while important, internal feelings of agency are only half of the story, to be truly empowered there must be an external result. In the case of Safa, the feminist exegesis leads her to divorce (and to reject the imam who would not give her one) from an abusive relationship, so I agree that her choice to convert was empowering as well as her decision to remain in the community. But her's is not the only story. For me, the most troubling was the story of Zipporah. When she converted, Islam was a way of celebrating the assertiveness of her mother and herself - of women in general - and was clearly empowering (p. 131). But once within the community, she was faced with a reality that did not fit her own beliefs. When a brother hit her, the community blamed her for being overly assertive and thus provoking him. She stayed in the community because, "for Zipporah, Muslims are not perfect, but Islam is and therefore she prioritizes her needs in order to continue to enact her dominant personal narrative of Muslima and community leader." (p. 167) However, after she rejoined the masjid, "... she is less assertive and silences her criticism. ...now she believes that men are simply not ready for .... Islam's radical empowerment of women." At this point, Zipporah is no longer changing the community through her feminist exegesis, while she may not have "capitulated" internally, she has adapted "her performance to suit a community with whom she desires to belong." (p. 168) While her performance of feminist exegesis through tafsir was once what constructed community and ideology, now it is her silence. There is a disconnect between the empowerment from personal reasons for conversion and the external reality of the community she has entered.

Empowerment is a tricky subject and difficult to define, so I will draw the connection in a somewhat less controversial way. In "Christian Conversion in Muslim Java," Robert Hefner explains "the social and moral consequences of [the Christian convert's] publically [sic] proclaimed conversion were far greater than those of intellectualist introspection alone." (p.118) Just as conversion to Christianity has some negative externalities, so does conversion to Islam. But rather than address these not-so-positive aspects of the community in the same terms as the positive ones (that is, to speak of disempowerment alongside empowerment), Carolyn is committed to providing the doubting U.S. hegemony with examples of empowerment in Islam. At every turn she defends the women's decisions by saying that agency is empowerment, although this is clearly not the case when Aminah chooses to remain in an abusive relationship with her children, I argue that Aminah is not the exception Carolyn would portray her to be (p. 209). I do not mean that there are more Islamic women in abusive relationships because of their beliefs than Christian women, I mean that the women who does not want more children but has more anyway because she believes birth control is forbidden is not making an empowering decision. I mean that while the process of conversion, the reasons for conversion, may be empowering, continuing to participate in the community and in the religion may not be.

In general, as I said at the outset, I really enjoyed this work. I think Carolyn did an excellent job of socially locating herself, and it was that very location that helped me understand the bias towards presenting the empowering aspects of Islam over those that disempower. Especially, I am glad that she included such complicated and layered stories as those of violence and the "child marriage" of Jamilah (which was too complicated for me to address in this essay). I only wish that she could have addressed the negative aspects as negative instead of attempting to sweep them away into the outside community that "doesn't get it" and thus doesn't matter.

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Written April 19, 2005 for "Seminar: Conversion from a Comparitive Perspective" at Oberlin College

Last Updated April 19, 2005