Sisterhood Guest Post by social justice advocate and artist Hafsa. 

Pic by Rushda Mohinudeen

Last June, while visiting a north-western province in Sri Lanka, I had the chance of observing a community development initiative that focused on women’s empowerment and enhancing their role in participatory democracy. One of interesting prescripts that I observed was that most of the requests came from local women, who brought their concerns to informal gatherings; from where community organizers took on the role of coming up with ways to effectively address their concerns. These concerns ranged from raising awareness on issues related to domestic violence, marching against a rise in sexual abuse of minors and the culture of impunity surrounding it, and addressing what they saw as a lack of Tamil-language services in the local general hospital and transportation services. The latter of which was rectified by implementing a system of identification, whereby patients now need only present a color-coded card in emergency situations to receive services in the appropriate language, reducing the dangers of misdiagnosis and further distress.

Such ingenious solutions by locals stem from their ties to “place”, which is simultaneously an ecological design practice as a well as a proven sustainable development paradigm. It’s the idea that solutions derived from the lived experiences of locals have a transformative potential for communities, which far exceed the effectiveness of top-down policies implemented by central authorities. These women had no thought for waiting around until the authorities addressed their issues, they simply seized the day. All of this is to say that, in a country mired by nepotism and bureaucratic red -tape, the remarkable achievements of such women, demonstrate that there is still space, however small, in the Sri Lankan socio-political landscape for women to push for change. Needless to say that these women, who mainly spoke Tamil and many of whom were Muslim, get over looked time and time again by much of the media, and even parts of civil society, who only continue to obscure their presence from the public psyche.

In light of the rise in Islamophobic elements within Sri Lanka, many of the country’s Muslim women now find themselves in the frontlines of the chauvinism spearheaded by racist groups such as the Bodu Bala Sena (Buddhist Power Force). Muslim women, who increasingly don the veil or the long black robes, have been cited as a threat to such group’s xenophobic ideals, who find them guilty by association due to increasing visibility.

This is, of course, nothing new in my part of the world, where the meanings and connotations of Muslim women’s sartorial attires have been perpetually intellectualized, politicized and mystified since the Orientalist narratives began trickling in from the colonial era. More recently, the attacks on the world trade center and the subsequent “War on Terror”, has garnered new waves of (mis)representation of visibly Muslim women as either oppressed and in need of saving – incidentally a cause championed by mainstream U.S feminists during the Afghan war, or as abettors to violent extremism. It’s particularly unsettling for me to see these sentiments, or rather what I more comfortably understood to be the “western” obsession with veiled Muslim bodies, beginning to mirror in the psyche of subalterns on the other side of the globe. Looking at this situation through the post-colonial lens, particularly in the post-911 context, might be a worthwhile intellectual exercise for the Island’s scholars, but for now, it suffices to say that the rise in Islamophobia threatens to seriously “other”ize and dehumanize the country’s millennia-old Muslim community. Read more