Jasmin Zine

Unveiled Sentiments: Gendered Islamophobia and Experiences of Veiling among Muslim Girls in a Canadian Islamic School.

The practice of veiling has made Muslim women subject to dual oppressions—racism and Islamophobia—in society at large and patriarchal oppression and sexism from within their communities. Based on a narrative analysis of the politics of veiling in schools and society, the voices of young Muslim women attending a Canadian Islamic school speak to the contested notion of gender identity in Islam. The narratives situate their various articulations of Islamic womanhood in ways that both affirm and challenge traditional religious notions. At the same time they also are subject to Orientalist 1 representations of veiled and burqa clad women that represent them as oppressed and backward. Focusing on ethnographic accounts of veiling among Muslims girls who attended a gender-segregated Islamic high school in Toronto, this discussion allows a deeper understanding of how gendered religious identities are constructed in the schooling experiences of these Muslim youth.

Safe havens or religious ‘ghettos’? Narratives of Islamic schooling in Canada

Transnationalism and the experience of migrancy has lead to cultural dissonance for many newcomers from Muslim countries, unaccustomed to the culturally permissive social norms like consuming alcohol and partying, dating and premarital relations. Residing within culturally incongruent spaces, migrant Muslim communities often seek to shelter their children and youth from negative outside influences. Within this context, independent Islamic schools take on multiple sociological roles in the Canadian Muslim diaspora. For example, these schools attempt to create a ‘safe’ environment that protects students from the ‘de‐Islamizing’ forces in public schools and society at large. It is within the nexus of resisting cultural assimilation and engaging cultural survival that the need for Islamic schools emerges. These schools provide a culturally congruent space and a more seamless transition between the values, beliefs, and practices of the home and school environment. They also provide a space free from racism and religious discrimination that many students encounter within public schools. Yet Islamic schools, like other independent religious schools, are also accused of ‘ghettoizing’ students and not providing socialization within society at large, and are considered inadequate arenas for civic engagement in a racially and religiously plural society due to their ‘particularist’ orientation. This paper provides a critical examination of these claims and how they are both challenged and affirmed through the narratives of Islamic school stakeholders.

Reading Muslim women and Muslim women reading back: transnational feminist reading practices, pedagogy and ethical concerns

This special issue of Intercultural Education traces its origins to a conference panel examining the reception and teaching of Azar Nafisi’s 2003 memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran. In mid-2004 when the panel was conceived, Nafisi’s text was the most popular among an explosion of memoirs, novels, nonfiction and children’s literature by and about Muslim and Arab women being enthusiastically marketed and consumed in North America. The papers on this panel focused on how Nafisi’s text was being taken up within an Islamophobic global context in which Muslim women were increasingly the subject of neo-Orientalist pity, fear and fascination produced through a complex nexus of societal and imperial aggression. Now in 2007, the surge of writing and cultural production by and about Muslim and Arab women continues—texts which both challenge and perpetuate the currency of Orientalist writing and representation. Within the context of the current global and geo-political landscape and the ‘war on terror,’ competing imaginaries—Western imperialist, Orientalist, imperialist feminist as well as transnational feminist, anti-colonial and Islamic—form a contested terrain of knowledge production upon which the lives, histories and subjectivities of Muslim women are discursively constituted, debated, claimed and consumed through a variety of literary, academic and visual forms of representation. This special issue seeks to critically examine the ways these forms of representation are taken up in various educational sites and also to interrogate and reflect on

An interview with Jamelie Hassan

Jamelie Hassan is a visual artist and activist based in London, Ontario, Canada. Since the 1970s she has exhibited widely in Canada and internationally. In 1993 she was presented the ‘Canada 125 Medal’ in recognition of her outstanding service to the community, and in 2001 she received the Governor General’s Award in Visual Arts. She was awarded the Chalmers Art Fellowship in 2006. Her interdisciplinary works incorporate ceramic, painting, video, photography, text and other media and explore personal and public histories and are in numerous public collections. These include the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Museum London; the McIntosh Gallery, The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario; the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia, Vancouver; The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; the National Museum of Arab American Art, Dearborn, Michigan, USA and the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Egypt.