Material Girls: Talking about Gender and Consumerism at ISNA

Imam Zaid Shakir was the first speaker, and talked about how our current economic system reflects a “triumph of the material over the spiritual,” in which processes of commodification have replaced individuality and spirituality with market value.  He then talked about this in the context of women, femininity and female sexuality being transformed into material commodities, and their market values become the only way that they are considered to have worth.  He also discussed ways that women end up being seen in terms of utility value, with the result that if the utility is seen to be gone, women end up being discarded.  He advocated a focus on the Divinely-given spiritual value and integrity of each person as a way to counteract the negative effects of modern economic systems on human relationships and on gendered oppression.  It was a really interesting analysis of the relationships between economic oppression and patriarchal oppression, and very cool to hear it all talked about within an Islamic framework.

Rabia Khedr, a consultant on disability issues who founded and directs the Canadian Association of Muslims with Disabilities (CAMD), was next. She began her talk by asking if there was anything additional that she could do to accommodate any of her audience members.  Khedr herself is blind, and let the audience know that we would have to give her verbal cues in response to her speech.  The focus on making sure that everyone could access her speech was a powerful way to start; I would love to see such issues arise more often in conference spaces (Islamic and otherwise.)

Khedr emphasised that self-centeredness, egoism and vanity are traits possessed by all genders, races, religions, and so on, and that women have always sacrificed for their families (generalizing, of course), so it is unfair to target women alone.  Interestingly, this comes from my notes from her talk, which I was writing as she was speaking (and not while looking at the conference program), but the language she used seems to respond very directly and explicitly to the panel description, and to challenge it based on some of the very same concerns that my friend and I had about it.  Khedr put a lot of blame on men (and their families) who look for a “Doctor Barbie traditional housewife in hijab” when searching for a wife, and dared families to look for someone other than Barbie when trying to find a spouse for their sons.

Khedr talked about how Islam doesn’t restrict having wealth, but that it does place conditions and call for responsibility for how wealth is used.  She mentioned in particular that Divine rizq (sustenance) is pre-determined, and that it is futile to be trying to gain more material wealth than has already been established for us (not to say that we shouldn’t have to work for what we earn, but rather that the material gains should not be our goal, as they are ultimately not in our hands.)

What I found particularly interesting about Khedr’s speech was the way that she integrated an analysis of her own (physical) blindness.  She talked about blindness not as a defect, or a weakness, or an obstacle to overcome, but rather as a way of being that might cause some challenges, but also allows her certain insights that sighted people might not have.  For example, she talked about how she doesn’t see the material world, and the relationship that this has to her understanding of materialism.  She later talked about how people have asked her if she would want to undergo a procedure to give her sight, and she said simply that she’s not all that interested because she doesn’t see her self as broken, and therefore does not think that she needs to be fixed.  As she said, she was made this way, and “I am comfortable with God’s creation.”  It wasn’t a romanticization of disability, but a realistic way of looking at it that understands disability not as a problem, but as a way of experiencing the world.  I’ve spent some time in a disability studies class, so I’m familiar with this perspective, but had never heard it from an Islamic angle before. CAMD’s position is that we are all created equal and therefore we all deserve accommodation and equal opportunities to be engaged in our communities: their slogan is “Nothing about us, without us.”