close your eyes for a moment and picture
a Muslim woman whatever comes to mind
remember that image now open your eyes
and raise your hand if the woman you
pictured looked anything like this I’m
guessing most of you saw a
middle-eastern looking woman in a hijab
because you’ve probably learned through
the media through Hollywood even through
textbooks to associate this image and
this image alone with a Muslim woman in
her TED talk the danger of a single
story
Tyrande Adichie a Nigerian author says
show a people as one thing as only one
thing over and over again and that is
what they become for a long time when I
thought of a Muslim woman I also
pictured something like this before I
pictured myself before I pictured my
mother my grandmother if in our minds
this becomes a Muslim woman then Who am
I hey jobless seventeen-year-old
Canadian with Kenyan roots and Indian
ancestry I call myself a Muslim but I
don’t look like that image in your head
and if that image becomes a definition
then I don’t fit the definition and none
of these women from India and China to
France and Kazakhstan who all call
themselves Muslims fit the definition so
who are they in our minds they don’t
exist at least not as Muslims according
to this single story we’ve constructed
and there is an injustice in that I’m
here today to talk about Islam but I’m
not going to talk about it the way
you’ve probably heard most Muslims talk
about it the perception that all Muslim
women wear hijab or that they’re even
middle-eastern is a singular view of
Islam another is that Islam is violent
or that Islam is peaceful see I can’t
really say that Islam is violent or that
it’s peaceful because both of those
claims offer a single narrow definition
of the
truth caught up in this divisive
struggle to define Islam as one thing or
another Muslims and non-muslims alike
overlook the fact that Islam like any
other religion is not a monolith it
doesn’t have one set of prescribed
beliefs and Islam itself can’t act you
can’t hate teach preach or even promote
because Islam is not a person and it is
the people the believers who have the
beliefs as Diane Moore at Harvard
Divinity School explains religions are
cultural constructs that are constantly
being interpreted and reinterpreted over
time by vastly different people under
vastly different circumstances when we
seek to define a religion exclusively as
one thing we ignore and diminish the
experiences the stories the truths that
are excluded we perpetuate what a deep
she calls the single story I’d go as far
as to say that in our culture today the
way we think is in terms of single
stories we suffer from what I’d like to
call the single story mindset especially
although not only when it comes to Islam
so what do we do how do we stop thinking
in single stories when we talk about
Islam we really should be talking about
the multiple and incredibly diverse
Islam’s
that exist as Edward Said put it this
acknowledgement of internal diversity
within religion is one of the basic
underpinnings of a cultural studies
approach to understanding religion we
like to think of religion in a sort of
vacuum but as Diane Moore explains in
her EDX course on religious literacy
religions do not exist separate from the
human experience isolated from time and
space religions are embedded in cultural
contexts essentially you can’t take any
Muslim Christian Jew Buddhist or Hindu
and analyze their religious beliefs
without looking at their political
historical Geographic circumstances
their culture in short context really is
everything the cultural studies approach
combats the single story with a sort of
multi-story mindset
now I’m not here to try and tell you
which interpretation of Islam is right
or wrong legitimate or not my goal is
just to show you the variety that exists
within interpretations of Islam so it’s
one example of that that variety let’s
look at the concept of jihad in Islam
and how it’s been incredibly dynamic
throughout history jihad an Arabic word
appears several times in the Quran and
it literally means struggle however in
recent history with terrorists claiming
a sort of monopoly over the term many of
us in the West have come to think it
means holy war but that’s just one
interpretation it’s a single story of
jihad this past summer I interned as a
research assistant to dr. Ali Hassan II
professor of Indo Muslim religions and
cultures at Harvard to help research
with a book he’s writing the book is on
Muslim understandings of Islam in one
section of it traces the different
interpretations of jihad over time using
the cultural studies approach even in
the prophet’s era she had had a range of
meanings it could mean physically
fighting those who attacked the Prophet
and his followers but it could also mean
striving to take care of your parents in
old age or struggling against your own
ego later in the eighth and ninth
centuries of the rise of Arab
imperialism and the urge for conquest
some Muslims invoked jihad to legitimize
political goals and in the late eighteen
nineteen hundreds it was actually in the
context of European colonialism that
many Muslims in countries like Algeria
Libya and India used jihad to rally
citizens around anti-colonial movements
fast forward to the late 1900s during
the Cold War and it was the United
States that energized and endorsed the
interpretation of jihad as an armed
struggle revitalizing the concept of the
holy war in order to mobilize Muslims in
Afghanistan against the Soviets it’s
also interesting to look at how some
Muslims interpret jihad today in some
more modern and progressive contexts
take Amino a dude an african-american
Muslim feminist who calls her work
advocating for gender equality the
gender
jihad or take Parvez Sharma an Indian
film director who made a documentary on
gay rights called a jihad for love now
is another example of how religions are
embedded in cultural contexts let’s talk
about women in Islam like me you’ve
probably heard some people say that
Islam oppresses women but Islam itself
can’t oppress anyone or anything and we
can’t make statements like this without
compromising a large chunk of truth
there are Muslims and even Muslim
majority countries that don’t treat
women and men as equals but there are
also those that do with an any religion
there exists not only differing but also
completely contradictory interpretations
and beliefs and what’s more productive I
think in trying to deny contradiction
and to take polar opposite sides is to
try and understand why and how those
contradictions arise as many of you may
know in Saudi Arabia the government only
recently ruled that women be allowed to
drive without the permission of their
male Guardians and there are still many
restrictions on women’s rights in the
country CNN reports that Saudi women
still can’t marry divorce travel or get
work without permission from their male
Guardians but just because this takes
place within a Muslim majority country
doesn’t mean that the oppression of
women is an Islamic problem Wahhabi ISM
the specific type of Islam that Saudi
Arabia was founded on that it thrives on
today has been described by the global
community as puritanical ultra
conservative and it represents a very
very small minority of the many Islam’s
that exist around the world today in
1985 in a speech Pakistan’s first female
Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto declared
it is not Islam which restricts women it
is not Islam which provides for
discrimination it is men it’s no
surprise then that some men like many
Wahabis who live in patriarchal
societies and want to preserve their
dominance over women will interpret the
Quran interpret Islam
ways that justify the oppression of
women like believers of any faith they
interpret religion within the bounds of
their existing contexts and ideologies
Saudi Arabia is also just one Muslim
majority country of around 50 worldwide
each with their own distinct histories
consider the fact that the United States
has yet to have a female president and
that Pakistan Bangladesh Turkey
Indonesia Kosovo Senegal and Kazakhstan
are all Muslim majority countries that
have had a female head of government or
head of state also keep in mind that
even in predominantly Christian
countries like the u.s. women could even
vote until the early 1900s
speaking of Christianity the cultural
studies approach doesn’t just apply to
Islam many of you are probably familiar
with this image of Jesus and this is
likely how most Westerners see him but
travel across the world and you might
find a people who believe that Jesus
looked like this or like this or like
any of these other different depictions
situated in different cultural contexts
and just as Muslims can find
justification for hegemony terrorism and
social justice all in the same religious
Scripture the Quran so can Christians
and there’s at one point the American
South and the KKK used the Bible to
legitimize slavery and white supremacy
while in the 1960s African Americans
used the same text to support race
racial equality and freedom as Margaret
Atwood and author wrote in an article
entitled the battle between action and
belief Northup Frey used to say that the
Bible is not a book you judge it’s a
book that judges you since there are so
many contrary opinions and teachings in
it the group of them you select will say
a lot about who you are so let me now
tell you a bit about my Islam and by
extension a bit about who I am and why
I’m standing here today I could tell you
about growing up in Canada as a first
generation Canadian or about my mother’s
passion for social development in health
care I could tell you about living in
Calgary Alberta with a Muslim
mayor and a strong Shia a smiley
community or about my liberal arts
boarding school in Massachusetts and I
could explain to you how each of these
aspects of my own context my own
location and time and space have shaped
Who I am what I believe and how I
interpret my religion but let me spare
you the long backstory and tell you that
I believe in the absolute truth that all
people are created equal
I believe in the power of diversity and
difference so if I did not see in my
aslam a fundamentally egalitarian and
pluralistic outlook I would not be a
Muslim but I do and I am my Aslam means
peace justice compassion service but
that said that’s my Aslam and I know
that there are other responds that exist
that mean different things to different
people I don’t believe in wearing a
hijab but I respect the decision of
those Muslim women who do i as a Shia
Ismaili Muslim pray three times a day
but I don’t see the common Sunni
practice of praying five times a day as
any more or less legitimate than my own
as Amina would do it wrote in a book of
her speaking of other Muslims neither
their Islam nor my Islam has ultimate
privilege we are all part of a complex
whole in constant motion and
manifestation throughout the history of
multifaceted but totally human
constructions of Islam I’ve learned to
accept my place as part of the complex
whole that is Islam without absolute
izing my interpretation is the true
Islam the right one but you might still
be wondering why does any of this matter
not just to me but to you to all of us
we’ve all heard of this alleged war
between Islam and the West but the
problem is that it’s an imaginary war
it’s a battle based on a single story
that we’ve constructed in our minds to
shift responsibility away from ourselves
right now we are more at war with
ourselves than we are with each other we
are at war with the old tribal impulses
that boil beneath our blood with the
ancient he
instincts to resist change to reject a
difference and to gravitate towards the
comfort of homogeneity and of simple
binaries like moths towards a flame the
consequences of the single-story mindset
have manifested themselves time and time
again only 24 years ago in Rwanda
countless Hutu civilians slaughtered
800,000 Tutsis their neighbors their
friends even their family members
largely because a single story about the
Tutsis prevailed the story that they
were taking the best land that they were
in the way that they were cockroaches in
need of extermination recently the
United States has seen a shocking rise
in hate crimes against several different
groups of people
and behind these numbers are living
breathing feeling people when an
african-american man is imprisoned for
the way he looks he is the victim of a
single story when a woman in a hijab is
beaten for the way she prays she is the
victim of a single story when a gay man
is shot for the way he loves he is the
victim of a single story and the people
who imprison the african-american man
who beats the Muslim woman who shoot the
gay man they are also the victims of a
single story because they are deprived
of the infinite joy and enrichment that
comes from knowing understanding
learning from loving another human being
what happened in Rwanda and what
happened in Germany in Bosnia even in
Mayan Maher didn’t happen very long ago
and on the path we’re headed it’s not
long before something much like it
happens again the multi-storey mindset
may well be the key to our salvation the
difference between peace and war on any
scale as philosopher and professor
Martha Nussbaum wrote the real struggle
that democracy must wage is a struggle
within the individual self between the
urge to dominate and defile the other
and a willingness to live respectfully
on terms of compassion and equality with
all the vulnerability that’s such a life
entails when we adopt the multi-storey
mindset we restore the humanity of the
ignored the devalued the excluded and
also of the included we also reclaim our
own humanity
this struggle to transcend the
single-story is I think one of the
greatest struggles of our time this this
is our jihad thank you [Applause]
a Muslim woman whatever comes to mind
remember that image now open your eyes
and raise your hand if the woman you
pictured looked anything like this I’m
guessing most of you saw a
middle-eastern looking woman in a hijab
because you’ve probably learned through
the media through Hollywood even through
textbooks to associate this image and
this image alone with a Muslim woman in
her TED talk the danger of a single
story
Tyrande Adichie a Nigerian author says
show a people as one thing as only one
thing over and over again and that is
what they become for a long time when I
thought of a Muslim woman I also
pictured something like this before I
pictured myself before I pictured my
mother my grandmother if in our minds
this becomes a Muslim woman then Who am
I hey jobless seventeen-year-old
Canadian with Kenyan roots and Indian
ancestry I call myself a Muslim but I
don’t look like that image in your head
and if that image becomes a definition
then I don’t fit the definition and none
of these women from India and China to
France and Kazakhstan who all call
themselves Muslims fit the definition so
who are they in our minds they don’t
exist at least not as Muslims according
to this single story we’ve constructed
and there is an injustice in that I’m
here today to talk about Islam but I’m
not going to talk about it the way
you’ve probably heard most Muslims talk
about it the perception that all Muslim
women wear hijab or that they’re even
middle-eastern is a singular view of
Islam another is that Islam is violent
or that Islam is peaceful see I can’t
really say that Islam is violent or that
it’s peaceful because both of those
claims offer a single narrow definition
of the
truth caught up in this divisive
struggle to define Islam as one thing or
another Muslims and non-muslims alike
overlook the fact that Islam like any
other religion is not a monolith it
doesn’t have one set of prescribed
beliefs and Islam itself can’t act you
can’t hate teach preach or even promote
because Islam is not a person and it is
the people the believers who have the
beliefs as Diane Moore at Harvard
Divinity School explains religions are
cultural constructs that are constantly
being interpreted and reinterpreted over
time by vastly different people under
vastly different circumstances when we
seek to define a religion exclusively as
one thing we ignore and diminish the
experiences the stories the truths that
are excluded we perpetuate what a deep
she calls the single story I’d go as far
as to say that in our culture today the
way we think is in terms of single
stories we suffer from what I’d like to
call the single story mindset especially
although not only when it comes to Islam
so what do we do how do we stop thinking
in single stories when we talk about
Islam we really should be talking about
the multiple and incredibly diverse
Islam’s
that exist as Edward Said put it this
acknowledgement of internal diversity
within religion is one of the basic
underpinnings of a cultural studies
approach to understanding religion we
like to think of religion in a sort of
vacuum but as Diane Moore explains in
her EDX course on religious literacy
religions do not exist separate from the
human experience isolated from time and
space religions are embedded in cultural
contexts essentially you can’t take any
Muslim Christian Jew Buddhist or Hindu
and analyze their religious beliefs
without looking at their political
historical Geographic circumstances
their culture in short context really is
everything the cultural studies approach
combats the single story with a sort of
multi-story mindset
now I’m not here to try and tell you
which interpretation of Islam is right
or wrong legitimate or not my goal is
just to show you the variety that exists
within interpretations of Islam so it’s
one example of that that variety let’s
look at the concept of jihad in Islam
and how it’s been incredibly dynamic
throughout history jihad an Arabic word
appears several times in the Quran and
it literally means struggle however in
recent history with terrorists claiming
a sort of monopoly over the term many of
us in the West have come to think it
means holy war but that’s just one
interpretation it’s a single story of
jihad this past summer I interned as a
research assistant to dr. Ali Hassan II
professor of Indo Muslim religions and
cultures at Harvard to help research
with a book he’s writing the book is on
Muslim understandings of Islam in one
section of it traces the different
interpretations of jihad over time using
the cultural studies approach even in
the prophet’s era she had had a range of
meanings it could mean physically
fighting those who attacked the Prophet
and his followers but it could also mean
striving to take care of your parents in
old age or struggling against your own
ego later in the eighth and ninth
centuries of the rise of Arab
imperialism and the urge for conquest
some Muslims invoked jihad to legitimize
political goals and in the late eighteen
nineteen hundreds it was actually in the
context of European colonialism that
many Muslims in countries like Algeria
Libya and India used jihad to rally
citizens around anti-colonial movements
fast forward to the late 1900s during
the Cold War and it was the United
States that energized and endorsed the
interpretation of jihad as an armed
struggle revitalizing the concept of the
holy war in order to mobilize Muslims in
Afghanistan against the Soviets it’s
also interesting to look at how some
Muslims interpret jihad today in some
more modern and progressive contexts
take Amino a dude an african-american
Muslim feminist who calls her work
advocating for gender equality the
gender
jihad or take Parvez Sharma an Indian
film director who made a documentary on
gay rights called a jihad for love now
is another example of how religions are
embedded in cultural contexts let’s talk
about women in Islam like me you’ve
probably heard some people say that
Islam oppresses women but Islam itself
can’t oppress anyone or anything and we
can’t make statements like this without
compromising a large chunk of truth
there are Muslims and even Muslim
majority countries that don’t treat
women and men as equals but there are
also those that do with an any religion
there exists not only differing but also
completely contradictory interpretations
and beliefs and what’s more productive I
think in trying to deny contradiction
and to take polar opposite sides is to
try and understand why and how those
contradictions arise as many of you may
know in Saudi Arabia the government only
recently ruled that women be allowed to
drive without the permission of their
male Guardians and there are still many
restrictions on women’s rights in the
country CNN reports that Saudi women
still can’t marry divorce travel or get
work without permission from their male
Guardians but just because this takes
place within a Muslim majority country
doesn’t mean that the oppression of
women is an Islamic problem Wahhabi ISM
the specific type of Islam that Saudi
Arabia was founded on that it thrives on
today has been described by the global
community as puritanical ultra
conservative and it represents a very
very small minority of the many Islam’s
that exist around the world today in
1985 in a speech Pakistan’s first female
Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto declared
it is not Islam which restricts women it
is not Islam which provides for
discrimination it is men it’s no
surprise then that some men like many
Wahabis who live in patriarchal
societies and want to preserve their
dominance over women will interpret the
Quran interpret Islam
ways that justify the oppression of
women like believers of any faith they
interpret religion within the bounds of
their existing contexts and ideologies
Saudi Arabia is also just one Muslim
majority country of around 50 worldwide
each with their own distinct histories
consider the fact that the United States
has yet to have a female president and
that Pakistan Bangladesh Turkey
Indonesia Kosovo Senegal and Kazakhstan
are all Muslim majority countries that
have had a female head of government or
head of state also keep in mind that
even in predominantly Christian
countries like the u.s. women could even
vote until the early 1900s
speaking of Christianity the cultural
studies approach doesn’t just apply to
Islam many of you are probably familiar
with this image of Jesus and this is
likely how most Westerners see him but
travel across the world and you might
find a people who believe that Jesus
looked like this or like this or like
any of these other different depictions
situated in different cultural contexts
and just as Muslims can find
justification for hegemony terrorism and
social justice all in the same religious
Scripture the Quran so can Christians
and there’s at one point the American
South and the KKK used the Bible to
legitimize slavery and white supremacy
while in the 1960s African Americans
used the same text to support race
racial equality and freedom as Margaret
Atwood and author wrote in an article
entitled the battle between action and
belief Northup Frey used to say that the
Bible is not a book you judge it’s a
book that judges you since there are so
many contrary opinions and teachings in
it the group of them you select will say
a lot about who you are so let me now
tell you a bit about my Islam and by
extension a bit about who I am and why
I’m standing here today I could tell you
about growing up in Canada as a first
generation Canadian or about my mother’s
passion for social development in health
care I could tell you about living in
Calgary Alberta with a Muslim
mayor and a strong Shia a smiley
community or about my liberal arts
boarding school in Massachusetts and I
could explain to you how each of these
aspects of my own context my own
location and time and space have shaped
Who I am what I believe and how I
interpret my religion but let me spare
you the long backstory and tell you that
I believe in the absolute truth that all
people are created equal
I believe in the power of diversity and
difference so if I did not see in my
aslam a fundamentally egalitarian and
pluralistic outlook I would not be a
Muslim but I do and I am my Aslam means
peace justice compassion service but
that said that’s my Aslam and I know
that there are other responds that exist
that mean different things to different
people I don’t believe in wearing a
hijab but I respect the decision of
those Muslim women who do i as a Shia
Ismaili Muslim pray three times a day
but I don’t see the common Sunni
practice of praying five times a day as
any more or less legitimate than my own
as Amina would do it wrote in a book of
her speaking of other Muslims neither
their Islam nor my Islam has ultimate
privilege we are all part of a complex
whole in constant motion and
manifestation throughout the history of
multifaceted but totally human
constructions of Islam I’ve learned to
accept my place as part of the complex
whole that is Islam without absolute
izing my interpretation is the true
Islam the right one but you might still
be wondering why does any of this matter
not just to me but to you to all of us
we’ve all heard of this alleged war
between Islam and the West but the
problem is that it’s an imaginary war
it’s a battle based on a single story
that we’ve constructed in our minds to
shift responsibility away from ourselves
right now we are more at war with
ourselves than we are with each other we
are at war with the old tribal impulses
that boil beneath our blood with the
ancient he
instincts to resist change to reject a
difference and to gravitate towards the
comfort of homogeneity and of simple
binaries like moths towards a flame the
consequences of the single-story mindset
have manifested themselves time and time
again only 24 years ago in Rwanda
countless Hutu civilians slaughtered
800,000 Tutsis their neighbors their
friends even their family members
largely because a single story about the
Tutsis prevailed the story that they
were taking the best land that they were
in the way that they were cockroaches in
need of extermination recently the
United States has seen a shocking rise
in hate crimes against several different
groups of people
and behind these numbers are living
breathing feeling people when an
african-american man is imprisoned for
the way he looks he is the victim of a
single story when a woman in a hijab is
beaten for the way she prays she is the
victim of a single story when a gay man
is shot for the way he loves he is the
victim of a single story and the people
who imprison the african-american man
who beats the Muslim woman who shoot the
gay man they are also the victims of a
single story because they are deprived
of the infinite joy and enrichment that
comes from knowing understanding
learning from loving another human being
what happened in Rwanda and what
happened in Germany in Bosnia even in
Mayan Maher didn’t happen very long ago
and on the path we’re headed it’s not
long before something much like it
happens again the multi-storey mindset
may well be the key to our salvation the
difference between peace and war on any
scale as philosopher and professor
Martha Nussbaum wrote the real struggle
that democracy must wage is a struggle
within the individual self between the
urge to dominate and defile the other
and a willingness to live respectfully
on terms of compassion and equality with
all the vulnerability that’s such a life
entails when we adopt the multi-storey
mindset we restore the humanity of the
ignored the devalued the excluded and
also of the included we also reclaim our
own humanity
this struggle to transcend the
single-story is I think one of the
greatest struggles of our time this this
is our jihad thank you [Applause]
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