Donne musulmane: un ritratto contro stereotipi e luoghi comuni

“Muslim women: a portrait against stereotypes and clichés"

Telling aspects of Muslim women's lives with simplicity. A complex, diverse and globalised reality rooted in and confronted with the historical and religious tradition of the first centuries of Islam. Past and present, stereotypes and prejudices, modernity and change, the long struggle for recognition of rights and role in society, without forgetting important aspects of women's lives, family, work and space in the public sphere. "Muslim women: a portrait against stereotypes and clichés" is a well-meaning encounter, narrated with passion and respect, with a pinch of polemical vis and a touch of lightness between veiled styles and Islamic fashion.
The text is aimed at an interested but non-expert audience without delving into technicalities and academic speculations. The popular intent is supported by an apparatus of notes through which information is provided and texts and articles are indicated for further study.
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Foreword
Those who attend meetings and lectures dedicated to knowledge of and relations with the Muslim world often arrive there with ideas and considerations that are the product of the collective imagination. This is substantiated through a process of synthesising information learnt from the media - news gleaned from magazines, social media, talk shows and television series - to which is sometimes added a smattering of personal studies, experiences and readings. A mixture filtered through one's own scale of values and cultural, political, ideological background. The end result oscillates between fascination, bewilderment, distancing, disapproval and incomprehension, to the point of open hostility towards a system of life that appears opposed to our own. In such a context, it becomes complicated to recount the Islamic world with criteria of reality. It is even more difficult to present the Muslim world to women. An ambiguous relationship is woven between women's achievements, experiences, stories and struggles - personal and collective - aimed at obtaining rights and emancipation in the two worlds: the Western and the Muslim. The aim of this publication is to tell the story of Islam from the female point of view, unveiling stereotypes, unhinging prejudices and overcoming fences erected, at times, even unconsciously. What is intended is to divulge and clarify without making value judgements and without drawing a rigid dividing line between 'pro and versus' that divides customs, choices and beliefs into the 'best' and 'worst' categories. The tools of knowledge and scientific study of the main disciplines of Arab-Islamic culture, together with the direct reading of religious, historical and legal sources, accompanied by forty years of experience in the field through academic activity and research in a long and rich professional career, are brought together in this text to provide elements of knowledge and understanding.
Readers are presented with a text designed to make it easy - but not simple - to understand the complexity of the Islamic world as seen from the side of women. A work that adopts the women's point of view by turning its gaze from East to West.
The idea arose from the perception of an unexpressed question, the recognition of the need for analytical tools to help go beyond an implicit, hidden if not unconscious thought. Answering the questions that I have been asked most frequently over the years, clarifying without making a value judgement - neither just nor unjust - is what I propose to do in these pages. Inevitably, cultural attitudes, legacies, stratified and hidden influences in thought that are the product of mindsets, ideas and images resurface in every person. European and Western colonialism, in its consideration of other cultural models, has always pointed to women's subordinate status in other cultures as a clear sign of inferiority, this is particularly true of Islam, which counts the use of the veil and the segregation of women among its marked and visible distinctive cultural signs. Elaborating a reflection on Muslim women, with their just demands for autonomy, independence and self- assertion, does not elide adherence to the Islamic culture, tradition and identity.It is too easily forgotten that the main protagonists of the battles and struggles for human rights in the world of Islam are and remain Muslims. They criticise and denounce the distortions of oppressive and dictatorial regimes without renouncing their own cultural and religious universe: by virtue of Islam's principle of equality, they fight their battles, pointing out the pressure and contradiction of Islamic laws that could and should protect them, and highlighting the extent to which customary laws, local and tribal traditions condemn them to invisibility. The reflection, which we would like to become collective, concerns the transversality of a phenomenon: the persistence of patriarchal models. In every hemisphere where the male universe dominates, a life of limitations and oppression has been imposed on women. Wherever there is a law in force that excludes them from the public sphere, from the 'polis', they remain - as Nawal es- Sadawi, an Egyptian feminist, puts it - invisible because "...men neither veil nor undress" .