Hacking Islam

“My birth at the end of July 1967 makes me a child of the naksa, or setback, as the Arab defeat during the June 1967 war with Israel is euphemistically known in Arabic. My parents’ generation grew up high on the Arab nationalism that Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser brandished in the 1950s. But we “Children of the Naksa,” hemmed in by humiliation, have spent so much of our lives uncomfortably stepping into pride’s large, empty shoes."

Mona's feminism is driven by her questioning of Islam: how women's role has been interpreted and built into our traditions and mode of life. She has repeatedly tried to promote fresh ways of thinking about gender. Along with feminist Muslims, she would say that back in the 7th century, Islam was a progressive religion giving women rights where they had none. Its downfall was a patriarchal culture that corrupted these rights and therefore, oppressed women. We’ll never know if the sources of misogyny in the Arab world derive from Islam, or from imperialism and colonialism that reigned over the Arab world for centuries. If it was these cultures, and not Islam that introduced the systematic oppression of women, I think it’s easy to be put off when words like like “Arab” and “Muslim” are used interchangeably.

I've grown to believe that Mona is on our side. She's not only speaking for the woman who gets cat-called on the street while trying to buy some groceries, she’s speaking for the one who gets beaten because she has an opinion, for the one that is ostracized for her actuality.

Her views are profound because she dares to question Islam, a religion that still holds its ever subjective interpretations to a limit; it is almost as if she is envied her for her carelessness in doing so.