I was in class a few days ago, minding my own business (with my classmates) when my Language lecturer decided to ‘connect’ with me. I’ve observed that she tries to connect with different students unsuccessfully, making very basic mistakes in cross-cultural engagement.
For example, she kept on insisting on calling a Filipino classmate of mine “sayang”, a phrase that means something close to “darling” in Malay, but has a negative meaning (something like wasteful or wasted) in Tagalog. This continued for a few weeks until another classmate politely informed the lecturer that the student in question would rather be called by her own name.
So, fast forward to this week, and we got into a discussion about how I’d look better without my scarf on. I told her jokingly that if she knew what I looked like without it, she’d prefer it on too. So she starts on how Muslim men don’t have to cover up, to which I replied, yes, they do, only to a different extent. So the rest of the group chimed in about their own experiences, which was fun (because my class is a bit of a United Nations but without the bickering) for a while, until the lecturer ended the whole thing with - “But… nonsense right that men don’t have to cover up.”
To which I replied, “But it’s not nonsense to me.”
Okay, so I get the Western feminist argument about Muslim women being oppressed because we don’t get to leave our hair free to the wind and all that, but I guess this perception has seeped into the local Singaporean psyche. Or at least in the case of this lecturer.
Which brought me back to thinking about my role as a teacher (should I decide to want to make some money out of this course I’m taking) and how, even at the age of 33, I kind of expected my lecturer to behave in a way that was befitting the knowledge she was imparting (Montessori stressed a lot on dignity, respect, yadda yadda yadda…). Perhaps being a ‘proper’ student again (which is different from when I was taking those short courses in SAP, ITIL, iChain dan lain-lain i-Products) brought me back to those times when you do put Teachers (or persons of knowledge) on a pedestal. Never mind that it’s in a little college in a dodgy building (dodgy from 6pm onwards… heh!). More things to think about if ever one of my essays asked me to define my role as a Montessori teacher.
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So Meeshlet forwarded me this excellent article that talks about the Arab Muslim Woman (though this article speaks to me as a Muslim woman in general) as a feminist and why the label (feminist) doesn’t comfortably roll off our tongues when we try to describe our ‘worldview’.
From “Sorry, but we don’t need ’saving’ by Western feminists”:
Despite such achievements, it seems that American feminists are more concerned with the way these women dress rather than their substance; a notion that defeats feminism’s very essence. It is up to the Arab woman to decide whether the hijab or abaya is a religious obligation or a part of her cultural identity, for instance.
A lot of Western feminists refuse to accept that there are women who willingly choose this form of dress over the Western alternatives. The same reasoning holds for many other aspects of an Arab woman’s life, such as freedom to choose to stay at home and be a devoted mother.
A friend’s mother, who was visiting the country for the first time from the United Kingdom, watched a young woman stroll through the mall and made an astute observation: “She’s wearing an abaya yet she has the walk of such a liberated woman,” she said. It must not have occurred to her that maybe, just maybe, the Emirati woman had decided not to make a choice between the two.
Yeah. So I’m tempted to print this article and give my lecturer some extra reading for once.
