ABSTRACT
Rickie Solinger has struck on a key theme of our times: the power of the story to change the world. So when 9/11 shocked the ‘West’, many had to struggle to make sense of so-called Muslim cultures, which were so readily presented to us by our political leaders and media through stories of an ‘enemy other’. Sadly, politicians and media are often not to be trusted as leaders in these matters. They frequently tell very inadequate, and sometimes malevolent, stories. I was friends with a few Muslims, knew a little about the diversity across some fifty Muslim nations, and had visited a few. But I really knew very little. So I embarked upon a programme of reading ‘good stories’ about them. Gradually, listening to the stories of ‘others’ afforded me real insight into the diversity and complexity of Muslim sexualities and gender and hopefully prevented me from making strong and silly judgments. Lila Abu-Lughod’s powerful and deeply humanistic writings ‘against culture’ introduced me to the world of women in a Bedouin tribe showing their struggle to uphold ‘honor’ (‘agl) and ‘modesty’ (hashaam) though poetry, resisting tribal hierarchy with rebellion in myriad quiet ways. I learnt also that there were many pious Muslim women who resisted the victim model that had been forced upon them by the ‘West’ (Abu-Lughod, 1986, 2013). In stark contrast, Evelyn Blackwood (2010) guided me into a very different world of Muslim women in Indonesia: the Tombois who, as masculine females, identified as men and desired women, while their girlfriends viewed themselves as normal women who desired men. These contradictory practices draw upon but subvert both conventional Islamic and international notions of men and women. Meanwhile, I learnt from Marcia Inhorn’s (2012) research on infertility amongst Arab men that many of these men are a long way from any violent and macho stereotype and struggle sensitively and caringly with their loving wives over problems of infertility. Here was the ‘New Arab Man’ who was developing new forms of masculinity in the face of a changing world. I learnt too from Momin Rahman (2014) – an ‘English Pakistani Muslim Queer’ – about active ‘gay and lesbian’ Muslims in the ‘West’ confronting both homophobia and Islamophobia
simultaneously: under attack from two fronts. I learnt of the struggles with modernising sexualities from many Muslim voices. Working through the power of empathy , each of these books became part of a politics of storytelling for me. The world changes in both small and large ways through stories like these, and ultimately political change depends on good storytelling. In this article I plan to synoptically review a few of its recent forms, developments and polemics.
