Author Susan Muaddi Darraj presented "Honor Killings, Veiled Women, and Miss USA: The Road Ahead for Arab Feminism," Thursday evening in the Westhampton College Living Room, where about 100 people gathered to hear the talk about the rights and status of Muslim women in the modern age.
Darraj, a Christian of Middle-Eastern descent, holds a Master's degree in English literature and teaches at a community college in Maryland. She recently published "Scheherazade's Legacy: Arab and Arab-American Women on Writing."
Much of her lecture revolved around refuting stereotypes she says have developed about Muslim women and issues in the Arab community.
The veil posed a particular problem, she said, because efforts to force women to remove them might actually be harming those who felt compelled to have done so in order to please their families. The French legislature has recently passed a law against wearing veils, something Darraj viewed as "only justifying more state intervention into people's lives."
"There is a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of the Arab women in the Arab world," Muaddi said. She said that although for some women in the Middle East, the image of the silent, submissive, and oppressed women was accurate, for many more Arab women this image was quite far removed from the truth of their everyday lives.
She was also quick to point out that men, as well as women, wear a type of veil called a headdress, and that the veil "doesn't work as a symbol" of the Muslim world.
The other large topic on the agenda was honor killings, though she lamented the Western world's concern "as if these are the only two problems," citing poverty, as well as little access to media, when describing why Middle Eastern women didn't organize more frequently. Honor killings are when family members, usually women, are killed by their families for a moral or social transgression.
Darraj brought up the case of Du'a Khalil, a 17-year-old Iraqi girl stoned to death by her family for allegedly converting from Yazidi, a Kurdish religion, to Islam. Honor killings, Darraj said, are usually committed by the young people of a family, who face less severe punishment because of their youth.
But the killers can become shunned by the community, and the reputation can follow them into adulthood.
"No good comes from calling the honor killings," Darraj said. "They should be called murder."
Lastly, she touched on the Miss USA pageant, which was recently won by a Muslim -- Rima Fakih -- for the first time in its history. Though she acknowledged the organization's stated purposes for scholarships and community engagement, she also expressed skepticism that it advanced the cause of women's rights.
Crowd reaction was positive, and Catherine Matthews, a WILL member and attendee said "I don't know much about the subject, but it was nice how she tied it all together."
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According to its website, Women Involved in Living and Learning is a nationally recognized program in which women explore gender and diversity issues both in and out of the classroom.
This is the WILL program's 20th year on campus, and its series continues Nov. 8 with a lecture titled "Land, Memory & Desire: A Southern Queer Love Story."
Contact reporters Milos Jovanovic and Masato Tsuruta at milos.jovanovic@richmond.edu and masato.tsuruta@richmond.edu
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