Saturday, November 21, 2020

In Her Words: “Muslim Women Are Everything”

Breaking stereotypes and tired tropes
Gisele Marie Rocha launched her own heavy metal band in 2016, after fronting her brother’s band for four years.Fahmida Azim
Author Headshot

By Francesca Donner

Gender Director

“I have wanted to write this book since I was 14, the year I finally understood Muslim women are everything.”

— Dr. Seema Yasmin, author of “Muslim Women Are Everything”

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Tahani Amer, an astronaut who grew up in the suburbs of Cairo, endured a string of no’s before she finally secured a job with NASA’s Aeronautical Research program.

Marah Zahalka, Noor Daoud and Mona Ennab — members of the “Speed Sisters,” an all-female car racing team based in the Palestinian territories — defy expectations with every race they win.

Gisele Marie Rocha is the unexpected face, in a niqab and burqa, behind Eden Seed, a thrash metal band in Brazil.

Tahani Amer dreamed of becoming an engineer. She is now at NASA.Fahmida Azim

These women are validation of the premise behind Dr. Seema Yasmin’s new book — that Muslim women can be anything. The book, “Muslim Women Are Everything,” was released earlier this year.

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More than 40 profiles of Muslim women — illustrated by Fahmida Azim — aim to tear down the tiresome tropes of what Muslim women are: what they look like, what they wear, and what they do or don’t do. Page after page dares the reader to say these women cannot, or should not.

As for Dr. Yasmin: She is a Cambridge-trained medical doctor, a specialist in epidemiology, a journalist and the director of the Stanford Health Communication Initiative. She teaches at Stanford and is a visiting professor at U.C.L.A.

She didn’t get there easily.

She was born in Britain to a teenage mother, who was stuck in an arranged marriage. When Dr. Yasmin was just 5, her mother left the family to pursue her own education. As Dr. Yasmin tells it, “My mum was like: ‘I’m going to leave everything I know behind. I’m going to find a way to university so that you can have an education.’”

What followed was a childhood shuttling between worlds — the university where her mother was studying and her family’s conservative Indian Muslim community in the British Midlands.

Dr. Yasmin told me that the book was born out of a “frustration that the narratives about Muslim women were so one sided, so narrow, so unimaginative.” What followed was a conversation about breaking barriers and defying expectations, the world over.

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Samia Orosemane is a comedian. At first, success in the entertainment business was elusive. Doors kept closing in her face.Fahmida Azim

How did you get the idea for this book?

It all started as a very angry tweet. I was just absolutely fed up that even when Ibtihaj Muhammad, the American fencer, won a medal at the Olympics, the way that she and other Muslim women were celebrated was like, “Oh my God, look at that woman, she’s an athlete, and she’s a Muslim.”

And I was like: Wait, are you really trying to celebrate us by making it sound like we can’t do anything?

There was an editor who saw the tweet and said: This would make for a great essay, will you write an essay? And I said, no. Instead, I ended up writing this kind of prose poem. It was called “Yes, Muslim Women Do Things,” and it featured Muslim women doing amazing things like digging salad out from between their teeth and taking a nap. My point was that some of us do open-heart surgery; some of us go scuba diving; some of us are too lazy to do the dishes.

I think it really hit a nerve. A lot of people hated it. But some publishers were like, this would look great as a book.

The proposal started off about fictional women doing esoteric things and then it became about real-life Muslim women who are troubling all the definitions and messing up all the boundaries of what it means to be a woman and what it means to be Muslim.

Su’ad Abdul Khabeer is a hip hop professor, a scholar of race, culture and Islam.Fahmida Azim

There’s this perverse surprise among some people that Muslim women can drive or be funny or write or, well, do anything. What explains it?

I think it’s misogyny combined with Islamophobia. When you have a dominant culture that is male and white, it allows very little space for the rest of us to be our full selves. That’s how I came up with the title. I didn’t want there to be one idea of a Muslim woman. There are some Muslim women in this book who would probably disagree with the views of some of the other Muslim women in this book. And that’s great. We need to have that disagreement.

Nevertheless, many people still have a narrow vision of what a Muslim woman is …

Right. The stereotype is a meek South Asian woman who had an arranged marriage and wears a hijab and has lots of children.

Plus, in the U.K. and the U.S., the perception of Muslim women often excludes Black women.

How do you view your work against the backdrop of Black Lives Matter?

I don’t want to take away from the B.L.M. movement’s call for the rights of Black people, but Black Muslims do account for a fifth of all U.S. Muslims so those struggles are certainly connected.

It was really important to me that the true breadth of the Muslim experience be included in the book. But I’ve not been shocked when people have asked me on Twitter if the book features any Black Muslim women, the expectation being that there won’t be any. The bar is so low when it comes to inclusion.

In your book, you write about the comedian Zahra Noorbakhsh and how, after one of her shows, some fans came up to her and said, “You must be one of the good Muslims.” It was so disheartening to read this.

I don’t know what Zahra said in the moment, and I’m sure that she’s had many of those moments, but I look at how she’s taken on the comedy industry, and how the industry excludes a lot of people. To me she’s been othered and marginalized, and now she’s saying she’s going to create a new model that’s way more inclusive and that brings in all voices and perspectives. I feel like that’s actually her response to that moment and to all those moments.

“The choice to cover, or not, is a personal and spiritual choice for Muslims, and a political and cultural one influenced by geography, fashion the law, and the weather” writes Dr. Yasmin.Fahmida Azim

You have made the point that the outside world — whether it’s male clerics or Western politicians — can’t help weighing in on Muslim women’s choice to cover. Why do you think that is?

Because they don’t believe our bodies are ours. They police our bodies. I used to wear a hijab when I was younger. I was very devout. And then at some point I decided that wasn’t going to be the way that I presented myself to the world. But that was my decision.

I think that men want to be the ones dictating how women present themselves. For some men in some countries that might mean you must be covered. And then for others it’s like, “Oh no, we think that’s frightening,” or “That must mean you’re oppressed.” But you can be a feminist, you can have agency and you can choose to wear niqab and burqa, like Gisele Marie Rocha, a guitarist in Brazil. She has very clearly articulated why and how she chooses to cover, and how it’s a personal choice.

What hope do you have that things will change?

Things are so bad in the world right now that we have to imagine a better future. Without hope, I think I would just give up and believe that whatever narrow definition exists is all we’ve got. And I refuse to accept that.

Write to us at inherwords@nytimes.com.

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In Her Words is edited by Francesca Donner. Our art director is Catherine Gilmore-Barnes, and our photo editor is Sandra Stevenson.

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Friday, November 20, 2020

On Politics: Trump’s Latest Gambit

The president appears to meddle in Michigan’s electoral process: This is your morning tip sheet.

Trump summons Michigan Republicans to the White House to plan — but time is running out before states certify their results. It’s Friday, and this is your politics tip sheet.

Where things stand

  • President Trump has opened up new lines of contact with Republican state and local officials in Michigan as he seeks to invalidate the state’s results and subvert the national election.
  • With Inauguration Day exactly two months away, Trump plans to meet today at the White House with the Michigan Legislature’s Republican leadership. And he called at least one local Republican elections official this week amid the party’s challenge to the results in Detroit.
  • Michigan’s Senate majority leader, Mike Shirkey, and its speaker of the House, Lee Chatfield, both Republicans, are scheduled to visit Trump this afternoon, according to a person close to the situation. It’s unclear what exactly they plan to discuss.
  • Observers said that Trump appeared to be aiming at having Republican legislatures intervene and appoint pro-Trump electors in states Joe Biden won, throwing the Electoral College to the president when it meets on Dec. 14. But the effort to overturn the election results is all but certain to fail, and has been subject to defeat after defeat in the courts.
  • Both Shirkey and Chatfield have said that whichever candidate has the most votes after the results are certified will receive Michigan’s 16 electoral votes. And Shirkey said this week that Trump’s team was “not going to” succeed in persuading state lawmakers to overturn the election result.
  • The Trump campaign yesterday dropped the last of its federal lawsuits challenging the election results in Michigan, even as it signaled that it would seek to revive a Republican effort to invalidate the ballots coming from Detroit.
  • The Wayne County Board of Canvassers’ two Republican members, Monica Palmer and William Hartmann, initially voted against certifying the results on Tuesday, citing small discrepancies in the vote count from certain precincts. Palmer suggested at one point that votes in suburban precincts could be certified while votes from Detroit, which is predominantly Black, would be declared invalid.
  • They dropped their opposition after a torrent of blowback from Democratic officials and citizens, and the Board of Canvassers approved Wayne County’s results later that day. But on Wednesday night, after Trump called Palmer, it emerged that she and Hartmann had signed affidavits stating that they had been intimidated into approving the results and wanted to rescind their votes.
  • Democratic state officials said the ship had sailed. “There is no legal mechanism for them to rescind their vote,” said Tracy Wimmer, a spokeswoman for the secretary of state’s office. “Their job is done and the next step in the process is for the Board of State Canvassers to meet and certify.”
  • But yesterday, as it withdrew a lawsuit in Michigan, the Trump campaign pointed to Palmer and Hartmann’s affidavits. The deadline in Michigan to certify results is Monday.
  • Trump has also asked aides what Republican officials he could call in other swing states as he tries to stop results from being certified in battlegrounds where Biden won, advisers said.
  • The Trump campaign suffered other legal setbacks yesterday, as judges rejected its arguments in Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania.
  • In Arizona, Judge John Hannah refused to order a re-audit of Maricopa County’s ballots, citing a partial audit that found no irregularities. He also invited the state to ask the G.O.P. to pay the state’s legal fees, pointing to a state law that lets defendants pass their costs on to plaintiffs when a lawsuit is deemed baseless.
  • A Trump-appointed federal judge in Georgia rejected a lawsuit brought by a Republican supporter of the president, saying he had no grounds to sue and calling the relief he was seeking “quite striking.” The plaintiff had wanted to block the certification of election results based on his perception of fraud. (In other Georgia news, the secretary of state there announced last night that the state’s hand recount had not significantly altered Biden’s margin of victory.)
  • And in Pennsylvania, a county judge shot down the Trump campaign’s effort to invalidate more than 2,000 absentee ballots for technical reasons.
  • Rudy Giuliani, the president’s lawyer, said yesterday that the campaign would be announcing more lawsuits in Georgia, and possibly others in Arizona and New Mexico. He said he had evidence of a “centralized” plot of widespread fraud, but provided none.
  • In 2018, Scott Pruitt, the ally of the fossil fuel industry whom Trump tapped to run the Environmental Protection Agency, resigned amid a cloud of ethics investigations — including allegations of profligate spending and first-class trips on the public dime.
  • Now, as Trump’s time in office nears its close, Pruitt’s replacement, Andrew Wheeler, is under scrutiny as well. Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist who had previously served as Pruitt’s deputy, is planning to take two costly trips overseas in the weeks before his job runs out — one to Taiwan and another to four Latin American countries.
  • The taxpayer-funded Taiwan trip alone could cost roughly $300,000. That trip is part of an initiative “to collaborate on issues including the Save our Seas initiative and marine litter, air quality, and children’s health,” a spokesman for Wheeler said.

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Photo of the day

Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times

Trump is set to meet at the White House today with two top Michigan Republicans.

Why Trump’s unprecedented attack on the election is unlikely to succeed.

Trump’s political career has been one long saga of expectations upended and norms busted. His all-out assault this month on the election’s results represents the boldest and most outlandish gambit yet.

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As our reporter Jeremy W. Peters writes in an explainer for our Daily Distortions blog, it is also extremely unlikely to succeed.

Trump’s strategy centers on challenging the results in states and individual counties where he lost, and leaving them be in places that were more favorable to him. There are plenty of examples throughout United States history in which courts have tossed out election results on the local, state and federal levels because of irregularities.

But so far, vanishingly few of the Trump campaign’s claims about voting improprieties have been borne out.

And another thing that history tells us — and that election law experts told Jeremy — is that the legal bar is extremely high when it comes to invalidating the votes of American citizens. Even if they are proved, the irregularities have to be substantial enough to alter the outcome of a race.

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“The prevailing view today is that courts should not invalidate election results because of problems unless it is shown that the problems were of such magnitude to negate the validity of which candidate prevailed,” Edward Foley, an elections law expert at Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law, said in an interview with Jeremy. This tends to be hard to demonstrate, he said, since it’s hard to show which candidate a disputed ballot was intended to be cast for.

On first blush, Biden’s relatively close margins in a number of key states — including Georgia, Wisconsin and Arizona, where his lead is under one percentage point in each — might provide an opening for Trump’s team to challenge enough ballots that it could make the case that a result was invalid.

But even if it showed that a certain number of ballots were wrongly cast or counted, that number would probably have to be much higher than Biden’s margin of victory to prove that the election result could really have been changed.

That standard was met, apparently, in Clark County, Nev., where local officials voted this week to hold a do-over for one race for a county commission seat. Its margin? Exactly 10 votes.

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