Feldman & Shariah

I was just as baffled as plenty of other people when Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, suggested the acceptance by the UK government of Shariah for certain family law issues in UK Muslim communities. I associated Shariah with harsh and oppressive patriarchal norms and acts within Muslim society, and I could not understand why the Archbishop would publicly endorse such a legal system. In the March 16th edition of The New York Times Magazine Noah Feldman attempts to re-access the issue by providing a brief historical overview of the origins, transformations, and current calls for the reinstatement of Shariah in the Muslim world. His primary focus is on the role Shariah has played in balancing power within Muslim states and safeguarding individual legal rights (life, property, and legal process). In this telling, Shariah has been wielded by religious scholars as a means of keeping a certain class of political elites from gaining or asserting too much power and overrunning the legal rights of the everyday citizens. Thus, its revival today – in a more “legislative” form, shorn of its dependence upon scholars as spokesmen -- is largely articulated and advanced by groups hoping to place limits on autocratic regimes which they believe no longer respect the rule of law.

Individuals and groups hoping to transform society use ideologies, discourses, and images at hand; resistance and change do not operate in a vacuum, they are embedded within larger histories. Prof. Feldman does us a service by pointing out the ways in which Shariah has been used to support individual rights, including those of women. He makes it easier to grasp why Shariah would be considered – even by women – a means to achieve justice within Muslim societies.

Obviously, a writer can only cover so much ground in a Sunday magazine section of a newspaper. But questions remain. The essay serves as a corrective to limited thinking about the ways in which Shariah law addresses women, but it does not dispel some of the deeply troubling questions concerning women’s rights. Many of the questions I have concern local rather than theoretical issues. Shariah is being requested and fought for in certain Muslim states. How do those advocating other legal “frameworks” (which might extend even broader protection to women)– such as international human rights or secularized, “liberal” constitutional rights – fair in these states? And how do Islamist groups in those states respond to criticisms by these groups? Prof. Feldman writes that “In its essence, Shariah aspires to be a law that applies equally to every human, great or small, rule or ruled. No one is above it, and everyone at all times is bound by it.” But as feminists have gone to great lengths to show us, men and women are often “bound” by laws in radically different ways. Prof. Feldman asserts that “large numbers of women support…the ideal of Shariah in particular.” I would like to know more about the particulars of this support. For support of any regime or ideology within societies with such highly circumscribed gender orders begs the question of how consent, consensus, and support are arrived at. And then there is the local Western issue. Prof. Feldman starts the essay by referencing the Rowan Williams controversy, but he never responds directly to the criticisms the Archbishop’s statement brought forth. One of the most vexing being how to square Shariah with a “western” liberal democratic legal system which has come to grant (if not completely achieve in theory or practice) women an array of rights which are not found in the Shariah framework.

Fargo

So I gave Fargo another chance. And I still walked away with the same sour taste in my mouth. It's a real head scratcher, for it seems that the Coen brothers grasp the seriousness of the subject matter, but they just can't get past their tendency to caricature. With a film as outrageous as Raising Arizona, the art of caricature works in their favor: we don't need to believe these people exist, so their blank impossibility doesn’t place us in a cooly superior position to them. But with material as brutal as the Coens’ claim Fargo is built upon, caricature exhausts itself in condescension and reduces the moral and ethical issues to vacuous nonsense. When the pregnant female cop (Frances McDormand) gives her “all for a little bit of money” speech to the captured killer, it comes across as rank idiocy. Is it possible that in the presence of so much wanton brutality she could be such a simpleton? More importantly, any possibility of spectatorial identification with her judgment of the killers has been negated by the Coens’ patronizing treatment of her, her husband (another cop), and anyone else not associated with the killers. Anyone not evil or compromised in some way is depicted as a north country fool; If the Coens could have, they would have all these creatures just say “doncha knooo” for the entire film. The same skills with narrative that they have been praised for with No Country for Old Men, are in ample evidence here. The first thirty minutes -- before the caricatures take over -- is a vigorous piece of film-making.

Vietnam -- explicit and implicit

I’m looking for any excuse to link to a couple of songs I’ve heard recently which have really blown me away. So, I’ll try this gambit. Steve Goodman’s a cappella rendering of "Penny Evans" is explicitly about the USofA’s war on Vietnam and the effect this war has on one American family. Bob Martin’s “mill town” (from his 1972 Midwest Farm Disaster album) never mentions Vietnam, but I can’t shake the feeling that the war hovers over this song of working class, small town USA life. The Martin mp3 can be found at The Rising Storm, an excellent blog which should be consulted quite often. Here’s the Goodman clip