Attack of the Scareveils!

A bit more than halfway through Doña Bárbara now, and can't rush it because I'm trying to meet deadlines. Still, there's time for a bit of WTFery about something I saw in a bookstore at the Abu Dhabi Airport:


Just look at it! An entire shelf of Oppressed Muslim Women, testifying against the atrocities of their patriarchal cultures! Clockwise from top left: Jasvinder Sanghera's Daughters of Shame, Souad's Burned Alive, Betty Mahmoody's Not Without My Daughter, Jean Sasson's Mayada, Daughters of Arabia, Princess, Siba Shakib's Samira & Samir, Jean Sasson's Desert Royal. (No, I don't know what Jack Hight's Siege is doing in there.)

Pretty much all these books are from the same publisher, Bantam. And while a good lot of them may be legit (they're all allegedly non-fiction books), there's a fair number that have been exposed as complete fakes: Burned Alive is pretty clearly a hoax, and Jean Sasson's whole Saudi Princess Sultana series has been accused of plagiarism and fictionalisation on several counts, too. (Bantam was also the publisher that first won the bid to publish the religiously taboo potboiler, The Jewel of Medina.)

How am I supposed to feel about this? Should I be awed at the UAE's liberalness in allowing these books to be sold at all in their country? Impressed at the bookstore's enterprising attitude, given that these are exactly the kind of demonising fairy tales the West wants to hear from the Muslim world?

The truth is, of course, that I'm creeped out by how a single Euro-American publisher can corner the market on exploitation exotica, published regardless of fact-checking procedures and accountability, and how an institution in the UAE can lap this up, presenting these stories in the absence of context.

Conservative Islamic culture as practised today does indeed produce human rights nightmares: honour killings and religiously justified rape and abuse and slavery all really do happen. But, lumping the lies together with the truths produces a monstrous, unreal image of the Evil Muslim Man, from whom the pitiful Muslim Woman must be rescued by the West. Gayatri Spivak and Edward Said have said loads about this kind of thing.

And of course, there are genuine, intelligent Muslim female voices speaking out against human rights abuses beyond victim narratives: figures like Irshad Manji, Dina Zaman, Marina Mahathir and Shirin Ebadi. They're the folks the bookstore should stock, right next to the cover jackets of oppressed veiled women, I suppose.

Yeah, it's ironic that I'm addressing issues of authenticity on a blog that mainly deals with fiction. I just freaking hate it when people deliberately misrepresent exotic cultures for their own benefit.

Aside from that, Abu Dhabi Airport is pretty cool, and Etihad Airways is a great way to fly.

See you again on the blog in less than a week, hopefully.