Muslim Women Debrief After Trump’s Win

Participants in an Iraqi-American feminist playwright’s workshop gathered to discuss the election.
Ghazala Khan
Ghazala KhanIllustration by Tom Bachtell

One of the many received notions shattered by last week’s election was the belief, among supporters of Hillary Clinton, that women of all creeds and colors would band together to elect the first female President. That didn’t happen. Fifty-three per cent of white women voters took a pass on Clinton and threw their support behind the self-proclaimed groper. (A few went further, coming to Trump rallies in T-shirts that said things like “Hillary Couldn’t Satisfy Her Husband / Can’t Satisfy Us.”)

Last Thursday night, as protesters marched on Fifth Avenue, seven young feminists gathered in a midtown theatre to reflect on what had happened. They had a unique perspective: all were of Middle Eastern heritage, and some were recent immigrants. They’d got to know one another in a creative-writing workshop at Queens College, called Places of Pilgrimage, which was started by Heather Raffo, an Iraqi-American playwright. Raffo’s new play, “Noura,” reimagines Henrik Ibsen’s 1879 feminist work, “A Doll’s House,” from the viewpoint of an Iraqi refugee living in New York City.

Raffo had instructed her students to read Ibsen and write about their experiences growing up in the patriarchal societies of the Middle East. Many wrote about feeling oppressed by other women. In Egypt, where female genital mutilation is common, “it was often the mothers and aunts who were the biggest enforcers of the practice,” Raffo said. She went on, “What has come up in my writing and other women’s writing is how cruel women can be to each other.”

Reem Razek, twenty-four, grew up in Egypt and in Saudi Arabia; as a teen-ager, she complained about being treated differently from her brothers. When she was eighteen, her father, a doctor, had her committed to an insane asylum after she told him that she no longer believed in the teachings of Islam. (She eventually persuaded her doctors that she was a believer and defected during a family trip to upstate New York.) Razek said that, during her rebellious years, “I noticed a lot of the women in my family believed the same things that I did. But they were pissed off at me for saying it out loud.” A friend disowned her publicly but sent her private messages on Facebook, saying, “I wish I had the courage to do that.”

Razek talked about Trump’s campaign. “When I saw the women who were defending him after the pussy-grabbing comments, it reminded me so much of the women in the Muslim Brotherhood who’d defend bad things that the Brotherhood guys did,” she said. “They’d say, ‘Men and women are different, and we have to accept that we’re the weaker sex.’ I think a lot of women struggle with the Stockholm-syndrome thing.”

When they were living in Arab countries, the women said, they resented pressure from family members to be “modest.” But during the campaign they found themselves wanting to defend Muslim traditions. Talk turned to Trump’s attack on Ghazala Khan, the Gold Star mother who appeared at the Democratic National Convention wearing a hijab; Trump implied that she didn’t speak because she was muzzled by her husband. Alexandria Khalil, who is half Egyptian and half Puerto Rican, said, “That was when I realized how angry I was.”

Aya Darwazeh, who is Palestinian-Jordanian, said that she was upset by the way Americans “look down on Middle Eastern women in terms of their dress. People assume that we’re repressed. It’s demeaning. A lot of white American women don’t realize the hijab isn’t forced on us.”

Raffo said that the hijab is powerful because “it’s a visual.” But the stereotyping goes both ways. Her seven-year-old daughter has been drawing pictures of Trump. “She always draws him flanked by two babes,” she said. “With the big boobs, the tight dresses, heels. Look at his daughter, his wife—women as accessories.”

The women talked about the pressure they felt, in America, to be sexy. Razek said, “It’s the opposite of the expectation of modesty, but it almost feels the same.” Her relatives back in Egypt are Trump fans. “My father had all his books. He had DVDs of ‘The Apprentice.’ He was, like, ‘This is what a man should be like.’ ”

In 2012, Egypt held its first Presidential elections, and Razek’s father and her brothers got excited about the Muslim Brotherhood. “With the Brotherhood, people wanted to kick out the old regime. It was the same narrative as with Trump,” she said. When Mohamed Morsi was elected, “my father said, ‘Wait a few years. Egypt is going to be so great!’ Now it’s worse.”

None of the women had on a hijab, but they said that friends who wear it have been harassed lately. (One woman in the workshop had been pushed down a flight of stairs in the subway while pregnant.) Yet Raffo’s students said they did not feel threatened. Ni, who left Iraq in 2009, after working as a translator for the U.S. military, said, “I lived for twenty-five years and a day in a country where I was always afraid. I was born in a war. I didn’t have a home, a family. I didn’t have normal things. I’m tired of running away. This is my home now, and I’m going to stand up for it. I have no more room for fear in my life.” ♦