Combining the spirit of Maslaha’s I Can Be She project with the Kiran Project’s extensive and long-term engagement with young women across London, these workshops will focus on building confidence and facilitating access to different forms of media and expression, and will also connect young women with role models within their own communities and empower them to share their own stories and aspirations.
This workshop series is inspired by our direct experiences of working with young Muslim women in different contexts. Each workshop will be run with ten young Muslim women, with each group from a different age bracket. The resulting material will be shown in a local exhibition which will take place in October half term 2011, and then again as part of the overall ICBS exhibition in March 2012.
The multi-dimensional workshops will:
1. Train young women in how to use different forms of media including film, radio, photography, and fine art.
Participants will:
Gain a broad range of skills in areas such as film production, video camera operation, editing, scriptwriting, photography, radio broadcasting, interviewing, and creative arts
Receive training on how to blog and use social media in effective ways, and have the opportunity to gain a greater understanding of broadcasting and communications
Develop skills and familiarity with these different forms of media
Be empowered to use these different forms of communication to reflect upon their own lives and their place in society, sharing rich stories and diverse experiences
2. Introduce young women to inspiring local role models who can help them consider their career paths and aspirations.
This project will:
Create a greater awareness of role models and the important role Muslim women can play within their communities
Enable young people to meet potential role models across a variety of different professions, increasing awareness about the breadth of employment opportunities available to them in careers they feel passionately about. In particular, there are few visible role models within the arts and media world, sectors which can sometimes be perceived as ‘less respectable’
3. Challenge negative stereotypes of Muslim women and empower them demand change and achieve it for themselves.
This project will:
Facilitate the ability of Muslim women to describe their lives in their own words and share their views across a wider spectrum by challenging misrepresentations and prejudice
Who will benefit?
This project will take place across five boroughs in East London. The workshop series will involve a core group of 32 young women directly and will reach a much greater audience through publicity and an online presence where the project outcomes and the journeys of the participants will be shared. The process will be subject to a continuous evaluation, and impact will be measured through a rigorous participant survey. The effect of these workshops will also continue within the existing projects of Maslaha and the Kiran Project.
Specifically:
All of the work will be exhibited in a major exhibition in October (half term) which will bring together the wider networks of the two charities, targeting young people in particular. Maslaha and The Kiran Project will organize a large speaker event around this exhibition which will enable a wider audience to gain from meeting inspiring role models and speakers from the media and arts world. For example, The Kiran Project’s patron is Samira Ahmed, Channel 4 newsreader.
This project will have a strong online presence, enabling us to reach a wider audience and share training tips for budding film makers and photographers. The art and media that is produced (including film clips of role models talking about what inspires them and how they got to where they are today, and the experiences of the participants) will also be shared online, both through our website and social media, enabling us to reach more young people. Maslaha will promote this material in its work in education, for example with schools and youth groups.
This exhibition series will bring together photography, paintings and soundscapes that further explore the compelling stories of featured women from ICBS. These portraits will compliment each other in capturing the vibrant textures of these lives and causes.
The first feature was exhibited at the launch of this campaign on the 31st of March 2011. Muna Hassan, a young Somali health campaigner from East London was the first subject of this exhibition series.
The launch featured:
Photography by Liz Hingley – Liz intimately documents political and social issues, with a particular interest in alternative modes of community living. Her exhibition of 2009 – ‘“Under Gods”: stories from Soho Road’ documented the lives of residents on one of Britain’s most culturally diverse streets in Birmingham. This beautiful portrayal of faith and diversity was featured in the Daily Telegraph and on the BBC 2 Culture Show, and she is currently working on ‘“Under Gods” stories from Paris’.
Paintings by Emily Kirby – Emily’s paintings have been exhibited in Prague, southern Africa, and across the UK. Her work has always been concerned with the study of people, revealing the figure to be a landscape in itself. Her continuing aim is to explore techniques which portray people in a free and powerful way, as a celebration of their identity.
Soundscapes by Angela Robson - Angela is an acclaimed BBC radio documentary maker and has reported from twenty-eight countries, including Rwanda, Tuva and East Timor. A regular contributor to Woman’s Hour on Radio 4, her items have included a week-long series on five ‘Women of the Qu’ran’. She was the winner of the 2008 Lorenzo Natali Prize for Journalism and a finalist in the 2007 British Media and Environment Awards. These soundscapes will bring these stories to life, creating an audio depiction of these women's lives which also allows them to tell their stories in their own words.
Over the course of 2011 we will be fundraising to produce the next nine portraits, in preparation for a major exhibition in March 2012.
In March 2011 - on the 100 year anniversary of International Women’s Day - we took over an empty shop somewhere in Whitechapel to officially launch our campaign to capture the diverse stories of Muslim women in Britain today with an exhibition which featured the story of Muna Hassan, a 27 year old activist and campaigner from Newham.
As well as continuing to build up the films and articles of Muslim women featured on icanbeshe.org, Maslaha will explore some of these stories in more detail through an exhibition series featuring mixed media and visual arts, bringing together photographers, fine art painters, radio producers and more.
Our ICBS workshops with young people takes this one step further by enabling young women to capture their stories for themselves through workshops in film, photography, sound and fine art.
This campaign captures the spirit of everyday activists, visionaries and pioneers – their passions, their experiences, and the paths which led them to dedicate their lives to their causes. It will also provide a platform from which to explore the issues these women are passionate about, incorporating a shared dedication to women’s rights, empowerment and equality.
In March 2012 Maslaha will organize a major exhibition to bring together the work of the artists from the ICBS exhibition series with the work produced by the young women through the workshops in a powerful demonstration of these vibrant lives being told in enthralling ways.
Nana Asma’u was the daughter of Usman dan Fodio, the founder of Sokoto Caliphate – one of the most powerful North African kingdoms of the era. She continues to be honoured in northern Nigeria as an early feminist icon and a pioneer in the field of women’s education.
Women’s education
Nana Asma’u was known throughout the sub-Saharan Muslim world as a leading scholar. Fluent in Arabic, Fulfulde, Hausa and Tamacheq, and well-versed in Arabic, Greek and Latin classics, her great learning was a product of a vibrant tradition of female scholarship. For the Qadiriyya community to which she belonged, education and the pursuit of Truth were religious duties common to both women and men – to deny women the opportunity to develop their God-given talents was to challenge God’s will. Asma’u’s father wrote often on the subject of women’s education:
“How can educated men allow their wives, daughters and female dependents to remain prisoners of ignorance, while they themselves share their knowledge with students every day? Muslim women, do not listen to the speeches of those who are misguided... They deceive you when they preach obedience to your husbands, without telling you of the obedience which is primarily due to Allah and His Prophet.”
In common with many nineteenth-century European women, female scholars often justified their learning as a service to the community, emphasising that only educated women could be good wives and mothers, and fulfil their familial duties.
During the 1830s, Asma’u formed a group of female teachers, called jajis, who travelled throughout the Caliphate educating women from a great range of backgrounds: rich and poor, Muslim and non-Muslim. In turn, each jaji taught their own groups of learned women, called the ‘yan-taru, or “those who congregate together; the sisterhood”. To each jaji she gave a malfa – distinctive balloon-shaped hats usually worn by men.
Poet
In the predominantly oral culture of the Caliphate, learning was overwhelmingly passed on through the spoken word. The key teaching method employed by the jaji was the repetition and memorisation of poetry composed by Asma’u and other female scholars.
Asma’u’s poetry was designed to be as accessible as possible to the widest range of women. She wrote a large collection of poetry in Fulfulde, primarily for the Fulbe aristocracy, and in Hausa, intended for the population at large. She made extensive use of mnemonic devices, enabling her works to be easily memorised by teachers and students, and explained in fuller detail during instruction.
Through historical narrative, elegy and admonition, Asma’u’s poems of guidance became tools for instilling the founding principles of the Caliphate in the minds of its subjects. In her writings, she documented many achievements of the early state, including the Fulani Jihad (1804-1810), in which her father conquered Nigeria and Cameroon.
Politics
As well as educating women for the sake of their own intellectual and spiritual fulfilment, Asma’u’s educational work served a powerful political purpose.
Through the spread of Islamic learning, the inhabitants of the Caliphate’s newly conquered territories could be integrated more thoroughly into the ruling Muslim order. In time, the jajis became symbols of the new state, and their malfa hats emblems of Islam.
Asma’u outlived most of the founding generation of the Caliphate, making her an invaluable source of guidance to its later rulers. When her twin brother Bello succeeded her father as Caliph, Asma’u became his advisor. According to contemporary sources, she wrote instructions to governors, and debated freely with the scholars of foreign princes across North Africa.
References
Beverly Mack and Jean Boyd, One Woman’s Jihad: Nana Asma’u, Scholar and Scribe, (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2000)
Muhammad Jameel Yusha’u, ‘Nana Asma’u’s Tradition: An Intellectual Movement and a Symbol of Women’s Rights in Islam during the 19th Century’, www.gamji.com/article3000/NEWS3642.htm
Katja Werthmann, ‘The Example of Nana Asma’u’, Magazine for Development and Cooperation
With her five month-old son Zane in tow, Lateefa met with Maslaha to discuss her life, art, faith and inspirations.
This artist and designer’s work is heavily inspired by Islamic art and design and draws upon elements which she has encountered through her life. The daughter of Sufi converts, Lateefa spent much of her childhood travelling around North America, Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. Noting that the she has come to see the geometry in Islamic artwork as a framework to an otherwise chaotic backdrop, she similarly compares her faith to being like an anchor in her life.
Getting to where she is now has been a long path, which has reinforced her faith and impacted her work. However, Lateefa is confident in her future ahead and we all look forward to seeing where it takes her. For more information or to see Lateefa’s work, please go to Lateefaspiker.com.
Dr Rabia Malik is a senior systemic psychotherapist and lead for the Marlborough Cultural Therapy Centre based at the Marlborough Family Service in London. She specialises in working with South Asian and Muslim clients. She conducted her doctoral reserach on the cultural construction of mental illness amongst Pakistanis and more recently co-authored a report commissioned by the Muslim Youth Helpline and the National Youth Agency on the need for faith-sensitive support services for young Muslims.
Rabia is involved in a number of Muslim community initiatives and is a Trustee at the Muslim Youth Helpline and on the mangement comitttee of City Circle, an independent discussion forum for professional Muslims. She is also an academic social psychologist and has been a senior lecturer at the University of East London, where she taught, amongst other subjects, a course on race, culture and psychology. She also works currently as a freelance therapist and trainer.
From writing the first UK policy report on British Muslim women and the labour market to setting up the UN Office in Darfur, Zamila’s career has seen her across the globe and in a variety of sectors. Currently a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institute in Doha, Zamila’s work currently focuses on such topics as labour markets, socio-economic integration, health and education.
Inspired by the example of her mother, a first generation migrant and single mother, and icon Malcom X, she instils their fundamental value of working hard to learn and achieve without expectation. Being grounded in her faith, Zamila finds that the fundamental ideals of tolerance, acceptance, learning and integration have helped her greatly in her work and travels and enable her to maintain a strong and integrated sense of self. With a successful policy career that sprouted from a small kernel of knowledge, she continues to push herself into new directions and looks forward to whatever unexpected opportunities may lie ahead.
Khola is an Islamic scholar and consultant. She advises companies on issues related to Islam that affect their work. She also contributes to the work of the Three Faiths Forum, which promotes dialogue between Muslim, Christian and Jewish communities.
Despite a childhood terror of public speaking Khola is now regularly to be found taking part in debates designed by organisations such as The Qatar Foundation and The Institute of Ideas. Not only this but the Radio 4 programme she contributed to with Irshad Manji in the Beyond Belief series won the Sony Gold Award for Best Speech Programme - also known as the Oscar of radio!
Buthainah is a woman who defies categorisation. She holds a Distinction Masters degree, works as a financial analyst and is an irrepressible sportswoman who is determined to see a female Saudi basketball team play at the Olympics. While Buthainah acknowledges there is a long path to tread before this happens she has never been deterred by adversity, even when forced to beg and borrow time on basketball courts for her team to practise. So surely if anyone can drive women's sport in Saudi Arabia towards this goal, it is Buthainah.
