Around 75 students and community members gathered in the Knight Library on Tuesday evening to listen to a public lecture entitled “Burqas, Bikinis, and Hip Hop: Different Kinds of Muslims.” A professor of Islamic history and Associate Director at the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University, John Voll gave the lecture to promote understanding of the diversity within the Muslim world.
The Muslim world, he said, is “a world that we need to look at that has within it a broad variety of religious experiences;” a world where “different kinds of Muslims exist.”
Yet according to Voll, a Wisconsin native, most Americans tend to ignore “the dynamic spectrum of Islamic life in the contemporary world.”
When Americans thinks about Islam, he said, “most scholars end up talking about one specific kind of Muslim – the radical, terrorist Muslim.”
Part of the problem in the United States, Voll said, is that “when discussing religion, we bring to it the idea that religion is a fixed thing.” Rather, he said “religion is a collection of symbols, images and concepts people use to express what they think are the truths of existence.”
“There are people who wear bikinis who think of themselves as Muslim,” Voll said, “and there are people who wear burqas who think of themselves as Muslim.”
Voll said it is possible to “represent the diversity” of the contemporary Islamic world “within the framework (of women’s clothing).”
To illustrate his point, Voll discussed “three different modes of Islamic expression” among women: the totally covered woman in a burqa, the secular woman in a bikini and the vast middleground of the “covered but relatively fashionable” woman.
Voll said “most people still tend to think of modernization as the same thing as Westernization,” and so they view Islamic head coverings as a protest to modernity. “By and large, western feminists … assume that anybody wearing a burqa can’t be in favor of women’s rights.”
In Voll’s opinion, this is a false assumption. He said the use of the burqa and the head-covering hijab in the contemporary Islamic world, “is not a battle of people who are deflecting modernity.”
“The burqa and the hijab are just as modern as the bikini is,” he said. “There are many different forms that modernity can take given the culture that is shaping it” and “different kinds of Muslims describe different kinds of modernity.”
In today’s Islamic world, Voll said there is “a dynamic, productive middle” between “bikini Islam and burqa Islam,” endeavoring “to create a survivable synthesis that is modern and that meets both ends of the extreme.”
Voll referenced the ‘burqini’, a modern Muslim alternative to women’s swimming attire which he called “a successful synthesis between the bikini and the burqa.”
Another example Voll used is Mustaqim Sahir, an American Muslim and hip-hop artist who tries to make Islam accessible for non-Muslims through his art.
Voll said the middle-ground of Islamic expression “unfortunately gets ignored.”
“Part of the problem,” he said, “is that there remains all of this diversity, but we think that at heart, they’re all the same.”
“Not every person who wears a burqa is a bin Laden,” he chuckled. “Of course, I’ve never seen bin Laden going drag in a burqa anyway.”
We should pay closer attention, he said, because the “dynamic, creative middle” of Islamic expression “is changing the way Islam is interacting with the modern world.” In ignoring the diversity among Muslims, he said, “we miss the possibility of having a global collaboration with a people that are our real allies.”
University student Mashel al Abdullatif, who is Muslim, agreed with Voll, saying that diversity in the Muslim world is like stairs – one can be on the top, at the bottom or in a multitude of places in between.