demonising Islam, positive stories about Muslims are all too rare. How refreshing then, to see last weekend's Sunday Life profile on one half of Australia's most famous Muslim couple, the academic and writer, Susan Carland.
In a world intent onFirst, let me say that I applaud wholeheartedly such initiatives to combat the pervasive stereotype of the passive Muslim woman, and I think Susan Carland is a national treasure.
![Susan Carland in her Sunday Life shoot.](/web/20160925144215im_/http://www.watoday.com.au/content/dam/images/g/r/f/s/c/r/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.grlmuu.png/1474511341590.jpg)
Nonetheless, this story highlights that there is something missing in our current discourse on the role of women in Islam. Namely, when we talk about the pressure on women to conform, we tend to focus only on whether they are physically forced, threatened, or otherwise explicitly told what to do. What we overlook is that sometimes women make certain choices out of love and the need to be loved.
Allow me to backtrack for a moment. As someone raised in one of Islam's many minority sects, but who stopped practicing religion many years ago, I have always been intrigued by those who, like Carland, convert to Islam as adults.
Perhaps this is because, as a teenager, all I wanted was to escape it.
When I say "it", I don't mean the religious ideology itself so much as the whole package of being a Muslim woman, which is as much – if not more – about family loyalty and community cohesion as it is about faith.
Although we like to compartmentalise religion and culture – treating them as two distinct entities – they do overlap, both informing and reflecting each other. Being raised Muslim means you often cannot divorce religious choices from family and community expectations.
For some women, this isn't an issue; their faith is assured, freeing them to embrace religion and culture openly. But for some of us, the burden is enormous and the desire for escape is irrepressible.
In some ways I envy those who come into Islam from the outside, who, stripped of the baggage of culture, can distil it to its essence. For that reason, I understand how Islam's mandate for modesty can be regarded as liberating in terms of rejecting western sexualisation and, as Carland puts it, the "currency (of) exposed flesh."
But – and there has to be a but – when you are raised in an environment where "modesty" is itself the most valuable currency in which a woman can trade (both for religious reasons and to preserve her family's good name), it can be a prison from which breaking free may mean losing your family as well as your religion.
In short, growing up in Islam as a woman is far different to finding it as an adult.
Of course, this does not mean that converts are "less" Muslim. Certainly, in terms of faith alone, converts are "more" Muslim than me.
But when Carland talks about going "travelling (and) scuba diving at the Great Barrier Reef," and how Islam doesn't hinder but actually helps this, because "hijab facilitates mobility," I am reminded that to do those very things, to travel as a young single woman and to scuba dive (not in the Reef but in the Red Sea), I had to leave Islam, and my family, behind.
Understand that this was not because the religion itself forbids it, or because I did not love my family, but because there was no separation between Islam and the context in which I lived it. I either had to embrace it all or walk away, and so I chose to walk away.
Again, this is not the fault of Islamic ideology. I completely agree with Carland's assessment that Islam in theory is feminist and progressive. But Islam in practice is another beast entirely, and, when you are a first generation Arab Muslim teenager in Australia, it can be impossible to discern where religion ends and cultural pressure begins.
In this era of Hansonism and Islamic terror (which now seems to mean any act of violence committed by anyone thought to be Muslim), where half of the Australian population apparently wants Muslim immigration banned, it is becoming increasingly difficult to voice these issues.
As Omar Sakr writes brilliantly here, when white people demand to know "why we're not dealing with the problems inherent in our own cultures," it is usually because we're trying to keep western society "from erasing all the good in them and us."
Indeed, it is this hostile climate that has led me to once again embrace my Muslim roots after so many years of rejecting them. It is not faith so much as the knowledge that my Muslim background can and likely will be used against me that compels me to keep calling myself a Muslim.
I do recognise that I am saying this from an unusual vantage point. Years after "disowning" me, my family "took me back" and now I associate with the community on my own terms, knowing I can walk away again when it gets too much (it does, and I do).
This is something that others may not be willing or able to do. For them, the choice may still be all or nothing.
And this is the problem in trying to find an ideal representative of a group as maligned as Muslims. By sheer virtue of looking to, as Sunday Life puts it, the "educated, articulate (and) well-reasoned," we are still assessing what makes an acceptable Muslim by western standards, by what makes white people comfortable.
Unsurprisingly, what makes them comfortable is someone who isn't too different to them and can soothe their anxieties about the role of women by quoting those Quranic verses (and there many) that elevate the status of women.
But this well-meaning desire to strike that perfect balance between Muslim visibility and assimilation is overlooking the hard choices faced by some Muslim women, which ultimately does Muslim communities no favours.
Ultimately, we can't look only to scripture to understand how being Muslim shapes and affects the lives of women – because for many of us, Islam is more than its written word; it is practice, it is culture, and, for better or worse, it is family.
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