Women and Community

Women and Community
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Women and Community
This paper provides a summary of the main arguments made by each of the two female authors of the articles. Their criticism of the double standards for men and women in each community is described along with their reasons for these double standards. Moreover, this essay describes the concerns of these two authors with regard to the effects of these double standards on young Muslim women.
Some of the Black Muslim women who are part of the hip-hop generation and who create improvisation zones by infusing hip-hop culture and Islamic faith in the music which they create include the author Anaya McMurray, Eve and Erykah Badu (McMurray, 2008, p. 76). Although Muslim women contribute to the culture of hip-hop, this is hardly ever talked about. A number of tools are utilized in marginalizing and/or misrepresenting the experiences of Black Islamic women. These include (i) popular images of Islamic women; (ii) the roles that women and men are encouraged to play in the hip-hop industry; and (iii) the suppression of unchurched voices in mass media and black history. It is worth mentioning that these 3 tools actively attempt to control and/or render invisible Black Muslim womanhood (McMurray, 2008, p. 85).
Images of Muslim women – when McMurray compares her image, the image of Eve and that of Erykah Badu with the popular images of Islamic women, a big difference is clear. The common images of Islamic women show Middle Eastern women who are covered, yet Badu, Eve and Anaya McMurray are never covered. Their images challenge the misrepresentation that every Muslim woman is from the Middle East and/or that Muslim women are always covered and are not free to pursue careers in entertainment and music. Furthermore, their images challenge the supposition that any woman who is not evidently marked as belonging to a different religion is Christian by default (McMurray, 2008, p. 86).
Repressing the voices of the unchurched – McMurray (2008, p. 86) also argues that the tool which is utilized in marginalizing Black Islamic women is Christian domination. The repression affects both the intellectual expression as well as representations of black religion in mass media and black culture. The repression of unchurched voices is apparent within the mass media, for instance TV One and Black Entertainment Television – 2 television networks which are particularly aimed at representing the culture of African Americans. Although such television networks are supposed to be representing the culture of African Americans and not the culture of Black Christians, they mostly devote so many hours to Christian programming every morning. All in all, keeping out non-Christian religious representations on such networks serves to work against correct depictions of hip-hop culture and black culture, both being heterogeneous (McMurray, 2008, p. 87).
Double standards: The roles of Muslim women and men in hip-hop industry – Black Islamic women are not represented very well in the hip-hop industry given that the particular roles that Black Islamic women ...