Peaceful Families

American Muslim Efforts against Domestic Violence

Juliane Hammer

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780691194387
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie du mariage et de la famille

An in-depth look at how Muslim American organizations address domestic violence within their communities In Peaceful Families, Juliane Hammer chronicles and examines the efforts, stories, arguments, and strategies of individuals and organizations doing Muslim anti–domestic violence work in the United States. Looking at connections among ethical practices, gender norms, and religious interpretation, Hammer demonstrates how Muslim advocates mobilize a rich religious tradition in community efforts against domestic violence, and identify religion and culture as resources or roadblocks to prevent harm and to restore family peace.Drawing on her interviews with Muslim advocates, service providers, and religious leaders, Hammer paints a vivid picture of the challenges such advocacy work encounters. The insecurities of American Muslim communities facing intolerance and Islamophobia lead to additional challenges in acknowledging and confronting problems of spousal abuse, and Hammer reveals how Muslim anti–domestic violence workers combine the methods of the mainstream secular anti–domestic violence movement with Muslim perspectives and interpretations. Identifying a range of Muslim anti–domestic violence approaches, Hammer argues that at certain times and in certain situations it may be imperative to combat domestic abuse by endorsing notions of "protective patriarchy"—even though service providers may hold feminist views critical of patriarchal assumptions. Hammer links Muslim advocacy efforts to the larger domestic violence crisis in the United States, and shows how, through extensive family and community networks, advocates participate in and further debates about family, gender, and marriage in global Muslim communities.Highlighting the place of Islam as an American religion, Peaceful Families delves into the efforts made by Muslim Americans against domestic violence and the ways this refashions the society at large.

1

Shifting Landscapes and a Missing Map

STUDYING MUSLIM EFFORTS AGAINST DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

Violence is so ubiquitous and yet sometimes seems far away. Even after all this research I still have to remind myself that every second of my life, someone else’s life is defined, limited, and destroyed by people and systems that assume the right to break and cut, to wound and scar, to wield the power over life and death of other human beings.

HOW OFTEN HAVE I SEEN WORDS from a poem by Warsan Shire on social media that talks about the poet touching a map of the world and asking where it hurts? The map answers, on behalf of the world, that it hurts everywhere, and the poem touches me every time.¹ There is so much pain and suffering around us; the whole world is hurting. Much of this human pain and suffering is caused by violence inflicted on some humans by other humans. Even when we think it is elsewhere and not in our lives, this violence is all around us: as state-sanctioned violence, as war, as armed conflict, as sexual assault, as child abuse, as gender-based violence, as racist hate crimes, as incarceration, as gun violence, and the list goes on. The horrors of wounds, blood, and scars are physical but pain comes in many forms, injuries can be nonphysical, and trauma inflicted goes beyond the body.

Why, then, do I write a book about violence? And how do I write such a book? The why is easier to explain: I am writing to stop the violence. I want all of it to end. Now. The how required me to start in a specific place, to think about a specific aspect of the pervasive violence in our lives, and to find ways to go beyond it. My path to that goal has been to write this book about American Muslim efforts against domestic violence (DV). That there are people who, like me, want to end such violence gives me hope and it needs to be known.

Peaceful Families. House of Protection. Domestic Harmony. Healthy Families. House of Peace. These are concepts and indeed visions and goals to be found in the names of American Muslim organizations working against domestic violence in Muslim communities. Their central goal is simple: the eradication of domestic violence, a scourge that affects too many individuals, families, and communities in the United States and all over the world. Their work, however, is complicated, ongoing, and challenging. This book is about the people who carry out anti–domestic violence work in Muslim communities in the United States. It chronicles their efforts, their motivations, and their engagement with gender dynamics, textual interpretation, and religious authority.

It is also a book about domestic violence: about its victims and its perpetrators, about the structures, systems, and principles that allow domestic abuse to continue. It is the trauma and injury of the countless victims that makes the work of the advocates necessary and salient. I have ongoing concerns about erasing the victims and survivors from these pages by focusing on those who advocate for them and offer them support. However, the survivors and their stories are in every chapter and they are the reason this book came into being. I see and remember their pain and their suffering, and I deeply admire those who continue to work to end it. Thus this book on Muslim efforts against domestic violence is also a constant reminder of the existence of such violence in Muslim families and communities.

In what follows, I lay out the framework for the chapters of this book, including the sources and methods I employed in my study, the complex landscape of secondary literature on domestic violence, my arguments and theoretical contributions, the themes I trace throughout my research materials, and, finally, the structure of the book itself. I end with a short reflection on the politics of critique.

Mapping the Project

I was sitting in the back seat of her car when Karima, who was driving me back to the train station after an event at a Muslim community center, asked me how I had developed an academic interest in Muslim efforts against domestic violence. I have been asked the same question by other Muslim advocates many times and still struggle with a short answer. I have not been the victim or survivor of sustained abuse by an intimate partner, even though there have been occasions in my life that would count as abusive and damaging. I have only recently begun to piece together instances of abusive relationships that have surrounded me since childhood, but I never recognized or named them as such before I began this research. If it was not an experience of abuse or even the conscious witnessing of it, then what did inspire me to write this book?

It was 2008 and I was reading essays in Living Islam Out Loud for my book project on woman-led Friday prayer and Muslim women’s activism. One essay in the book stood out to me: Mohja Kahf writing about her jadedness in engaging in communal conversations about what Islam is, who has authority, and how this Islam matters to her. She tells the story of her volunteer work with a women’s shelter and a battered Muslim woman for whom she was asked to translate. The woman, severely physically and emotionally abused, was convinced that her abuse was in line with Islamic teachings and tried to find fault with her own actions to justify it. Kahf experienced outrage, but instead of further distancing herself from Islam and Muslims, she decided to engage:

We are implicated for dropping out of the community and its discourses when we are alienated. For giving up on changing Islam. Like I had. For giving up on being part of the conversation, the Islam-talk. . . . Why I need this Islam-talk? Because it was the only talk that would get this battered woman out of her old worldview. She would not leave without Islam. She has to take her Islam with her to make a new life, a new way of thinking about life as a woman, alone in the world. I had to give her a jolt of Islam-CPR, and I needed it myself, too.²

In her quest for better answers, she encountered the works of Muslim women scholars, like Amina Wadud, Asma Barlas, and Asifa Qureishi, scholars who center their own exegetical and legal work on notions of gender justice, a topic I will return to. She also engaged with more conservative scholars and leaders and discovered that there was no support for domestic violence among them either. I will return to this shortly as well. In that moment in 2008, though, the idea for this research project and book was formed. First, I had to find out more about domestic violence in Muslim communities. Then I realized that my contribution, as a religious studies scholar, would be to analyze the religious frameworks and discourses surrounding domestic violence, and from there it was a logical step to focus on those who produced and applied such frameworks in their efforts to end domestic violence.

The sources for this book are of several different kinds: interviews and participant observation notes from six years of ethnographic research and a wide array of textual materials collected since 2008. As in most of my projects, I combine analysis of ethnographic materials (which become texts through the research process) with the analysis of sources that are more commonly associated with the category text, many of which are categorized as primary texts in the humanities. They include books, articles, blog posts, social media conversations, YouTube videos, song lyrics, poetry, and magazine features to account for the breadth of conversations about domestic violence taking place in Muslim communities. Some are produced by victims and survivors, others by concerned community members, and a significant portion comes from religious scholars and leaders. Some of these textual materials date back to the 1990s while others were produced and included in the project in the last few months of writing in 2017. I began the ethnographic portion of the study in 2010, and in the six years that followed I conducted almost seventy interviews with advocates, activists, and service providers. I also attended over forty events, including DV awareness events in Muslim communities, social service provider conferences, cultural sensitivity training sessions for law enforcement, service providers, and lawyers, and strategic meetings of Muslim DV advocates.

From the outset, it was clear to me that I was not going to create a comprehensive map of Muslim efforts against domestic violence. I do not privilege ethnographic research over textual analysis (or vice versa), nor do I see them in competition with each other. There is an emerging picture in my analysis, and there are patterns, but most important, there are stories to be told and stories to be analyzed. My greatest regret is that only a fraction of the stories, people, ideas, and materials I encountered have made it into the book.

There is a second reason for the missing map alluded to in the title of this chapter: the landscape of Muslim efforts against domestic violence is constantly changing. There are many reasons for the relative instability of this landscape, including the toll that the work takes on those engaged in the field, leading to burnout and high turnover rates; the oscillating and challenging shifts in funding (and the lack thereof); the political landscape of anti-Muslim hostility and anti-feminist backlash; and the very nature of nonprofit organizations and movements.

This means that the people I interviewed may or may not still be in this line of work or activism. The organizations I worked with may have ceased to exist, they may continue to be actively engaged in these efforts, or they may have moved on to merge with larger organizations or have incorporated DV-focused programs into other social service frameworks.

Despite this shifting landscape, the scene or movement against DV among Muslims is small, small enough for people to know each other. It was thus important and necessary to obscure the identities of those I interviewed—because there are risks associated with involvement in anti-DV work that range from stigmatization in communities to threats of violence from perpetrators of DV. I employ several strategies to help ensure confidentiality. Some, like using pseudonyms for people, are common in ethnographic research and writing. Others, such as creating composite stories in some of the chapters, will garner more skepticism but are justified by the need for protection. Where that is the case, I have indicated it in the chapter. I also decided to not disclose which organizations I worked with because it is rather easy to identify individuals associated with certain organizations. There were many more organizations than I could directly research during the project. Where possible in terms of confidentiality, I acknowledge ideas and materials produced by specific organizations to give credit to them for their intellectual work.

In my six years of active ethnographic research, I encountered many people whom I consider heroes, women and men, who invest their lifetime, their energy, and their courage in this work. I entered their networks and circles as a Muslim insider, albeit as one who is easily identified as a Muslim feminist. As a white Muslim woman, as a convert, and as a Muslim woman who does not wear hijab, I am a very particular insider who is also a potential outsider in certain circles. Work against domestic violence, in Muslim communities even more so than in the mainstream, carries risks, and the people in the movement have many good reasons to be skeptical and to require effort to earn their trust. I built that trust over time and came to be recognized as someone who is deeply invested in anti-DV effort beyond writing a book or publishing an article. The advocates I encountered first offered help in accessing networks; they provided the names of others I should connect with and they vouched for me when I did so. This method of identifying research partners in Muslim communities and DV organizations also provided me with some sense of the networks that existed at the time of my encounters.

There is perhaps a question that needs to be answered about what I mean by American Muslim efforts against domestic violence. I had to formulate an answer to that question in order to tell people what my research was about and so that they could help me identify research partners. I focused my study on those individuals, organizations, and networks for whom being Muslim and employing a Muslim framework against DV was meaningful. This means that this specific aspect of their identity was, in their own estimation, significant for their work against DV. My study is limited to the United States, and within the United States, I recognize as an American Muslim (or Muslim American) each individual who lives and works in the United States and identifies as Muslim.

Domestic Violence as a Field of Study

While DV is often ignored or made invisible in public discourse, occasionally interrupted by campaigns to raise awareness of it, there is a sizable academic literature on the topic. The vast majority of publications, including many books and academic journal articles, are produced in fields such as social work, criminology, public health, and psychology. It is beyond the purview of this study to offer a survey of this literature. As part of my own project, I read several dozen of those books and articles to gain an understanding of the approaches, debates, and historical developments in the field. A number of them have been included in the bibliography. These sources address incidents of domestic violence, statistical distribution, analysis of intervention methods, descriptions of physical and psychological trauma, the effects of witnessing DV, the methods of service providers, the impact on service providers, the economic impact of DV, the role of legislation and the policing of DV, and cultural factors that impact incidents of DV, as well as the role of substance abuse, other forms of violent crime, and the challenging arena of producing reliable data on DV. There is also a growing awareness in the DV field of the need for more research on the relationship between domestic violence and other forms of societal violence including war, gun violence (which plays a significant role in DV murders), and sexual violence.

There is a second type of literature, not always academic but relevant to this chapter. Beginning in the 1970s and increasing in volume ever since, there is a body of literature that raises awareness of DV through the voices and stories of the victims. Included here are publications that intersect with another strand of materials: works that engage religious traditions and communities in the conversation about domestic violence. In chapter 7, I discuss some of those materials, including the Journal of Religion and Abuse, in more detail.

At the intersection of religion and domestic violence, there is a much smaller but growing literature on Muslims and domestic violence. I consulted a significant number of sources on domestic violence in Muslim-majority societies as well as in Muslim-minority communities, in the United States, but also in Europe and Australia. Many of these sources are also listed in the bibliography. Some of them, especially those providing statistical evidence for the rate of domestic violence in American Muslim communities, play an important role in Muslim awareness efforts and will be discussed further in later chapters. One of the challenges for researchers working on Muslims and DV in Muslim communities is the very category “Muslim.” It intersects and is occasionally even conflated with other, ethnic categories, so that we see studies on Arab Americans, South Asian Americans, and others as overlapping with the religious category “Muslim.” This in turn makes it possible to consider Muslims as a cultural rather than religious group and leads to a tension over cultural difference that I explore further in chapter 2. At times, there also is a clear reluctance to consider religion as a meaningful category of inquiry, either as a resource or as a problem. Addressing religion’s relationship to DV is one important reason for writing this book.

Feminist Studies and Domestic Violence

There is an ongoing and at times raging debate about the relationship between feminist theory (and practice) on the one hand and addressing domestic violence in U.S. society on the other. Scholars have argued that it was the feminist movement that propelled domestic violence to the forefront of debates about families, women’s rights, and state legislation regarding marriage and family. This process began in the 1960s but is far more complicated than a straightforward story of mainstreaming feminist critiques of patriarchal hierarchies and resulting abuse of patriarchal power. The work to create acknowledgment of DV followed by legal, social, and political remedies for the staggering presence of domestic abuse in the lives of American families has seen success, repeated backlash, and a meandering path in which accomplishments have become bargaining chips for political games on the federal and state levels; funding has been increased and then dried up, and the level of dom...