British Muslim masculinities and cultural resistance: Kenny Glenaan and Simon Beaufoy’s Yasmin

Abstract

This paper explores the extent to which the 2004 film Yasmin challenges normative constructions of British Muslim gender identities. It argues that the female protagonist moves beyond stereotype, finally remaining open to contradiction and hinting at a British Muslim feminist subjectivity. Conversely, however, an oppositional masculine Muslim subjectivity that evades the hegemonic binary of liberal secular freedom vs Muslim repression/aggression remains a troubling absence in the film.

Keywords:

• British Muslim
• class
• culturalism
• feminism
• masculinities
• resistance

Notes

1. In 2009, Nick Griffin won a seat in the European Parliament for the North West region, and the BNP’s Andrew Brons was elected MEP for Yorkshire and Humber, a region that incorporates Keighley.

2. The social deprivation of Britain’s Muslim minority has been well documented. The Fourth National Survey of Ethnic Minorities, published in 1997, highlighted the extent of the poverty of Pakistanis and Bangladeshis (Modood et al. 180). Seven years later, the report on Islamophobia by the Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia sketched a very similar scenario: Pakistani and Bangladeshi people continue to suffer from higher rates of poor health and to experience higher levels of unemployment than national averages, and three quarters of the communities’ children “live in households earning less that half the national average” (Stone 30). Further, Islamophobic anti‐terrorism legislation has led to an increased experience of victimization among Britain’s Muslims. According to statistics published by the Home Office on 12 December 2003, “[i]n 2002–03, there were 32,100 searches under the Anti‐Terrorism Act, 21,900 more than in the previous year and more than 30,000 above 1999–2000 levels. Resulting from 32,100 searches, just 380 people were arrested” (38).

3. As S. Sayyid maintains, the occlusion of societal structures of oppression in the context of a neo‐liberal culture “means that the condemnation of violence is increasingly skewed towards those who do not have the means to establish their own structures of violence” (the Muslim “rioters”, or Muslim youth drawn to commit violent acts of terror) (xii).

4. Arguably, even where majority (liberal) Britain is constructed as the “victim” of the hyper‐masculinized Muslim perpetrator (for example in hegemonic representations of the 2005 bomb attacks on London transport), the image of the passive Muslim woman (or her “liberated” counterpart) remains necessary to the implicit patriarchy of Muslim men (the bombers) in contradistinction to the imaginary absence of patriarchy in liberal Britain.

5. The implication is that gender inequality and the spectre of the passive Muslim woman have been deployed in the reports as a means of corroborating culturalist constructions of the men and their role in the riots.

6. Examples of “assimilationist pressures” might include widespread and ongoing Islamophobia, both incidental and institutional (Stone 7–14), or the citizenship tests that were introduced in 2005 and subsequent proposals by ministers to toughen access to citizenship further by stipulating that “migrants would only be able to become British citizens if they could demonstrate good behaviour and a willingness to integrate”, as well as agreeing to a “life in Britain good neighbour contract” (Wintour and Travis np). Assimilationist rhetoric recurs in politicians’ pronouncements, especially following inter‐racial tensions. For example, in the wake of the 2001 riots, David Blunkett called for a “test of allegiance” and claimed that Britain was suffering from an “excess of cultural diversity” (Abbas 12). However, it is important to recognize the progress that has been made in recent years in granting Muslims and other minorities the right to practise their (religious) culture in the public sphere – for example, the provision of halal meat in the army and that women who work for the Metropolitan Police Service are now allowed to wear the hijab (13).

7. A significant contrast to this can be found within Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers in which the character Suraya is the victim of her drunken husband’s enactment of this very cultural practice.

8. Lewis offers an example of the “ethnicity paradox” in action in his description of the Muslim Youth Helpline (MYH). He writes of the MYH: “Much of its content supports its director Shareefa Fulat’s contention that the acquisition of a robust Muslim identity can enhance the confidence of young Muslims and encourage them to participate in civic life” (57–58).

9. There is another notable example of a subversion of the boundary between “inside” and “outside” in the film. A burka‐clad woman is tormented by a gang of young boys on bicycles: Yasmin intervenes, and so too does an elderly white woman, apologizing for the boys’ behaviour. Interestingly, this incident was unscripted; the woman was a passer‐by, unaware that the scene was a drama being filmed (Jeffries np).

10. I am grateful to Susheila Nasta for alerting me to Teresa de Lauretis’s notion of the “space‐off”.

11. Peter Morey offers a contrasting reading of Yasmin in which he argues persuasively that through its documentary form the film reproduces an anthropological perspective which works to “other” the Muslim community and carries traces of the neo‐colonialist binary of Muslims as outside and in conflict with modernity. Interestingly, for Morey it is the character of Faysal who ruptures this “neo‐colonial economy” and represents a transgressive element in the film because he cannot be easily located on either side of the binary (Morey and Yaqin).

12. Similarly, Sanghera and Thapar‐Bjorkert’s work on the gendering of Muslim youth identities, which highlights the ways in which Muslim women in Bradford, in contrast to their male counterparts, are becoming “active agents of social change”, describes how these women are using their faith to challenge patriarchal pressures and values within their community, thereby “decoupling” culture (seen as “retrogressive”) and religion (186–87).