What Black Feminist Praxis and Mouna Chatt’s (Re)Wayat Can Teach Us About Resistance

Hosted as part of Islamophobia Awareness Month, I recently attended a workshop led by Mouna Chatt, a current undergraduate Sociology and Politics student, around her research project under the OUR MIND Programme offered by Edinburgh Neuroscience. Mouna’s research, which she undertook in the summer of 2023, titled (Re)wayat: Renarrating Muslims in Edinburgh, centres around countering collective Islamophobia in Edinburgh by highlighting diverse Muslim narratives throughout the city.  

Mouna’s research utilizes a key feminist epistemology, namely storytelling; a powerful tool that can be used to challenge dominant narratives on gender and sexuality, alongside their intersections with race, ethnicity, class, religion, and other identity markers used for categorization (Nooijer & Cueva, 2022). Of course, storytelling isn’t just a tool for feminists, but it was clear during the workshop that Mouna’s use of storytelling was very much inspired by feminist perspectives; even the title (Re)wayat – based off of the Arabic rewayah (رواية) meaning ‘story’ – contextualizes and positions the research within intersectionality, because intersectionality is not just about identities, but the core of it is to address the violence present in the conjunction of the identities. In her workshop, Mouna utilized this framework and mode of analytical inquiry to discuss the inherent structural violence present in Western contexts around Muslim identities and, by providing narratives of Muslims who occupy multiple marginalized identities, her research then becomes a tool of inquiry which provokes the audience into considering and challenging the dominant, often stereotyped, narratives of Muslims in the West.  

The workshop was an interesting and engaging experience for me – up until that point most events I have attended at the university often take more of a lecture format, and it was a really refreshing change of pace to be involved in the wider theoretical and sociological influence behind Mouna’s research. She actively had those who were attending the workshop think of and challenge current structures and ways of thinking on Islamophobia – how does it exist in the present, what are the steps we can take to resisting it systemically, and is it possible to imagine it ceasing to exist in the future? What would that look like? 

That last part especially resonated with me; this past semester I have been taking ‘Race and Ethnicity’, a course offered by RACE.ED Co-Director Dr. Katucha Bento. Throughout the course, while delving into and dismantling our understandings of race and ethnicity in both historical and contemporary contexts, Dr. Bento encouraged us to think about whether it is possible to exist in a world without race, with our final lecture focusing on refusal beyond resistance. Similarly, within the workshop, Mouna explored with us whether it was possible to live in a world without Islamophobia – an ongoing issue foundationally built on racialization and racial discrimination.  

How does this relate to feminism at all? Because refusal beyond resistance is rooted in WOC activist causes, particularly those of Black feminist activists (Emejulu & Scheer, 2021). Black feminist praxis in refusal of resistance embraces marginality and imagines a futurity in which the had to is emphasized – Black feminists have had to have the responsibility to imagine and create futures as practices of survival. They have had to directly challenge dominant narratives surrounding themselves and their communities in order to sustain their future, actively resisting in the present and imagining their future to prevent exhaustion. To resist successfully and prevent burn-out is to also simultaneously practice alternative ways of living, of being, in order to envision and prepare for the marvellous. Resistance of refusal reaches the fundamental state of being – challenging one’s own marginality and oppression by creating alternative modes of being in the present to sustain the future marvellous (Campt, 2017; Emejulu & Scheer, 2021).  

I believe Mouna is well on her way to effectively navigate this praxis of refusal beyond resistance within Islamophobia. Introducing narratives of a diverse, intersectional cast of Muslims in Edinburgh creates a bridge, a point of challenge – it is at once acknowledging and resisting Islamophobia and envisioning a world beyond it, in which a religion is just a religion, and that Muslims are, in fact, not a product of their religion, but rather, the religion is a product of them.  

Sources:  

Campt, T.M. (2017). Listening to Images. doi:https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822373582. 

Emejulu, A. and van der Scheer, I. (2021). Refusing politics as usual: mapping women of colour’s radical praxis in London and Amsterdam. Identities, pp.1–18. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/1070289x.2021.1914951. 

 De Nooijer, R. and Cueva, L.S. (2022). Feminist Storytellers Imagining New Stories to Tell. Gender, development and social change, pp.237–255. doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82654-3_11. 

Author Bio:

Sheher Bano is currently a final year undergraduate in Sociology and an Undergraduate Communications and Events Intern at GENDER.ED.