The physical activities of Muslim women in an Islamic context was the subject of a talk given at U of T by Jennifer Hargreaves, Professor of Sport Psychology at London’s Brunel University. The lecture, entitled “Islam and Female Physical Culture,” was part of the “Gender Matters” seminar series given by the Centre for Girls’ and Women’s Health and Physical Activity. It was designed to educate listeners to the challenges faced by women throughout the Middle East.
Professor Hargreaves’ published works include Heroines of Sport: The Politics of Difference, and Identity and Sporting Females: Critical Issues in the History and Sociology of Women’s Sport. She is well known for shedding light on social and gender issues that need to be addressed by contemporary politicians and world leaders.
Hargreaves, who has family in Toronto and Vancouver, said that aside from long-standing issues such as the Iraq war and the ongoing conflict in Israel and Palestine, “the discourse is at the heart of the fraught relationship between Islam and the West,” and that this was partly played out in sport. While recognising that attitudes toward female participation in sport vary from country to country, Hargreaves characterised this long-running discourse as “a tug of war between conservative fundamentalist political power and more liberal Islam.”
The specific obstacle to women’s participation in sport lies in the belief of hard-line Islamists that women’s participation in sport is immoral, especially when not adequately covered up with a burqa.
Professor Hargreaves supported her research with real-life examples of Muslim women who achieved success in athletics only to be sharply criticised for it in their own countries. Chief among these was the example of the Algerian Hasiba Bolmarqa, who won the gold medal for the women’s 1500m run in the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games and was harassed upon her return home to the point where she was forced to exile herself to Italy for her own safety.
Hargreaves, along with her colleague Gamina al-Hadir, the first Muslim woman to write a critical PhD in this discipline, interviewed numerous women over the years of her research, from places as far away as Egypt and Kuwait and as close to home as South London.
Nevertheless, Hargreaves went on, there are some examples where women in the Islamic world have been allowed to participate in athletics in an Islamic context. The prime example was when Iran hosted the Muslim Women’s Games, where women were permitted to compete amongst themselves provided they remain adequately covered. Such initiatives, according to Hargreaves, are seen as an acceptable alternative to what is seen as the undesirable and corrupt nature of the Olympics, and are sometimes attended by delegations of Muslim women from the west as well.
The challenge, mused Hargreaves, was competing in the mainstream, and to date the numbers of Muslim women participating in such large-scale events as the Olympics have remained small.
Margeret MacNeill, the organiser of the event, praised Professor Hargreaves as “A pioneer in gender studies within [the field of] sociology of sport. She’s also one of the few looking at race and gender [of the subject].”
