CBEES Advanced Seminar with Ivan Simić, Assistant Professor at Charles University, Prague

Speaker: Ivan Simić, Assistant Professor and Principal Investigator of the PRIMUS project: “Project Sickle and Veil - Communist Gender Policies Towards Muslim Minorities in Eastern Europe”, Charles University, Prague

Discussant: Yulia Gradskova, Associate Professor in History, Senior Researcher, Department of Gender Studies, Södertörn University and Research Leader, CBEES

Chair: Emek Cayli Rahte, Associate Professor at the Department of Radio, Television and Cinema, Faculty of Communication, Hacettepe University, and Visiting Researcher at CBEES and at the Department for Media and Communication Studies, Södertörn University

Abstract:
In this paper, I explore how Muslim men were targeted by a series of interventions aimed to change gender relations within Muslim communities. Yugoslav communists were led by stereotypes about Muslim men, Muslim families, and Muslim communities, driven by socialist modernity notions. Heavily influenced by Soviet models from Central Asia, Yugoslav communists aimed to create a homogenous and mobile population that would participate in the socialist project. Some policies that affected Muslim communities were universal for all, whilst some targeted Muslims explicitly. Namely, a series of interventions into Muslim communities started by introducing mandatory elementary education for girls, a ban on underage marriage, and the replacement of the Sharia law with the universal Yugoslav family law. However, in 1951 the Yugoslav Communist Party launched an aggressive veil lifting campaign introducing severe punishment for women, and men who by any means pressured women to wear the veil. The Party's activists entered houses and forced women to appear in public unveiled. During all these years, Muslim men were presented as those preventing women from enjoying the benefits of socialism, often keeping backward traditions so as to preserve their privileged positions. However, as this research shows, Muslim women often fought against unveiling, whilst Muslim men, particularly those close to the Party, attempted to adhere to the Party policies for personal gains. Furthermore, Yugoslav communists relied on the support of the Islamic Community of Yugoslavia, and its strong modernist tradition, which supported all Party policies regarding equal education, civil laws, marriage, divorce, or unveiling. Muslim men were targeted and blamed for years for any failure of the communist modernising process, although interests of Muslim men were often fragmented – some eagerly supported new gender policies, some just wanted to be left in peace to their lives, and some found ways to resist the changes.
Finally, this paper argues that gender policies towards Muslim women and men were utilised to exert influence over Muslim communities for state-building purposes. It shows how ideas about Muslim women and men, family and gender relations informed aggressive policies, and questions the broader consequences of the authoritarian state's attempt to change cultural norms aggressively and to what extent these policies contributed to Islamophobia.

Bio: Ivan Simić is a gender historian at Charles University in Prague. He is the principal investigator on a large project that explores communist gender policies towards Muslim minorities in Eastern Europe. He earned his PhD at University College London in the UK. At UCL, he was a SSEES foundation and FBB Trust Fellow. Before joining Charles University, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Carleton University in Canada and a research fellow at Yale University. He has held fellowships at the University of Graz and the Center for Advanced Studies in Sofia. He authored a book with Palgrave, ‘Soviet Influences on Postwar Yugoslav Gender Policies’, and he has published numerous articles on gender in Eastern Europe. His next book will be out with the University of Toronto press in summer of 2023.

Join the seminar via ZOOM:
https://sh-se.zoom.us/j/65515559000?pwd=TEx2OGhWNXZ2SWhuNUJnOXJlaDB1Zz09
Meeting ID: 655 1555 9000
Passcode: 776375