Saba Mahmood’s anthropological work studies the gain in skills, agency and capacity building by the women’s dawa movement in Egypt. These women increase their virtue toward the goal of piety by following dominant, often patriarchal norms. Mahmood argues that “teleological feminism” ignores this gain in agency because this kind of feminism only focuses on opposition or resistance to these norms. In this paper I defend Mahmood’s “anti-teleological” feminist work from criticisms that her project valorizes oppression and has no vision for (...) a nonoppressive feminist future. I argue the future envisioned by teleological feminists gets caught in “the Hegelian” trap of replicating past oppression in their feminist future. I find in Mahmood’s work the tools to escape this trap. I argue, rather than a movement of overcoming oppression, Mahmood’s work suggests an immanent and creative movement that emphasizes difference for a truly new future. I turn to a Bergsonian metaphor and argue that this movement can be seen as akin to the movement of biological evolution. I conclude using the work of Eve Sedgwick that the Egyptian women that Mahmood studies are being read in a “paranoid” fashion and demonstrate using Leila Ahmed a better “reparative” reading of these women. (shrink)

In her book, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Saba Mahmood analyzes the practices of the women in the mosque movement in Cairo, Egypt. Mahmood argues that in order to recognize the participants as agents, we need to question the assumption that agency entails resistance to norms; moreover, we need to question the feminist allegiance to an unquestioned ideal of freedom. In this paper, I argue that rather than giving up the ideal of freedom, we can (...) explore the possibility that there are different conceptions of freedom, and that the agency of the women in the mosque movement can be understood through a conception of freedom as a practice of connection, or belonging. I develop this alternative paradigm through discussions of four conceptions of freedom: Foucault's theory of agency as self-creation, positive freedom, communitarian freedom, and freedom as resistance. (shrink)

I begin the first part by showing how situationism should make us question traditional understandings of virtues as intrinsic dispositions. I concentrate specifically on situationist experiments related to mood. I then introduce Islamic virtue ethics and the dawa movement. In parts two and three I examine ethnography of the dawa movement to explore how they deal with worries about the influence of mood on their virtue. In part two I show how they train their habits in very traditional virtue ethics (...) ways in order to be more resilient when faced with virtue-diminishing affective situations. In part three I show how the situation, rather than hindering practitioners, is recruited into helping these women achieve piety. I conclude, in part four, by showing the dawa movement's creative use of the Islamic veil as a way to help these women deal with the objection that one cannot avoid all bad situations. Going beyond social psychological experiments, I examine two methodological sources not found in situationist debates. First, I argue for ethnography as an empirical method through which to study virtue. I draw on ethnography of the Islamic women's dawa movement. Secondly, the work in the philosophy of mind on ‘affective scaffolding’. (shrink)

This paper explores how Islam is understood by Muslim women entrepreneurs and considers its influence on their entrepreneurial experiences in the country-specific context of Lebanon. In so doing, we adopt a qualitative interpretative approach, drawing upon 21 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with women entrepreneurs. Accordingly, we present empirical evidence detailing how Muslim women entrepreneurs utilise various aspects and teachings of Islam to make sense of their entrepreneurial decisions. We thus provide insight into how women’s entrepreneurship interlocks with Islamic teachings and the (...) restrictions imposed by patriarchal socio-cultural values in Lebanon. This paper advances entrepreneurship research by demonstrating how Islam unfolds as a source of inspiration and resilience for women entrepreneurs, if and when equipped with an Islamic feminist interpretation. (shrink)

This article addresses issues of body and sexuality exposed by documentary films about orthodox Jewish women in Israel and traditional Islamic women in Iran, directed by Anat Yuta Zuria and Ziba Mir-Hosseini, respectively. These two groups of religious women are faced with some similar circumstances. The directors of these films use their cameras to expose not only the male gaze, but sometimes they also turn their cameras back on the men who perpetuate and benefit from religious legal systems that subjugate (...) these women. The camera thus is not merely a documentary tool but also a political tool revealing what is hidden in the inner sanctum and redeeming it from the “private sphere.” This comparison highlights the potential of Jewish feminism in Israel; it challenges it to work in alliance with Islamic women who live either as citizens in Israel or as non-citizens in the occupied territories. (shrink)

‘Intersectionality’ has now become a major feature of feminist scholarly work, despite continued debates surrounding its precise definition. Since the term was coined and the field established in the late 1980s, countless articles, volumes and conferences have grown out of it, heralding a new phase in feminist and gender studies. Over the past few years, however, the growing number of critiques leveled against intersectionality warrants us as feminists to pause and reflect on the trajectory the concept has taken and on (...) the ways in which it has traveled through time and space. Conceptualizing intersectionality as a traveling theory allows for these multiple critiques to be contextualized and addressed. It is argued that the context of the neoliberal academy plays a major role in the ways in which intersectionality has lost much of its critical potential in some of its usages today. It is further suggested that Marxist feminism offers an important means of grounding intersectionality critically and expanding intersectionality’s ability to engage with feminism transnationally. (shrink)

This paper looks at the place of items long associated with the bodies of South Asian women in mainstream fashion. First, there will be a profiling of some of the scenes where bindhies, mendhies and related scents and sounds are donned and adored by white bodies. By participating in conversations with South Asian women in Britain in the second part of the article, the author is able to discuss some of the stirrings raised by the recent legitimization of these items (...) by multicultural capitalism, leading towards an exploration of a different sense of aesthetics, memory and desire. The ambivalent attraction of limited recognition offered by the anthropological urge to ‘know’ the ethnic ‘other’ is noted. A consideration of the rage induced by the power of whiteness to play with ‘ethnic’ items which had not so long ago been reviled when they were worn by South Asian women points to the historical amnesia that underlies much multicultural celebration. The allure of images packaged as oriental for South Asian women themselves, although often from a different set of sensibilities and memories, stresses the importance of historical reconstruction. (shrink)

This article examines developments in ‘Islamic feminism’, and offers a critique of feminist theories, which construct it as an authentic and indigenous emancipatory alternative to secular feminisms. Focusing on Iranian theocracy, I argue that the Islamization of gender relations has created an oppressive patriarchy that cannot be replaced through legal reforms. While many women in Iran resist this religious and patriarchal regime, and an increasing number of Iranian intellectuals and activists, including Islamists, call for the separation of state and religion, (...) feminists of a cultural relativist and postmodernist persuasion do not acknowledge the failure of the Islamic project. I argue that western feminist theory, in spite of its advances, is in a state of crisis since (a) it is challenged by the continuation of patriarchal domination in the West in the wake of legal equality between genders, (b) suspicious of the universality of patriarchy, it overlooks oppressive gender relations in non-western societies and (c) rejecting Eurocentrism and racism, it endorses the fragmentation of women of the world into religious, national, ethnic, racial and cultural entities with particularist agendas. (shrink)

This article presents the Islamic bioethical deliberation on the issue of sex assignment surgery for infants with disorders of sex development or intersexed as a case study. The main objective of this study is to present a different approach in assessing a biomedical issue within the medium of the Maqasid al-Shari’ah. Within the framework of the maqasidic scheme of benefits and harms, any practice where benefits are substantial is considered permissible, while those promoting harms are prohibited. The concept of Maqasid (...) al-Shari’ah which is the mechanistic interpretation of Qur’an and Hadith presents the holistic attention of Islam on many life activities, including healthcare. Indeed, this concept encompasses many aspects of worldly life, both for the human individual and collectively for the whole society. In healthcare, the practice of SAS on DSD newborns has presented an assortment of implications on the future livelihood of the affected individual. The process of decision-making seems to be very multifaceted since every element such as the determination of the ‘correct’ sex and the urgency of early surgery must consider the benefits and harms, as well as the child’s rights and best interest. The application of the concept of Maqasid al-Shari’ah, would convey a pragmatic approach that is often disregarded in Western medicine. This approach considers the right of the individual to live life optimally, individually and socially and practice his faith, precisely, in accordance with the assigned gender. (shrink)

In 2008, Dutch anti-Islam Member of Parliament Geert Wilders produced a short video called Fitna to visualize his argument that Islam is a dangerous religion. Thousands of men and women across the globe uploaded their own videos to YouTube to criticize or support the film. In this article, we look at these alternative videos from a feminist perspective, contrasting the gender portrayal and narratives in Fitna with those in the alternative videos. We contend that Fitna expressed an extremist Orientalist discourse, (...) in which women are presented as the current and future victims of the oppression of Muslim men and Islam. In contrast, the YouTube videos give voice to women themselves who come from across the globe, are relatively young and often active Muslims. Second, they express different view points in generically new ways, criticizing and ridiculing Wilders or producing serious and committed explanations of their own understanding of Islam. Third, although relatively few women appeared in the videos, those that did speak for themselves, not only take on Wilders, but also claim their right to speak within Islam. We propose to understand these videos as acts of citizenships through which women constitute themselves as global citizens, in some cases by engaging in ‘deliberation’ as it is understood in feminist political theory, in other cases by taking a ‘voice’ that can be responded to. (shrink)

More than ever, ‘the headscarf’ is a dominant trope in contemporary ‘Western’ discourses on migration. Within controversies on Muslim ‘others’, ethnicity and gender frequently interweave. In discussions about the Muslim woman, a problematic dichotomy frequently emerges: namely the representation of a Muslim woman who wears the headscarf and is seen as ‘oppressed’ or ‘traditional’. This is opposed to the position of a Muslim woman who does not wear the headscarf and is simultaneously considered a ‘self-determined’ or ‘modern’ Muslim woman. Against (...) this backdrop, this contribution adopts a critical perspective on dichotomising discourses on Muslim women’s practices in relation to wearing the headscarf. In this article the authors examine narrative interviews with four Muslim women, focusing on their subjective experiences and psychological coping strategies with dichotomous and dichotomising stereotypes. An in-depth qualitative analysis shows that these women display a need to constantly justify and negotiate their own positions in relation to wearing the headscarf, regardless of whether the interviewed women actually wear a headscarf or not. Based on this, the authors identify different psychological coping strategies and discuss them critically in a wider framework that draws attention to existing social hierarchies. (shrink)

In the Algerian War of Independence, women famously used both traditional and modern clothing as part of their revolutionary efforts against French colonialism. This paper uncovers some of the principal lessons of this historical episode through a phenomenological exploration of agency, religion, and political transformation. Part I draws primarily on the philosophical insights of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty alongside the memoirs of Zohra Drif, a young woman member of the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale, in order to explore the (...) worldly and habitual nature of human agency in contrast to the Enlightenment stress on individual rationality and autonomy. Part II turns to John Russon’s phenomenological interpretation of religion in order to argue for the ineluctable significance of religion on human existence, in contrast to the modern tendency to oppose religious tradition and secular modernity. Part III analyzes the dynamics of intercultural communication, and argues for the political power of phenomenology as a critical enterprise that enables more just and emancipatory visions of collective human life and political transformation to come to the fore. (shrink)

In Hiba Ra’uf’s Woman and Political Work, she argues that the family is the basic political unit of the Islamic community or nation (the umma). Her thesis is both feminist and Islamist, as she argues that the ‘private is political’. By drawing analogies between family and umma, family and caliphate, the personal and the political, the private and public, Ra’uf seeks to dismantle the oppositions of secular society, to challenge the division of society into discrete spheres. This entails an implicit (...) challenge to the secular state, but effected through the politics of the family. An Islamic family, she argues, is a powerful site for the transformation of socio-political institutions; a politics of the microcosmic with macrocosmic ramifications, effected through the very embodiment and practice of an Islamic ethos at a grassroots, capillary level. However, though Ra’uf contests liberal secularism’s division of spheres with feminist and Islamist critical methods, she reproduces some of its fundamental assumptions about the nature of the family: as the domain of religion, in opposition to the secular state; as rooting community, in opposition to the individualism of the citizen; as an ethics grounded in affect; and as an essentially feminine world. In making the family the sphere of Islamic politics, Ra’uf re-enacts secularism’s division of spheres, sacralizing the affective bonds of intimate relations and making the family the domain of religion. Furthermore, by emphasizing the family as the domain of women’s political work, she reinscribes the family as a feminine sphere, so that woman’s vocation is familial, as is her ethical disposition. (shrink)

This article critically addresses recent anthropological and feminist efforts to theorize and analyse Muslim women's participation in and support for the Islamic revival in its various manifestations. Drawing on ethnographic material from research on young Muslims engaged in Islamic youth and student-organizations in Norway, I investigate some of the challenges that researching religious subjectivities and practices pose to feminist theory. In particular, I deal with how to understand women's religious piety in relation to questions of self, agency and resistance. Engaging (...) with Saba Mahmood's work on The Politics of Piety, this article suggests ways of understanding the young women's religious engagement that move beyond the confines of a binary model of subordination and resistance, coercion and choice. Grounding the discussion in ethnographic analysis of how young Muslim women in Norway speak about the ‘self’, I argue that critically revisiting feminist notions of agency, autonomy and desire, is necessary in order to understand the kinds of self-realization that these women aspire to. However, the article argues against positing Muslim conceptions and techniques of the self as ‘the other’ of liberal-secular traditions. Rather, I show how configurations of personhood, ethics and self-realization drawn from Islamic and liberal-secular discursive formations inhabit not only the same cultural and historical space, but also shape individual subjectivities and modes of agency. (shrink)

In late 2003, the Canadian media reported that the Islamic Institute of Civil Justice would start offering arbitration in family disputes in accordance with both Islamic legal principles and Ontario's Arbitration Act of 1991. A vociferous two-year debate ensued on the introduction of “Sharia law” in Ontario. This article analyzes representations of Muslim women's agency that came to the fore in this debate by examining reports in three Canadian newspapers. The debate demonstrated two notions of agency. The predominant perspective conceptualized (...) Muslim women's agency as their ability to resist domination, tying secularization to agency. A second strain of the debate portrayed agency as embedded in intersecting social forces of domination and subordination. The first perspective homogenized diverse Muslim communities, fostering the gendered racialization of these communities. Understanding agency as embedded, by contrast, enabled conceptualizations of Muslim women as agentic religious subjects. (shrink)

In the context of the continuing dominance of delocalised Western feminist theoretical models, which allow the non-Western and not quite Western ‘others’ to either be epistemically annihilated or appropriated, it becomes crucial to look for transformative feminist theoretical tools which can eventually help break the so-called mere recognition patterns and move in the direction of transversal dialogues, mutual learning practices and volatile but effective feminist coalitions. Speaking from the position of postcolonial and postsocialist feminist others vis-a-vis the dominant Western/northern gender (...) studies mainstream, and drawing on examples from a broad range of social contexts (from the Armenian queer social movement to a recent Indian gang rape controversy), the authors of this article address the validity of two such transformative feminist tools: border thinking that operates on a more general theoretical level, and disidentification that offers a more praxial operational realisation of the border principle. (shrink)

This article reports on the first stage of a research project on German university students’ conceptualization of Arab women and to what extent it is affected by the latters’ representation in the Western press during the Arab Spring. We combined discourse analysis and corpus-linguistic approaches to investigate the relationship between lexical items used by the students to express their attitudes toward Arab women and those featuring in news headlines about them published in British, American, and German news media. Results show (...) that the portrayal of Arab women in Western news headlines has a clear impact on German students’ opinions of them. The findings also show that our participants tend to be aware of this effect, which could be partly due to their familiarity with discourse analysis as students of linguistics. These results have implications for incorporating media education systematically in general university courses. (shrink)

Islam is a religion of vast dimensions which has inspired great civilizations and today offers many men and women comfort and ethical guidance. In this paper I suggest that the tension between the Qur'an accepted as the perfect timeless word of God and the encultured dynamic Islam of nearly a quarter of the world's population results in contending perspectives of women's role and rights. The Qur'an gives men and women spiritual parity, but there are verses in the Qur'an that some (...) feminists find difficult to reconcile with the modern rights of women. Most Islamic feminists make a clear distinction between cultural practices and the pure word of God. 1 There are profound differences in the status of women within and between predominantly Muslim countries. In some countries it is illegal for women to drive a car, or to move freely outside the home, in others women have become heads of state. The decision to wear the veil, often a sign of empowerment in Europe, is in parts of the Islamic world obligatory. Voices representing an exclusivist, literalist understanding of Islam have entered the mainstream of Muslim lives due in part to the fact that Wahhabism imposes a narrow, sectarian view of Islam, and the Saudi government with its massive oil wealth propagates this puritanical form of Islam across the world. Some traditionalist maulanas and maulvis are concerned above all with women's modesty and enforce customs that refine, purify and protect their chastity. They, like some Islamic feminists, position Islamic rights and roles for women with regard to the exoticized and eroticized `other' — in this case Western civilization, Western imperialism and the rise of Western feminism. `The West' becomes for traditional interpreters a kind of contemporary jahilya. There are also many progressive Muslim scholars who seek to articulate a historically accurate, non-idealized, now challenged, now challenging, view of Islam with an uncompromising emphasis on social justice, equality and pluralism. This paper argues that the ongoing, postcolonial battle against Western `imperialism' demands epistemological humility. Nevertheless, women are fighting for basic human rights and freedoms in parts of the Islamic world where the State, religious authorities and the patriarchal family assume the right of legal and moral surveillance. In considering the nature of violence to Muslim women in Pakistan and the UK, I hope to show that accusations of orientalism should not deter us from recognizing the courage of women activists who themselves risk imprisonment and of the struggle of women victims of rape and domestic violence to overcome feelings of shame and dishonour. I argue that both the private and public spheres need to be made safe for all Muslim women, and not just a professional elite. This can only be achieved by a fuller recognition of women's rights encapsulated in law and all aspects of public life. (shrink)

Drawing on the scholarship of Critical Religion, this article shows how the modern category “religion” operates through a gender code which upholds its discursive power and enables the production of religious—and therefore racial—hierarchies. Specifically, it argues that mentioning religion automatically makes gender present in discourse. Acknowledging religion as an inherently gendered category in this way gives further insight into the discursive power and functioning of the religious label. With the example of the Westphalian production of the “myth of religious violence” (...) and the employment of “religion” in colonial contexts, I demonstrate how a gender code upholds and enables the discursive power of religion. Religion is both gendered and gendering. Acknowledging the multiple ways in which religion is gendered and gendering, then, has important bearings on the analysis of religion’s racializing function which is upheld and aided by the gender code through which religion is spoken. (shrink)

This article considers the academic writings and activism of the major Continental feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti against the background of the growing religiously and racially biased anti-immigration sentiment in Europe. Special attention is paid to Braidotti’s recent response to the post-secular turn in feminism. The article contends that Braidotti’s work highlights and embraces the destabilising structural effects the intensified migration flows have on European identity. It argues that Braidotti charts new models of European subjectivity that would facilitate mutually affirmative and (...) trans-formative relationships between those (self-)perceived as Western feminists and those positioned as immigrant women. (shrink)

Nationalisms are polymorphous and often internally contradictory, unleashing emancipatory as well as repressive ideas and forces. This article explores the ideologies and mobilization strategies of two organizations over a 10-year period in the occupied Palestinian territories: a leftist-nationalist party in which women became unusually powerful and its affiliated and remarkably successful nationalist-feminist women's organization. Two factors allowed women to become powerful and facilitated a fruitful coexistence between nationalism and feminism: a commitment to a variant of modernist ideology that was marked (...) by grassroots as opposed to military mobilization and a concern with proving the cultural worth of Palestinian society to the West, a project that was symbolized by women's status in important ways. By comparing international and indigenous feminist discourses, the study also demonstrates how narratives about gender status in the Third World are implicated in, and inextricable from, international economic and political inequalities. (shrink)

Tolerant discourse in the United States has responded to heightened stereotyping of Muslims as violent by countering that “not all Muslims are terrorists.” This subtyping of Muslims—as some radical terrorists among mostly peaceful “moderates”—is meant to protect a positive image of the group but leaves the original negative stereotype unchanged. We predicted that such discourse may paradoxically increase people’s support of anti-Muslim policies because the subtyping and its associated negative stereotypes justify hostile actions toward Muslims. In Study 1, subtyping predicted (...) support for three anti-Muslim policies, but only among political moderates and conservatives. In Study 2, participants who were exposed to subtyping narratives expressed greater support for surveillance of Muslims in the United States. The effect of subtyping narrative exposure was stronger on support for hawkish anti-terror policy when participants’ preexisting endorsement of subtyping was low. Irrespective of the well-meaning intentions of peaceful vs. radical subtyping, its expression can justify ongoing “War on Terror” policies. As the population of Muslims increases in North America, the intuition that most Muslims do not meet the negative stereotype may ironically reduce inclusion. (shrink)

The Muslim woman wearing the veil, the female anorexic and the from-male-to-female transsexual constitute three different figures that, despite their striking differences, have a common symbolic ground. By focusing on the similarity between the veiled woman and the other two figures, the article sheds a different light on the debate about the Muslim veil in western societies. It is argued that the western notion of woman is based on a structural ambivalence of transcendence and immanence. On the one hand, woman (...) is expected to be liberated, in control and active in public life and in all ways just as free as the man, on the other she represents a deficiency compared to the man; it is expected of her that she takes up a complementary, subordinate position in relation to the man. The subordinate position, however, is seldom pronounced. Officially, the gender hierarchy is not a part of egalitarian societies, that is, the modern configuration that formally rejects a hierarchical worldview. Is this the reason why the three figures are regarded as pathological? Does their way of demonstrating extraordinary transcendence combined with extraordinary immanence make them monstrous? (shrink)

This paper presents a poststructuralist, postcolonial and feminist interrogation of the ‘Girl Effect’. First coined by Nike inc, the ‘Girl Effect’ has become a key development discourse taken up by a wide range of governmental organisations, charities and nongovernmental organisations (NGOs). At its heart is the idea that ‘girl power’ is the best way to lift the developing world out of poverty. As well as a policy discourse, the Girl Effect entails an address to Western girls. Through a range of (...) online and offline publicity campaigns, Western girls are invited to take up the cause of girls in the developing world and to lend their support through their use of social media, through fundraising and consumption. Drawing on a wide range of policy documents, media outputs and offline events, this paper explores the way in which the Girl Effect discourse articulates notions of girlhood, empowerment, development and the Global North/south divide. (shrink)

In this article I analyze both generalized propriety as a boundary marker of Sudanese identity in Cairo, and gendered attitudes toward morality and female genital cutting (FGC) as a fundamental aspect of that boundary. Sudanese have been profoundly affected by the ongoing political crisis in their home country, by the displacement triggered by political and economic collapse, and by their deteriorating legal and social status in Egypt. The dramatic changes in the circumstances of Sudanese residence in Cairo have challenged the (...) cultural norm of gender complementarity as men ‘stay at home’ for want of work while women seek and find new opportunities for themselves. This unstable situation has led Sudanese to place more emphasis on ‘proper’ ways of behaving and being, an assertion that helps define the ethnic boundaries of the Sudanese community in Cairo. I demonstrate the inconsistencies between discourse and reality through ethnographic data while analyzing how Sudanese have found new ways of asserting their identity and resisting the practice of FGC. (shrink)

The practice of Islamic veiling has over the last ten years emerged into a popular site of investigation. Different researchers have focused on the various significations of this bodily practice, both in its gendered dimensions, its identity components, its empowering potentials, as a satorial practice or as part of a broader economy of bodily practices which shape pious dispositions in accordance with the Islamic tradition. Lesser, however, has this been the case for the practice of not veiling or unveiling. If (...) and when attention is accorded to the latter, it is often grasped as a product of integration or an effect secular governmentality, but only rarely as a bodily practice. Drawing on narratives of second generation secular and religious Maghrebi Muslims in Belgium, this paper pursues this second perspective by examining to which extent not-veiling can be understood as a technique of the self (Foucault) that is functional to shaping a liberal (Musilm) subject. While a first part of this article will unpack the ethical substance of such discursive interrogations and point to the ways in which they are intertwined with the enactment of a liberal self, the second part will examine the embodied contours of this problematization, which appeared through the labour upon one's affect and bodily dispositions that this refusal of the hijab, or the act of unveiling, implies. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe aim of this essay is to give voice to the distinct types of feminist consciousnesses in dominantly Muslim societies, which have been mostly ignored or marginalized by Western and Western-influenced feminisms. I analyze Islamic and secular feminisms in Turkey and in Iran and show the shortcomings and patriarchal elements in both movements. I also show the authenticity and necessity of both movements, and emphasize their contributions to the feminist ideal of pluralism. Finally, by producing this project, I hope to (...) carve a space for Middle Eastern Feminisms in global feminist scholarship. (shrink)

In 1987 the book Not Without My Daughter by Betty Mahmoody became a worldwide best-seller. In the line of Mahmoody’s book, similar ‘true stories’ of western white women with oriental husbands were published. These books concentrate on topics like bad marriages, abuse and international parental abduction. In this article the books are analysed as popular culture products of orientalist discourse on mixed marriages. They are maternal melodramas in which women who are victims of their intermarriage become heroines by sacrificing themselves (...) for the sake of their children. As ‘learned foolhardy women’ the authors of these stories are cultural reproducers of the West; their function is to warn other women not to enter into a mixed marriage and to warn western society about the dangers of racial and cultural intermixture. (shrink)

This article attends to the transformation of national identity that occurs in the context of ‘the multicultural debate’ in the Netherlands, and unfolds on the terrain of Dutch (secular and sexual) exceptionalism. First, it explores the connections between two topics that are prominent in the ‘multicultural debates’ all over Europe and undergird the civilizational discourse of a post-Cold War geopolitical era: discussions about secularism on the one hand, and gender and sexual politics on the other. Through a mode of ‘secular (...) nostalgia’, which mobilizes the understanding of the Netherlands as a place par excellence of emancipation for both women and sexual minorities, the Dutch secular arrangement is restructured in new exclusionary ways. Second, it explores how dominant discourses on the symbolic and material borders of the nation interpellate young Muslim women who often figure as the central ‘subjects of debate’. I rely on the notion of interpellation (Althusser) to explore the question of subject formation, with a particular attention to the epistemological conditions of ‘talking back’ as a subject whose constituency and agency is always already informed by the terms in which she is addressed. (shrink)

This article traces not only some of the borrowings but also the differences between feminist and gay politics in the context of the post-1989 ‘multicultural debate’ and the hegemony of civilizational politics. This investigation is empirically grounded in one national context, that is, the Dutch case, which is exemplary when it comes to bringing politics of gender and sexuality to bear on national and cultural identity politics. The article recapitulates some insights on how feminist politics can get entangled with colonial (...) and imperialist politics and traces these connections in a Dutch context. It goes on to review some of the forms homonationalism and homonostalgia take in the Netherlands. And it concludes with a discussion of the resemblances and differences between the ‘saving women’ and ‘saving gays’ narratives that inform civilizational modes of feminist and gay politics. (shrink)

The increasingly pervasive practice of veiling among Muslim women has stimulated a great deal of scholarly investigation and debate. This study brings empirical evidence to bear on current debates about the meaning of the veil in Islam. This article first examines the conflicting meanings of the veil among Muslim religious elites and Islamic feminists. Although the dominant gender discourse among Muslim elites strongly favors this cultural practice, an antiveiling discourse promulgated by Islamic feminists has gained ground within recent years. This (...) study then examines how these discursive disputes affect gender identity negotiation among veiled and unveiled Muslim women living in Austin, Texas. Interviews with these women highlight how their gender identities reproduce and reformulate existing Muslim gender discourses. Special attention is paid to the subjective disparities and points of congruence between both groups of respondents. This study concludes by suggesting avenues for future research on the intersection of gender, religion, and cultural difference. (shrink)

The current debate over the hijab is often understood through the lens of a ‘clash of civilizations’ between a tolerant ‘secular’ ‘West’ and a chauvinist ‘religious’ ‘East’. The article argues that this polarization is the result of a specific secular semiotic understanding of religion and religious practices which is nowadays embedded in western law. In my analysis, secular’s normative assumptions, played around the control of women’s bodies and the definition of religious symbols in the public sphere, work as a marker (...) of ‘citizenship’ and ‘racialized religious belonging’. Through women’s bodies, western/secular law creates a link between gender, religion, ethnicity and belonging which forms a specific law and religious subject. Thus, secularism emerges not as the separation between private and public, state and religion, but as the reconfiguration of religious practices and sensitivities in the public secular space through the control of the visible. (shrink)

Public debates depict Arabs as opposed to gender equality because of Islam. However, there may be substantial numbers of Arab Muslims who do support feminist issues and who do so while being highly attached to Islam. This study explains why certain Arabs support feminism while remaining strongly religious. We propose that some Arab citizens are more likely to subvert patriarchal norms, especially in societies that construct Islam and feminism as more compatible. Empirically, we apply three-level multinomial analyses to 51 Arab (...) Barometer and World Values Surveys, which include 57,000 Arab Muslims. Our results show that one in four Arab Muslims supports Muslim feminism—far more than those who support a more secularist version of feminism. Employed women, single people, people who distrust institutions, and more highly educated people support Muslim feminism more than do others—especially in societies that construct feminism and Islam as less contradictory, such as those with strong feminist movements. The presumption that Islam and feminism are necessarily opposed may hinder feminism. A more effective way to boost gender equality in the Arab region may be to embolden emancipatory religious interpretations. (shrink)

Spanish Translation of "He/She/They/Ze" (Ergo, 2018).

Various esoteric traditions apply different modes of expression for the same metaphysical truths. We may name the two most known esoteric languages as ecstatic and scholastic. Early Daoist use of reverse symbolism as for metaphysical truths and its critical way of viewing formalist understanding of traditional teachings, common virtues and popular beliefs show that it applies an ecstatic language, which, being called shaṭḥ in Sufi terminology, has a detailed literature and technical description in Sufism. This article tries, after a short (...) survey of the concept of shaṭḥ in Sufism, to consider some early Daoist teachings such as wuwei, disparagement of moralism, and disparagement of rationality from an Eastern Sufi point of view regarding shaṭḥ to achieve a clearer insight into the gnostic aspects of the tradition, and to avoid certain possible misunderstanding of the teachings. (shrink)

Given the dichotomy of “Islam and the West” and its currency post-September 11, how do we respond to the question of a modern Islam? This is the key idea that this paper explores, by discussing what Islam represents, and what modernity entails, arguing that Islamic teachings and practices are not necessarily incompatible with modernity, and that the discourse on Islam and modernity and where the two are headed can be legitimately engaged in by Muslims given that Islamic societies are diverse (...) and subject to global influences. (shrink)