retooling democracy and feminism in the service of the new empire

RETOOLING DEMOCRACY AND FEMINISM IN THE SERVICE OF THE NEW EMPIREAuthor(s): Saba MahmoodReviewed work(s):Source: Qui Parle, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Summer 2006), pp. 117-143Published by: University of Nebraska PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20685707 .

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RETOOLING DEMOCRACY AND FEMINISM IN THE SERVICE OF THE NEW EMPIRE1

Saba Mahmood

While the war on Iraq has been raging with no end in sight, the European and American press has been having a heyday report

ing on the atrocities Islam commits daily against women deemed

unfortunate enough to have been born into its fold. Hardly a week

goes by without one of the major dailies running a story on the lat

est affront, if not act of violence, Islam has committed yet again

against the collectivity of Muslim womanhood. Since the events of

September 11, 2001, the Euro-American publishing industry has

produced a series of best-sellers that tell harrowing tales of Muslim

(and at times non-Muslim) women's survival under misogynist cul

tural practices that are supposed to characterize most, if not all, Islamic societies. These autobiographical accounts help secure the

popular judgment, now issued unequivocally from progressives, liberals, and conservatives alike, that Islam must reform.2 In this

judgment, Islam's mistreatment of women serves both as a site for

the diagnosis of the ills that haunt this faith and a strategic point of intervention for its restructuration. If the path to such a reformation

is unclear, its promise is not: Nothing short of "democracy" lies

waiting in the wings if recalcitrant Muslims can be made to see the

light. In this age of imperial certitude, the fate of Muslim women

and democracy has become indelibly intertwined, with calls for

Qui Parle, Vol. 16, No.1 Summer 2006



118 SABA MAHMOOD

"Islamic reformation" drawing a direct link between women's free

dom and the establishment of democracy in the Muslim world.

In this essay through a focus on some of the recent best-sell

ers published by Muslim women documenting Islam's patriarchal ills, I want to question both the certainty of the assumption that the

future of democracy lies in securing women's freedom, and the

idea that empowering women is a necessary step in eliminating

religious fundamentalism in the Muslim world. The testimonials I

will analyze have played a crucial role in securing support for the

neo-conservative agenda in the United States, particularly the judg ment so widespread in contemporary Europe and America that the

fetid character of Muslim practices must be purged and exorcised

at all costs. In their vast sales and widespread popularity, these

Muslim women's testimonials have been successful in reaching an

audience that right-wing political pundits such as Bernard Lewis

and Fouad Ajami cannot. The authors of these texts, much like Sal man Rushdie, to whom they are frequently compared, have taken on a heroic status as embodiments of resistance to the brutalities of

Islam, now so numerous and so unrelenting. As I will describe, the

heroization of these authors has propelled them into political and

corporate arenas in an unprecedented fashion, where they are

deployed both to inspire anti-Muslim pathos and to commodify anti-Muslim chic. While this in itself might be unsurprising, though

disturbingly so, my reading of these texts is motivated in part by the

astounding lack of critical response they have elicited within left and liberal circles despite the fact that these writings perform an

age-old genre of Orientalist (if not outrightly racist) tropes that

accord popular legitimacy to the current neo-conservative policy

agenda in the United States and the swell of right-wing anti-immi

gration policies in Europe.

Key Texts and Voices

One of the great successes within this genre is Azar Nafisi's

Reading Lolita in Tehran (hereafter RLT),3 a book that within a year of its publication had already spent over thirty-three weeks on the



RETOOLING DEMOCRACY AND FEMINISM 119

best-seller list (beating even Hillary Clinton's memoir), sold over

500,000 copies, and whose rights to publication have been bought in more than twenty-two countries.4 RLTls a book that is somewhat

distinct from the rest of the writings that I will discuss later in the

essay, particularly in its well-written prose and literary pretensions. It shares nonetheless two key characteristics with the other less

well-executed books within this genre. RLTgives a singularly exco

riating account of life in the Islamic Republic of Iran, with no con

sideration for the shifting position of women since the 1979 revo

lution, in order to buttress the impression already deeply entrenched among its Euro-American audiences that Islam is an

incurably misogynist, sexist, and life-squelching religion whose

reform must begin with liberating its women.5 Second, like other

books within this genre, RZThas also been hailed by neo-conserv

ative think tanks and cultural pundits as an important text that jus tifies their calls for regime change in the Middle East, whose bene

fits, we are told, will be most deeply felt by the most oppressed

population of the region, namely, Muslim women. In these two

important ways, Nafisi's text, along with others I discuss below, stand in contrast to other more nuanced accounts of women's lives

in Muslim societies that cannot be so easily recuperated under

these two narratives.6

A second publication, of far less literary merit, is Carmen Bin

Laden's Inside the Kingdom: My Life in Saudi Arabia (hereafter IK).7 It is an account of Carmen's marriage to one of Osama bin Laden's

twenty-five brothers and the years of claustrophobic (albeit plush) boredom she spent in Saudi Arabia. The book has been translated

into sixteen languages, and its hardcover edition made it to The

New York Times best-seller list soon after its publication (it was also a best-seller for months in France). A far greater success than IK is

Irshad Manji's book, The Trouble with Islam: A Muslim's Call for

Reform in Her Faith (hereafter 7"/), initially published in Canada and widely acclaimed in the United States.8 In September 2004, it

had already been on the best-seller list in Canada for twenty-nine weeks and was being translated into twelve languages, with rights to publication sold in nineteen additional countries.



120 SABA MAHMOOD

In France there have been numerous such testimonials pub lished, many appearing at the time of the passage of the controver

sial French law that banned the wearing of the veil in public schools. Key among them is Bas les voiles! written by Iranian dis

sident Chahdortt Djavann, whose personal testimony on the gov

ernment-appointed Stasi commission played a key role in mobiliz

ing official and public opinion against the veil. Other examples include Fadela Amara's Ne putes ni soumises, Loubna Meliane's

Vivre libre, Marie-Th?r?se Cuny Souad's Br?l?e vive, Leila's Mari?e

de force, and Samira Bellil's Dans l'enfer des tournantes.9 Holland,

Spain, Sweden, and Germany also lay claim to their own ambas

sadors of Islam's patriarchally oppressed. In a context where the

"Muslim problem" has become a key focal point in debates about

European identity, such spokeswomen perform an unofficial but now essential role within national political culture.

While this burgeoning popular literature animates the old colo nial trope that indelibly linked the problem of Islam to the "Woman

Question," it is also quite unique in several respects. First, it departs from earlier precedents in its ethnographic first-person mode of writ

ing, one that presents a Muslim woman's eye-witness account (as in, "I was there") of how Islam and its various customs are the essential source of women's oppression. The dust jacket of Bas les voiles!

quotes the author as saying, "I wore the veil for ten years. It was the

veil or death. I know what I'm talking about." In addition, these

native voices authenticate and reproduce the views espoused by many neo-conservative Likudite academics (such as Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes, and Fouad Ajami), writers who have long held Islam

responsible for the underdevelopment of Muslim societies and

whose work has helped seal the image that Islam is pathologically backward, regressive, and patriarchal. A number of the best-sellers

published in North America in fact read like Muslim women's man

ifestos for the Bush administration's policy of regime change in the

Middle East as well as for the Patriot Act's active targeting of

American Muslims as potential harbingers of terrorism at home.

A good example of this is Irshad Manji's TI which is breath

taking in its unrelenting reproduction of Likudite and neo-conserv




ative policy and rhetoric ? all told in the voice of a purportedly self-critical and reformist Muslim woman who wants to bring her

lost brethren to the correct path.10 While many of these books tend to favor hyperbolic and inflammatory rhetoric, Manji takes great

pleasure in using language that is clearly aimed at injuring and

offending Muslim sensibilities. Her text is therefore littered with sentences that describe Muslims as "brain-dead," "narrow-mind

ed," "incapable of thinking," "hypocritical," "desperately tribal," and "prone to victimology." She brands Islam as being more liter

alist, rigid, intolerant, totalitarian, anti-Semitic, and hateful of women and homosexuals than any other religion, and its rituals

more prone to inculcating "mindless and habitual submission" to

authority. Her denunciations of Islam and Muslims are matched by the unstinting praise she reserves for the West, Christianity, Judaism, and Israel. She finds the Western record unparalleled in

human history for its tolerance, its "love of discovery," "openness to new ideas," and so on. Given the denigrations Manji visits on

Muslims, it is not surprising that her message has found fecund

ground not among the brethren she claims to reform but rather

among such anti-Muslim bigots as Daniel Pipes (who has reviewed

Manji's work in glowing terms) and the neo-conservative lobby that

he represents. To characterize Manji as simply a shrill ideologue for the neo

conservative agenda, however, would be to underestimate and mis construe the public presence she commands. Not only is Manji both an up-and-coming media star and a successful socialite, one

who is seen in close proximity with celebrities such as Salman

Rushdie (with whom she often appears at public events), but her

book has received glowing reviews in leading American and

European newspapers. Her reviewers often tend to benignly over

look the factual errors, misrepresentations, and polemical over-sim

plifications that characterize Manji's discussion of the Palestinian

and Israeli conflict, Islamic history, and the recent record of Western

imperial incursions in the Muslim world. Reviews that criticize

Manji's historical distortions have not been published in the main

stream press, nor have they detracted from the unqualified support



122 SABA MAHMOOD

many liberal and conservative commentators offer for her argu ments. For example, Andrew Sullivan,11 a well-known columnist for

The New York Times and former editor of The New Republic, has

this to say about Manji's book: "The Trouble with Islam is a memo

rable entrance. It isn't the most learned or scholarly treatise on the

history or theology of Islam; its dabbling in geopolitics is haphazard and a little na?ve; its rhetorical hyperbole can sometimes seem a

mite attention-seeking.... But its spirit is undeniable, and long,

long overdue. Reading it feels like a revelation. Manji, a Canadian

journalist and television personality, does what so many of us have

longed to see done: assail fundamentalist Islam itself for tolerating such evil in its midst. And from within/m The last caveat is telling:

Manji's book has a special status because she is "one of them" and

yet she dares to say what pundits of public opinion like Bernard Lewis have told the West all along. Why does Manji succeed where

other Muslims have clearly failed? The answer for Sullivan lies in the

"distinct tone of liberalism" Manji uses ? "a liberalism," he says, that "seeks not to abolish faith but to establish a new relationship

with it. If we survive this current war without unthinkable casual

ties," he concludes, "it will be because this kind of liberalism didn't

lose its nerve. Think of Manji as a nerve ending for the West ?

shocking, raw, but mercifully, joyously, still alive" ("DE"). These

closing lines are telling for the providential role this kind of liberal

ism has come to play in the present historical moment: Not only must it redefine every Muslim's proper relationship to his or her

faith, but all those who do not follow its dictates are characterized as fanatics and fundamentalists. Furthermore, inasmuch as this pre

scriptive liberalism is supposed to inform the higher motivations for

the war in Iraq, Sullivan considers it a harbinger of "joy and mercy" for the Iraqis, a state of affairs that only the West can deliver to the

benighted inhabitants of the Muslim world.

Let me now turn briefly to the role this genre of Muslim

women's testimonials has played in Europe ? in France and the

Netherlands, for example ? in shoring up the growing anti-Muslim

sentiment and in lending support to the passage of a number of

anti-immigration laws targeted at the poorest and most vulnerable




sections of the European population. In the Netherlands, the

Somali woman Ayaan Hirsi Ali has become a leading voice against the Dutch government's welfare and multicultural policies that she

claims have fostered domestic violence against Muslim women by

allowing the Islamic community to practice its patriarchal tradi

tions and customs unfettered by the regulatory surveillance of the

state. She gained further notoriety following the now-infamous

murder, by a Moroccan immigrant, of Theo van Gogh, a Dutch

filmmaker with whom she had collaborated to produce a film

depicting Islam's poor treatment of women.13 Hirsi Ali first came to

prominence when, riding a long wave of anti-Muslim sentiment

following the events of 9/11, she publicly excoriated the prophet Muhammed (calling him a pervert and a tyrant) and renounced her

faith as a Muslim. Hirsi Ali lent a new voice of credibility to the racist views of anti-immigrant politicians, such as Pirn Fortuyn (who was killed by an animal rights activist in 2002), by making inflammatory statements such as: "The Muslim community lags in

enlightened thinking, tolerance and knowledge of other cultures."14

Like Irshad Manji, Ayaan Hirsi Ali has been handsomely rewarded for her insights. Apart from the fact that she has rock-star status

among many sections of the Dutch population, the right-wing

People's P?rty for Freedom and Democracy offered her a ticket to

run as a member of the parliament, a seat she won by popular vote

in January 2003, despite the fact that prior to the airing of her anti

immigrant views she had no public profile in Dutch politics.

Similarly, in France, Chahdortt Djavann, who became the

poster child for the French government's ban on the veil, has

espoused widely acclaimed views not that different from those of

Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Irshad Manji: Djavann declared that the act of

veiling is akin to women's rape, and argued that only women who

have worn the veil have the right to speak about the issue. While

denouncing women who "choose" to put on the veil as Islamist

fundamentalists, Djavann also claimed that it was only women like

herself (critics of the practice) who could speak legitimately on the issue. Bernard Stasi, a member of the French parliament who head

ed the government-appointed commission that recommended the



124 SABA MAHMOOD

ban, praised Djavann for offering the most moving testimony heard

by the commission.

It is hard to escape the impression that these women are de

facto ambassadors of an international community of oppressed Muslim womanhood, their voices standing in for this entire collec

tivity despite the fact that they represent only a small slice of a much larger spectrum of opinion on this issue. Their popularity in

this moment far exceeds that of authors of similar genres of popu lar literature, for their authority cuts across fields of politics, public

policy, and popular culture. The power these figures command in

the public imagination is evident in the fact that corporations are

increasingly embracing these figures to showcase their socially

responsible and culturally sensitive face. The manufacturer of the

luxury car Audi, for example, has been promoting Azar Nafisi and

her book RLT, along with public figures like David Bowie, the actor William H. Macy and the teenage soccer star Freddy Adu, all part of Audi of America's "Never Follow" campaign to sell the brand to

affluent and educated potential buyers. Nafisi appeared in adver

tisements for Audi in magazines as diverse as Vanity Fair, Wired, Coif Digest, The New Yorker, and Vogue. In Audi-sponsored liter

ary events for Nafisi, her life-size cut outs hang next to Audi pro files in bookstores across the U.S.15 While Nafisi's book does not

rely on the shrill polemical tone and acrid verbiage so characteris

tic of other accounts I discuss here, it nonetheless has played a key role in buttressing the monochromatic view most Euro-Americans

hold of women living in Muslim societies. Insomuch as automobile

advertisements sell not simply cars but also forms of social and

class identity, Audi's promotion of Nafisi shows the extent to which a genuine concern for Muslim women's welfare has been evacuat

ed of critical content, whittled down to a commodified token of

elite chic. The project of "Saving Muslim Women" is reminiscent

these days of the "Save the Whale" campaign that not so long ago had enjoyed wide support among educated middle and upper classes of Europe and America.

Perhaps the most surprising element in this confluence of pol itics, popular culture, and corporate capital is the purchase this bur




geoning literature commands within liberal feminist circles and a

general lack of critique of the reductionism these texts enact in the

name of saving Muslim women. The wide support these accounts

have garnered is striking for the strange bed fellows it has produced: one sees neo-cons such as Lewis, Pipes, and Ajami

? all of whom

have championed the Bush administration's agenda of regime

change in the Middle East ? sharing the same space of endorse

ment for these books as Susan Sontag, Barbara Ehrenreich, and

Margaret Atwood.16 This cohabitation is all the more strange because, unlike the former, the latter figures are known for their

criticisms of the Bush administration's military adventures in the

Middle East.

There is no doubt that there are important and significant dif

ferences on a wide variety of issues between neo-conservatives and

those who identify themselves as feminists. There is, however, a

convergence of opinion between these different constituencies

when it comes to current discussions on Islam, particularly the

judgment that Islam is the most misogynist and patriarchal of all

religions and that the liberation of its women is a necessary step in

the reform of this tradition. What makes this convergence all the more disturbing is that it comes almost twenty years after post colonial scholars articulated a robust critique of the Orientalist

assumptions that help secure such an intertwining of feminist and

imperial discourses. While scholars have analyzed how feminism

has been historically used to justify colonial and imperial projects, the re-emergence of this old intertwining invites further reflection.

I believe that it is crucial for those interested in thinking critically about feminist praxis to inquire into the prejudices, impetuses, and

proclivities internal to the feminist tradition that make it so pliable to colonial and imperial projects. By this I do not simply mean that

we should be critical of the opportunistic uses to which feminism

is put (such as Laura Bush's use of feminist rhetoric to justify the

war against Afghanistan), but to ask a deeper set of questions about

the reformist agenda of progressive change to which many strands of feminism remain committed. The realization of such a vision

necessarily depends upon the mobilization of interventionist



126 SABA MAHMOOD

power so as to yield the desired results. It is this will to power inter

nal to feminism, however benign its aims, that must be subjected to renewed scrutiny in this moment of empire.

Honor Killings

In order to suggest some ways of thinking about these issues, let me turn to the question of "honor killings"

? another key trope

through which the atrocity of Islam's tribalism is thematized these

days. It is the subject of yet another best-selling Muslim woman's

autobiography of her first-hand encounter with this "barbaric prac tice." Norma Khouri's book Forbidden Love: A Harrowing True

Story of Love and Revenge in Jordan (henceforth FL) won great acclaim when it was first published by Random House in Australia

in 2002, and later by Simon & Schuster in the United States under

the title Honor Lost: Love and Death in Modern Day Jordan. Khouri's book is a harrowing tale of how her close Muslim friend was stabbed to death by her father for daring to date a Christian man in Jordan. Khouri painstakingly recounts how she had to flee

for her life so as to avoid being killed by her own family members because she dared to provide assistance to her friend in her clan destine romance. For many readers of the book, the fact that

Khouri, a Christian by birth, was subjected to the same treatment

as her Muslim friend was a testimony to the existence and power of the "brutal desert code of behavior" that does not discriminate

between followers of Islam and their more enlightened cousins, the

Christians.17 Widely described as a tale of grief, passion, and rage, Khouri's book not only provided a first-hand account of the dread

ful practice of "honor killing," but bore testimony to many of the

ills Khouri's audience already knew characterize the Muslim world. It is hard to keep a straight account of these ills, but most of them

should be familiar to any consumer of popular culture these days: the oppression of the veil, conservative social mores, a general life

squelching culture of gender control, and so on.

Khouri's book soared up quickly on best-seller lists in France

and Australia, selling a quarter of a million copies in fifteen coun



RETOOLING DEMOCRAC Y AND FEMINISM 127

tries, generating close to a million dollars in royalties, and invigo rating campaigns to fight honor killings in Jordan and beyond. Khouri became a celebrity overnight, often appearing in high pro file media events, writers' festivals, women's rights forums, col

leges, and high schools. On these occasions, she issued heart

wrenching calls to fight the practice of honor killing in the Muslim world, calls that reportedly often reduced her audience to tears.

One reporter from Courier Mail noted that Khouri's publisher, Random House, often added an electric charge to her public appearances by providing well-placed security guards who were

supposed to protect her from impending Muslim rage and vio

lence.18 There was hardly a newspaper from across the three conti

nents that did not cover the pathos of Khouri's plight: from The

New York Times to the Sunday Herald, The Guardian, Jerusalem

Post, and a wide array of Australian newspapers. All this high drama came to a sudden end when in July 2004,

an investigative reporter discovered that not only had Khouri not

visited Jordan since the age of three, living all of her life in South west Chicago until her immigration to Australia shortly before the

publication of her book, but that she knew little or no Arabic, had

been on the run from the Federal Bureau of Investigation for an

alleged fraud, and had basically spun a false (if convincing) tale about her ordeals in Jordan. All of these revelations apparently came as a shock to her publishers, Random House and Simon &

Schuster, even though the National Commission for Women in

Jordan had earlier in the year notified them of their discovery of more than seventy factual errors in Khouri's book, only to have

their claims dismissed by both presses, who said they stood by their

author.19 All of this changed suddenly when these revelations were

made public, and Khouri's publishers withdrew the book from sale.

Champions of the book seemed aghast at how successfully Khouri had fooled her international audience and elite publishing houses. As one reporter asked incredulously, how can an "author

peddle fibs for almost two years worldwide in an era of push-button archival search engines, satellite broadcasts and instant communi

cation?"20 Answers to this question varied. Some said that Khouri's



128 SABA MAHMOOD

"palpably sincere" public performances won over even skeptics, others held the relatively lax protocols of commercial publishing

responsible, and still others pointed the finger at the Australian

propensity to fall for fetching tales of suffering and injustice, espe

cially when written in an immigrant voice. The publishing director

of Harper-Collins even acknowledged that the success of Khouri's

book was a testimony to the fact that there has been a "global post

September 11 demand for non-fiction, particularly books which

perpetuate negative stereotypes about Islamic men."21. Other inves

tigations revealed that Norma Khouri had enjoyed active support from the upper echelons of the Bush administration. Dick Cheney's

daughter Elizabeth Cheney, for example, had endorsed and sup

ported the publication of FL in her capacity as deputy assistant sec

retary of state in charge of the Middle East Partnership Initiative, a

$100 million fund that promotes political and educational reforms in the region.22 There were also reports that Dick Cheney himself had written a letter of recommendation to support Khouri's applica tion for a resident visa to the Australian government.23

Despite the surprise and criticism expressed, a consensus

soon emerged about the fundamental importance of Khouri's book. Critics suggested that the true power of her book lay not in its per sonal or individual narrative but in the larger truth it captured about

Islam's unparalleled record of the subjugation of women. The fac

tuality of Khouri's account came to be increasingly seen as only incidental to the larger reality that the book documented, a reality

whose truth the Western world already knew. The regnant assump tion undergirding this consensus seemed to be that insofar as

Islam's victims are not individuals but entire collectivities, its essen

tial brutality cannot be falsified because it transcends the (merely)

empirical register. Thus a well-placed Australian academic wrote

that Khouri's redemption lay in the fact that she might have been

personally transformed by her fraudulent performance because the

truth of the cause she enacted was ultimately larger than, and tran

scendental to, the agency of her own imposture.24 Given the

astounding moral gymnastics such a conclusion entails, it is impor tant to point out that Khouri's book, and others like hers, are not



RETOOLING DEMOCRAC Y AND FEMINISM 129

simply expressions of the reigning consensus about Islam's mis treatment of women, but are also a crucial means of production of

this consensus in this post-9/11 world of ours.

I want to be clear here in case I am misunderstood. I am not

disputing the fact that women suffer acts of violence in Muslim

societies, or that many Islamic edicts and practices uphold gender inequality, or that women are often punished for breaking what are

considered to be the protocols of proper gendered behavior. But

what I want to question is the idea that the inordinate attention lav

ished on Muslim women's suffering in the popular media today is

simply driven by a concern for their well-being. Let us take the issue of man-on-woman homicide, a practice that occurs widely in

almost all societies and is a testament to the continuing prepon derance of domestic abuse and violence against women. The

United Nations estimates that the number of women who are vic tims of "honor killings" come close to 1,000 per year in Pakistan, a

country whose total population is approximately 140 million.25 In

comparison, as The Family Violence Prevention Project documents,

approximately 1,500 women are killed every year by their spouses or boyfriends in what are called "crimes of passion" in the United States (roughly more than three women are murdered by their

boyfriends or husbands every day in the U.S.).26 Despite these com

parable statistics, not only do popular discussions in the interna tional media about the practice of "honor killings" fail to locate the

problem of violence against women within the larger comparative context, but they also represent the issue as if it is solely a function of Islamic or Arab culture rather than a product of complex social, economic, and political forces. Furthermore, the current preoccu

pation with highly individualized accounts of Islam's victims stands in sharp contrast to the deafening silence that has accompanied far

more egregious acts of collective violence visited upon women in

the last five years in the Congo and Gujarat, India.27 Yet none of

these events occupy the space and volume dedicated to the plight of Muslim women in the current press

? a fact that should alert us to the larger ideological project that the trope of Islam's patri archy currently facilitates.



130 SABA MAHMOOD

I am making a rather straightforward and familiar point here:

No discursive object occupies a simple relation to the reality it pur

portedly denotes. Rather, representations of facts, objects, and

events are profoundly mediated by fields of power in which they circulate and through which they acquire their precise force,

shape, and form. Consequently, contemporary concern for Muslim

women in Euro-American public debate cannot be dissociated

from the war declared by European and American governments on

the Muslim world (which includes Muslim immigrant populations residing in Europe and America). Given this context, in what fol

lows I would like to explore what it means, in this moment of

empire, for the freedom of Muslim women to be conjoined with

the rhetoric of bringing "democracy" to the Middle East. In partic ular, I am interested in showing the multiple fallacies and obfusca

tions that attend the now oft-repeated mantra that the project of

reforming Islam must begin with improving the condition of the women of this faith, that the future of democracy in the Middle East

lies in improving women's lot.

Women, Democracy, and Islamic Reformation

Pundits from the left and right agree these days that one of the

most compelling strategies for eliminating Islamic fundamentalism

consists in empowering Muslim women: educating them, giving them access to economic resources, and helping them secure polit ical representation. The argument underlying this strategy, simulta

neously echoed in policy and academic arenas, is paraphrased by Barbara Crossette, a leading New York Times reporter, in this man

ner: "When women's influence increases ... it strengthens the

moderate center, bolstering economic stability and democratic

order."28 The reasoning goes something like this: Insomuch as fem

inism is supposed to be "the opposite of fundamentalism,"29 and

since fundamentalists hate democracy, then it follows that empow

ering women will further the cause of feminism, which in turn will

help eliminate Islamic fundamentalism.

Apart from the more complicated fact that a number of




strands within the Islamist movement ? pejoratively referred to as

fundamentalist in the literature I cite here ? seek to broaden the

scope of political debate in the Muslim world rather than narrow

it,301 want to question the facile equation made between democ

racy and women's socio-economic status, the idea that promoting the latter will automatically lead to the former. This equation is eas

ily put to test if we look at the conditions under which women lived in pre-war Iraq. Despite the fact that Iraq was not a democracy,

Iraqi women enjoyed one of the highest rates of literacy in the Third World and were widely represented in various professions includ

ing the army and public office. During the years of Iraq's expand

ing economy, Saddam Hussein's regime implemented policies to

attract women into the workforce by providing them incentives

such as generous maternity leaves, equal pay and benefits, and free

higher education.31 One might say that the condition of women in

pre-war Iraq was not so dissimilar to other socialist countries (such as the former Soviet Republics or Cuba) where the lack of liberal

democracy did not translate into the marginalization of women

from the socio-economic and political life of these countries.

Iraqi women's socio-economic condition began to decline

after the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, but suffered the most serious set

back with the first Gulf War and subsequent economic sanctions

imposed by the U.S., in cooperation with the United Nations and

its European allies. Female literacy dropped sharply after the Gulf

War, and women's access to education, transportation, and employ ment became increasingly difficult. The current U.S. occupation of

Iraq is only the most recent chapter in twelve years of debilitating sanctions that have directly contributed to the most dramatic

decline in Iraqi women's living conditions. Needless to say, in the

current situation of violence, lawlessness, and economic stasis, women (along with children, the elderly, and the disabled) are the most vulnerable victims of the ensuing chaos and are not likely to

see their access to even the most basic amenities and resources

restored in any near future. Not only has Iraqi women's dramatic

loss of "life and liberty" failed to arouse the same furor among Euro

Americans as individualized accounts of women's suffering under



132 SABA MAHMOOD

Islam's tutelage, but a number of pundits now suggest that because

free elections in Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries might

bring Islamists to power (as indeed was the case in the 2005 elec tions held in Palestine and Egypt), they should perhaps not be so

widely championed by the United States government. Apart from

the fact that these pundits find Islamist ascendance to political power inimical to American strategic interests, the fate of women

under Islamic regimes is often marshaled as the penultimate reason

for thwarting Islamist success at the polls. Note again here the neat

equivalence drawn yet again between American foreign policy and women's interests, between democracy and women's freedom.

One recent heart-wrenching appeal for instituting democracy by legislating women's freedom was voiced by Barbara Ehrenreich in an op-ed piece written for The New York Times in the lead-up to

the 2004 American elections.32 In this piece, Ehrenreich upheld Carmen bin Laden's autobiography IK as the manifesto that all Democrats should embrace in their policy toward the Muslim world. As I briefly mentioned earlier, IK is Carmen bin Laden's account of her luxurious life both in Switzerland, where she was

born and raised and currently resides, and in Saudi Arabia, where she lived as the sole wife of one of the rich scions of the bin Laden

family for several years. Apart from the few titillating details Carmen bin Laden throws in about the fanatical behavior of her

better-known brother-in-law Osama, much of the book describes the claustrophobic character of her life in Saudi Arabia, one punc tuated by extended luxurious vacations in Europe, palatial houses

with an army of servants, lavish parties, and opulent consumption. Carmen, much like the authors of other similar testimonials, brims with her adulation for the West, its lifestyle and its "opportunities." At one point in the autobiography, when a Safeway first opens in

Jeddah, Carmen cannot contain her enthusiasm and writes: "Now

every modern product could be bought ? and it was. We filled

basket after basket with JELL-O and Campbell's soup, Swiss cheese

and chocolate. Bread from the bakery still came peppered with

weevils ? I insisted my cook learn to bake bread ? but now we

had pineapple chunks and real milk. They tasted of progress."33




Carmen's zeal for Western consumer products in this text is

only matched by her sneering and derogatory portrayal of Saudi

women. She describes these women as bovine creatures, who have

gaudy tastes, lack bourgeois housekeeping skills (they buy gold fur niture and decorate their houses with plastic flowers), and are wily with men. At one point she says, "I was living in a society where

women were nothing and wanted to be nothing. They didn't seem

to seek the changes that I was expecting and longing for; and I felt frustrated, surrounded by women who didn't have the will or

courage to resist. They had intelligence and energy... but they

expressed it only in religion. They lived, but only for their faith; their

personalities were completely annihilated."34 For bin Laden, these

women, who she could not stand for their religiosity and passivity, were doomed to a herd mentality by the straight jacket of their cul tural traditions: "You never develop as an individual in the Middle

East. People may manage to escape their tradition for a short while, but those rules catch up to them."35

It is this account that inspired Barbara Ehrenreich's plea to

John Kerry and the Democratic Party to make gender parity a cor

nerstone of their foreign policy in the Middle East because in her

opinion the real enemy is not terrorism but an "extremist Islamic

insurgency whose appeal lies in its claim to represent the Muslim

masses against a bullying super power." Ehrenreich goes on to

argue, "But as Carmen bin Laden urgently reminds us in Inside the

Kingdom, one glaring moral flaw in this insurgency, quite apart from its methods, is that it aims to push one-half of those masses

down to a status only slightly above that of domestic animals.

While Osama was getting pumped up for jihad, Carmen was get

ting up her nerve to walk across the street in a residential neigh borhood in Jeddah

? fully veiled but unescorted by a male, some

thing that is illegal for a woman in Saudi Arabia." Note how in one

fell swoop, Ehrenreich not only equates "the Islamic insurgency" with Saudi Arabia, ignoring the fact that the Saudi government his

torically opposed many strands of Islamism, but also represents Islamist movements as a male plot that enjoy no support among

Muslim women.



SABA MAHMOOD

Having diagnosed the problem of Islamism in this way, Ehrenreich goes on to argue that the best way to combat this mis

begotten Islamic insurgency is for the U.S. government to empow er Muslim women, offering increased support for their education,

provided it is secular, giving asylum to women fleeing "gender total

itarianism/' and restoring U.S. aid for the United Nations family

planning program. She qualifies her recommendations by saying, "I

am not expecting these measures alone to incite a feminist insur

gency within the Islamist one. Carmen bin Laden found her rich

Saudi sisters-in-law sunk in bovine passivity, and some of the more

spirited young women in the Muslim world have been adopting the

head scarf as a gesture of defiance toward American imperialism. We're going to need a through [sic] foreign policy makeover ?

from Afghanistan to Israel ? before we have the credibility to stand

up for anyone's human rights. You can't play the gender card with

dirty hands." In conclusion she states, "If you want to beat Osama,

you've got to start by listening to Carmen." In this rather simplistic

logic (religion is to men as freedom is to women, patriarchy is to

men as economic change is to women), there is a failure of the

intellect to understand Islamism as anything other than a false con

sciousness for Muslim women, whose opiate stupor can be shaken

loose through the operations of secular education.

That Barbara Ehrenreich, whose own work has centered pre

cisely on the intertwining of class and gender issues, can be so

blind to Carmen bin Laden's elitist and bourgeois judgments about

Saudi women's taste and social behaviors is a testament to the fact

that Islamic societies have come to be viewed through a kind of

cultural essentialism that was pass? only a few years ago. Perhaps far more egregious is the fact that Carmen bin Laden's utter distaste

for the collectivity of Saudi women can be so easily accommodat

ed within a feminist agenda whose basic premise we are told is to

care for women and to salvage them from the abjection to which a

patriarchal society commits them. The veil, in Ehrenreich's formu

lation, particularly when worn willingly, is only a sign of the mis

guided judgment practiced by women besotted with the false

promises of a hopelessly patriarchal insurgency. Perhaps it is




because Ehrenreich, like Carmen, knows that this insurgency is not

in the best interest of women, who are supine and passive creatures

to begin with, that she concludes that it is up to the United States

(better led by the Democrats than Republicans) to free these

enslaved souls.

This assignation of a salvational role to the U.S. brings to

mind an earlier moment in the colonial history of the Middle East, when British occupying powers were also outraged by what they took to be Islam's degradation of women. Ironically enough, a

number of British colonial officers, such as Lord Curzon and Lord

Cromer, who championed the cause of saving Muslim women from

Islam, actively opposed women's suffrage at home in Britain.36

Then, as right now, it was the education of women that was sup

posed to create a more enlightened and civilized populace. Calls for the reformation of Islam these days, when they do

not rely on direct military intervention to produce the desired

result, often suggest a broad strategy of educational reform (as does

Ehrenreich), one in which Muslim religious sensibilities can be

brought in line with a secular-liberal privatized form of religiosity. This is a strategy of slow progressive transformation, one in which, as Katha Pollit puts it, "organized religion [is made to] wither away or at any rate modulate away from dogma and authority and reac

tion toward a kind of vague, kindly, nondenominational spiritual

uplift whose politics if it had any, would be liberal."37 The problem lies in the singularity and certitude of this vision, a certainty that

brooks no argument and makes no adjustments to different ways of

living religiously and politically in this world. Furthermore, it fails to consider that inculcating a liberal religious sensibility among

Muslims might not result in decreased militant attacks on the

United States or other Western European powers. This is not

because all Muslims are violent but because the nature of the

grievances they hold against the West has more to do with geopo litical inequalities of power and privilege than their benighted reli

giosity which propels them to violence. Even Osama bin Laden was clear in his message at the time of the World Trade Center

attacks: He wanted American troops out of Saudi Arabia, a just



136 SABA MAHMOOD

solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and an end to Euro

American domination of Muslim resources and lands. His ends, if

not his means, speak to a wide range of Arabs and Muslims who

are currently witnessing one of the most unabashedly imperial pro

jects undertaken in modern history, a project that, as a number of

observers point out, has done more to fuel the militant cause than

eliminate it.38

What is still more troubling about this prescriptive project of

liberalizing Islam is that it is the telos of the West ? the ethos of a liberal-democratic society with all its cosmopolitan sensibilities

and pleasures ? that is posited as the Mecca toward which all

Muslim societies should conscientiously head. Apart from the

infeasibility and singularity of this vision, what strikes me as impe rialistic is the chain of equivalences upon which such a vision rests.

Not only are Islamic militants the object of this unrelenting pre scription but so are the millions of Muslims who follow what are

considered to be illiberal, orthodox, and conservative interpreta tions of Islam, key among them the wearing of the veil, a strict

abidance by rituals of Islamic observance, avoiding the free mixing of the sexes, and adjudication of public and political issues through

religious argumentation. Insomuch as the appellation of funda

mentalism has now come to enfold within itself not simply Islamic

militants but also those who embrace this range of practices, calls

for the liberalization of Islam are aimed at the transformation of

these Muslims, making their life-styles provisional if not extinct

through a process of reform.

As I have shown elsewhere, the prescriptive force of this lib

eral project is not simply rhetorical.39 It enjoys the support of the

U.S. State Department, which recently allocated over $1.3 billion

to an initiative entitled "Muslim World Outreach" aimed at trans

forming the hearts and minds of Muslims through a range of theo

logical, cultural, and pedagogical programs. Part of a broader strat

egy of the White House National Security Council, this initiative is

engaged in training Islamic preachers, establishing Islamic schools

that propagate liberal interpretations of Islam, reforming public school curriculums, and media production (which includes estab




lishing radio and satellite television stations, producing and dis

tributing Islamic talk shows, and generally shaping the content of

public religious debate within the existing media in Muslim coun tries). What is notable about this broad-based multi-pronged strat

egy is that it is not the militants but ordinary, "traditional" Muslims who are the targets of this reform, in that they are seen as woeful

ly lacking in the kind of sensibility required of modern citizenry.40 This project bears obvious similarities with the State Department's Cold War strategy with one exception: The current campaign has an overt theological agenda that abrogates the same liberal princi

pal ?

right to religion and freedom of conscience ? which the

U.S. is supposed to foster among Muslims through this campaign.41 The Muslim World Outreach program seeks to build alliances

and networks with what it calls "moderate" Islamic scholars who

promote a liberal interpretation of Islam and who largely echo the

programmatic vision championed by the U.S. State Department. The fact that calls for liberalizing Islam are now increasingly made

by a range of prominent Muslim intellectuals ? such as Khaled

Abul Fadl, Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, Abdolkarim Soroush, Hasan Hanafi ? is testimony to the hegemony that liberalism commands as a political ideal for many contemporary Muslims, a hegemony that reflects, I would submit, the enormous disparity in power between the Euro-American and the Muslim world today. In their

reflections, it is Islam that bears the burden of proving its compat

ibility with liberal ideals and the line of questioning is almost never

reversed. These well-meaning Muslim reformers do not ask, for

example, what it would mean to take the orthodox practices of

Islam, embraced by many in the Muslim world right now, and

rethink through them many of the secular-liberal values that are so

readily upheld today (such as freedom of choice, autonomy, and

indifference to religious forms of belonging). What would such a

dialogue look like? How would such a conversation change our

world-making projects?

Tragically this is not the direction we seem to be headed

toward, and if anything, the current political climate is such that

those who challenge aspects of this liberal telos are made to pros



138 SABA MAHMOOD

trate themselves at the altar of a secular-liberal inquisition. Such

was the fate of the Swiss Muslim intellectual Tariq Ramadan whose

writings often challenge the certitude that liberalism is the prophy laxis for all of Islam's troubles, and he remains critical of recent leg islation aimed at disciplining European Muslims (such as the

French ban on the veil).42 Ramadan was offered a tenured position as the Henry R. Luce Professor of Religion, Conflict and Peace

building at the University of Notre Dame's Joan B. Kroc Institute for

International Peace Studies in January 2004. After being granted a

non-immigrant visa, the U.S. State Department decided to revoke

it a few days prior to his arrival in the United States. No explana tion was offered for the revocation despite protests from human

rights and civil liberties organizations. Faced with the accusation

that he is a fundamentalist, woman-hater, and anti-Semite, Rama

dan was compelled to reduce his response to a series of denials:

namely, that he does not hate women, that he is not an anti-Semite, and that he does not condone violence.43 Any possibility of engag

ing in a dialogue that could have facilitated a serious engagement with religious and political difference was foreclosed in the name

of keeping fundamentalists at bay. As a number of critics of liberalism point out, it is a charac

teristic of liberal thought ?

which, we must remind ourselves, cuts

across conservative and radical projects ? to assimilate unfamiliar

forms of life within its own projection into the future, a future that

is defined by the unfolding of the liberal vision itself. All life forms that do not accord with this futurity are to be subsumed within a

teleological process of improvement and are destined to become

either extinct or provisional. This attitude toward difference seems

to animate not only calls for Islamic reformation, but is also oper ative in contemporary strands of feminism, particularly in its cer

tainty that women's sensibilities and attachments, those that seem

so paradoxically inimical to what are taken to be women's own

interests, must be refashioned for their own well-being. It is this

arrogant certitude that I want to question today: Does the confi

dence of our political vision as feminists ever run up against the

responsibility that we incur for the destruction of life forms so that




"unenlightened" women may be taught to live more freely? Do we

even fully comprehend the forms of life that we want so passion

ately to remake so that Muslim women and men may live a more

enlightened existence? Can we even entertain the possibility that

practices like the veil might perform something in the world other than the oppression and/or freedom of women? Have we lost the

capacity to be able to hear the voices of Muslim women that do not

come packaged in the form of Ayaan Hirsi AN, Azar Nafisi, and

Irshad Manji? Would an intimate knowledge of life-worlds that are

distinct, and perhaps even opposed to our cosmopolitan lifestyles, ever lead us to question the certainty with which we prescribe what

is good for all of humanity? At a time when feminist and democra

tic politics run the danger of being reduced to a rhetorical display of the placard of Islam's abuses, these questions offer the slim hope that perhaps a dialogue across political and religious differences ?

even incommensurable ones ? can yield a vision of coexistence

that does not require making certain life-worlds extinct or provi sional. It requires of us to entertain the possibility, perhaps too

much to ask in the current imperial climate, that one does not

always know what one opposes and that a political vision at times

has to admit its own finitude in order to even comprehend what it

has sought to oppose.



140 SABA MAHMOOD

1 This paper was initially delivered as a talk at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, University of California Berkeley, in September 2004. I am grateful to Noah Salomon for his assiduous research assistance in procuring the materials for this

essay. My thanks also extend to Michael Allan, Charles Hirschkind, Mayanthi Fernando, and members of the faculty resident group at the University of California

Humanities Research Institute at the University of California Irvine (Spring 2006) for their comments.

2 Note, for example, that despite the widely divergent politics of Tariq Ali and Daniel

Pipes, both agree that Islam needs to be reformed in accord with a secular-liberal

conception of religion. Tariq Ali is a progressive South Asian British author who

comments prolifically on imperial and colonial politics, while Daniel Pipes, a neo

conservative with strong links to Likud in Israel, is the founder of the notorious web

site Campus Watch that posted dossiers of academics critical of Israel in order to

intimidate them into silence. After much criticism, the dossiers have been with

drawn, but the website still encourages students to "tattle" on critics of Israel teach

ing on American campuses. On this and other related issues, see John Mearsheimer

and Stephen Walt, "The Israel Lobby" in London Review of Books, vol. 28 no. 6

(March 2006): 23. 3 Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran (New York: Random House, 2003). Hereafter

cited as RLT

4 This essay was initially given as a talk in September 2004. While parts of this text

have been revised, all the statistics on the circulation of these books are from 2004.

It needs to be emphasized, however, that similar accounts continue to be produced

by leading publishing houses, and fill a particularly profitable niche in European and American markets. For a list of books that are in press, destined I suspect for

similar success, see Joseph Berger, "Muslim Woman's Critique of Custom," The New

York Times (March 25, 2006). 5 On this point, see Roksana Bahramitash, "The War on Terror, Feminist Orientalism,

and Oriental Feminism: Case Studies of Two North American Bestsellers," Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 14, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 223-237. For the

handsome rewards Azar Nafisi has received for playing this role from the neo-cons, see below.

6 A good example is Marjane Satrapi's two popular accounts of her life as an Iranian

girl in both Iran and the United States: Persepolis I (2004) and Persepolis II (2004), both published by Pantheon Graphic Novels. My thanks to Juliet Williams for bring ing this to my attention.

7 Carmen bin Laden, Inside the Kingdom: My Life in Saudi Arabia (New York: Warner Books, 2004). Hereafter cited as IK.

8 Irshad Mani, The Trouble with Islam: A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2005). Hereafter cited as 77.

9 Fadela Amara, Ne putes ni soumises, Paris: Editions La D?couverte, 2004; Semira

Bellii, Dans l'enfer des tournantes (Paris: Gallimard, 2003); Chahdortt Djavann, Bas

les voiles!, (Paris: NRF Gallimard, 2003); Leila's Mari?e de force (Paris: OH! Editions, 2004 (later published by a more prestigious house called "J'ai Lu" in 2005), Loubna

Meliane, V7vre libre (Paris: OH! Editions, 2003; and Marie-Th?r?se Cuny Souad,




Br?l?e vive (feris: Editions Pocket, 2004). 10 For a more recent expression of her uncritical support for Likudite policies, see

Irshad Manji, "How I Learned to Love the Wall," The New York Times (March 18,

2006). 11 Andrew Sullivan's uncritical support for Manji is not entirely surprising: Both have

made their name by playing on their gay identity while at the same time embracing conservative political positions. The irony lies in the fact that while Sullivan cham

pions Manji for her feminist proclivities, he himself is known for his opposition to abortion in the United States (a position supposedly consistent with his Roman Catholic faith).

12 Andrew Sullivan, "Decent Exposure," The New York Times Sunday Book Review

(January 25, 2004, emphasis added). Hereafter cited as "DE."

13 For an incisive analysis of this film and Ayaan Hirsi Ali's position within Dutch pol itics, see Annelies Moors, "Submission," ISIM Newsletter (vol. 15, Spring 2005): 8-9.

14 Simon Kuper, "Guru of the Week ? Big Thoughts in Brief ? Ayaan Hirsi Ali," The

Financial Times Limited (March 27, 2004). 15 Julie Salamon, "Author Finds that with Fame Comes Image Management," The New

YorkTimes(June 8, 2004). See httpy/work.colum.edu/~amiller/nafisi.htm (accessed March 27, 2006).

16 For a similar role the Feminist Majority played in marshalling support for the United States war in Afghanistan, see Charles Hirschkind and Saba Mahmood, "Feminism,

Taliban, and the Politics of Counter-insurgency," Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 75, no. 2 (2002): 339-354.

17 Seth Mydans, "The Saturday Profile: A Friendship Sundered by Muslim Code of

Honor," The New York Times (February 1, 2003). 18 Jamie Walker and Hedley Thomas, "Clues Written in Sands of Hindsight," Courier

Mail (Queensland Australia) (July 31,2004). This and other articles note that despite the life-threatening circumstances Khouri was supposed to be subjected to, she

made no adjustments in her public appearances and never turned down invitations

to speak in large forums.

19 Janaki Kremmer, "A 'True Life' Memoir of an Honor Killing Unravels in Australia," The Christian Science Monitor (August 3, 2004).

20 Kate Legge, "Hoaxer so Hard to Read," The Weekend Australian (July 31, 2004).

Hereafter cited as "HHR."

21 "HHR."

22 The Australian government approved Khouri's application for a "Distinguished Talent Visa" which allowed her to remain in Australia along with her husband and

two children. Tony Koch and f?ul Whittaker, "With Friends in High Places, Khouri to Defend Her Honor," The Australian (August 10, 2004).

23 At a time when the Bush administration has increasingly made it difficult for Muslims to procure tourist, student, or immigration visas to the U.S., it is all the more

striking that Khouri and her husband won the Cheney family support despite the fact that they had been under an FBI investigation at the time on charges of real estate

fraud in the United States. For many Muslims this sends a clear message: If you

espouse the right rhetoric, you will be handsomely rewarded by the Euro-American



142 SABA MAHMOOD

establishment. This was just as much the case with Khouri (until her cover was

blown) as it is for Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Irshad Manji. 24 lain McCalman, director of the Humanities Research Center at the Australian

National University, writes, "Observers could not help being moved by her viscer

al anguish and her ardor to rectify the wrongs of Jordanian women. Many now

believe that Ms. Khouri's public tears were merely the reflexes of a brilliant actor, but others feel that her conviction went deeper. Sometimes, it seems, a new identi

ty can be taken up with the force of a conversion. For people trapped in shabby pasts, a new persona can offer liberating as much as predatory opportunities." See

"The Empty Chador/' The New York Times (August 4, 2004). 25 Statistics vary depending on the news source. For a couple of different estimates,

see: (a) the 2005 report issues by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan,

http:/Avww.hrcp-web.org/report_HRW.cfm; and (b) the Amnesty International

Report issued in September 1999, http://web.amnesty.org/library/lndex/engASA 330181999.

26 See the Family Violence Prevention Project website, http://endabuse.org^resources/ facts.

27 In the Congo, for example, more than three million people were reported killed in 2003, a genocide marked by the sexual violence committed against women at a

scale that put the stories from Bosnia to shame. With the exception of a few articles, the lack of international response to this crisis has gone for the most part unnoticed

in Western media. See, for example, Somini Sengupta, "Congo's Warring Factions

Leave a Trail of Rape," The New York Times (June 9, 2003); and The New York Times

editorial published on June 25, 2003. During the same period when the hunger for

Muslim women's suffering was peaking among Euro-American readers, relative

silence prevailed at the atrocities committed against Muslim women in Gujarat, India where a well-executed pogrom to kill Muslims was carried out under the pro tection of state police. See Jyotsna Singh, "Gujarat Muslim women 'rape victims'", BBC News South-Asia, April 16, 2002 (http://news.bbc.co.Uk/2/hi/south_asia/ 1933521 .stm). for a more detailed analysis of the gendered character of the Hindu

nationalist violence visited upon Muslims in Gujarat, seeTanika Sarkar, "Semiotics

of Terror: Muslim Children and Women in Hindu Rahstra," Economic and Political

IVeefc/yOuly 13, 2002). 28 "The Angry Men Who Dictate Policy," The New York Times (November 4, 2001 ). 29 This is Katha Pollitfs phrase; see her introduction to Betsy Reed, ed., Nothing

Sacred: Women Respond to Fundamentalism and Terror (New York, Nation Books,

2002): xiv.

30 The Islamist movement is comprised of a number of different strands, including the

much publicized militant strand but also grassroots political parties whose aim it is

to broaden the scope of electoral democracy through civic activism and public par

ticipation, but whose efforts are often thwarted by authoritarian Middle Eastern gov ernments ? as we saw recently in the 2005 Egyptian elections but also earlier in

Tunisia, Turkey, and Morocco. The broadest current, however, within the Islamist

movement is what I loosely call the piety movement (in some places it is referred to

as the da'wa movement), which consists of a network of charitable non-profit orga nizations that provide welfare services to the poor (often through mosques) as well




as a range of networks and groups whose aim it is to make ordinary Muslims more

religiously observant in their daily conduct and practice. These various tendencies

within the Islamist movement differ not only in the kind of critique they offer of Western hegemony and Muslim governments, but also in the social and political

imaginarles they endorse and enable. On this point, see Saba Mahmood, Politics of

Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

31 See Huibin Amee Chew, "Occupation Is Not (Women's) Liberation," ZNet (March

24, 2005): http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ltemlD=7518; and Reem

Bahdi, "Iraq, Sanctions, and Security: A Critique," Duke Journal of Gender, Law, and

Policy (june 22, 2002): 237-253. 32 Barbara Ehrenreich, "The New Macho Feminism," The New York Times (July 29,

2004). Hereafter cited as "NMF."

33 IK, 95, emphasis added.

34 IK, 105, emphasis added.

35 IK, 16.

36 Nothing Sacred, ix.

37 See Lei la Ahmed, Women, Gender and Islam (Cambridge: Harvard U niversity Press,

1992), 152-53.

38 See Charles Glass, "What Osama Said," London Review of Books, vol. 28, no. 2,

(March 2006): 14-18.

39 See Saba Mahmood, "Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire: The Politics of Islamic

Reformation," Public Culture, vol. 18, no. 2 (2006): 323-347.

40 For an extensive discussion of why ordinary traditional Muslims pose such a threat

to U.S. strategic interests and the entire Western civilization, see the Rand Corpora tion report Civil and Democratic Islam: Partners, Resources, Strategies (Pittsburgh: Rand Corporation, 2003).

41 There are many ironies in this, but one that merits some reflection is how this poli

cy of promoting liberal religiosity in the Middle East sits in tension with the Bush White House's active promotion of Evangelical Christian agenda at home. As I have

argued, these seemingly opposite tendencies need to be analyzed as part of what

constitutes secularism today ?

particularly the understanding that secularism is not

simply an evacuation of religion from politics but its re-orchestration (Mahmood

2006). On the development of this conception of secularism, see Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity Islam, Modernity (Ralo Alto: Stanford

University Press, 2003). 42 See Tariq Ramadan, Western Muslims and the Future of Islam (New York: Oxford

University Press, 2005). 43 Tariq Ramadan, "Too Scary for the Classroom?" 77re New York Times (September 1,

2004).



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