Whose "Human Rights"?

This is from Talal Asad's book "Formation of the Secular" (2003). In it, he critically engages with the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum's 'Human Capabilities' approach to human rights.

Asad's critique problematizes the normative assumptions of (this version of) liberal "Human Rights" discourse, as well as dissects its political utility.

"The self-owning “human”

I said earlier that the Universal Declaration does not define “the human” in “human rights” other than (tautologically) as the subject of human rights that were once theorized as natural rights. But what kind of human does human rights recognize in practice?

Those who formulate and implement Western policies often assume that there is a natural fit between the legal culture of “human rights” and the wider culture of “Western norms.” This includes particular attitudes to the human body and to pain. In Chapter 3 I mentioned some post-Enlightenment views about measures of suffering that allowed imprisonment to be represented as humane as opposed to flogging. Here I want to pursue a slightly different point: attitudes to the body indicated by such moral preferences – why, for example, confinement, even solitary confinement, is an acceptable form of punishment while any punitive practice that directly impinges on the body is not.

High value is clearly given to the integrity of the body – which explains in part the particular horror in Euro-America at the widespread custom of female genital mutilation in some African regions. I say “in part” because there is no comparable sense of horror at the custom of male genital mutilation. The latter is, of course, a quite familiar practice in the Judeo-Christian West and the former is not. But there is more to it than that. There is the belief that female circumcision, unlike the male variety, interferes with the sexual pleasure of the women. The enjoyment of sexual intercourse is a valued part of being human; anything that interferes with that enjoyment is in some powerful sense inhuman. [31] It therefore becomes a matter of a human right and its violation. So there is here both an interference with the subject’s ability to experience “full” sexual pleasure. The human being owns his or her body and has the inalienable right to enjoy it.

In an impressive series of publications Martha Nussbaum has reopened the old question of human nature through the Aristotelian idea of human capabilities that she recognizes can also be linked to the concept of human rights. Her basic idea is that a list can be compiled of central human functional capabilities (for example, “Being able to use the senses, to imagine, think, and reason – and do these things in a ‘truly human’ way, a way informed and cultivated by an adequate education, including, but by no means limited to, literacy and basic mathematical and scientific training. Being able to use imagination and thought in connection with experiencing and producing self-expressive works and events of one’s own choice, religious, literary, musical, and so forth” [Nussabum, pp. 78-79]). The universal character of these capabilities, according to Nussbaum, can be found in the Rawlsian idea of “overlapping consensus,” which I have discussed briefly in connection with Taylor’s use of it in the Introduction. “By ‘overlapping consensus’ I mean what John Rawls means,” she writes, “that people may sign on to this conception, without accepting any particular metaphysical view of the world, any particular comprehensive or ethical view, or even any particular view of the person or of human nature.” And yet, Nussbaum’s idea of universal capabilities does express the emerging idea of “the human” in it. A subject possessing bodily integrity, able to freely express himself or herself, and entitled to choose for herself or himself what to believe and how to behave is not simply a “freestanding moral core of a political conception” to which people sign on. It is itself a thick account of what being human is – and one that underpins human rights.

As a view of human nature it follows that where these capabilities are not being exercised due to obstacles, their removal will allow humans either to exercise them spontaneously (and to rank them), or to freely choose not to do so. However, humans will have to be taught what good capabilities are and how to exercise them, and to be prevented from exercising vices that harm others. After all, humans are also capable of cruelty, greed, arrogance, treachery – indeed there is scarcely anything they are not capable of. So part from being able to identify vices and their harmful social effects, someone must have the power to identify “obstacles,” to remove them, and also to ensure – by force if necessary – that vices are not restored. That sovereign power is a human capability too, but not one that everyone may freely exercise simply on that account. When invested in the state, that juridical power becomes a precondition for the flourishing of human capabilities. According to Nussbaum, that state must, of course, be one committed to universal values. As such it would not only secure the same rights for all its citizens, but also their ability to experience the emotions of love, grief, justified anger – and even their ability to “use the senses, to imagine, think, and reason – and to do these things in a ‘truly human’ way.” One difficulty here is that the secular state now becomes the definer of “the truly human,” and although Nussbaum attempts to distinguish between capability and functioning, assigning only the definition of the former to the state, it is not always possible to distinguish between them.

There are other well-known problems with this view that may be noted in passing. First, the ability to choose freely whether or not to exercise a capability sometimes encounters a contradiction: because certain choices are irrevocable, they themselves may constitute insurmountable obstacles to further choices (as an illiterate one cannot make an informed choice regarding literacy unless one has experienced it, but having become literate one cannot then change one’s mind). Second, it is a notorious fact that human capabilities – and the conditions in which they are realized – are subject to conflicting interpretations. When “human capabilities” are legally enshrined the business of interpreting them is the privilege of judicial authorities and technical experts, and politics proper is excluded. In brief, it becomes a matter of domination rather than negotiation.

Who - in a world of nation-states - has the authority to interpret and the power to promote the conditions that facilitate human rights, and "the human" they sustain? At a meeting two years ago the U.S. Trade Representative negotiating China's entry into the World Trade Organization causally observed in response to a journalist's question that "democratic political reform and greater adherence to human rights are certainly encouraged by an opening to the West and Western norms." What might these norms be when viewed as styles of life relating to specific kinds of subjectivity?

In a recent article on American global power, Ignacio Ramonet, chief editor of Le Monde Deiplomatique, recounts the scale of U.S. military, diplomatic, economic, and technological hegemony, and then goes on to ask why - given the liberal democratic ideology of equality and autonomy - there isn't more criticism of it? I quote his elegant answer in full:

"No doubt because US hegemony also embraces culture and ideology. It has long been the home of many fine, universally respected intellectuals and creative artists in every field, who are quite rightly admired by one and all. Its mastery extends to the symbolic level, lending it what Max Weber calls "charismatic domination". The US has taken control of the vocabulary, concepts and meaning of many fields. We have to formulate the problems it invents in the words it offers. [The article at Le Monde's website currently has the following sentence instead: "It obliges us to formulate problems of its own invention with the words it offers". Italics supplied by Asad. He also combined the paragraphs together.] It provides the codes to decipher enigmas it created in the first place. In fact, it has set up any number of research centres and think-tanks for this very purpose, employing thousands of analysts and experts. These eminent bodies produce reports on legal, social and economic issues with a perspective that supports the ideal of the free market, the world of business and the global economy. Their lavishly funded work attracts endless media attention and is broadcast the world over... Wielding the might of information and technology, the US thus establishes, with the passive complicity of the people it dominates, what may be seen as affable oppression or delightful despotism. And this is all the more effective as its control of the culture industries lets it capture our imagination. The US uses its admirable know-how to people our dreams with crowds of media heroes, Trojan horses despatched by their master to invade our brains. Only 1% of the films shown in the US are foreign productions, while Hollywood floods the world with its wares. And close behind come television series, cartoons, videos and comics, not to mention fashion, urban development and food. The faithful gather to worship the new icons in malls - temples raised to the glory of all forms of consumption. All over the world these centres of shopping fever promote the same way of life, in a whirl of logos, stars, songs, idols, brands, gadgets, posters and celebrations (like the extraordinary spread of Halloween in France). All this is accompanied by the seductive rhetoric of freedom of choice and consumer liberty, hammered home by obsessive, omnipresent advertising (annual advertising expenditure in the US exceeds $200bn) that has as much to do with symbols as with the goods themselves. Marketing has become so sophisticated that it aims to sell not just a brandname or social sign, but an identity. All based on the principle that having is being... The American empire has become a master of symbols and seduction. Offering unlimited leisure and endless distraction, its hypnotic charm enters our minds and instills ideas that were not ours. America no longer seeks our submission by force, but by incantation. It has no need to issue orders, for we have given our consent. No need for threats, as it bets on our thirst for pleasure."

I do not present this statement as decisive evidence of what is going on in the world. Its interest lies in the explanation it offers of how, by having "to formulate the problems [America] invents in the words [America] offers," global society adapts to a stronger, more modern language - in which the equal rights to pleasure can be articulated as America's project of secular redemption. [38] Ramonet's recognition that the desire to do as one pleases (to do what pleases one) evoked by marketing discourse is familiar enough - the normalization of consuming desires is a banal feature of contemporary capitalist society often noted by both supporters and critics. Familiar, too, is his suggestion that the human being assumed in modern market culture is an autonomous individual who seeks pleasure and avoids pain. For just as electoral democracy postulates the equivalence of citizens (each of whom counts as one and only one) within any given party, so market strategies assume the equivalence of buyers (each of whom counts as one) within any given niche. In both cases the choosing subject is a statistical object to be targeted, added to or separated from other individuals. It is this that explains the U.S. Trade Representative's claim that greater adherence to human rights is encouraged by the acquisition of "Western (that is, American) norms" in place of older ones, just as the opening up of free trade with the West and the blossoming of a market society will reinforce human rights.

My thought is not that this claim is arrogant, or otherwise morally tainted, but that it may be true. "Cultures" are indeed fragmented and interdependent, as critics never tire of reminding us. But cultures are also unequally displaced practices. Whether cultural displacement is a means of ensuring political domination or merely its effect, whether it is a necessary stage in the growth of universal humanity or an instance of cultural takeover, is not the point here. What I want to stress is that cultures may be conceived not only in visual terms ("clearly bounded," "interlaced," "fragmented," and so forth) but also in terms of the temporalities of power by which - rightly or wrongly - practices constituting particular forms of life are displaced, outlawed, and penalized, and by which conditions are created for the cultivation of different kinds of human. Resentment on the part of the weak about being treated cruelly by the powerful is generally a spontaneous human reaction, but learning to see certain practices as insupportable that were not previously viewed as such, and organizing social opposition to them, are steps in the reconstruction of the human.

In an interdependent modern world, "traditional cultures" do not spontaneously grow or develop into "modern cultures," People are pushed, seduced, coerced, or persuaded into trying to change themselves into something else, something that allows them to be redeemed. It may not be possible to stop this process; it may be a wonderful thing that the process takes place as it does because people really are redeemed through it. I do not argue for or against such directed changes here. I merely emphasize that they are not possible without the exercise of political power that often presents itself as a force for redeeming "humanity" from "traditional cultures." Or - and this comes down in the end to the same thing - as the force for reclaiming rights that belong inalienably to man in a state of nature.

In the seventeenth century, so John Pocock proposed, the self was beginning to be seen as contingent. The anxiety that that provoked was the context in which Locke's political appeal to natural rights acquired added plausibility. Legal discourses for defining the person gain added weight. In an essay on flexible capitalism at the close of the twentieth century, Richard Sennett has argued that the highly unstable conditions of work in America are making a coherent narrative of the self - and therefore realization of "character" - increasingly difficult. It is possible (although this is not Sennett's argument) that this new stage in the growing anxiety about the private self is not unconnected to the increasing insistence on the redemptive quality of human rights at a global level. When the secularist ideological order separating public politics from private belief is seen to crumble, the new terrain is occupied by a discourse of human rights taht can be taken as either sacred or profane. Canovan's appeal to myth to defend the liberal project of human rights (see Chapter 1), King's appeal to universal brotherhood and human dignity under God, the U.S. government's global project to free both belief and property, and Nussbaum's celebration of the capabilities of the sovereign human are all variations of this discourse."

(Talal Asad 2003: 148-155)

[31] "Martha Nussbaum cites "opportunities for sexual satisfaction" as an aspect of "Bodily Integrity," listed as one of the "central human functional capabilities" in her influential Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 78. The assumption that "opportunities for sexual satisfaction" can be clearly identified and legally protected is intriguing".

[38] "But as the post-9/11 "war on terrorism" demonstrates, the United States does not simply seduce its opponents with pleasure. It is prepared to use devastating force. The war against Afghanistan was presented by the American media not only as the pursuit of terrorists but as as the liberation of Afghan women..."

Note: Please see the book for all footnotes.

Youth and the issues they face today

A laudable and much needed service for our communities. For details see Muslim Youth Helpline's website.



See another noteworthy initiative here: Children's Islamic Library

Hope other communities can take inspiration from the above two projects. For the library project, I think a further challenge would to be incorporate general educational and recreational material, especially considering the dearth of Islamic educational material in certain areas. The challenge would be to develop the logistics and compile a list of quality material. By 'logistics' I mean general guidelines and review process.

Meri Mehboob Kahin Aur Mila Kar Mujh Se

Sahir's poem on Taj Mahal reminds one of Ali Shariati's On the Plight of the Oppressed People. Like Ali Shariati, Sahir seeks to set standards for beauty and love.

A question that comes to mind: Beauty and Truth, are they two separate things? Could a magnificent monument - be it Taj Mahal, Egyptian Pyramids, large Cathedrals, or extensive Mosques - built on the involuntary sweat and blood of innocent people be ever considered beautiful?

I copy two different translations of the poem below.




Taj Mahal by Sahir Ludhianvi

For you, the Taj may be a monument of love;
you may adore this lovely spot
but, darling,
let's meet somewhere else!

In such royal places,
we-- the poor?
Regal opulence seen every which way,
two poor lovers-- here?
Really out-of-place!

Sweetheart, under this so-called symbol of love,
if only you'd seen the vulgar splurge of opulence.
Charmed you may be by royal mausoleums,
if only you'd thought
of our own dismal homes!

Countless millions are in love;
who can say their emotions aren’t real
just because they, like us, have no means
to put up an advertisement?

These mausoleums, these arrogant forts,
these pillars of royal eminence, these lush gardens:
In these very flowers and vines
runs the blood of our own ancestors, my love.

Don't you think they must also have been in love,
the people whose art and skill
made this monument so beautiful?
They and their loved ones now lie nameless,
in unmarked graves,without a single candle
yet lit for them.

These gardens, by the Jamuna [River],
this palace, the embroidered doors, walls and niches--
that's just how an emperor,
using his wealth and power,
mocks the love between us destitutes.

Could we meet somewhere else, darling ?

Translated by: Riz Rahim

Taj Mahal by Sahir Ludhianvi

The Taj, mayhap, to you may seem, a mark of love supreme
You may hold this beauteous vale in great esteem;
Yet, my love, meet me hence at some other place!

How odd for the poor folk to frequent royal resorts;
‘Tis strange that the amorous souls should tread the regal paths
Trodden once by mighty kings and their proud consorts.
Behind the facade of love my dear, you had better seen,
The marks of imperial might that herein lie screen’d
You who take delight in tombs of kings deceased,
Should have seen the hutments dark where you and I did wean.
Countless men in this world must have loved and gone,
Who would say their loves weren’t truthful or strong?
But in the name of their loves, no memorial is raised
For they too, like you and me, belonged to the common throng.

These structures and sepulchres, these ramparts and forts,
These relics of the mighty dead are, in fact, no more
Than the cancerous tumours on the face of earth,
Fattened on our ancestor’s very blood and bones.
They too must have loved, my love, whose hands had made,
This marble monument, nicely chiselled and shaped
But their dear ones lived and died, unhonoured, unknown,
None burnt even a taper on their lowly graves.

This bank of Jamuna, this edifice, these groves and lawns,
These carved walls and doors, arches and alcoves,
An emperor on the strength of wealth,
Has played with us a cruel joke.
Meet me hence, my love, at some other place.

Translation by: K.C. Kanda

Review - Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran

Review: Jasmine and Stars: Reading More than Lolita in Tehran (UNC Press, 2007)

By Ali A., Islamic Insights, Feb 9-15, 2009

While reading a text assigned for your class on a topic related to Islam and Muslims, ever had that feeling of frustration, “That’s NOT how it is!”? You know the reading is full of holes, yet you are at a loss for words to articulate what’s wrong with it?

If your answer is yes, here is a book in which you will find a range of tools to dissect those annoying readings. The book is called “Jasmine and Stars: Reading more than 'Lolita' in Tehran” (UNC Press, 2007). The author is Fatemeh Keshaverz, who is a professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Keshaverz’s argument is two-fold. One, she exposes the omissions and misrepresentations in Azar Nafisi's national bestseller “Reading Lolita in Tehran” (Random House, 2003). Two, she presents a literary analysis of a range of poetry and prose from Iran as well as gives us a feeling of life in Iran from her personal experience. This exposition is meant to question the simplistic and bleak picture one may get from “Reading Lolita in Tehran” and to invite the readers to understand Islam and Muslim cultures in their full complexity and richness.

Keshavarz argues that Azar Nafisi’s book represents a ‘New Orientalist’ narrative. Her argument builds on the critical writings of Edward Said in which he argued that the way the West perceived the Orient (the East) had profound consequences on their mutual interactions. By “West”, he was particularly referring to the circles of power and the intellectual discourse over the past few centuries. In the Orientalist perception, the East was seen as unvaryingly different, backward, inferior, mysterious, and dangerous. It was something to be wary of or to be disciplined. Aggressive colonial expansions in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere were rationalized as a ‘progressive force’ which would civilize the indigenous populations in the colonized lands. These expansions occurred simultaneously with the development of the Enlightenment and technological advancements in the West. [1] Edward Said further argued that such perceptions, especially concerning the Muslim world, continue to dominate the popular discourse in the West.

Developing on Said’s line of argument, Keshavarz argues that the ‘New Orientalist’ narrative "equally simplifies its subject. For example, it explains almost all undesirable Middle Eastern incidents in terms of Muslim men's submission to God and Muslim women's submission to men. The old narrative was imbued with the authority of an all-knowing foreign expert. The emerging narrative varies somewhat in that it might have a native--or seminative--insider tone. Furthermore, as the product of a self-questioning era, it shows a relative awareness of its own possible shortcomings. Yet it replicates the earlier narrative's strong undercurrent of superiority and of impatience with the locals, who are often portrayed as uncomplicated. The new narrative does not necessarily support overt colonial ambitions. But it does not hide its clear preference for a western political and cultural takeover. Most importantly, it replicates the totalizing - and silencing - tendencies of the old Orientalists by virtue of erasing, through unnuanced narration, the complexity and richness in the local culture" (p.3).

The introduction and the first chapter of “Jasmine and Stars” introduce the goal and main arguments of this book. The subsequent three chapters take the readers on an exciting journey which explores the rich literary heritage and diverse lives of the people in Iran. Keshavarz particularly focuses on the Sufi tradition in her discussion of Islam. The personal stories she shares all throughout the book convey feelings of warmth, tenderness, and “shared humanity” (p.5) (shared by the peoples of Iran and the West). In her analysis of poetry, novels, and Sufi thought in these three chapters she also shows how these literary expressions animate in the lives of ordinary people in Iran. The fifth chapter quite sharply dissects “Reading Lolita in Tehran”. Concluding the book in the sixth chapter, Keshavarz once again exhorts the readers to explore the shared humanity and richness of Muslim cultures.

The first and fifth chapters along with the introduction could also be read separately if readers are interested in specifically reading the critique of “Reading Lolita in Tehran”. The tools and vocabulary provided in these chapters could also help with evaluating works such as “Nine Parts of Desire”, “The Bookseller of Kabul”, “'The Kite Runner”, “The Almond”, “Persepolis”, and “The Trouble with Islam”.

The value of this book should be self-evident in a time when distortions and lies about Islam and Muslims are widespread. These distortions are damaging not only for inter-communal relations but also the way Muslims themselves perceive their identity. Yet while reading the book, at times I wished that Keshavarz had scrutinized the premises of these distortions even more deeply. This analysis would have expanded the power and scope of her criticism. Below are two inter-related points in this regard.

The first point is that people do not have to believe in the same things you believe in before you could appreciate and respect their humanity. By presenting instances of ‘shared humanity’ (shared values, emotions, thoughts), Keshavarz does a fine job of relating with the Western audience. Her discussion of modern Iranian literature, particularly the works by Forough Farrokhzad and Shahrnush Parsipur, conveys a strong sense of agency – the kind of agency which is idealized in the liberal feminist discourse(s). Keshavarz is also very frank about her feminist sensibilities in the book that have informed her selections and arguments. However, the real challenge in any attempt to understand other cultures and peoples is to appreciate the ‘differences’ in outlooks and sensibilities, while also observing that our own ideals may not be universally valid. For example, women in Muslim cultures may also cherish ‘autonomy’ and ‘empowerment’, but their definition of these ideals may be very different from what some liberal feminists would like for them. Failing to recognize this difference can result in the kind of intolerance that is seen today in France against the Muslim Hijab. Some scholars would take the argument on another level to argue that ideals like ‘freedom’ and ‘autonomy’ (which have a particular history in the Western liberal tradition and are often defined in terms of individual choices and interests in opposition to community values and interests) may not be as important – if at all – for many women in other cultures. Saba Mahmood and Lila Abu-Lughod’s works make compelling arguments in this regard. [2] In their works they also argue that appreciating these differences does not necessarily mean falling into moral relativism.

The second point is that we need to question the question first before answering with the typical ‘Not all Muslims are fundamentalist/extremists, and we need to consider the voices of moderation and peace too’. The question that needs to be asked first is what’s wrong with being a fundamentalist and who defines a “fundamentalist” as such? If being a fundamentalist means believing in some fundamentals of religion, then most Muslims are fundamentalists! This issue connects to a dichotomy that underlies the popular discourse in the West. In this dichotomy Muslims are either ‘Good’ or ‘Bad’. Good Muslims are ‘modern’, ‘moderate/progressive/rational’, and ‘pro-western’. The Bad Muslims are ‘backward’, ‘fundamentalist/extremists/fanatics’, and ‘anti-western’. I am not saying that “Jasmine and Stars” necessarily falls into this trap. But it misses the voices and sensibilities of those considered to be the “Bad Muslims” (both male and female), particularly those that were part of the Islamic Revolution in 1979 and those that are opposed to physical and symbolic intrusions by global powers today. By no means is this segment of the population a minority in Iran, and they are the ones most frequently stereotyped in the ‘New Orientalist’ narratives. Representing their lives and outlooks does not necessarily mean that one endorses or justifies them. But as risky and daunting as this task may be for the kind of project that Keshavarz is engaged in, without challenging the ‘Good vs. Bad’ Muslim dichotomy most answers would come off as merely apologetic in the popular discourse.

Toward this end, we first need to scrutinize the normative assumptions of the liberal-secular discourse and its supposed moral superiority. (Examples are in the last two points – one relating to the discourse on women’s rights, the other relating to the politics of war on terror). Next, we need to bring in the political and historical context in the picture. I have Mahmood Mamdani’s important work “Good Muslim, Bad Muslims” (Pantheon, 2004) in mind that critically examines the American foreign policy during the Cold War era. In the first chapter of “Jasmine and Stars” Keshavarz could also use a more elaborate discussion on the relation between power and knowledge, in how misrepresentations about Islam serve the hegemonic ambitions of global powers today. [3]

In the challenging task of representing the missing voices (of the supposed “Bad Muslims”), Keshavarz could perhaps find a parallel with the outrage she personally felt when it was unintentionally implied to her by another person in London that the Iranian culture and people were backward ('they ate with hands') (p.24-25). The outrage was not about using or not using spoons per se. It was about the insinuation underlying it in that particular situation which she felt was undermining her culture and her own identity. She perceived it to be a kind of symbolic violence. It is clear from the text that she felt it rational and natural to respond to it. Other people can also have similar attachment to their religious symbols and values, and they can be as real and rational to them as any other reality out there.

On a side note, at times, I did not feel very convinced by the interpretation she presents in some of her anecdotal examples. For instance, the encounter she had at the grocery store in the check out line where she thought that her Muslim name caused discomfort and suspicion in the next lady. She made that conclusion by just observing the lady’s body language and thought that the lady's particular behavior was a reflection of the dominant cultural understandings (p.16-17). One can similarly question the scene in the bus where she listened to a conversation between two soldiers who were returning from the war front in 1987. Based on a very short dialogue between the soldiers, our author suggests that "I can tell you for sure that neither of them had enjoyed the war, or had looked for heroism, and yet neither had run away..." (p.134). Not sure what she meant to imply with this, but the question is whether anything could be implied with certainty on the basis of that short conversation. In these and some other anecdotal examples, more ethnographic details would have helped the readers to judge for themselves whether they agree with her interpretation.

I hope that the critical remarks in the second half of this review would not to dissuade you from reading this wonderful book with full of gems. These remarks were only meant to seriously engage with her arguments. I highly recommend this book for personal readings and group discussions. [4]

Ali A. is a doctoral student in social sciences. He can be reached at alismails786@gmail.com.

References:

[1] The critical point that needs to be emphasized here is that the justification given for Colonial expansions was not contradictory to the liberal ideals of political rights and self-determination. The Enlightenment contained notions of uni-linear progress of history and civilizations, the emphasis on particular modes of thought and reason, and the importance on individual rights and private property as means of self-actualization. Based on these ideals certain cultures and peoples were seen as “modern” and “superior” and others as “backward” and “inferior”. Both John Locke and John Stuart Mill supported and rationalized the practice of colonialism as a “progressive force” which would civilize and advance the backward civilizations. That was the “White Man’s Burden”. These ideas were also incorporated by particular versions of missionary Christianity. For more on this line of argument see Uday Mehta’s “Liberalism and Empire” (Chicago, 1999).

[2] See Lila Abu-Lughod. “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?” (American Anthropologist, September 2002). An interview with Abu-Lughod (Asia Source, March 2002). See Saba Mahmood’s interview by Nermeen Shaikh in “The Present as History” (Columbia, 2007) and her book “Politics of Piety” (Princeton, 2005).

[3] Hamid Dabashi’s critical review of “Reading Lolita in Tehran” entitled “Native informers and the making of the American empire” (Al-Ahram, June 2006) has some useful insights in this connection.

[4] Readers may also like to see the following pieces: Interview: Fatemeh Keshavarz with ZNet; Interview: Fatemeh Keshavarz with UNC Press; Interview: Good Muslim, Bad Muslim - Mahmood Mamdani - Asia Source; Review: Movie ‘300′ by Hamid Dabashi; “Questioning Liberalism, Too” by Saba Mahmood, Boston Review.

On Rumors

Here is another interesting article from Psychology Today. This is the first time I have come across with this magazine. The articles in it seem to be of mixed quality. Especially, I have problem with how they essentialize males and females - their desires, attitudes, behavior - without giving consideration to the variations within and across ethnic and cultural groups.

However, the below one and the other one which I copied in the previous post seem quite interesting. This one is especially relevant to how we construct the social reality around us.

The 8½ Laws of Rumor Spread
Some rumors grind to a halt, while others circle the world. Why some ideas spread and others die.
By Taylor Clark, Psychology Today, Nov/Dec 2008

If I'm not gullible and you're not gullible, how come some improbable stories take a long time to die?

...

Most of us don't like to think of ourselves as gullible. But we're especially likely to accept as true—and do our best to spread—tales that have several specific characteristics that take aim at our best defenses.

At its core, a rumor is just an unverified scrap of information we pass among ourselves to make sense of the world. In one case study conducted at Ohio University by psychologist Mark Pezzo, students had heard that someone on campus had died of meningitis. The story spread because the anxious students were trying to find out what was going on: "Is the rumor true?" "How do you get meningitis?" "I heard that everyone on campus will need to have a painful spinal tap, did you hear that?" In the marketplace of misinformation, fit rumors survive and spread like epidemics, while unfit rumors die quick deaths. So what separates the fit from the unfit? What, in short, are the laws of effective rumors?

1: Successful rumors needle our anxieties and emotions.

When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005, water wasn't the only thing that flooded the city. In the environment of intense anxiety and uncertainty, grim rumors flourished: Sharks have infested the water! Terrorists planted bombs in the levees! Murdered babies and piles of corpses filled the Superdome!

Unfortunately, the national media reported many of the rumors as fact—especially after a misinformed Mayor Ray Nagin told talk show hosts like Oprah Winfrey that "hundreds of armed gang members" were killing and raping at will inside the dome. Yet once the crisis began to abate, investigators found that almost all of the widely circulated stories were false. FEMA doctors even showed up at the Superdome with a refrigerated 18-wheeler to cart away the hundreds of dead bodies rumored. They found six—none of them a homicide victim.

So why did these stories pop up? Fear breeds rumor. The more collective anxiety a group has, the more inclined it will be to start up the rumor mill. As Rochester Institute of Technology rumor expert Nicholas DiFonzo explains, we pass rumors around primarily as a means of deciphering scary, uncertain situations: Exchanging information, even if it's ludicrously false, relieves our unease by giving us a sense that we at least know what's happening. "One major function of rumors is to figure out the facts and find what the appropriate, adaptive thing to do is. Look at 9/11. I don't ever remember feeling so threatened as I did after 9/11, and people used rumors to try to manage the threat."

Thus when 9/11 left people terrified and searching for answers, they heard a horde of alarming (and completely false) rumors—that terrorists had injected anthrax into one of every five cans of Pepsi, that no Jews showed up to work at the World Trade Center on 9/11 because they knew about the attacks beforehand. (In fact, about 15 percent of those who died in the attacks were Jewish.)

Very few of the tales were positive, because we're naturally more inclined to pass on negative information. "As humans, we have a tendency to weight negative information more," says Helen Harton, a psychology professor at the University of Northern Iowa. "It makes evolutionary sense. It's more important to know how to avoid a tiger than to know where a field of nice flowers is."

Of course, most of us don't have to worry about tiger attacks anymore, but we do dread things like layoffs at work. So we toss rumors back and forth to figure out what's really up.

2: Rumors stick if they're somewhat surprising but still fit with our existing biases.

If you ever open endlessly forwarded e-mails, you're probably familiar with at least one notorious malapropism from President George W. Bush: "The problem with the French is that they don't have a word for 'entrepreneur.'" Or this embarrassing gem from the pop starlet Mariah Carey: "When I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I can't help but cry. I mean, I'd love to be skinny like that, but not with all those flies and death and stuff." Can you believe they actually said these things?

Well, don't. Both quips were made up by pranksters. Even so, they enjoyed viral spread for the simple reason that both are juicy enough to be shocking—yet not so far-fetched that we doubt the two parties could have uttered them. They confirm what many already believe—that Bush is, let's say, not quite firing on all cylinders, and that Carey is a vain diva—without setting off too many common-sense alarms.

In short, we're primed to accept them. As Mikkelson explains, "These stories get in under our radar because they click in with what we already believe, or want to believe." If you already think liberals are waging a war on religion, you'll be more likely to buy 2008's (untrue) rumor that the new dollar coins omit the customary "In God We Trust." (It's printed along the side.) If you buy the idea that too much money unhinges people from reality, you might believe the story that Tiger Woods rented a mansion for the 2007 U.S. Open, moved everything out, and flew in all of his own furniture so he would feel at home during the four-day tournament.

Even when presented with evidence refuting a rumor, we often stick to our biases. A 2007 University of Maryland study found that only 3 percent of Pakistanis believe Al Qaeda was responsible for 9/11. "It's difficult for them to accept that Al Qaeda, their fellow Muslims, could have perpetrated these acts," says DiFonzo.

3: Easily swayed people are more important than influential people in passing on a rumor.

In the mid-1970s, the Life Savers Company introduced a product that revolutionized the way kids chewed gum: Bubble Yum. Before it came along, you had to work on a piece of gum for ages to make it soft enough to blow bubbles. But Bubble Yum was squishy right out of the wrapper. It was the perfect gum… maybe a little too perfect, kids thought. What was making it so soft? Soon, the obvious answer presented itself: spider eggs. Bubble Yum was made with spider eggs.

This bit of schoolyard conjecture became ironclad truth with staggering speed, sending Bubble Yum's sky-high sales into a tailspin. Within 10 days of first getting wind of the rumor, Life Savers executives commissioned surveys that revealed "well over half" of New York area children had already heard it.

The spider egg story didn't zoom from kid to kid so quickly because of well-connected playground information magnates or influential adolescent gum mavens, but because kids are credulous, and credulous people make rumors go. "It's your willingness to pass things along that matters, not necessarily how much status or respect you have," says Duncan Watts, a sociologist who researches information spread for Yahoo. Kids will believe almost anything (another long-lived schoolyard rumor claimed the "Mikey likes it" Life cereal kid died after a mixture of soda and Pop Rocks made his stomach explode), and thus rumors run rampant in schools. But the same is true of gullible adults: They're the ones who really fuel rumors.

4: The more you hear a rumor, the more you'll buy it—even if you're hearing that it's false.

According to a poll, 11 percent of Americans believe the rumor that Barack Obama is secretly a radical Muslim who refuses to say the Pledge of Allegiance and was sworn into the Senate on the Qur'an (and probably hates mom and apple pie as well). The myth that he is a Muslim is so pervasive that The New Yorker could satirize it on a cover depicting a cheery new prez Obama hanging out in the White House in full Islamic garb—with an American flag burning in the fireplace and a portrait of Osama bin Laden on the wall.

But if the hyper-liberal New Yorker was trying to expose the absurdity of the rumor, someone probably should have talked to Mark Pezzo first. Even hearing that a rumor is bunk, he observes, tends to plant it deeper in your mind. "No question, the more you hear something—even the same thing from the same person—the more you believe it," says Pezzo. "Politicians know all about this; the more I heard about weapons of mass destruction, the more believable they seemed to me. Even a denial can be a repetition of a rumor." (Just ask Senator John Kerry, whose 2004 presidential bid sunk thanks to whispers about his swift-boat service in Vietnam—even though most of the media stories were about how the rumors were false.)

What's more, repeating a rumor can also make people believe it came from a credible source. In one Stanford study, the more subjects heard a rumor about dried rat urine on Pepsi cans, the more likely they were to attribute the information to Consumer Reports rather than to The National Enquirer.

5: Rumors reflect the zeitgeist.

Every fall, right around mid-September, Barbara Mikkelson starts receiving urgent reports of a grisly new trend in gang initiations. Prospective gang members are driving around in the evening with their headlights intentionally turned off, the story says, and when a well-intentioned motorist flashes his brights at them, the would-be gang member has to follow the car home and kill everyone inside. SO NEVER FLASH YOUR LIGHTS THIS IS FOR YOUR OWN GOOD PLEASE FORWARD THIS TO EVERYONE YOU LOVE!

It's always in mid-September that the rumor resurfaces. "That's when you first have to start thinking about putting your headlights on when you're coming home from work," she explains. "Headlights are on people's minds. That's why you never hear it in the dead of winter or the height of summer."

Rumors have the greatest chance of multiplying when the topic is something people are already pondering. As University of British Columbia psychologist Mark Schaller points out, "What matters is a match between the nature of the information and the goals of the people who are trafficking that information." So what's on our minds lately?

The election of 2008, and the thousand plausible and implausible tales swirling around the candidates. Among the best ones: As a Navy pilot, John McCain executed a "wet start" (a maneuver that involves flooding your fighter plane's engine with fuel so that starting up unleashes a huge and macho burst of flame) so reckless that he actually set an aircraft carrier on fire. Then there's the one about how Barack Obama has been endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan—they're tricky, those Klansmen.

6: Sticky rumors are simple and concrete.

Examine your stockpile of offbeat conventional wisdom: It takes seven years for swallowed gum to pass through the body. We only use 10 percent of our brains. The Great Wall of China can be seen from space. People swallow eight spiders a year in their sleep.

These tidbits are all simple and specific, with a vivid detail that sticks in the mind. They're also false. But they illustrate the point that tangible, easily graspable tales have an excellent chance of catching on. "Complicated ideas are not that spreadable," says Duncan Watts. "Ideas with content, when they do spread, lose their content." Rumors work just like a game of telephone; after they've been transmitted a few times, the details get lost and the message grows simpler.

According to Mikkelson, the spider-swallowing rumor got its start when a columnist for PC Professional wrote a story bemoaning our tendency to believe every harebrained factoid in mass e-mails; the writer made up the statistic as an example of the kind of ludicrous thing credulous people will, um, swallow. In time, the fact that it was a joke got lost in transmission, and now millions live in fear of sleeping with their mouth open.

The principle of concreteness also helps spread urban legends (which are rumors presented in story form, usually as something that happened to a friend's ex-girlfriend's mechanic's second cousin). Ever heard the tale of the guy who accepts a drink from a stranger at a bar, then wakes up in a tub full of ice, one kidney poorer? How about the one where the woman tries to dry out her wet lap dog by putting it in the microwave? Chances are, you remembered those tall tales because a visceral image—fingering your stitches in an ice-filled tub, watching a live dog sizzle in a microwave—got lodged in your mind.

"Urban legends survive only if they conjure up very visual or very tactile images," says Chip Heath, a Stanford business professor who studies idea spread. "Our brains are wired to remember concrete, sensory things better than abstract things." For example, if researchers give people lists of words to memorize and then recall later, the tangible ones ("apple," "pencil") will spring to mind more often than the conceptual ones ("truth," "justice").

7: Rumors that last are difficult to disprove.

Ever wonder why even the craziest legends and conspiracy theories never seem to die? Why do people still believe there's a giant prehistoric reptile prowling Loch Ness, even though innumerable hours of investigation have produced zero proof of such a creature? Well, it's a pretty big lake: How can we be sure she's not in there? It's tough to disprove the idea definitively.

As DiFonzo explains, a rumor like "On Thursday's Late Show, David Letterman's hairpiece fell off!" doesn't work, because people can check it out and easily find evidence it didn't happen. But a rumor like "I heard David Letterman's hairpiece fell off during a show, but they destroyed all the tapes!"—that's more like it.

Persistent rumors tend to have what Chip Heath calls a "testable credential," some element that can be misconstrued to give the story a whiff of credibility. "Rumors very often have a little truth test that people can run," he explains. "There was a rumor in the San Francisco Bay Area in the '90s that Snapple supports the KKK. You turned the label around, and you saw a capital letter K with a circle around it. People were doing that test, and then all of a sudden this seemingly preposterous rumor becomes more plausible." (For the record, Snapple bottles do bear the K—the symbol for "kosher"—as do thousands of other drinks and food products.)

8: We are eager to believe bad things about people we envy.

Is there anyone in America who hasn't heard about Richard Gere and the gerbil? The story goes something like this. Gere checked himself into Cedars-Sinai Hospital in California complaining of intestinal pain and rectal bleeding. When doctors investigated, they found Gere's beloved pet gerbil Tibet, shaved, declawed, and dead, lodged in Gere's rectum—the result of "gerbilling," a sexual practice common among gay men. So doctors performed an emergency gerbilectomy on Gere. The gerbil was removed—but the story stuck.

Needless to say, none of this ever happened. Gere was never admitted to the hospital for rectal bleeding, and "gerbilling" is not a sexual practice at all, among gay men or anyone else. Gerbils aren't even legal in California (for agricultural reasons, not sexual ones). Like most rumors about celebrities, its origin is unknown, but we do know the rumor hit a tipping point in the 1980s after a hoaxster, claiming to be from the ASPCA, flooded Hollywood fax machines with a bogus press alert about Gere's putative "gerbil abuse."

Celebrities are easy targets for sordid tales. An almost equally widespread rumor is the one about the lead singer of New Kids on the Block being rushed to the emergency room, where doctors pumped his stomach and removed more than a gallon of semen he'd swallowed during an orgy of oral sex. The details vary: Sometimes the quantity of ejaculate is reported as one gallon, sometimes 10. Sometimes the substance removed is human semen; other times it's dog semen. The rumor has variously featured Rod Stewart, Elton John, David Bowie, Marc Almond, Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol, Jeff Beck, Jon Bon Jovi, Alanis Morrissette, Li'l Kim, Foxy Brown, Britney Spears, and Fiona Apple. But the basic story stays the same.

Once someone hits a certain level of celebrity and adulation, it seems, the mill starts to churn automatically—and the more beautiful and successful the star, the more depraved the rumors. Jamie Lee Curtis is a hermaphrodite. Cher (or Janet Jackson) had a rib removed so she'd look skinnier. Catherine the Great died trying to make love to a horse.

What is it about celebrity rumors that makes them spread so widely and stick so hard? Part of it is good old-fashioned schadenfreude. "People pass along rumors that they, on some level, tend to agree with, if there's something in the story that they identify with, that they want to be true," says Mikkelson. "We envy celebrities, and it's just human nature to pull down what has been raised so high."

Richard Gere is so annoyingly handsome that we want to believe he's really a sicko or otherwise flawed. Girls were so taken by the New Kids on the Block that men longed to believe they were actually secret gay dog fellators.

The easiest way to tarnish the reputation of a male heartthrob is to undermine his masculinity and suggest he's not interested in women at all—but rather, men, gerbils, or dogs. Which is why gay rumors have plagued so many handsome Hollywood leading men, from Tom Cruise to Johnny Depp to Orlando Bloom. "Saying that so-and-so good-looking male actor is gay is seen as pulling him down a peg or two," explains Mikkelson. "It's like, well, he may be attractive to women, but he's not attracted to women—so there!"

The Ninth Law

We might also postulate a final law of rumor survival: Sometimes, there is no "why." Often, we tell remarkable tales to build relationships or show off our yarn-spinning prowess—not necessarily because we think they're true.

And hey, sometimes they are true. Research by DiFonzo and Prashant Bordia, of the University of South Australia, has found that in groups with an established hierarchy—like large offices—the scuttlebutt you hear about company affairs is around 95 percent accurate.

"Every Halloween, you hear the rumors about people putting razors in apples and giving them to trick-or-treaters," DiFonzo says. "Actually, my own family had an experience where my wife found a sewing needle embedded in a piece of our kids' Halloween candy. I know, it sounds crazy—the rumor expert believes a rumor. Don't tell anyone."

Saba Mahmood: Questioning Liberalism, Too

Another thought provoking article:

Questioning Liberalism, Too

A response to “Islam and the Challenge of Democracy” by Khaled Abou El Fadl

Saba Mahmood

Source

Khaled Abou El Fadl’s essay is an erudite attempt to explore those principles and values within Islamic political and legal traditions that could be made compatible with ideas of liberal democracy. Abou El Fadl joins a growing number of scholars who have been writing on this theme in the last three decades—some of these writers are located in the Muslim world and others in Europe and the United States. These thinkers represent a wide spectrum of political perspectives: some of them are supporters of the reformist trend within the Islamist movement (such as Tariq al-Bishri in Egypt, the Tunisian scholar Rashid al-Ghannouchi, who lives in exile in France, and Abdolkarim Soroush in Iran), and others espouse a more straightforward secular-liberal line (such as Said Ashmawi in Egypt, Nurcholish Madjid in Indonesia, and Aziza al-Hibri in the United States). The increased attention that the Western media has recently given to these explorations is an indication of the hope that “liberal Islam” has been invested with, following the events of September 11, a potential resource for “saving Islam” from its more militant and fundamentalist interpreters.

What’s curious to me is that in these explorations by Muslim scholars Islam bears the burden of proving its compatibility with liberal ideals, and the line of question is almost never reversed. We do not ask, for example, what would it mean to take the resources of the Islamic tradition and question many of the liberal political categories and principles for the contradictions and problems they embody? Or, how would one rethink these problems by bringing the resources of Islamic political history to bear upon them? For instance, many of the aforementioned authors, including Khaled Abou El Fadl, urge that liberal conceptions of individual autonomy, human rights, and individual freedom be incorporated into Islam. Thus Abou El Fadl argues in his essay that the “Qur’anic celebration and sanctification of human diversity” should be made the ground for incorporating what appears to be a liberal conception of tolerance: “an ethic that respects dissent and honors the right to adhere to different religious or non-religious convictions.” It is striking that the normative claims of liberal conceptions such as tolerance are taken at face value, and no attention is paid to the contradictions, struggles, and problems that these ideals actually embody. As scholars of liberalism have shown, the historical trajectory of a concept like tolerance encompasses violent struggles that dispossessed peoples have had to wage to be considered legitimate members of liberal societies—not to mention the ongoing battles about what it means “to tolerate” someone or something, who does the tolerating and who is tolerated, under what circumstances, and toward what end. Given this fraught history, is it not worth pausing to reflect whether other traditions, such as Islam, might have their own resources for imagining such an “ethic that respects dissent and honors the right to adhere to different religious or non-religious convictions?”

There were different conceptions of religious and communal coexistence, for example, that informed the social and political life of the diverse communities that lived under the Ottoman Empire and even under Mughal rule in South Asia. These conceptions were not organized around the problem of majority and minority populations. In the Ottoman system, for instance, non-Muslim communities were vertically integrated into a hierarchical ruling structure, but had their own independent legal systems. This mutual accommodation enabled different social groups living under a shared political structure to practice distinct ways of life; life-worlds were the preconditions for the individual’s existence, rather than the objects of individual interests as they are conceived within liberal democratic thought. The system did not make non-Muslims the social or legal equals of Muslims, but it did grant them a certain autonomy to practice and develop their traditions in a manner that is almost inconceivable under the present system of nation-states. The reason I bring up this different understanding of coexistence is not because I believe in its moral superiority, or consider it to be an example from the Islamic tradition that could be made commensurable with a liberal understanding of tolerance. Rather I want to use this history to ask what I think is a far more interesting set of questions, such as: how does this history make us rethink the politics of tolerance and pluralism beyond the confines of individualism to include the rights of plural social groupings? Or, for that matter, to ask whether the liberal meaning of tolerance is the best or the most desirable one; what does this understanding preclude, under what kinds of presuppositions, and for whom?

I believe the reason these kinds of questions are seldom pursued is because of the hegemony that liberalism commands as a political ideal for many contemporary Muslim intellectuals, a hegemony that reflects the enormous disparity in power between the Anglo-European countries and what constitutes the “Muslim world” today. Indeed, the idea that the liberal political system is the best arrangement for all human societies, regardless of their diverse histories and conceptual and material resources, is rarely questioned these days. One would think that proponents of “pluralism and diversity” in the world, like Abou El Fadl, would want to explore some of the contrasting ways that questions of difference have been imagined and politically instituted within different non-liberal traditions.

It should also be pointed out that Khaled Abou El Fadl’s essay is largely a philosophical exercise, one that does not take into account the practical impediments to the institutionalization of democracy in the Muslim world. Had he been concerned with practical issues, he would have had to deal with complicated questions such as why some of the worst violations of democracy in the name of Islam have been perpetrated by states (such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Pakistan) which have been propped up by liberal democracies like the United States—support without which these states would not have survived in their present form. A more practical engagement would also have had to deal with the fact that the problems of religious and ethnic strife, or the abrogation of democratic freedoms, do not simply reflect the “undemocratic” tendencies within Islam, but characterize most secular regimes in the Third World today. As many scholars have recently taught us, these problems are not unrelated to the liberal forms of government implemented by colonial and postcolonial states. I do not fault Abou El Fadl for his philosophical inquiry. But what I do find problematic is his failure to subject to critical scrutiny our liberal notions of justice, autonomy, tolerance, individual rights and so on, from the standpoint of the Islamic traditions he so clearly holds dear. Rather than ask the question of how Muslims can become better liberals, I believe it is far more pressing to ask how the world is (or can be) lived differently—confronted as we are with a historically unprecedented homogenizing force of modernity that will brook no arguments for an alternative vision.

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Image: Cover of Saba Mahmood's "Politics of Piety" (2005 Princeton)

Description from the University Press Books

Author Saba Mahmood is Professor in the Anthropology Department at the University of California, Berkeley.

Politics of Piety is a groundbreaking analysis of Islamist cultural politics through the ethnography of a thriving, grassroots women's piety movement in the mosques of Cairo, Egypt. Unlike those organized Islamist activities that seek to seize or transform the state, this is a moral reform movement whose orthodox practices are commonly viewed as inconsequential to Egypt's political landscape. Saba Mahmood's compelling exposition of these practices challenges this assumption by showing how the ethical and the political are indelibly linked within the context of such movements.

"This very timely book opens doors into spaces of Islamic piety that shatter the stereotypes which dominate thinking in the West. Mahmood carefully unpacks the distortions that common modes of liberalism and feminism impose on the Muslim world. She combines richness of description with theoretical sophistication to provide insight into the struggle of some Muslim women to live their faith, often in the face of not only Western liberal influences but also Arab nationalism and political Islamism. The reader is forced to face dilemmas that cannot be easily resolved. This is social science at its most illuminating." --Charles Taylor, Board of Trustees Professor of Law and Philosophy, Northwestern University

Plight of Women in Pakistan

Scholars have suggested a variety of perspectives to explain women's plight in Pakistan. Here is an insightful perspective that considers power, status, and money to be at the roots.

The Social Farce
By Ayesha Siddiqa, Dawn, September 05, 2008

Source

ALTHOUGH Pakistan’s attention seems completely diverted towards the upcoming presidential elections, there are other equally important things happening in the country such as the burying alive of two women.

The words of Baloch Senator Israrullah Zehri has angered a lot of people. The politician believes that such acts cannot be condemned as they are part of the local tradition of not allowing women the freedom of selecting their partners without the consent of their parents or guardians. Those trying to challenge authority, hence, must be punished according to tribal norms.

The feminists, in particular, view it as an issue of women’s rights. However, this problem is a subset of the larger issue of the lack of social and political development and the gradual militarisation of society. It should be viewed in this context.

While analysing the issue, let us differentiate between reality and the response to it. The social reality is what was expressed by the Baloch senator, according to whom honour killing is part of the local culture and traditions. His statement angered many but I would prefer Zehri over others of his kind — like one particularly prominent, foreign-educated and seemingly liberal female politician who many years ago made a similar claim during a private conversation. I was perturbed how she hid her feudal character under the garb of western sophistication. Such elements are difficult to catch and protest against.

Over the years, especially during the past couple of decades, society has become more militarised which means that what is defended as local culture is actually a greater distortion of religion and local traditions to enhance the power of individuals. The power play that we see in the country amongst politicians on a larger scale is actually an extension of a similar game that is played at the micro level in society. Women get punished as well as men because they don’t have a similar power status. This is the norm of a feudal, tribal and militarised society.

Surely, Mr Zehri did not know any better. He, like many others of his kind, has only seen the exercise of naked power. The senator was only trying to defend what he sees as a symbol of power that is his ultimate goal and that of others strutting about in the corridors of power. Balochistan is not alone in this. Such savage acts are presented as custom in other parts of the country as well. Recently, when I expressed my concern to a Sindhi journalist regarding the opening up of new madressahs in interior Sindh as a means to influence the Sufi traditions of the region, his response was that what was a matter of greater concern were incidents of honour killing — all defended in the name of tradition.

Can honour killing stop without debating the structure of society and without wanting to change it? The answer is in the negative. Protests against individual acts of violence will certainly provide relief to a few but will not root out the problem. The religious clerics led by the feudal/tribal leaders (or the other way around) will keep arguing that women have fewer rights than men. But their claims and counter-claims are all a farce until people begin to address the issue of restructuring the culture which is the basis of such crimes.

And one has to be realistic in understanding two critical points. First, feudalism and tribalism do exist in the country. For those, who believe that feudalism is no more in this country, the answer is that the institution has morphed into newer shapes. It might have ended from the perspective of the mode of production, but its socio-cultural forms exist. In fact, the institution has deepened its roots.

Second, the militarisation of society has influenced the process of morphing so that individuals, groups or institutions who represent the non-feudal class behave like them as well. For instance, there is no real difference between Senator Zehri and Pervez Musharraf who not too long ago had claimed that women get raped to get Canadian visas. The underlying sentiment is similar — gender rights or human rights are not possible because it challenges the power of those at the top who will then choose to treat issues of rights as cursory and one to be ignored and brushed aside as minor problems, even non-existent matters.

Let’s be very clear that such acts of brutality have nothing to do with religion or morality, otherwise such brutal rules would be applied elsewhere too. I am reminded of a tragic incident in a village in south Punjab where a young girl, who had sought shelter at a shrine after running away from her stepmother, was gang-raped. Ultimately, she was imprisoned on charges of adultery because the culprits had greater access to the local pir who was a member of parliament as well. The victim did not represent his constituency while the culprits did. The power structure was clearly tilted against her and so was the local standard of morality.

Interestingly, similar norms were not applied to some of the female members of the pir’s family known for morally dubious practices. Even the orthodox mullahs of that area have never ventured to punish the immorality mentioned above or issue fatwas. In fact, moral turpitude is a reality in all closed spaces. Peep inside any closed household, especially those that claim to be the spiritual saviours of the people, and there will be a number of stories, the protagonists of which go unpunished due to their higher social background.

The social system says that money and power determine whether or not one is punished for an act of immorality. These two aforementioned attributes make it convenient for many to hide their sins and escape honour killing or jail sentences. More important, the menfolk of such families are not even expected to hide their immoral acts. In many cases, being a mullah or a pir is sufficient licence for anything otherwise condemnable.

So, while we agree that Mr Zehri has correctly projected honour killing as a local tradition, could we also ask him to see the circumstances in which such practices are born? Burying men or women alive or killing them for honour is not about religion or tribal morality but about the ability of some individuals to exercise naked power.

The question is that is it social imbalance that Zehri and others like him were elected to defend or will he see the real purpose of his and others political existence? Furthermore, closed spaces and unequal power will always breed moral corruption. The current power structures have to be broken if morality is to be restored to our socio-political space.

The writer is an independent strategic and political analyst.

Saving Muslim Women

Following are excerpts from two interviews conducted within last few years and collected in the volume “The Present as History” by Nermeen Shaikh (Columbia 2007). Would highly recommend this volume to all readers, especially those in the humanities and social sciences.

Lila Abu-Lughod

Lughod, pg. 144-5: “Many of us have noticed that suddenly, after 9/11 and the American response of war in Afghanistan, the hunger for information about Muslim women seems insatiable. My own experience of this was in the form of an avalanche of invitations to appear on news programs and at universities and colleges. On the one hand, I was pleased that my expertise was appreciated and that so many people wanted to know more about a subject I had spent twenty years studying. On the other hand, I was suspicious because it seemed that this desire to know about “women and Islam” was leading people away from the very issues one needed to examine in order to understand what had happened.

Those issues include the history of Afghanistan – with Soviet, US, Pakistani, and Saudi involvements; the dynamics of Islamist movements in the Middle East; the politics and economics of American support for repressive governments. The problem gets framed as one about another culture or religion. Plastering neat cultural icons like “the Muslim woman” over messier historical and political narratives doesn’t get you anywhere. What does this substitution accomplish? Why, one has to ask, didn’t people rush to ask about Guatemalan women, Vietnamese women (or Buddhist women), Palestinian women, or Bosnian women when trying to understand those conflicts? The problem gets framed as one about another culture or religion, and the blame for the problems in the world placed on Muslim men, now neatly branded as patriarchal….

“… I ask myself about the very strong appeal of this notion of “saving” Afghan women, a notion that justifies American intervention (according to the First Lady Laura Bush’s November 2001 radio address) and that dampens criticism of intervention by American and European feminists. It is easy to see through the hypocritical “feminism” of a Republican administration. More troubling for me are the attitudes of those who do genuinely care about women’s status. The problem, of course, with ideas of “saving” other women is that they depend on and reinforce a sense of superiority by Westerners.

When you save someone, you are saving them from something. You are also saving them to something. What violences are entailed in this transformation? And what presumptions are entailed in this transformation? And what presumptions are being made about the superiority of what you are saving them to? This is the arrogance that feminists need to question. The reason I brought up African American women, or working-class women in the United States, was that the smug and patronizing assumptions of this missionary rhetoric would be obvious if used at home, because we’ve become more politicized about problems of race and class. What would happen if white-middle class women today said they needed to save those poor African American women from the oppression of their men?”

****

“The point about women’s veiling is of course too complicated to lay out here. But there were three reasons why I said it could not so simply be associated with lack of agency. First, “veiling” is not one thing across different parts of the Muslim world, or even among different social groups within particular regions. The variety is extraordinary, going from headscarves unself-consciously worn by young women in rural areas to the fuller forms of the very modern “Islamic dress” now being adopted by university women in the most elite fields, including medicine and engineering. Second, many of the women around the Muslim world who wear these different forms of cover describe this as a choice. We need to take their views seriously, even if not at face value. Beyond that, however, we need to ask some hard questions about what we actually mean when we use words like “agency” and “choice” when talking about human beings, always social beings always living in particular societies with culturally variable meanings of personhood. Do we not all work within social codes? What does the expression we often use here, “the tyranny of fashion,” suggest about agency in dress codes?

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“I think we need to recognize that even after “liberation” from the Taliban, Afghan women (and one can’t presume any uniformity of views even within this category) might want different things from what we (Westerners, of course also a diverse category) might want for them. What do we do about that? I don’t think we need simply to be cultural relativists, advocating respect for whatever goes on elsewhere and explaining it as “just their culture.” I‘ve already talked about the problem of “culture” explanations in my criticism of the focus on the category of “Muslim women.” And it should be recalled that Afghan or other Muslims’ “cultures” are just as much part of history and an interconnected world as ours are. What I think we need to do is to work hard to respect and recognize difference-as produces of different histories, as expressions of different circumstances, as manifestations of differently structured desires. We might still argue for justice for women, but consider that there might be different ideas about justice and that different women might want, or choose, different futures from what we envision as best. Among the most difficult things for American feminists to accept is that these futures might involve women in developing within a different religious tradition, or traditions, that don’t have as their primary ideal something called “freedom.”

Reports that came out of the Bonn peace conference in late November 2001 revealed that there were even differences among the few Afghan women feminists and activists present. Some, like the representative of the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) refused to be conciliatory to any notion of Muslim governance. But others looked to Iran as a country in which they could see women making significant gains within an Islamic framework – in part through an Islamically oriented feminist movement that is challenging injustices and reinterpreting the religious tradition. The situation in Iran is itself the subject of great debate within feminist circles, especially among Iranian feminists in the West. It is not clear whether and in what ways women have made gains, and whether the great increases in literacy, decreases in birthrates, presence of women in the professions and government, and a feminist flourishing in cultural fields like writing and filmmaking are because of or despite the establishment of a so-called Islamic Republic.

The concept of an Islamic feminism itself is also the subject of heated debate. Is it an oxymoron, or does it refer to a viable movement forged by women who want another way? Still, the representatives at the Bonn peace conference thought it was more realistic to look to the Iranian model than to a secular Western one if they wanted to have any appeal to local women and to have a chance of transforming women’s lives and gender relations from within.”

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Saba Mahmood

Saba Mahmood, Present as History, 148-153: “In my writing when I use the term “liberal” I am referring to liberalism as a tradition of political thought and philosophy with a distinct conception of the subject, ethics, and politics. The liberal tradition as it emerged over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth century in Europe is coincidental with development of capitalism and modern governance. Among the principles central to liberal political and moral philosophy that I address in my work on Islamism is the principle of liberty and freedom as an individual and political ethic. While the notion of freedom is valued in a number of premodern traditions, liberalisms comes to be primarily understood as an individual capacity to act autonomously in accord with one’s own desires and interests (interest here is largely defined in economic terms). Insomuch as autonomy is regarded as a “natural” human attribute, it presupposes a necessary antagonism between the individual and the social, and individual interests are understood to stand in opposition to community values and interest. The liberal maxim that the good life is necessarily a freely chosen one in which a person develops his unique capacities in accord with his “own will and interests” has now become the most dominant ethic of our age….

"The precepts of liberal political philosophy were introduced into non-Western societies (including Muslim societies) through colonial rule and an expanding system of global capitalist power (through institutions of law, governance, trade, and commerce) over the course of two centuries. Liberal presuppositions about politics and society have over time become an intrinsic part of the sensibilities and institutions of these societies and form an important resource for indigenous critiques of Western power and domination throughout the colonial and postcolonial period. It is precisely because many aspects of liberal discourse have become a part of the language of resistance to Western forms of power that I think it is important to attend to its hegemonic qualities, its normative assumptions, and the ways in which it remains peculiarly blind to other kinds of political and social projects and moral-ethical aspirations. Let me elaborate on this…

“A second example I want to give here of the hegemony liberalism commands in discourses of resistance is the prominence given to the ideal of individual freedom and autonomy within postcolonial feminist projects. One of the most cherished goals of postcolonial feminism-a movement aimed at improving the collective situation of “Third World women”- is to secure conditions under which women can live more autonomously and learn to distinguish between their “own desires” and those of the society, tradition, culture, or community. Despite the critiques leveled against Eurocentric feminism, it is quite common for postcolonial feminists to continue to reproduce many liberal assumptions, key among them the idea that the individual’s desires and interests stand in a relationship of opposition to the demands of tradition, society, and community. It is quite common, therefore, to hear that one of the failings of traditional societies is to subsume the individual within the collective (the family, the biradari, etc.), thereby extinguishing the opportunities for women to learn how to distinguish between their own desires and those of the society, the elders, the culture, and so on. But one might as to whether such an opposition between the individual and the social is universally valid: indeed, such an opposition hardly applies to how life is lived and experienced in Western liberal societies.

In my work I have tried to unpack the limits, prejudices, and blind spots that the adoption of liberal ideals and discourses has produced within the political imagination of postcolonial Muslim societies. Thus, for example, in my book Politics of Piety I have tried to problematize the liberal valorization of the value of autonomy and the concomitant ideal of freedom that animates contemporary feminist thought. In doing so, my aim is not to dismiss the utility of these ideals for women’s struggles, or to suggest that they are wrong, or to presuppose a better model of the relationship between the individual and the social. Rather my aim is to question the validity of these distinctions as universally valid and to urge feminists to challenge this rather narrow and parochial way of being human in the world. Some of the questions I am interested in exploring are: What are the different conceptions of the self that are now part of the postcolonial Muslim world that stand in tension with liberal conceptions of the self that are often upheld as more enlightened ways of being human in the world? Because liberalism does not map on to the geographic divide of the West and non-West (in other words, it is not a “cultural” trope) but commands a much broader set of allegiances, what sorts of mutations and genealogies of the self exist in our postcolonial world? What structures of power and authority, with different kinds of political imaginaries, do different conceptions of the subjective presuppose? And what desires, other than freedom, do people live by? What do we mean by freedom, from what, and toward what end? …

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“The remarks I made that you quote from were a product of the dissatisfaction I had come to feel with feminist analyses of the Islamic movements in particular and conservative religious movements in general. These analyses often present two supposedly different accounts of women’s participation in the Islamist movement. On the one hand, you have accounts in which feminist scholars portray Islamist women as the antithesis of all that feminism stands for, women who instrumentally appropriate feminist symbols, imagery and language, only to make these symbolic resources serve patriarchal ends and goals. On the other hand, there are monographs that desperately search for “Islamic feminism,” trying to unearth the feminist potential within Islamist women’s discourses even when this language is not a part of Islamist projects. These two accounts, in my opinion, are the mirror opposite of each other: the political and analytical worth of this movement is to be measured in terms of whether it is profeminist or antifeminist. What changes in this equation is the valuation of Islamism vis-à-vis feminism, but we learn little about the goals, projects, and practices of Islamism itself. It is seldom asked whether feminism is the relevant lens through which to analyze women’s participation in the Islamist movement: Are there other notions of what it means to be human in this world, competing conceptions of human flourishing and collective and individual good, whose logic does not map onto the ideals that feminism represents and advocates? How might these movements expand feminist politics and analytics beyond what this tradition already knows and values?

Feminism, as I discuss in my book, admittedly is a wide ranging tradition that encompasses socialist, liberal, radical, and other interpretations. But what is common to this tradition and indeed what gives it a certain analytical and political coherence, is the position that women are the subservient members of any society and it is the task of feminist scholars both to render this subservience visible within a given society and to suggest ways in which this subservience might be subverted and changed. While I consider both of these aspects of feminist scholarship to be a worthy enterprise, I also think that in order for feminism to be a vibrant and expansive tradition, it must expand its horizons to a consideration of projects, aspirations, and desires that do not reproduce its liberatory assumptions and telos- but indeed challenge it. In other words, if feminist analysis aspires to be more than a regurgitation of its moral superiority (which these days often translates into a simple denunciation of Islam’s abuses), then it must seriously contemplate the idea that it can learn something from nonliberal movements; that these movements might have something to teach feminists about what it means to be human in this world and to live in a variety of ways that do not map onto the logic of anti- or profeminist positions. Such a way of engaging nonliberal movements requires that we question the idea that all women, regardless of their historical and social location, are necessarily interested in expanding their freedoms, that they all seek to become autonomous individuals against the constraints of social and cultural norms.”

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“I think one of the reasons why the burqa-or the veil-took such center-stage in the feminist mobilization against the Taliban in the United States is due to the overdetermined status of the veil in Western history, particularly the colonial and Orientalist legacy that made the veil a symbol of Islam’s inferior status vis-à-vis “European civilization.” What Charles Hirschkind and I tried to point out [in “Feminism, the Taliban, and Politics of Counter-Insurgency”] is that American feminist preoccupations-along with the Western media’s-came at the expense of ignoring (or downplaying) the conditions of war and starvation that women were subjected to at that time in Afghanistan. Let me remind you here of the immense feminist mobilization we saw in American against the Taliban: it was led by the Feminist Majority whose broad-based campaign bore fruit as a wide array of popular women’s magazines (Such as Jane, Glamour, and Vogue) and television and radio shows honed in on the burqa as the primary symbol of Afghan’s women’s oppression. Mind you, this was before the events of September 11, 2001, when the Bush administration instrumentally used this vast feminist mobilization to justify its bombing of Afghanistan and the overthrow of the Taliban regime. At the time, there were other Afghan women’s organization that had also been trying to draw international attention to women’s plight under Taliban rule, but their efforts never seized the American imagination on the scale or in the manner that the Feminist Majority campaign did- with the burqa as its potent and singular symbol.

We need to recall here that when the Taliban came to power in 1995, the situation of Afghan women was already dire as a result of twenty years of war in which the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, had turned the region into an orgiastic field of violence. The United States alone poured over three billion dollars into Afghanistan, the largest covert operation in the U.S. history since the Second World War, to destabilize the Soviet occupation (with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the two most dictatorial regimes in the region, as partners in this project). It has been widely reported that the vast majority of the U.S. financial aid was given to the most extreme militant groups in Afghanistan with the understanding that “religious fanatics” would fight the godless communists better. When the Taliban came into power in 1995, they made the situation for urban women worse, but, as was reported even in the popular media at the time, women’s situation remained much the same in rural areas.

The Feminist Majority campaign, by virtue of focusing exclusively on the burqa and the Taliban regime, in effect ignored these other issues and the larger context that hand enabled the Taliban to come into power in the first place. In doing so, American liberal feminists overlooked the U.S. government’s culpability in promoting extremist groups like the Taliban and in creating the conditions of war and starvation to which women were particularly vulnerable. In the Feminist Majority campaign literature, there was hardly a mention of the fact that the United States had practically created the likes of the Afghan mujahideen (of which the Taliban were a product) or the brutal history of U.S. involvement in the region. The focus on the burqa made the Taliban issue sexy, it caught the attention of the popular media. Celebrities, who would not have been moved by accounts of poverty and starvation, were galvanized by the image of the burqa. The question we asked in this article was a simple one: Why were images of starving women and children, ravaged by twenty years of war, not as moving for Americans as the image of the burqa-clad women?

It was clear to us that what mobilized the sympathies of ordinary Americans was the shared judgment that the veil is the ultimate symbol of Muslim women’s oppression, which, once removed, would give Afghan women the freedom to do what they wanted. Now this judgment, as we argued, is not simply wrong but a fantasy, produced by a certain kind of imaginary that has an overdetermined reading of the veil. It does not take much intelligence to understand that Afghan women’s freedom depends not on an article of clothing but on the kinds of resources they have access to and the general social conditions in which they live: simply put, an unveiled starving woman is no better than a veiled starving woman. Furthermore, as has been proven over and over again in history, groups that are most devastated by conditions of war, militarization, and starvation are women, children, and the elderly since they are the most vulnerable members of a society and their access to the material resources of a community is limited. It was the silence of the feminist and the media campaign in American against this far more injurious form of victimization of women (enable by billions of dollars in U.S. financial and military aid to the region) that was absolutely astounding to us.

Given the campaign’s success, it was hard for us not to reach the conclusion that the preoccupation of liberal feminists and the Western media with the veil had more to do with the long-standing colonial fantasy to disrobe the Muslim woman than with an interest in securing her “liberation.” This is not a difficult deduction to make especially if one follows the events in Afghanistan since the ouster of the Taliban. When the American forces marched in, there were joyous celebratory articles and reports in the U.S. media about how the overthrow of the Taliban would result in Afghan women unveiling themselves, which in turn was represented as an act that would restore their freedoms and rights. Of course, subsequently, we learned that not all women wanted to unveil and that the custom of donning the burqa continued to be practiced in many areas of Afghanistan. More importantly, women’s situation became much worse than it was under the Taliban because of increased lawlessness and ethnic-tribal warfare, and the escalation of poverty and militarization in Afghanistan (numerous human rights groups have documented this). Yet none of these disturbing reports have galvanized the Feminist Majority, media celebrities, or popular media (all of whom rallied in support of the U.S. military campaign obscenely named “Operation Enduring Freedom”) to take up the cause of Afghan women.

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“… Is women’s adoption of regimes of dieting, exercising, and various body enhancement techniques in Euro-American societies simply an expression of their false consciousness or is one’s relationship to cultural values, its standards of sexual, physical, and personal worth, more complicated than the false consciousness thesis allows? The notion of false consciousness presumes an omniscient self-transparent consciousness that can step out of the fog of ideology to reveal the “true conditions” of one’s oppression and a pathway out of it. Such clairvoyance is crucially dependent upon a calculation of more and less enlightened beings, wherein the destiny of the latter is clearly to be determined by the former. As must be clear, my objection to such a formulation is both analytical and political.

I do not think that the concept of “choice” is very helpful here either, even though it is the term often used in debates around the veil-both by its champions and detractors (“I choose to wear it” versus “The veil is a cultural imposition”). Liberalism often formulates choice as a measure of freedom (societies that have “more choices” are supposed to have “more freedom” and those with fewer choices have less). Yet such a calculus must be clearly rejected precisely because of the ways in which choice has been rendered an instrument of domination in liberal capitalist societies. Not only does this liberal formulation resurrect the fiction of the autonomous sovereign subject, but it also blinds us to the powers and processes that produce such a subject. Clearly, neither the veil nor any other form of attire can be easily mapped onto the calculus of less-and-more choice (or less-and-more freedom) precisely because one’s relationship to a religious-cultural practice is far more implicated and complicated.”