Muslim Women and the Politics of Representation

In her essay “Deploying the Muslimwoman,” miriam cooke raises a number of important questions and issues, the most important of which is a discussion of the category “Muslimwoman” as a transnational imaginary enabling the production of new meanings, discourses, and identities in the context of gender and Islam. She argues that the category Muslimwoman includes a broad range of issues and subjects, from the formation of a cosmopolitan identity to the creation of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) advocating transnational and translocal activism to women’s participation in nationalist and militaristic movements to sharia activism. cooke’s formulation of a primary identity of the Muslimwoman as a form of strategic essentialism that enables rethinking Islam and negotiating gender issues challenges hegemonic discourses that justify neocolonial policies of war and militarism in the Middle East in the name of women’s oppression in Islam. Her claims that the category Muslimwoman has become a site of women’s activism confront and displace the framing of neocolonial and imperialist forces of occupation as liberating the so-called oppressed Muslimwoman.

While I agree with cooke’s argument that the category Muslimwoman is a place from which women can speak out against the imperialist and patriarchal regimes of power and knowledge to which they have been subjected, I would like to take the category in a different direction and discuss complexities involved in and contradictions between this identity and multiple historical and geopolitical locations.¹ These issues are important because we are living in a transnational context that is marked by uneven power relations in the circulation of systems of representation along with capital, labor, and bodies. In my view, questions of race, gender, religion, and cosmopolitanism cannot be separated from old and new forms of colonialism and new formations of empire. Indeed, if we were to ignore the hidden operation of imperialist subtexts, it would be difficult to process either the imperialist plan of bringing gendered subjects into its temporal zone or the national invention of tradition in a move to write the local into this frame. In addition, questions of representations and subalternity including an interrogation of who is speaking on behalf of the Muslim woman and the significance of either academic or nonacademic informants in shaping the cosmopolitan consciousness of race, gender, and religion would be obliterated.

Let me elaborate briefly on three important aspects of these issues: (1) the tensions and contradictions related to modern notions of temporality in the narrative spaces of the empire and the nation and the compatibility of such notions in particular forms of worlding² (the West and “the Rest,” the discourse of Orientalism, the othering of Islam as a religion, the reinvention of tradition as it relates to issues of foundationalism and fundamentalism, and the binary opposition of the religious and the secular); (2) the compatibility of the empire and the nation in investing in foundational and fundamentalist notions of secularism and religion through feminine iconography; and (3) the question of representation and mediation in a transnational context where postcolonial and diasporic Muslim women have become the material evidence (the body) upon which racial, religious, and cultural notions of authenticity and otherness are framed to give meaning to civilizational thinking as well as religious and secular forms of nationalism and fundamentalism.

In the first case, I argue that since colonial modernity, notions of temporality both religious and secular have invested in feminine tropes and iconographies to write space into time by interpolating subjects—in this case, Muslim women—who are assuming an identity that is a byproduct of an image of identity in Homi Bhabha’s terms.³ In this context, the formation of the category Muslimwoman cannot be separated from its imperialist and nationalist subtext, as it displays the tensions and contradictions of the space/time gap, or what is left out when space gets written into a particular temporality. The excess of the category Muslimwoman, or what is expelled through the process of such subject formation, is of great interest to me. I argue that historicizing the emergence of the Muslimwoman as an identitarian category is crucial not only for our understanding...