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For more than thirty years, much of the Muslim world has been sliding backward, away from modernity. Maybe the West and Israel, defeat and humiliation, dictators, emirs or mullahs are to blame. Or maybe it’s one of those cycles of fanatic religiosity that afflicts every society from time to time. Some voices of reason, however, have to stand up and say “Enough! There is a modern world and Muslims should be part of it.” Some apostles of progress have to do more than bemoan their fate, bow to the diktats of intolerance, make excuses for willful ignorance or turn their backs on the faith altogether. Well, at long last that chorus is growing among Muslims, and if you listen to the most strident voices, damned if they don’t sound like an all-woman band. They’re way out there on the edge of the faith; their message and their lifestyles are so far from the torpid Muslim mainstream they’re almost in the desert.1 What is needed is a move beyond tradition—nothing less than a reform movement to bring the core concepts of Islam into the modern age, a Muslim Reformation to combat not only the jihadist ideologues but also the dusty, stifling seminaries of the traditionalists, throwing open the windows to let in much-needed fresh air.2 Irshad Manji sees herself as moving Islam into the 16th century; Ayaan Hirsi Ali wants to move it into the 18th. It’s as if Luther and Voltaire were living at the same time.3 CHAPTER FIVE Gender and the Figure of the “Moderate Muslim” Feminism in theTwenty-First Century ELORA SHEHABUDDIN Gender and the Figure of the“Moderate Muslim” | 103 The moderate Muslim is almost a Western invention. Since 9/11, she has been eagerly sought out as an ally in various causes and adventures that ultimately hurt Muslims more than help them. As the first quotation above shows, the “moderate,” “reform”-minded, “good” Muslims most celebrated in the West today also happen to be female. Strike that. They are female precisely because certain Western political entities and cultural outlets insist that Muslim women are severely and uniquely oppressed even in “the torpid Muslim mainstream ” and need to be saved. Perhaps aware of the rich scholarship criticizing the long tradition of what Leila Ahmed has called “colonial feminism,” many journalists, scholars, and bloggers are now relieved to have found women who are Muslim, ex-Muslim, or non-Muslim (but from the Muslim world) to further their rescue missions into the Muslim world. What is striking about the recent refrains about “moderate Muslims” and calls for an Islamic Reformation are their basic underlying assumptions: that Islam must follow a path similar to Western Christianity, that modernity and freedom must be understood the same way for and by everyone everywhere, and that the issues of women and gender are central to this much-needed overhaul of Islam. These assumptions ignore the violent and complex history of the European Reformation itself, as well as the long history of critique and reform within Muslim societies, and ultimately reveal more about the interests of those issuing the calls than the priorities and concerns of Muslims themselves. Gender analysis has played an invaluable role in the scholarly study of what is broadly referred to as the Muslim world, transforming our understanding of colonialism and imperialism, political participation, representations of Muslims, and, indeed, Islam itself. There has been an outpouring of insightful new work in recent years, from feminist interpretations of religious texts to deeply contextualized studies of Muslim women’s lives, faith, and everyday practices. Today, however, this nuanced, sophisticated work risks being overshadowed and undermined by the more imperial use and abuse of gender to serve U.S. foreign policy objectives. Gender has become crucial in the fabrication of the category of “moderate Islam” and the figure of the “moderate Muslim.” Perhaps as in no other field, gender has long been and continues to be extraordinarily politicized on the subject of Islam and Muslims, at both intellectual and policy levels. Gender issues and feminism have become closely linked to American projects of domination, exploitation, and selfrepresentation in ways that are reminiscent of the nineteenth-century colonial and missionary enterprises, but are, of course, also quite distinct. As Saba Mahmood reminds us, it would be naïve to argue that “the discourses of feminism and democracy have been hijacked to serve an imperial project. Such an [3.22.181.209] Project MUSE...

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