Rejoinder to “Muslimwoman” Responses

There are many situations, conditions, and identities that we recognize but cannot name. The lack of a name does not matter until it does; at that point, it becomes urgent to articulate succinctly what before had been dimly felt and poorly expressed. The process of naming is fraught: Does the name really explain anything? Does it have analytical value? Is it worth the effort of adopting a new name for what had long been nameless? Neologisms are routinely distrusted because they compel a rethinking of the familiar. Once coined, however, the name expands understanding and allows for new discursive structures. Take, for example, the designation of countries with sizeable Muslim populations or a history shaped by Muslims as Islamic. The term highlights religion at the expense of other factors. Tackling the problem linguistically, world historian Marshall Hodgson invented a new word—Islamicate—that would question the centrality of religion in the identification of such societies but would not eliminate it. In so doing, he separated religious from cultural and social effects even while holding on to their imbrication with one another. Hodgson’s neologism enabled an epistemic shift; it redefined the ways in which knowledge about Muslim societies might be produced.¹

In an attempt to make sense of a growing problem confronting Muslim women, I too have coined a neologism—Muslimwoman. My concern was to find a way to draw attention to the post–9/11 collapse of religion and gender into a singular and imposed political category. I wanted to highlight the ways in which non-Muslims and Muslim religious extremists alike deploy this newly entwined religious and gendered identification. The Muslimwoman is useful also for those Muslim women who recognize a strategic utility to this essentialist identity. The test of the effectiveness of neologisms like Islamicate and Muslim-woman is that they are so relevant that they impose themselves.

My goal in combining Muslim and woman into one was to emphasize how these two words have collapsed into each other. Muslimwoman is both a noun and an adjective that refers to an imposed identification the individual may, but generally does not choose for herself. In the Derridean sense, it is an iteration whose repetition does not simply “produce a replica of the first original usage and its intended meaning: rather every repetition is a form of variation, . . . a linguistic, legal, cultural and political repetition-in-transformation.”² The Muslimwoman is not an “archetype”; nor is it an “ontological status,” as Zine asserts. It is not a description of any kind of reality that should be inflected by class or ethnicity; it is the ascription of a label that deliberately and strategically reduces all diversity to a single image, generally that of the veiled woman. The veil, real or imagined (because the unveiled woman is often thought to be the exception that proves the rule that all Muslim women are veiled), functions like race, a marker of essential difference that many women in both Muslim-majority and -minority societies find hard to escape.

Although Badran questions my claim that 9/11 had a significant impact beyond the West, I maintain that it did. The tragedy of 9/11 and the catastrophic “war on terror” it unleashed have reached Muslim populations from the Middle East to Central, South, and Southeast Asia. It was 9/11 that allowed Western states to other their Muslims so that many now live in their birth nations as guests at best and parasites at worst. In the United States and Europe, the surge in Islamophobia since 9/11 has redrawn boundaries of citizenship. Second- and third-generation Muslims find themselves having to justify belonging to places and communities into which they were born.

“I am as American as you are,” said one of the panelists at last summer’s Aspen Institute seminar on Muslim women. The white audience smiled indulgently: “How articulate she is! How smart these Muslim women are!”

When I pinpointed 9/11 as a turning point in attitudes toward Muslim women, my intention was not to claim that their stigmatization is new. Not at all. The point, rather...