Lost in Translation: Writing Back from the Margins

miriam cooke’s article raises some important ongoing questions about how the category Muslimwoman is being constituted, contested, and lived. The dynamics associated with naming and inhabiting this identity through the binaries of Orientalist constructions and theological mandates are not new, although cooke has employed the neologism Muslimwoman to signal the conflation of gender and religion in the articulation of this category as a post–9/11 phenomenon. Elsewhere, I have argued that Muslim women must navigate between the competing and contradictory spaces of Orientalist and fundamentalist discourses in the ways our bodies and identities are read, regulated, and consumed.¹ The politics of identity that govern the narration of my body and subjectivity as a Muslim woman have been the product of deeply entrenched historical, political, imperial, and religious inscriptions. These discursive markings bear the imprint of colonial fascination, desire, and disavowal, as well as religious invocations of piety, honor, and moral regulation. The narrow discursive boundaries that frame the articulation of our identities limit the agency of Muslim women to locate our sense of subjectivity and identity outside the parameters that have been determined for us.

I am increasingly concerned with not only the problematic dialectics through which the category Muslimwoman is constituted but also how the processes of marking and naming this category continues to be governed by the authority of those who do not live this identity. As Muslim women, we are not in control of the meanings mapped onto our bodies. The meanings and significations that shape our ontology have been hijacked, and as a result, we become “fugitive subjects” as the true meaning we associate with our identities must elude and evade the “Muslimwoman industry” that seeks to claim authority over identities, bodies, and lived experiences. This industry has historically been dominated by colonial cultural producers—the European Orientalist writers, artists, and travelers upon whose accounts contradictory depictions of the veiled and oppressed victim or hypersexualized Oriental Muslim woman were circulated, consumed, and canonized. Patriarchal Islamic religious authorities have also exerted their providence over the moral, physical, spiritual, and ontological status of Muslim women in equally narrow and limiting terms that have relegated us to positions of gendered subordination and public exile into domestic harems and political forms of purdah, while in the same breath, assuring us of our spiritual equality. While these Orientalist and fundamentalist narrations persist, a new breed of authorities on our lives now comes in the form of secular politicians who decide (as have the mullahs) how we should regulate our bodies within public space, for example, as in the case of France and Turkey, where our sisters are banned from wearing head scarves in public institutions for fear they might undermine the sanctity of secularism. Other members of this industry that use Muslim women as political currency are civil-society actors, such as nongovernmental organization (NGOs), journalists, and academics exhibiting a neocolonial impulse. Within humanitarian projects, the Muslimwoman enterprise often extends to paradigms of rescue and the need to liberate us from our misfortunes and misogynistic cultures through exposing our tragic and imperiled lives, often irrespective of or in deliberate collusion with the neo-imperialism of the ongoing “war on terror” and embedded racial hierarchies. Academic forms of imperialism govern the scholarly representation of Muslim women and enact the discursive authority to label, name, and authorize our experiences and become “experts” on our identities. In the meantime, we are reduced to exotic subjects.² Even dissident Muslim women, such as Irshad Manji, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Azar Nafisi, whom cooke notes are marketing and commodifying their insider stories of Muslim oppression, have claimed a dominant space within the Muslim woman industry as “refuseniks” and purveyors of sensationalized stories to satiate the ongoing imperialist fascination with Muslim women’s lives.³

In all these formulations, the productive power to name the Muslim woman as abject subject also simultaneously produces the subject location of those doing the naming. Orientalists gain positional superiority and become constituted as “civilized subjects”; Islamists shore up patriarchal male authority as a dominant religious subject; politicians become the so-called...