Epilogue

In December 2019, in preparation for a TEDx talk (Naber 2019a), I reached out to my longtime comrade, Palestinian feminist Nada Elia, for advice on the content of my presentation. She asked me about my big idea. I hesitated before I said, "Arab feminism is not an oxymoron." She screamed, "What? We have been saying that since the nineties!" Indeed, Jo Kadi (1994) used this phrase in the introduction to the first anthology on Arab American feminisms. In the early 2000s, Amira Jarmakani (2011) used the concept of "invisibility" to describe Arab American feminism, and Lara Deeb (2018) has been addressing how scholars of the Middle East have been repeating a litany to colleagues, the public, and other feminists for at least four decades that says, as she puts it, "Muslim women are not universally oppressed. Muslim women have agency. They are not necessarily more oppressed than other women. They are not solely defined by religion. Etc. Etc. We keep repeating these basic facts because we feel a responsibility and pressure to do so."

The big idea I originally submitted to TEDx was "War is a feminist issue," focusing on the current geopolitical realities that are concerning us now, in Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Kashmir, and beyond. Yet after months of back-and-forth, the event organizers, reminding me that the primary audience would be white women, urged revisions that led me to focus on challenging misconceptions about "the veil" and clarifying, like the broken record many of us have become, that Arab—as well as Muslim—feminisms exist.

As the contributions to this special issue illustrate, the attempt to challenge misconceptions about "Arab and Muslim women" continues to entrap us. I often ask myself how much longer I can continue to put my body on the line for a feminist politics that begins and ends on the defense, challenging misconceptions, inserting and uplifting a counter-discourse.

On college campuses, many of us face ongoing targeting for raising critiques of US-led war and empire. While teaching on Zoom, a student told me he could only participate via chat rather than speaking out loud. He was scared his Islamophobic parents would overhear him discussing the anti-Muslim racism and sexism that underline the war on terror. That same week, I was forced to engage with university administrators after a Zionist organization contacted them in an effort to police my writing and my voice.

Despite how deeply we may yearn to disable the repeat button on this same old song and dance, and despite changes in the forms of warfare that drive anti-Muslim racism—from new forms of surveillance and unmanned aircraft technologies to immigration bans—one thing has not changed: even the newest and most improved forms of anti-Muslim racism are justified by recycled arguments about "Islamic sexual savagery." This is why I would argue that it is imperative to affirm, louder than ever before, the foundational arguments that anti-racist Middle East and Muslim feminists have been affirming for decades, despite how sick or how tired we may be. Indeed, the Biden administration has made it clear they will continue the war on terror (Sjursen 2021), a war that has relied heavily on racist arguments of Islamic sexual savagery as a justification for genocide, displacement, and the confiscation of land and resources. As feminists working to end anti-Muslim racism have contended, the repetitive blaming of gender violence in Middle Eastern and South Asian Muslim communities on culture and religion has the effect of turning attention away from the United States' own imperial and anti-immigrant violence and covering up how the US war on terror—including the Muslim ban—depends on the very gendered and sexualized violence that the Muslim ban seeks to protect "Americans" from (Naber 2019b). And now, more than ever before, we need to affirm our anti-imperialist/anti-racist feminism coalitionally and relationally through the solidarity framework of joint struggle—integrating, for instance, a feminist politics of prison abolition, anti-militarism and decolonization, immigrant justice, and beyond.

Indeed, liberal strands of feminist and LGBTQ activism often leave the problem of culture blaming, central to...