Gender and secularism of modernity: How can a Muslim woman be French?

Feminist Studies

Volumn 32, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 239-255

  Najmabadi, Afsaneh ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33750944006     PISSN: 00463663     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/20459085     Document Type: Article

References (37)

1. Montesquieu, Fenian Letters, trans. C.J. Betts (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1973).
2. The word "veil" itself has become an impossible yet indispensable word to use. Its meaning, even in its barest sense of what kind of outfit it describes, varies drastically in different historical contexts. In Iran, for instance, what today is considered "veiling" (covering the body, leaving the face exposed) would have been considered "unveiling" (showing the face) in the early-twentieth century. In the context of the French controversy, I use it as a general term to refer to the covering of a woman's hair, usually with a scarf, that expresses a religious-cultural practice and identification.
3. See Yesim Arat, "One Ban and Many Headscarves: Islamist Women and Democracy in Turkey," HAGAR: International Social Science Review 2, no. 1 (2001): 47-60;
4. and Burçak Keskin-Kozat, "Entangled in Secular Nationalism, Feminism, and Islamism: The Life of Konca Kuris," Cultural Dynamics 15, no. 2 (2003): 183-211.
5. See Maryam Namazie's numerous articles espousing this viewpoint at www.Iranian.com.
6. The contestation over who speaks for Islam in France is itself a struggle over the relationship between Islamic identification and national citizenship.
7. Wendy Brown, "Who Has Culture and Whom Culture Has" (paper presented at the cultural citizenship conference, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, 20-21 Feb. 2004). The paper constitutes part of a forthcoming book, "Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire."
8. Katherine Pratt Ewing, "Living in the Diaspora: Between Turkey and Germany," South Atlantic Quarterly 102, nos. 2-3 (2003): 405-31. Most recently, much of the coverage of denial of visa to a prominent Muslim scholar. Tariq Ramadan, was Informed by this notion of deceit: that he was a grandson of Hasan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the 1930s, seemed to convey more truth about him than anything he has written or done, or the fact that he was born and brought up in Switzerland.
9. Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali, "Veiled Politics: Rethinking the Debate on Hijab," ISIM Newsletter 13 (December 2003): 202-36.
10. For an argument for moving the debate out of the choice paradigm especially for those opposed to the ban, see Ajay Singh Chaudhary, '"The Simulacra of Morality': Islamic Veiling, Religious Politics, and the Limits of liberalism," Dialectical Anthropology 29 (2005): 349-72.
11. See also Saba Mahmood, "Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival," Cultural Anthropology 16, no. 2 (2001): 202-36, for a different view of the choice paradigm, one that fails to take into account the understanding of veiled women themselves and the place of public piety in modern subjectification, wherein the practice of veiling in public spaces is part of, indeed central to, the constitution of modern national subjeahood.
12. Joan W. Scott, "Symptomatic Politics: Banning Islamic Head Scarves in French Public Schools," unpublished manuscript, 26.
13. These early accounts include Mirza Abu al-Hasan Khan Shirazi, Hayrat'namah, ed. Hasan Mursil'vand (Tehran: Rasa, 1986);
14. Mirza Abu'l Hasan Khan Shirazi, A Persian At the Court of King George, 1809-1810, trans. Margaret Morris Cloake (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1988);
15. Mirza Abu Talib Khan Lakhinaw'i Isfahani, Masir-t Talibi (Tehran: Sazman-i intisharat va amuzish-i inqilab-i Islami, 1984);
16. Muhammad Saffar, Disorienting Encounters: Travels of a Moroccan Scholar in France, 1815-1816: The voyage of Muhammad as-Saffar, ed. and trans. Susan Gilson Miller (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992);
17. Mirza Salih Shirazi, Guzarish-i safar, ed. Humayun Shahidi (Tehran: Rah-i naw, 1983);
18. Mirza Fattah Khan Garmrudi, Safarnamah-i Mirza Fattah Khan Gamrudi bih 'Urupa, ed. Path al-Din Fattahi (Tehran: Chapkhanah-i Bank-i Bazargani-i Iran, 1969);
19. Rizaquli Mirza, Safarnamah, ed. Asghar Farmanfarma'i Qajar (Tehran: Asatir, 1982).
20. For a critical study of how this travel literature informed historiography of Iranian modernity, see Naghmeh Sohrabi, Signs Taken for Wonder: Qajar Travel Literature to Europe (Ph. D. diss., Harvard University, 2005).
21. Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism, and Historiography (New York: Palgrave, 2001).
22. "Scott, "Symptomatic Politics," 7.
23. For a more extensive historical expansion of this proposition in the case of Iran, see my book, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
24. 'Abbas 'Ali Kayvan Qazvini, Hajj'namah-i Kayvan (includes Kalamat-i Kayvan and Kayvan'namh), ed. Rashid Yasimi (Tehran: Matba'ah-i Busfur, 1930), 214.
25. For a summary of this argument in the case of Iran, see Afsaneh Najmabadi, "Mapping Transformations of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in Modern Iran," Social Analysis 49 (Summer 2005): 54-77.
26. This was articulated most strongly by Fatima Mernissi in Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in a Modern Society (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1975).
27. I give an example of this double work in "Rules of Desire: The Interminable Question of Hijab," http://iranian.com/Najmabadi/2005/August/ Hijab/index.html.
28. The literature on politics of Iranian modernity is enormous. I have found the following particularly insightful and helpful to my thinking: Fariba Adelkhah, Being Modern in Iran, trans. Jonathan Derrick (London: Hurst, 1999);
29. Mehrzad Boroujerdi, Iranian Intellectuals and the West: The Tormented Triumph of Nativism (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1996);
30. Roy Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985);
31. and the many writings of Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, esp. Emergence of Two Revolutionary Discourses in Modern Iran (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1988)
32. and Refashioning Iran.
33. See Parvin Paidar, Women and the Political Process in Twentieth-Century Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
34. Mohja Kahf, Western Representations of the Muslim Woman: From Termagant to Odalisque (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), 4-5.
35. Billie Melman, Women's Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718-1918: Sexuality, Religion, and Work (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992).
36. Paraphrased from Kahf, Western Representations, 120.
37. Kahf, Western Representations, Ibid., 8.