Abstract
The complicated role European feminism played in legitimating and extending colonial rule in vast regions of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East has been extensively documented and well-argued for some time now.1 For many of us raised in this critical tradition, it is therefore surprising to witness the older colonialist discourse on women being reen-acted in new genres of feminist literature today, with the explicit aim of justifying the U.S. war on terror in the Muslim world. It seems at times a thankless task to unravel yet again the spurious logic through which Western imperial power seeks to justify its geopolitical domination by posing as the “liberator” of indigenous women from native patriarchal cultures. It would seem that this ideologically necessary but intellectually tedious task requires little imagination beyond repositioning the truths of the earlier scholarship on Algeria, Egypt, Indonesia, and India that has copiously and rigorously laid bare the implicated histories of feminism and empire.
This chapter would have been impossible to write without the assiduous research assistance of Noah Salomon, Michael Allan, Stacey May, and Mark McGrath. I am thankful not only for their help in locating the materials but also for keeping me abreast of the enormous popularity this genre of literature enjoys in various public forums. My thanks to Jane Collier, Charles Hirschkind, and Joan Scott for their critical comments, and to Mayanthi Fernando for introducing me to the French examples in this genre. A longer version of this paper appears in Joan Scott (ed.), Women Studies on the Edge, Duke University Press, 2007. I would like to thank Duke University Press for permitting the republication of this piece in its current version. My sincere thanks to Ann Braude for her expert editing for this volume.
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© 2009 The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and the Women’s Studies in Religion Program, Harvard Divinity School
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Mahmood, S. (2009). Feminism, Democracy, and Empire: Islam and the War on Terror. In: Herzog, H., Braude, A. (eds) Gendering Religion and Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230623378_9
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