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🪵 The Threshold

Passing judgment on veiling requires an explicit normative framework, not raw empirics.

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tagsja-picks, addendum, definitional_content, primary_study, singleton, xref, category/definitional-content
aliases@hussain_framing_2017, loc. 597

3 min read

Passing judgment on veiling requires an explicit normative framework, not raw empirics.

Evidence

To accept, to qualify or to resist such Muslim women’s perspective is to invoke a normative framework. In recent years aspects of feminism and liberalism (e.g. ‘western feminism’ and ‘muscular liberalism’) have been cynically and insincerely used to critique and undermine various Muslim practices and claims for accommodation, including issues of women’s dress. However, not all such appeals have to be cynical or insincere. They can be principled and reasonable (without necessarily being valid). Without trying to spell out in any detail the sincere and insincere versions of these highly complex and varied ‘isms’, I am simply making the point that some such normative framework is necessary. An analysis of Othering, e.g. of how the fact of living within a hegemonic secularism subtly influences Muslim subjectivity, is incomplete without an appeal to a normative framework, for without that we cannot know to what extent the influence is a result of an exercise of self-interested power, of domination, and to what extent it is an aspect of benign social change on the part of Muslims themselves, who on a reasoned basis come to adapt their practices and modify their sense of what it means to be a Muslim. — A. Hussain, N. Meer, Framing Muslim Integration, 597

Categorization

  • ADDENDUM: Directly follows the ‘immodesty moral panics’ article: this is the theoretical move that such panics must be judged against, since even the charge of oppressive Othering itself presupposes normative standards.
  • XREF: connects to: Islamophobia analysis unavoidably requires an explicit normative framework. — Runnymede Trust (ed. Farah Elahi & Omar Khan), Islamophobia: Still a Challenge for Us…, 592; Critique frameworks like anti-Islamophobia remain incomplete without explicit normative argument. — A. Hussain, N. Meer, Framing Muslim Integration, 599; Measuring Islamophobia requires reliable indicators rather than anecdotal evidence. — Erik Bleich, What Is Islamophobia and How Much Is…, 59 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

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