The Arabic term fitna links female appeal to civil strife and rebellion.

Evidence

One of the primary meanings of fi is “rebellion against divine law,” or “civil war and re.. volt” in which the believers’ faith and unity of community is put in grave danger. Fitna can also mean “temptation,” “attractiveness,” or “infatuation.” Muslim jurists, in discussing female sexual.. ity, use the verb yuftinu (from the root fatana, the same root from which fitna is derived), which literally means “to charm or enamor someone”; these jurists thereby intimately connect seduction with sedition. — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 784

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the semantic range of fitna — from divine rebellion and civil war down to attraction and infatuation, all sharing a root.
• SEED: A philological essay on how one Arabic root encodes the feared equation of female beauty with social disorder — and what unwinding that etymology does to the feminist debate.