Well-meaning feminist rescue of Muslim women can itself destroy life worlds

Evidence

I want to end with a quote from Saba Mahmood that both raises important questions and offers an answer of sorts: … Does the confidence of our political vision as feminists ever run up against the responsibility that we incur for the destruction of life forms so that “unenlightedned” women may be taught to live more freely? Do we fully comprehend the forms of life that we want to so passionately to remake so that Muslim women and men may live a more enlightened existence? … Would an intimate knowledge of life worlds that are distinct from, and perhaps even opposed to, our cosmopolitan lifestyles ever lead us to question the certainty with which we prescribe what is good for all humanity? At a time when feminist and democratic politics run the danger of being reduced to a rhetorical display on the placard of Islam’s abuses, these questions offer the slim hope that perhaps a dialogue across political and religious differences … can yield a vision of coexistence that does not require making certain life worlds extinct or provisional. It requires us to entertain the possibility … that one does not always know what one opposes and that a political vision at times has to admit its own finitude in order to even comprehend what it has sought to oppose. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 585

Categorization

• XREF: Relocates the problem from ‘them’ to ‘us’ — the frightened/enlightened subject’s own certainty becomes the object of critique, echoing the reader’s stated analytical pivot. — connects to: Imperial feminism framed Muslim women as needing rescue by a liberal West
• DEEPTHINKING: The closing finitude of one’s political vision as a precondition for understanding what one opposes is a genuinely dense, paradigm-shifting thought central to self-critical advocacy.