Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (70 page)

in part because the labor that belongs to the fi d of analysis is diff rent from that required by the demands of political action, both in its temporality and its social impact. It is not that these two modalities of engagement-
_
the po.. litical and the analytical-should remain deaf to each other, only _ that they should not be collapsed into each other.4 By allowing theoretical inquiry some immunity from the requirements of strategic political action, we leave open the possibility that the task of thinking may proceed in directions not dictated by the logic and pace of immediate political events.

Wendy Brown has written eloquently about what is lost when analysis is subjected to the demands of political attestation, judgment, and action. She argues:

It is the task of theory . . . to "make meanings slide," while the lifeblood of politics is made up of bids for hegemonic representation that by nature seek to arrest this movement, to fi meaning at the point of the particular political truth-the

nonfl and nonnegotiable representation-that one wishes to prevail. . . . [L]et us ask what happens when intellectual inquiry is sacrifi to an intensely politicized moment, whether inside or outside an academic institution. What happens when we, out of good and earn intentions, seek to collapse the distinction between politics and theory, between political bids for hegemonic truth and intellectual inquiry? We do no favor, I think, to politics or to intellectual life by eliminating a productive tension-the way in which politics and theory effectively interrupt
each other-in order to consolidate certain political claims as the premise of a program of intellectual inquiry. ( W. Brown 2001, 41 )

I read Wendy Brown here as insisting on the importance of practicing a cer.. tain amount of skepticism, a suspension of judgment, if you will, toward the normative limits of political discourse. "Intellectual inquiry" here entails pushing against our received assumptions and categories, through which a number of unwieldy problems have been domesticated to customary habits of thought and praxis.

This argument gains particular salience in the current political climate, de.. fi by the events of September 11 , 2001 , and the subsequent war of terror that the United States govern has unleashed on the Muslim world. The long..

4
The distinction between these two forms of human labor, as Judith Butler points out, goes back to at least Aristotle, who argues that "theoretical wisdom" is not the same as "practical wis.. dom" since each are oriented toward diff rent ends: the former pursues what Aristotle calls "hap-

piness," and the latter "virtue" (Butler, Laclau, and
Z
izek
2000, 264-66 ).
F6r contemporary refor-

mulations of this argument, see Wendy Brown's discussion of the work of Benedetto Croce, Maurice Merleau--Ponty, and Michel Foucault (W. Brown
2001 , 40-44)
.

standing demand that feminists stand witness to the patriarchal ills of Islam has now been enlisted in the service of one of the most unabashed imperial projects of our time. Consider, for example, how the Feminist Majority's intern campaign against the Taliban regime was an essential element in the Bush ad.. ministration's attempt to establish legitimacy for the bombing of Afghanistan aptly called "Operation Enduring Freedom" ( on this, see Hirschkind and Mah.. mood 2002 ). It was the burka..clad body of the Afghan woman-and
not
the destruction wrought by twenty years of war fu by the United States through one of the largest covert operations in American history-that served as the primary referent in the Feminist Majority's vast mobilization against the Taliban regime ( and later the Bush administration's war). While the denial of education to Afghan women and the restrictions imposed on their movements were often noted, it was this visual image of the burka more than anything else that condensed and organized knowledge about Afghanistan and its women, as if this alone could provide an adequate understanding of their suffering. The in.. adequacy of this knowledge has today become strikingly evident as reports from Afghanistan increasingly suggest that the lives of Afghan women have not im.. proved since the ouster of the Taliban and that, if anything, life on the streets has become more unsafe than it was under the old regime due to conditions of increased sociopolitical instability ( Amnesty Intern 2003 ; Badkhen 2002 ; Human Rights Watch 2002 ). Perhaps we need to entertain the possibility that had there been some analytical complexity added to the picture that or.. ganizations such as the Feminist Majority presented of Afghan women's situa.. tion under Taliban rule, had the need for historical refl not been hij acked by the need for immediate political action, then feminism might have been less recruitable to this ill..conceived proj ect.

The ethical questions that imperial projects of this proportion pose for fern.. inist scholars and activists are also relevant to the more sedate context of the women's mosque movement that has been the focus of this book. To the de.. gree that feminism is a politically prescriptive project, it requires the remaking of sensibilities and commitments of women whose lives contrast with femi.. nism's emancipatory visions. Many feminists, who would oppose the use of military force , would have little diffi supporting projects of social reform aimed at transforming the attachments, commitments, and sensibilities of the kind that undergird the practices of the women I worked with, so that these women may be allowed to live a more enlightened existence. Indeed, my own history of involvement in feminist politics attests to an unwavering belief in projects of reform aimed at rendering certain life forms provisional if not ex.. tinct. But the questions that I have come to ask of myself, and which I would like to pose to the reader as well, are: Do my political visions ever run up against the responsibility that I incur for the destruction of life forms so that

"unenlightened" women may be taught to live more freely ? Do I even fully comprehend the forms of life that I want so passionately to remake ? Would an intimate knowledge of lifeworlds distinct from mine ever lead me to question my own certainty about what I prescribe as a superior way of life for others?

In his provocative and disturbing book
Liberalism and Empire,
Uday Mehta argues that one of the reasons a number of liberal th committed to ideals of equality, liberty, fraternity, and tolerance, were able to actively endorse the project of the Empire-a project not simply of conquest and pillage but also of profound political and moral patern -had to do with a broad orientation inherent within liberal thought regarding how one responds to "the experi.. ences of the unfamiliar" (Mehta 1999, 201). As Mehta argues, for those who share this orientation, any given present is to be understood in terms of its con.. tribution to an unbounded future. Insomuch as unfamiliar ways of life are

judged by reference to their projection into such a future, one
-
defi by the

unfolding of the liberal project itself, the particularities of these forms are ren.. dered provisional, moments of difference subsumed within a teleological process of improvement (Mehta 1999, 201-210). A similar orientation is also operative, I believe, in our feminist certainty that women's sensibilities and at.. tachments, particularly those that seem so paradoxically inimical to what we take to be their own interests,
must
be refashioned for their own well..being.