Suchergebnisse

Transgender identities and sexualities find a visibly accepted presence in the medieval history of India, especially in the Mughal era. Historical accounts and studies have indicated the prestige and power enjoyed by the third gender in the Mughal Empire to the extent that some of the writings have located them as an integral part of Mughal courts of law, holding some key positions of the royal palaces. In the extant literature on transgender, the analysis of their position as depicted through Hindustani Cinema in the Mughal period remains inadequate. The cinematic representation of the transgenders in the Mughal period can certainly offer a wide window to analyse their status in the given era, as this period has been documented as one of the most liberal periods for the transgender in Indian History. The present article aims to fill this gap through a mise-en-scene analysis of Hindustani Cinema based on the Mughal Empire during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Hindustani Cinema has offered a marginalised space on-screen to transgender people for a long time by putting them only in humorous and comic roles. By providing an intense analysis of all the films based on the Mughal period in Hindustani Cinema, the present article argues that even period films are not devoid of the politics of representation of contemporary times.

The plight of religious minorities in the Middle East is often attributed to the failure of secularism to take root in the region. Religious Difference in a Secular Age challenges this assessment by examining four cornerstones of secularism--political and civil equality, minority rights, religious freedom, and the legal separation of private and public domains. Drawing on her extensive fieldwork in Egypt with Coptic Orthodox Christians and Bahais--religious minorities in a predominantly Muslim country--Saba Mahmood shows how modern secular governance has exacerbated religious tensions and inequalities rather than reduced them. Tracing the historical career of secular legal concepts in the colonial and postcolonial Middle East, she explores how contradictions at the very heart of political secularism have aggravated and amplified existing forms of Islamic hierarchy, bringing minority relations in Egypt to a new historical impasse. Through a close examination of Egyptian court cases and constitutional debates about minority rights, conflicts around family law, and controversies over freedom of expression, Mahmood invites us to reflect on the entwined histories of secularism in the Middle East and Europe. A provocative work of scholarship, Religious Difference in a Secular Age challenges us to rethink the promise and limits of the secular ideal of religious equality

Politics of Piety is a groundbreaking analysis of Islamist cultural politics through the ethnography of a thriving, grassroots women's piety movement in the mosques of Cairo, Egypt. Unlike those organized Islamist activities that seek to seize or transform the state, this is a moral reform movement whose orthodox practices are commonly viewed as inconsequential to Egypt's political landscape. Saba Mahmood's compelling exposition of these practices challenges this assumption by showing how the ethical and the political are indelibly linked within the context of such movements. Not only is this book a sensitive ethnography of a critical but largely ignored dimension of the Islamic revival, it is also an unflinching critique of the secular-liberal assumptions by which some people hold such movements to account. The book addresses three central questions: How do movements of moral reform help us rethink the normative liberal account of politics? How does the adherence of women to the patriarchal norms at the core of such movements parochialize key assumptions within feminist theory about freedom, agency, authority, and the human subject? How does a consideration of debates about embodied religious rituals among Islamists and their secular critics help us understand the conceptual relationship between bodily form and political imaginaries? Politics of Piety is essential reading for anyone interested in issues at the nexus of ethics and politics, embodiment and gender, and liberalism and postcolonialism. In a substantial new preface, Mahmood addresses the controversy sparked by the original publication of her book and the scholarly discussions that have ensued

Tekst omawia zjawisko uwikłania niektórych nurtów współczesnego feminizmu w odtwarzanie dyskursu islamofobicznego. Autorka prezentuje postaci takie jak Azar Nafisi, Irshad Manji czy Ayaan Hirsi Ali – publicystki i działaczki przedstawiające skrajnie negatywny obraz islamu jako religii ze swojej istoty nakłaniającej do przemocy i uciskającej kobiety. Taka wizja islamu jest bliska ideologii konserwatywnej i świetnie wpisuje się w zachodnie projekty imperialistyczne, takie jak wojna z terroryzmem czy interwencje na Bliskim Wschodzie dokonywane pod pretekstem "wprowadzania demokracji". Jak pokazuje autorka, część zachodnich feministek, np. Margaret Atwood czy Susan Sontag, nie dostrzega tego faktu i bezkrytycznie przyjmuje dyskurs wspomnianych krytyczek islamu. Postaci te odgrywają więc rolę "ambasadorek islamofobii", legitymizując swoje stanowisko jako "feministyczne" i "postępowe".

To write a review essay about three books on what at first glance appear to be very divergent topics may seem like an impossible task. Samera Esmeir's book, Juridical Humanity, is an exploration of colonial law as it conscripted Egyptians into the grid of humanity; Judith Butler's Parting Ways is a critique of Zionism and state violence from a Jewish perspective; and Hussein Agrama's Questioning Secularism is about the paradoxical nature of secular power as manifest in modern Egypt. Despite this divergence, I found a rich thematic resonance between the three books that was unexpected and illuminating. All three books are deep meditations on the nature of law, its violent and performative character, even as they are also about a lot more. In what follows, I discuss the central themes of each book with a short rumination on their shared themes.

The right to religious freedom is widely regarded as a crowning achievement of secular-liberal democracies, one that guarantees the peaceful coexistence of religiously diverse populations. Enshrined in national constitutions and international laws and treaties, the right to religious liberty promises to ensure two stable goods: (1) the ability to choose one's religion freely without coercion by the state, church, or other institutions; and (2) the creation of a polity in which one's economic, civil, legal, or political status is unaffected by one's religious beliefs. While all members of a polity are supposed to be protected by this right, modern wisdom has it that religious minorities are its greatest beneficiaries and their ability to practice their traditions without fear of discrimination is a critical marker of a tolerant and civilized polity. The right to religious freedom marks an important distinction between liberal secularism and the kind practiced in authoritarian states (such as China, Syria, or the former Soviet Union): while the latter abide by the separation of religion and state (a central principle of political secularism), they also regularly abrogate religious freedoms of their minority and majority populations. Despite claims to religious neutrality, liberal secular states frequently regulate religious affairs but they do so in accord with a strong concern for protecting the individual's right to practice his or her religion freely, without coercion or state intervention.

"Politics of Piety" is a groundbreaking analysis of Islamist cultural politics through the ethnography of a thriving, grassroots women`s piety movement in the mosques of Cairo, Egypt. Unlike those organized Islamist activities that seek to seize or transform the state, this is a moral reform movement whose orthodox practices are commonly viewed as inconsequential to Egypt`s political landscape. Saba Mahmood`s compelling exposition of these practices challenges this assumption by showing how the ethical and the political are indelibly linked within the context of such movements. Not only is this book a sensitive ethnography of a critical but largely ignored dimension of the Islamic revival, it is also an unflinching critique of the secular-liberal assumptions by which some people hold such movements to account. The book addresses three central questions: How do movements of moral reform help us rethink the normative liberal account of politics?

This short essay calls for an examination of the assumption that critique is necessarily secular and of the necessary disciplines of subjectivity and practices of rumination and interpretation entailed in this assumption.

This article argues that insomuch as feminism is both an analytical and politically prescriptive project, it aims not only to analyze the situation of women in different historical and cultural locations but also to transform their conditions of subjugation. Consequently, feminist scholarship tends to accord freedom a normative status, and to emphasize those instances that exemplify women's desire to be free from relations of subordination. An important consequence of this tendency in feminist scholarship is to limit the conceptualization of agency to acts that further the moral autonomy of the individual in the face of power. Through an examination of the women's piety movement in Egypt, this article argues for uncoupling the notion of agency from that of resistance as a necessary step in thinking about forms of desire and politics that do not accord with norms of secular-liberal feminism and its liberatory telos.