• Contextualizing a Theme.

    Feminist Scholarship - Affinities with Modernity -

    The Continuities and Ruptures

• Problematizing a Theme.

    Consciousness and Context.

    Situation and Intent/ Agency and Medium / Identity and Setting

What does the scholarship of an epoch tell us about the ruling paradigm? How does the scholarship of an epoch relate to the dominant paradigm?

 

 

• What is a Paradigm? How do we distinguish Paradigms? What is the advantage of approaching a field study or an issue area through an inquiry at the paradigm level? What are the limitations or constraints in such an approach? Background to the paradigm debate. Birth of the paradigm consciousness in the social sciences. Beyond the sociology of knowledge: to its archaeology, to its philosophy and architectonics.

• What do we mean by the Scholarship of an epoch? ( Institutionalized learning; the academy; intellectual and literary expression as it is mediated through the media, instructional and cultural channels of a particular society; that which is endorsed by the professional/ authoritative agents in a culture/ society. Another level of definition focuses on symbolic signifiers: scholarship as a vehicle and medium of cultivating the sensibilities/ understanding in the community: consciousness and conscience - a realm for self-articulation and communication at the level of the cognitive, the affective, and the symbolic…

• To what extent does the scholarship of an epoch affirm and reinforce underlying features of a dominant paradigm? To what extent does it expose or undermine it? What are the uses of complexity and ambiguity in evaluating the dialectics of a scholarship in the making? To what extent does current scholarship serve as a mouthpiece of the crisis of an age? What do we mean when we refer to scholarship as a function/ vehicle for articulating and disseminating the consciousness and conscience of an age? Like all cultural artifacts, the ‘disciplines’ reflect on and mirror their medium - However, some sites are more transparent than others, more revealing, or incisive. Feminist scholarship falls in this latter category. What are the factors making for this edge to the ‘profession’?

• Feminist Scholarship as genre.  Can we speak of a ‘feminist scholarship’ for all the diversity that constitutes it? For all its heterogeneity, like modernity, can we identify a ‘core’ feminism in an academy in search of its bearings? What are some of the characteristics of feminist scholarship? Ambivalence and complexity/ perplexity? Perspicacity, incisive: a culture field that lies at the nexus of convergences and divergencies: its capacity to bring together odds: lucidity and conflation… the concrete the particular, the realistic: the pragmatic, yet, also the utopian, the ideal, the abstract… extreme subjectivity, the capacity to explore surface-depth levels/ nuances: to alternate between extremes… to manipulate language: tropes, puns, literary expression; to combine the intellect and intelligence with the sensible and sensuous/ sensual; the intuitive and spiritual, with common sense and the pragmatic.

• A Pioneering Experience? How some neglected dimensions of knowledge and being in modernity have surged with a vengeance in certain expressions of feminist consciousness/ scholarship.

• A Smart Experience? How feminist scholarship has capitalized on the essentials of the Zeitgeist and come to represent a compact and condensed moment of it: Partly because feminist scholarship is practiced in the spirit of a vocation more than merely profession… And how the sense of the profession has been radicalized by the feminist experience.

• The Limitations and Constraints inherent in feminist scholarship. Why it cannot provide a viable alternative for grounding the transition beyond modernity and the contemporary academy.

Contextualizing & Problematizing

 

Note. Where Modernity is the setting for assessing the feminist experience in the West, Colonialism and Modernization provide the historical and mythical underpinnings for deconstructing a parallel experience.

 

• Studies of Women in the Third World and Women in the Muslim World . Beyond a shared legacy of the Colonial Moment there is the specificity of the historical encounter between ‘Islam’ and the ‘West’ – What are the consequences of this specificity? (Convergencies and Divergencies)
  
• The history and evolution of a field at the paradigmatic level [ = the search for thought patterns and justification]: From ‘Orientalism’ to ‘Developmentalism’ to ‘Democracy & Human Rights and … ‘Civil Society’ :
  

• What is the significance of this trajectory for grounding / understanding a scholarship and a politics on "Women, Islam, and Gender"? The historical and cultural ‘embeddedness’ of a discourse [= a level of praxis where ideas and action are politicized and the dialectics [debate/ jadal] sustained over a period of time becomes increasingly polarized ]
  

• Women and Gender as a site for contesting and contestation in the Muslim world: [Note! A spatial metaphor recalling a renewed interest in the Body and, beyond sexuality, its resonances with spirituality; ‘body as temple of the spirit?’] - Who gets what, when, where and how, and … to what end? Who gets to define identity and consciousness in the Muslim world; the conflict of meaning and representation.
  
• Why women and women-related issues are at the heart of the struggle for cultural survival .. In what way does the ‘woman question’ reflect the cultural question in the Muslim world? What are the implications of this qualitative difference for assessing feminist consciousness and identity? How does this differ from the way feminist consciousness and identity are experienced/ conceived and articulated in the dominant liberal, radical, and post-modern circles? What do we mean when we refer to the woman question in the contemporary West as being more of a crisis of ‘generic being’ - contrasted with ‘cultural identity?’ What is the impact of globalization currents on feminist consciousness and representation in the Muslim world (as well as throughout other culture-areas and traditions?)
  
  

Charting the Scholarship in the Field.

To deal with a fast growing volume of literature, and to understand what is at stake in the ongoing discourses, we need some kind of map to help identify, classify, and recognize recurrent patterns of thought, or the different voices as they contest for audibility, where they come from, what they mean … We suggest some initial categories in light of a selection of a general bibliography, as well as on the basis of an accompanying set of processed material accessible in the SISS inhouse Reserved Readings. [State-of-the-Art Collection/ WTP]

Alongside  this functional classification, there is an initiative to ‘deconstruct’ some of the assumptions that ground some of the scholarship in mainstream academy [ See eg. ‘Understanding Gender in the Muslim World’] The objective of this exercise is to stimulate a critical reading that probes beyond a ‘surface-reading’, and sensitizes to the embedded biases and ideological/ or cultural interests of much of the current anthropological or historical writing. We also point to a growing and useful body of inquiry that is emerging which is more complex, and may not be captured by any single or singular attempt to reduce and amplify certain elements of a picture/ or notes in a tune so as to underline distinct patterns of thought or distinguish pitches in the cacophony of echoes as they resonate from a field beset with its confusing signals.

Remember that the success of feminist scholarship lies in partially redefining scholarship as partisanship and its appeal to various degrees of subjectivity to vindicate its offensive against the cannon (ie : the dominant traditions of inquiry constituting the modern professional academy).

 

Throughout we keep in mind some of the salient patterns and echoes which reflect the affinities in a body of core feminist literature which is projected from ‘conventional’ (western) feminist sources, and raise questions about the limits of autonomy and authenticity, as well as the possibilities of an alternative scholarship/ academy. This keeps us focused on the level of the paradigm, alerts us to opportunities to step beyond the existing to the possible. In the background of our orchestration of different voices and levels of inquiry and articulation, there is a recurring theme and appeal to notes coming from the tawhidi episteme and the median culture-type… Where does this category appear? It appears initially in the intermittent encounters with elements from the Islamic tradition, its Sources, and illustrations from its legacy, as constituting the nucleus for recovering/ rediscovering/ reconstructing the rudiments of an alternative paradigm that can sensitize us to a global moral economy. [See eg. ‘Gender and the Moral Economy’]

On the imperative of reaching beyond the Shaping Global Order

We peer into the teaming fora in the contemporary world economy to identify pockets of disaffection and disintegration in the pervasive disorientation and confusion that pervades as traditions are steadily eroded and the burdens of the ‘end of modernity’ come to weigh down the conscience and the institutions of its most advanced sectors. [Associated themes are touched on in redefining the scope of politics from the grass-roots to the Presidency to embrace the social, cultural, and the moral both at the national and international level - (eg. Politics of abortion and the laws defining sexual morality) - For global trends we view some footage about the epidemiology of the sex trade as a burgeoning culture-industry at the dawn of the third millenium. ( see documentary: Investigative Report from the Red Light Districts) . What do such global trends mean in Muslim contexts in politics and society, as well as in the academy? In addressing this question we try to identify and explore contradictory trends in reshaping the elements of a global moral sensibility and see how this intersects with ‘feminist’ initiatives engaged in reshaping their cultures and redefining communities.

Politics, Economics, and Psychology have conventionally provided the language and idiom as well as the preferential accesses for engaging the energies of the academy in the social sciences. Feminist scholarship, at its inception, was no exception to this rule, even though it came to the arena with a greater penchant for the moral and cultural, as well as a methodological inclination for exploring the hermeneutical dimension - contributing to the growth of interpretative and ‘interpellative’ social inquiry not restricted to ‘hard science’. This is as true for the general feminist literature as it is for the literary output on Women in Islam/ and women in the Muslim world. At the turn of the millenium, however, the ascendant metaphor of the clash of civilizations has brought moral as much as cultural issues to center stage. The politics and scholarship of women and gender is an ideal site for identifying this shift and tracing the discourse back to its roots, re-examining basics. We come full circle to the relevance of the paradigm to engaging this discourse. We do so at this point in the story from a more focused encounter with Islamic sources as a frame of reference for a critical introspection on aspects / moments in a discernible Muslim feminist discourse / consciousness as it takes shape in a volatile and changing context. Some examples from the literature & the field are selectively pointed out to identify and distinguish different currents / voices.

Emphasis shifts to issues of a more theoretical nature. Taken as the defining referent from which we launched our inquiry into the current scholarship and politics of women and gender-related issues, how can an Islamic perspective itself be defined? What are the different examples in the field that identify with this perspective? Specifically, what are some current initiatives that have engaged Islamic Sources in an intellectual or scholarly endeavor to articulate and formulate such a perspective? Can we distinguish the scope and levels at which this articulation has been sought?

‘Engendering Community’  is one such initiative at the macro-level that attempts to bridge the diverse dimensions of the ‘woman question’. The tawhidi episteme with its postulates on the bearings of a culture and contrasting culture-types constitutes the paradigm grounding in which this initiative is conceived. What are the prospects for redefining the scope of a New Sociology which takes the engendering of community for its focus? How does it serve to bring women and women related issues to the center of the academy, away from the periphery?

• The premise for rehabilitating gender scholarship within that revalorized framework of inquiry calls for shedding new light on the very sources that prompted this initiative. For a point of departure in this critical venture we take certain ayahs from the Qur’an for reflection. What are some of the questions we bring to this heuristic reading? How do they touch on some of the vital concerns of a global order in search of its moral and cultural bearings?
  
• At the interstices of these concerns is the problematic of sexuality and spirituality … How do these seemingly irreconcilable antipodes in the human moral economy come to be reconciled and integrated through a fresh encounter with revelation? What kind of reason or rationality is at stake in rediscovering elements of a holism and perspicacity that often eludes the conventional (and modernist) readings of the text? And how can a Muslim feminist consciousness contribute to shaping a culture that is attuned to a global moral economy?
  

On this note the threads of a scholarship and politics of gender are picked up once more to situate the potential contribution of a shaping consciousness and discourse coming from an Islamic perspective. With gender and women-related issues selected as a site of contesting in an emerging world order where civilizational awareness and identity are at stake, what is the paradigm in which this contestation is set? What are its underlying strengths and limitations? How is this reflected in mainstream feminist scholarship and how does gender politics impact on the discourse on Women in Islam? Last but not least, what does this line of questioning mean for assessing the countervailing challenges and opportunities for the initiatives coming from an Islamic perspective?