Feminism, democracy, and empire: Islam and the war on terror
Saba Mahmood
Translation in Greek by Ourania Tsiakalou
Abstract
The complicated role European feminism played in legitimating and extending colonial rule in vast regions of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East has been extensively documented and well-argued for some time now. For many of us raised in this critical tradition, it is therefore surprising to witness the older colonialist discourse on women being reenacted in new genres of feminist literature today, with the explicit aim of justifying the U.S. war on terror in the Muslim world. It seems at times a thankless task to unravel yet again the spurious logic through which Western imperial power seeks to justify its geopolitical domination by posing as the “liberator” of indigenous women from native patriarchal cultures. It would seem that this ideologically necessary but intellectually tedious task requires little imagination beyond repositioning the truths of the earlier scholarship on Algeria, Egypt, Indonesia, and India that has copiously and rigorously laid bare the implicated histories of feminism and empire.