Tanzeen R. Doha is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the University of Califor-
nia, Davis. In his ethnographic work, he puts the Anthropology of Islam literature 
in conversation with Frantz Fanon’s sociogenic reading of psychoanalysis, which 
he then explicates through 20th century Islamist thought. Doha is also the general 
editor of the independent journal Milestones: Commentary on the Islamic World.

Specters of Islam:
Anti-Islamist (Re)Presentations in

Secular Media and Feminism (1979–2011)

Tanzeen R. Doha

Abstract

This article examines anti-Islamism in media and feminist discourse 
between the years of 1979–2011. It argues that modern feminism 
requires anti-Islamism, a relation that gives rise to anti-Islamist 
representations in the media. I situate the confrontation between 
secularity and Islamism—in both The New York Times and feminist 
theory—within a specific historical ordering that I term “Islamist 
periodization.” Beginning with 1979, the year of the Islamic Revolu-
tion in Iran and the Meccan siege, the periodization examines three 
distinct phases: the 1980s as a time of consolidation and complexity; 
1991–2001 as a period of US hegemony; and 2001–2011 as the age 
of perpetual war. During these periods, as the article demonstrates, 
there is significant ideological commonality between mainstream 
feminist theory and secular media.

Introduction
In this paper, I trace historical developments in Islamist politics and main-
stream feminism in relation to media representations of Muslim women. 
By examining articles in The New York Times (NYT) published between 
1979 and 2011, I suggest that secular representations of Islam, both in the 
media and feminist discourse, propagate what I call ‘anti-Islamism’ (devel-
oped below). By constructing a periodization based on signature events 
within contemporary Islamist history, I identify tactical shifts within the 
larger, global strategy of anti-Islamism. As a conceptual frame, anti-Isla-



30 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 35:2

mism moves beyond articulations that either conceptualize Islamophobia 
as a behavioral-psychological disposition created through misinformation, 
or as a structural form of racial bigotry. Instead, anti-Islamism describes a 
consistent effort to counter and negate Islam’s world-making aspirations. 
The Western discourse around gender, historically, has been a central site in 
this negation. Therefore, this article examines how feminism as a political 
and epistemic project (with three major exceptions) necessarily requires 
anti-Islamism—an incompatibility reinforced by media representations.

By examining articles published in the NYT between the years 1979-
2011 and demonstrating their relation to feminist intellectual and political 
traditions, this article studies how patterns of representation within spe-
cific historical periodizations (re)articulate the structure of what I term 
anti-Islamism. As a conceptual term, anti-Islamism breaks with prominent 
theorizations that reframe Islamophobia as anti-Muslim racism.1 Anti-Isla-
mism as a framework allows us to understand not only how Islamophobia 
operates at the level of communal racial attitudes, but also in relation to 
the historical, epistemic, and psycho-social effects of secularization and the 
War on Terror. Having said that, anti-Islamism both precedes and exceeds 
the War on Terror and earlier forms of war in the Islamicate world. It is both 
general and generative. Sociological case studies and ethnographic accounts 
provide us with empirical data, but frequently fail to narrate a theory of how 
and why the anxiety and fear towards Islam has a generalizing consequence 
in modern secularity. 

Conceptualizing anti-Islamism as secularization is generative, for secu-
larization produces particular kinds of histories, social relations, psycholo-
gies, reasonings, and cultural formations. It promotes and mobilizes certain 
normative European values and political concepts. Meanwhile, conceptu-
alizing secularism as anti-Islamism performs a negative function: the dis-
cursive and material evacuation of the world-making project of Islamism. 
Modern secularity aims to reduce Islam into culture by negating the cen-
trality of the Sharia. Because the Sharia is not law in the modern sense, in-
sofar as it does not separate the legal from the political and ethical, secular 
regimes try to delink the Sharia of Islam from its socio-cultural expressions. 
It is precisely this disjuncture that demarcates the modern Muslim identity 
within the Western paradigm. But Sharia is not only law that is enforced 
from the outside, it is the mechanism that organizes the soul, trains the 
body, purifies the heart, refines the intellect, and disciplines the mind to 
produce proper Islamic subjects. By de-centering the Sharia, modern secu-
larity de-subjectivates Muslims, and de-essentializes2 Islam.



 31

Methodology
In the documentary Manufacturing Consent—titled after a book by the 
same name—Noam Chomsky explains the central role of the NYT in not 
only organizing the social and political perceptions of its readers, but also in 
organizing historical knowledge. Chomsky explains that the 

New York Times is certainly the most important newspaper in the United 
States and, one could argue, the most important newspaper in the world. 
The New York Times plays an enormous role in shaping the perception of 
the current world on the part of the politically-active educated classes. 
Also, The New York Times has a special role, and I believe its editors prob-
ably feel that they bear a heavy burden, in the sense that The New York 
Times creates history. That is, history is what appears in the NYT archives. 
The place where people will go to find out what happened is the NYT; 
therefore, it’s extremely important, if history is going to be shaped in an 
appropriate way, that certain things appear, certain things not appear, 
certain questions be asked, other questions be ignored, and that issues be 
framed in a particular fashion. 

I focus on the NYT for my analysis of media representation in relation to 
gender and Islam,3 examining its articles not only for a positivist analysis 
but also for its representations of Islamic discourse and subjects as part of 
a much larger social, political, and intellectual history. They are not sim-
ply structural results of an ideological apparatus. Rather, they signify the 
workings of power, within sets of networked institutions that have specific 
geopolitical interests—and all of this emerges from a specific Eurocentric 
discourse in which anti-Islamism is a driving force. My focus on feminist 
intellectual history is not accidental. In my analysis, I describe how the 
NYT specifically focuses on the bodies of Muslim women and their use of 
the veil, which signifies political visibility in relation to the body. This rep-
resentational focus on women’s rights and its mobilization also comes with 
a specific understanding of the body which has a particular genealogy in 
Eurocentric political-epistemic history. Because of this focus, then, I trace 
the relation between these representations in the media and more sophisti-
cated intellectual discourse within the feminist tradition.

With that said, there are three kinds of texts sometimes considered 
part of the feminist tradition (yet existing in tremendous immanent ten-
sion with it) that are exceptions to the rule of hegemonic feminism, and/or 
the hegemony of feminism. By hegemony of feminism, I mean that within 
the ideological domain of mainstream and radical Western discourse, ques-

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32 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 35:2

tions related to the condition of women are almost always readily addressed 
by the feminist systems of knowledge. I call into question efforts that try 
to make feminism paradigmatic for questions, concerns, problems related 
to women, sex, and gender in the Islamic world. However, I identify three 
specific texts that (alongside others like them) are crucial for understanding 
the uses and abuses of categories like gender, sex, and women in the con-
temporary discourse on Islam. While I emphasize the significance of the 
following texts for the mobilization of Islamism, I do not intend to make 
any evaluative gesture towards each author’s oeuvre. De-authorizing these 
texts also helps in thinking of each text as an exemplar of a particular genre 
of critique against Western hegemony, in which secular feminism is a con-
stituent part.

First, consider “White Wars: Western Feminisms and the ‘War on Ter-
ror.’” In this 2007 paper, Sunera Thobani identifies feminist texts published 
in the aftermath of 9/11 that articulate Western feminism’s working rela-
tionship with whiteness and the global War on Terror. Thobani demon-
strates how texts with very different political orientations “share surprising 
convergences in their treatments of violence and in their representations 
of white imperial subjects and Muslim Others.”4 While her dismantling of 
Phyllis Chesler and Zillah Eisenstein’s writings are straightforward because 
one relies on civilizational arguments against Islam and Muslims and the 
other argues against patriarchy in a way that makes “American masculin-
ity” and Taliban “misogyny” similar, Thobani’s pointed critique of Judith 
Butler’s psychoanalytic and philosophical approach to violence reveals the 
wide range of feminisms (liberal, Marxist, poststructuralist) entangled in 
anti-Islamist assumptions. Butler’s secularity is obvious: she relies on “the 
primal vulnerability of the infant condition” which forms the basis for her 
notion of a collective ‘we.’ It is here that Thobani exposes Butler’s uncritical 
comparison of the victims of 9/11 and the victims of US imperial aggression 
in Iraq and Afghanistan. Texts like Thobani’s are outside of paradigmat-
ic feminism because instead of offering prescriptions on gender and sex 
borrowed from a Western humanist tradition, they illustrate the relation 
between feminism (as a category) and the machinations of war. 

Second, in the groundbreaking 1987 essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s May-
be: An American Grammar Book,” Hortense Spillers explains how the con-
ditions of slavery and its consequent history have inaugurated a process 
of ungendering for Black subjects. The essay demonstrates the incompat-
ibility of normative gender and blackness, not necessarily because of lack 
of interest in gendered relations, but simply because civil society concep-



 33

tions of gender—available only to the non-Black, i.e. the Human—are 
articulated and organized through the subjugating structure of slavery or 
black social death.5 Spillers writes, “Under [the conditions of slavery], we 
lose at least gender difference in the outcome, and the female body and the 
male body become a territory of cultural and political maneuver, not at 
all gender-related, gender-specific.”6 This theoretical observation troubles 
feminist conventions, and focuses the question of slavery onto the problem 
of flesh. She reads the “theft of the body” as “high crimes against the flesh” 
of the African female and male. In this sense, her analysis points to a gen-
erality of wounding, injury, and dishonor of bodies placed under slavery 
that become in their most immediate articulation, “a primary narrative” of 
the flesh. When she speaks about the enslaved African female subject, she 
discusses the specificity of ungendering as well: “This materialized scene 
of unprotected female flesh—of female flesh ‘ungendered’—offers a praxis 
and a theory, a text for living and for dying and a method for reading both 
through their diverse mediations.”7 A text like Spillers’—which is in conver-
sation with feminism—is foundational for any consideration of Islam in the 
contemporary world, not only because of the large and influential presence 
of African and Black populations within the fold of Islam, but also because 
modernity itself is grounded in the originary rupture of slavery. In fact, 
one should point out that Islamism is frequently described as a response to 
colonial history, but almost never as a response to slave plantations by the 
millions kidnapped from the shores of Africa. Spillers’ essay provides the 
necessary historical, cultural, and material insights that help (re)position 
contemporary Islam, as a force in opposition to American (neo)plantations, 
as a retaliatory and guiding principle for the mobilization of slave revolts.  

Third, in the 1983 essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” Gayatri Spivak 
deconstructs the Western philosophical and theoretical interest in repre-
sentation and “subjective essentialism.”8 She examines the text “Intellectuals 
and Power: A Conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze,” 
critiques their reductive theorization of Marx, and demonstrates how they 
operationalize the speaking subject. Spivak is careful in not reducing Fou-
cault and Deleuze to represent them as simply assuming that the oppressed 
subject can speak, but rather, that what they consider “unnamed” and 
“nonrepresented” subjects are organized by power and desire. And, there-
fore, the intellectuals are self-represented as those who can in fact, “analyze 
(without analyzing).”9 Spivak also points out how the philosophers miss the 
international division of labor, and how Foucault in particular due to his 
monist view of power is unable to see the relation between “localized resis-

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34 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 35:2

tance” and “macrological struggles.”10 She thinks that the two philosophers 
reinscribe the third world as a legible Other, reliant upon “naturally articu-
late” subjects of oppression.11 In the latter part of the essay, Spivak explains 
how the subaltern woman disappears in some ways between the British and 
Indian nativist narratives, the first being an example of ‘white men saving 
brown women from brown men’ and the second a nostalgic assertion of in-
digenous authenticity. She then suggests: “The two sentences go a long way 
to legitimize each other.”12 In another passage, she makes clear the space 
of non-place of the subaltern: “Between patriarchy and imperialism, sub-
ject-constitution and object formation, the figure of the woman disappears, 
not into a pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which the dis-
placed figuration of the ‘third-world woman’ caught between tradition and 
modernization.”13 A text like Spivak’s is an internal criticism of Europeanist 
thought as well as indigenous claims of tradition and authenticity within a 
discourse of gender. Overall, it does not promote any explicit feminist proj-
ect, nor does it promote or valorize traditions. It is relevant for Islam-re-
lated conversations, partly because of the large subaltern population in the 
Islamicate postcolony—subjects who are not recognized by civil society—
and partly because of contemporary Islam’s calling into attention the line of 
conflict between programs of modernization and reforms of Islam.

It is important to note here that there are other very significant works 
of counter-hegemonic feminism—particularly in postcolonial and transna-
tional feminist theory—that identify racial and colonial operations in tra-
ditional feminism. Works by Chandra Mohanty, Ranjana Khanna, and Rey 
Chow come to mind immediately.14 Whether certain texts by these scholars 
are to be included in the three exceptional genres I outline above, I leave to 
the reader. What I do want to state explicitly, however, is that my preoccu-
pation in this article is not to deconstruct “Western” (colonial) feminism, 
but rather to think through how the epistemic, material, and historical 
grounding of feminism is secular. Just as identifying the Western orien-
tation in particular forms of feminist discourse helps us determine their 
embeddedness in colonial power, investigating the secularity of feminism 
enables us to observe its embeddedness in what I term anti-Islamism.    

It is impossible to generalize about an entire tradition. I do not use 
the feminist tradition in my argument to generalize it. I make a distinction 
between generalization and categorization. While the former requires a 
comprehensive study of patterns and systematic trends, the latter examines 
how as a theoretical form—something with historical unity and self-con-
sistency—feminism requires anti-Islamism and therefore, cannot enter the 



 35

domain of Islamic orthodoxy.15 This incompatibility gives rise to a struc-
tural relation of incommensurability and irresolvable conflict between 
modern feminism and orthodox Islam. In other words, feminism as a cat-
egory is incompatible with Islamism, and at times it is explicitly engaged 
in the disarticulation of Islam. Often, this disarticulation of Islam takes 
the form of keeping the Quran—with reinterpretations of verses related to 
“wife-beating” and polygyny—but rejecting the entire hadith corpus and 
the Sharia. The necessary assumption is that the secondary texts emerged in 
the context of pre-modern forms of Islamic patriarchy and therefore must 
be rejected for their lack of concern about the social, historical, and po-
litical position of women. Again, my argument in this article is not moral 
but rather structural. Whether Islamic societies need feminism as a project 
requires a prescriptive discourse from which this article shies away.

Because my criticism of feminism is not comprehensive, I select spe-
cific texts in that tradition to discuss the relation between feminism and 
anti-Islamism within specific periodizations. I methodologically draw from 
Salman Sayyid, who explains his own deconstructive reading of feminist 
writings:

The reason for selecting these writers is not because they are necessarily 
representative of attempts to theorize fundamentalism (though the ar-
gument could be made that their conceptualization of fundamentalism 
shares many features with other such attempts), nor because I think their 
account is paradigmatic, but rather because their work makes clear the 
conditions of its discursive possibility.16

While my selection of specific texts is also due to their ability to make clear 
“the conditions of [their] discursive possibility,” I want to stretch Sayyid’s 
point further by suggesting that categorially, feminist interests counter Is-
lamism sometimes explicitly, and often implicitly. This incompatibility be-
tween modern feminism and Islamism arises from epistemic, conceptual, 
and material differences. Modern feminism’s basis is the sovereignty of the 
radical subject, the subject of the Enlightenment. It assumes that (Europe-
an) women as persons must have access to sovereignty, and therefore that 
any form of submission to authorities that violate this sovereignty must be 
addressed as an inhibition for the ultimate freedom and autonomy of wom-
en. While liberal feminism’s preoccupation has been the enhancement of 
property relations, the politics of representation, and state-based ‘rights,’ 
Marxist feminism engages with the question of labor (reproductive and un-
productive labor in particular), the wage relation, and value. But even with-

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36 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 35:2

in Marxist feminism, the economic critique of patriarchy (often through 
theories of value) relies quite heavily on the idea that the exploitative struc-
ture of capitalism targets women in a specific manner, and as a result den-
igrates their sovereignty. If one were to take these accounts of the subjuga-
tion of women under regimes of illiberalism and capitalism to their logical 
conclusion, and expand their vision to include the Islamic world, then one 
would obviously be confronted with the question of how in these societies 
the sovereignty of women is inhibited by—or their inhibition is justified 
by—the textual (and by extension material) tradition of Islamic orthodoxy. 
In an interview published in the journal Politics and Culture (2009) Silvia 
Federici is suspicious of sovereignty because of its close affinity to history 
of the nation-state, but retains the political use of the term, and promptly 
connects it to autonomy. Federici remarks,  

“Sovereignty,” in this sense, has none of the monarchical or nationalistic 
connotations historically associated with the term. It is a call for auton-
omy, for self-determination, and it is a rejection of the capitalist model 
of agriculture, that expropriates people from their lands and their tradi-
tional knowledge, subjects them to deadly international regulations, and 
turns food into a poison. As Mariarosa Dalla Costa puts it, “sovereignty” 
is an affirmation “of the right of populations to decide what to eat and 
how to produce it,” with a view of food as a “common good” rather than 
a commodity.17 

It is important then to take note that sovereignty’s meaning in liberal fem-
inism and Marxist-feminism goes through a significant shift, but the con-
cept’s fundamental association with autonomy remains constant. Whether 
one desires autonomy via a politics of the nation-state and reform in its 
laws, or through a political economic change, it is still a desire for the auton-
omy of the subject, or more precisely, a desire for the subject as autonomy. 
And, it is this subject—and autonomy—that is fundamentally contradic-
tory to Islam’s desire for subjects who are obedient to divine will, divine 
powers, and divine laws.   

I begin each section with a contemporary periodization of Islamism. 
Without this periodization it becomes impossible to ground these articles 
within a system of contemporary history. I begin my periodization with 
1979, the year of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, and end with 2011, the 
year that marks the death of Osama Bin Laden and a specific articulation 
in the history of Islamist leadership.18 Through this organization, I situate 
the discourses of media representation and feminism within a particular 



 37

political terrain. After periodizing a decade in relation to Islamist history, I 
discuss the sets of reasonings and arguments that are dominant in the fem-
inist intellectual tradition for that decade and then examine how the NYT’s 
representations carry similar assumptions about Islam and its traditions. 
Despite the tremendous similarities in media representations and intellec-
tual discourse between 1979-2011, there are also significant breaks, rup-
tures, and contradictions. However, I look at how anti-Islamism as a logic 
is operationalized in both cases, through a particular exercise of secular 
power and reasoning that produces an ensemble of knowledge about Islam, 
which is then re-articulated and reproduced within a particular economy.

In this article, I do not expand on these theoretical claims or provide 
a methodological paradigm. Rather, I focus on a shorter history, a man-
ageable time frame between the years 1979 and 2011, to demonstrate how 
anti-Islamism is operationalized and mobilized within a particular geneal-
ogy of modernist crisis. But this shorter history contains within it a larger 
historical speculation about the spectral presence of Islam.

1979: Grounding Contemporary Islamism
This article interrogates contemporary history by demarcating periods 
between 1979 and 2011 that were influential in the rise of contemporary 
Islamism as a threat to global colonial power. 1979 was a rupture in modern 
political history because it was the year Islamic clerics, under the leadership 
of Khomeini, were able to homogenize the rebellion against the Shah, seize 
state power, and create a constitutional basis for anti-Zionism. French phi-
losopher Michel Foucault, working as a journalist at the time, wrote about 
the possible effect of the Islamic Revolution on Middle Eastern political 
geography: “Islam—which is not simply a religion, but an entire way of life, 
an adherence to a history and a civilization—has a good chance to become 
a gigantic powder keg, at the level of hundreds of millions of men. Since 
yesterday, any Muslim state can be revolutionized from the inside, based on 
its time-honored traditions.”19 While such a fluent takeover of state pow-
er did not take place in other countries after all, one can easily recognize 
that Islam, in the thirty years since the Revolution, has become a stronger 
political force in non-Europe, and a concrete alternative to other forms of 
governance. The discursive political tradition of Islam with its tremendous 
corpus of knowledge provides for Islamists sets of laws, ethical structures, 
and political goals that are simultaneously stable and flexible. The stability 
originates from the structural fact that Islam, just like any other tradition, 
has its own discursive limit, and therefore has its internal texts, subtexts, 

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38 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 35:2

and contexts. But the flexibility of Islam complements, stretches, and shakes 
this stability, by allowing for the possibility of various political-ethical ma-
neuvers that can deal with the modern condition, and in the process expand 
its own availability.20 In other words, even thinking simplistically within a 
nation-state frame, the solution that Islam brings to Iran is different from 
what it brings to Palestine, which again is different from what it brings to 
Afghanistan. In terms of political strategy, the Islamic solution can be about 
consolidating state power, destroying state power, nurturing political terror 
networks, decolonial praxis, or even illiberal systems of governance. The 
structure of the Sharia and the central domain of jihad not only give Islam 
its substantive content, but they produce the condition for the applicability 
of each of the aforementioned strategies based on the historical demand of 
each situation.21

While the year 1979 inaugurated Islam’s transition from a peripheral 
discourse to an authoritative discourse with concentrated State power, it 
also marked the possibility of an internal critique at the theological and 
geographical center of Islam—the Ka‘ba. At the time, the revolution in Iran 
overshadowed the takeover of Mecca led by Saudi preacher Juhayman al 
Uteybi, but scholars now agree that this fanatic rebellion was in many ways 
the foundational event that created the possibility of al-Qa‘ida. Yaroslav 
Trofimov observes,

The significance of the Mecca uprising was missed at the time even by 
the most sharp-eyed observers. Too many other threats preoccupied the 
West. The seizure of the Grand Mosque—the first large-scale operation 
by an international jihadi movement in modern times—was shrugged off 
as a local incident… But with the benefit of hindsight, it is painfully clear: 
the countdown to September 11, to the terrorist bombing in London and 
Madrid, and to the grisly Islamist violence ravaging Afghanistan and Iraq 
all began on that warm November morning, in the shade of the Kaaba.22

While this journalistic observation may reify the events at the Ka‘ba, it re-
veals a particular kind of transition in the genealogy of Islamism within the 
larger structure of secular modernity. While the seizure of state power in 
Iran allowed for an anti-imperialist position with established military and 
defense apparatuses, the Meccan siege demonstrated Islamism’s ability to 
reconfigure itself for the purposes of a critique that questioned not only the 
deviance of the House of Saud but the very category of the state itself. The 
simultaneity of these events destabilizes the linear assumption that Islamist 



 39

politics merely changed its form from statism to anti-statism due to eco-
nomic history.23

The successful seizure of state power by religious clerics in Iran created 
the conditions for the possibility of Islamization at the level of political ge-
ography in the Middle East. The Islamic Republic’s constitutional non-rec-
ognition of Israel and its persistent interest in developing nuclear energy 
continue to demonstrate this political transformation. While the uprising in 
Mecca signaled a possible political critique of the established order among 
religious clerics, it failed to subvert the political power of the Saudi regime, 
which remains central to American geostrategic interests. This difference 
in foreign relations relates to the respective media representations of Iran 
and Saudi Arabia. Hakeem Naim demonstrates that while Saudi and Ira-
nian women both are represented as repressed and disciplined, the causal 
structures of repression are conceptualized differently.24 Naim suggests that 
while in the case of Iran, The New York Times identifies the Islamic Repub-
lic to be directly responsible for the repression of women’s self-expression, 
women’s immobility and docility in Saudi Arabia are understood to be root-
ed in a particular interpretation of Islamic law by conservative religious 
scholars. In the case of Saudi Arabia, the media representation seems to 
suggest that the state is interested in modernization that necessarily elevates 
women’s social status, while the Islamic ‘ulema (scholars) act as an obsta-
cle in that process. Naim’s comparative analysis demonstrates how the two 
major events of 1979—the successful revolution in Iran culminating in the 
seizure of State power, and the temporary siege of Mecca which was stifled 
with the help of Western intervention—launched these two trends in media 
representation. In the first, the coalescing of religious and state power ap-
pears dangerous (for Western interests), while in the latter, the disjuncture 
between religious rebellion and state objectives serves as a useful site of dif-
ference, through which it becomes possible to maintain liberal sensibilities 
towards women’s rights while simultaneously supporting the Saudi state.

When it became clear in the early 1980s that Ayatollah Khomeini 
would likely head an Islamic government, bourgeois feminists—both Irani-
an and Western—initiated a counter-revolutionary25 discourse deeply em-
bedded in Islamophobia. In 1978 Atoussa H. published a letter in Le Nouvel 
Observateur that denounced not only the specific interpretation of Islam by 
Iranian clerics but the foundational text of the religion itself. In her writ-
ings, the Iranian feminist cited de-contextualized passages from the Quran, 
evoking feminist concerns in a manner that violates the Quranic text’s own 
hermeneutic structure and promoted fear and suspicion among the French 

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40 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 35:2

Left. She insists, “Clearly, the man is the lord, the wife the slave; she can be 
used at his whim; she can say nothing. She must wear the veil, born from 
the Prophet’s jealousy toward Aisha!” At a press conference in Paris in 1979 
philosopher and feminist Simone de Beauvoir delivered a speech targeting 
the Islamic revolution, and in her articulation promoted a universal femi-
nist solidarity: “[It] is important to have a demonstration—on the part of a 
very large number of Western women, French women, Italian women, and 
others—of solidarity with the struggle of Iranian women.”26 The fact that de 
Beauvoir understood the “struggle of the Iranian women” to be outside of the 
immanent plane of the Islamic Revolution itself reveals not only her politi-
cal presuppositions about gender, Islam, and history, but also her particular 
alliance with Iranian women of a particular class position. In her uncritical 
conceptualization of “solidarity,” she failed to elaborate on the relation be-
tween historical differences and how the experience of patriarchy relates to 
divisions between “first” and “third” world. Her parochial view on the con-
dition of “Iranian women” not only promoted a notion of authenticity in an 
unproblematic way, but also hinted at flaws in her feminist methodology. 
Instead of conceptualizing the Iranian revolution—which has a genealog-
ical structure with tensions, ruptures, divisions and discontinuities—from 
within its own sets of reasons, arguments, knowledges, practices, and limits, 
both Atoussa H. and de Beauvoir assumed polemical positions against Isla-
mism as a category, violating an entire corpus of knowledge for the sake of 
a politics that finds its originary impulse in a European crisis. 

1980s: Consolidating Islamism(s)
In the 1980s, the Cold War split the world into two parts, generating an 
ongoing narrative of struggle in which dissociated political antagonisms 
are still represented as either products of a larger bipolar tension, or sim-
ply as peripheral moments. Beneath this bipolar tension between states—
frequently misrepresented as a struggle between capitalism and commu-
nism—there remained the real narrative of the crisis of capital. Indeed, 
the United States and the Soviet Union shared the same world system as 
its basis, and the differences between their respective societies had more 
to do with the manner in which the institutions of the state were instru-
mentalized in relation to economic history than their divergences at the 
level of political ideology. This structural economic reality disappeared in 
the larger framing of the Cold War, which representationally subsumes all 
political formations within its paradigm. In this context, various Islamist 
formations during this decade became mere products of the larger bipolar 



 41

tension. Even after the revolution in Iran and the Meccan siege of 1979, 
there continued a full-fledged Islamic revival in the Middle East and South/
Central Asia throughout the 1980s. Between 1979 and 1989 the mujāhidīn 
in Afghanistan engaged in defiant militant struggle against Soviet invasion; 
in 1982, Hizbullah formed in response to Israeli aggression in Lebanon; and 
in the aftermath of Palestine’s First Intifada, Hamas emerged as a major po-
litical force. While these formations undoubtedly took place at the plane of 
world historical events, the idea that the almost decade-long fight by a het-
erogenous group of Islamic insurgents under the banner of the mujāhidīn 
in Afghanistan simply arose under US tutelage is not only a misreading of 
that struggle, but a direct attempt at distorting history through orientalist 
techniques consistent with the structure of anti-Islamism. Such representa-
tional strategies are based on the assumptions that Islamists fight without 
any self-direction and are politically gullible subjects without a moral his-
tory, easily bought off with imperialist funding. Similar assumptions are 
made by right and left-wing experts about Hamas and Hizbullah. Hamas is 
described as a creation by Israeli intelligence for the purposes of undermin-
ing secular resistance by Palestinians, and Hizbullah is understood only as 
an extension of Iranian state interests in the region.    

Lena Meari suggests that The New York Times articles of the 1980s 
provide us with representations that are “apparently multiple, unstable, 
and at times contradictory.”27 In my own research, I encountered empiri-
cal evidence that suggests a similar structure of representation. The 1980s 
comprise the decade during which media portrayals consistently empha-
sized fluidity, multiplicity, and complexity. During this time, so-called ‘cul-
tural practices’ rather than religion appeared in the media as the source 
of women’s rights violations in Islamic countries. The “instability,” “fluid-
ity” and “multiplicity” of this period match the intellectual history of the 
time, during which Lyotard wrote The Postmodern Condition (published in 
French in 1979, in English in 1984) and defined “postmodern” as a form of 
“incredulity toward metanarratives.”28 While the text focuses on the phi-
losophy of science and how knowledge is legitimized within a particular 
epistemic history, it renewed scholars’ interest in marginal narratives across 
all areas of the humanities and social sciences. Lyotard’s emphasis on “local 
determinism” and “heterogeneity” contributed to the advent of Subaltern 
Studies and other forms of research on postcolonialism that questioned 
state-sanctioned historical archives and sought to mobilize history from the 
position of peasants, lower caste women, and dalits. 

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42 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 35:2

In feminist theory, Kimberlé Crenshaw, bell hooks, Angela Davis and 
others emphasized the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality 
to think critically about the complex subordination of non-middle-class 
women—particularly Black women.29 Indeed, the political heterogeneity of 
Islamism itself impacts and mirrors the complex character of its critique 
during the 1980s, during which the theoretical and political targeting of 
Islam largely took place indirectly—except by more directly Islamophobic 
thinkers located in Islamic countries themselves, including Nawal el Saad-
awi. Despite her Marxist focus on patriarchal class structure, el Saadawi 
explicitly cited Islamic fundamentalism as a major contributor to women’s 
oppression. In her anti-Islamist polemic, she conflated all fundamental-
isms to suggest that they perform the same ideological function for global 
capitalism. She wrote, “All fundamentalists—whether Christian, Jewish, 
Muslim or otherwise—are partners in the attempt to breed division, strife, 
racism, and sexism; they help international imperialism to maintain its 
control and to overcome popular resistance to policies that lead to war and 
increased exploitation.”30 Her argumentation follows a pattern that is com-
mon in anti-Muslim writings. It begins with universal declarations against 
fundamentalism as a category, but ends with the specific targeting of Islam, 
its legal structure, and its practices in relation to sex separation. El Saadawi 
criticizes Islamist success in organizing large numbers of men and women 
by suggesting that it merely provides a sense of return to an authentic past 
without addressing real contradictions. 

However, el Saadawi herself constructs a utopian past in which—both 
prior to Islam, and in very early Islamic history—women possessed rights 
that were subsequently overridden by Islamists, conceptualized as deeply 
patriarchal in the cultural sense, and antiquated in the political sense.31 
There are two analytical errors in this supposition. First, the anti-modern-
ism of Islamists is framed within a particular notion of teleology, in which 
the progress of man is determined by how closely he is able to mimic Eu-
ropean history. Because of this, Islamist critiques of liberalism, women’s 
rights, secularism, and European modernity more broadly are not only 
represented as reactionary in a cultural sense, but Islamists themselves are 
identified as political reactionaries who work against the directional im-
peratives of modernist time. In this analytical frame, Islam itself must be 
transcended in order to reach the telos of progress. Second, el Saadawi fails 
to understand the actual directional structure of modernity in relation to 
history. The implicit teleology in her thinking is external to economic his-
tory and consequently, lacks a proper conceptualization of the dialectical 



 43

determinations of capitalist modernity. In this sense, her Eurocentrism 
relies upon a non-dialectical idealism, in which Islamism becomes an ab-
straction disconnected from material life, existing only as a category to be 
denounced by feminists. Given this theoretical catastrophe, and failure to 
grasp the most elemental dimensions of Islamism in terms of its actual ma-
terial grounding in history—modernity included—it is not surprising that 
the initial utopia in el Saadawi’s account serves as a strategic ploy to place 
Islam in an earlier history, a history that in her analysis is in need of exhaus-
tion. This unidirectional view of history structurally debilitates Islam by 
evacuating its political content.

As mentioned earlier, the targeting of Islam during the ’80s —unlike el 
Saadawi’s account—was largely indirect. Throughout this decade, media re-
mained a central source of empirical information that validated a feminist 
project in which “cultural interpretations” of religion—rather than religion 
per se—are portrayed as the problem. This rewriting of religion as a cultural 
practice remains significant and relevant in anthropological debates. In The 
Interpretation of Cultures, Clifford Geertz describes religion as a “cultural 
system” to be understood at two levels—first, as an interpretive system of 
meanings and second, as a system immanent to social and psychological 
processes.32 Talal Asad critiques this two-level view by explaining how it 
essentializes religion, frames it within an interpretive hermeneutics, and 
places it outside of the field of power and social history. Asad writes, “The 
basic problem, however, is not with the idea of mirror images as such but 
with the assumption that there are two separate levels...This resort to Par-
sonian theory creates a logical space for defining the essence of religion.”33

In a NYT article titled “Dispute over a Moslem Divorce Ensnarls 
Gandhi” (1986),34 a woman appears to defy an entire community by using 
the courts to reclaim her rights against oppressive, local, and male-domi-
nated cultural practices. Muslim men are represented as particularly and 
peculiarly violent and domineering, while Muslim women are portrayed as 
being in opposition to the cultural logic of Islamic patriarchy. In the article 
a leading feminist writer and lawyer claims, “It is a dangerous trend when 
a minority community says it should be exempted from a Supreme Court 
judgment because of religion. A woman’s right to claim redress before a 
court of law should not be compromised.” Here, Islamic law is represent-
ed as the law of a minority culture that, in the end, should be subsumed 
within a universal (secular) law. In another article, “Islam: Feminists vs. 
Fundamentalists” (1985),35 a feminist lawyer in Bangladesh insists on a sep-
aration between Islam proper and cultural practices. She argues, “Men play 

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44 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 35:2

upon the religious sentiment of the people, and the people believe it is Islam 
when it’s a custom or a tradition.” 

In the aforementioned articles, both feminist critics happen to be 
lawyers. Their reasoning demonstrates how secular law acts as a means of 
negating what is understood to be the cultural parochialism of Islam and/
or Islamic law. While Lena Meari aptly illustrates how the NYT differenti-
ates between Muslim societies and American society through discussions 
focused on veiled Muslim women, this paper focus on how the distinction 
made between the categories “culture” and “religion” is also consistently at 
work. For example, in the article “The Moslem Veil in the City: A Matter 
of Tradition” (1984)36 that aims to represent New York City as a tolerant 
place for veiled Muslim women, the author focuses on cultural values as the 
marker of religion: 

Of about 20 traditionally dressed women who were interviewed, most 
said they believe that Islam asks women to conceal all but their hands 
and feet. They said their outfits elicit little overt discrimination, but cause 
heads to turn [...] Despite objections to living in a city that clashes with 
their values, several women said New York gives them the freedom to live 
as they choose.  

Other articles in the ’80s focus quite heavily on the instrumental role of sec-
ular law, and the negative cultural dimension of Islamic law. In the article 
“Saudi Arabia’s Gospel Columnists” (1985),37 Islamic law again appears as a 
set of parochial cultural codes:

Moslems consider Islam a complete system that governs every aspect of 
life, and Saudi Arabia takes its role as guardian of the faith particularly 
seriously. It is the only country in the world whose Constitution and legal 
system are entirely based on the ‘sharia’ or Islamic code of law. Details of 
social behavior, from what to wear to brushing one’s teeth, are the subjects 
of continual debate. The most burning issues of the day concern women.

This appraisal of the Sharia continues in the article “Pakistan’s Grim Islamic 
Law is not just a Threat” (1981),38 in which middle-class women’s organi-
zations frame Islamic law as a mechanism that works against the advance-
ment of women’s rights. The author echoes the previous articles’ analytical 
separation of culture and religion:

Islam preaches equality of men and women and this Government is com-
mitted to providing equality of opportunity for all. Such things as the 



 45

favoring of the male children, these are not Islamic but rather they are 
cultural traditions of the subcontinent.

This representation of the subcontinent as a region where cultural influence 
makes Islamization processes deviate from Islam proper is evident in other 
articles published in the NYT during the 1980s. In an article titled “The 
‘Islamization’ of Pakistan: Still Moving Slowly and Still Stirring Debate” 
(1986),39 the appearance of the word Islamization in quotes represents it 
as an inauthentic expression of Islam. The article itself elaborates on how 
women are specific victims of Islamic programs. In “Pakistani Women Take 
Lead In Drive Against Islamization” (1988),40 journalist Steven Weisman 
connects this notion of Islamization as a form of anti-feminism to the ques-
tion of governance and religious authority’s incompatibility with liberal in-
stitutions and rights. He quotes lawyer Amna Piracha, “But the issue is more 
than just women’s rights. The issue is whether Pakistan is to be governed by 
elected representatives of the people or a group of clergymen answerable to 
no one.” The relation between governance and accountability in this articu-
lation is curious. Here, if Islamization takes place—in which the clergymen 
do not derive their legitimacy through a secular notion of the law, due to 
their allegiance to a concept of divine order which is unverifiable—there is 
an absence of juridico-political legitimacy. This notion of juridico-political 
legitimacy, however, arises from a provincial history that is universalized 
through a logic of Eurocentrism which is itself unaccountable.

1991–2001: US Hegemony and Islamic Reconfiguration
With the end of the Cold War in 1991, the US emerged as a global power 
inaugurating a unipolar world. With the demise of the Soviet Union, the fo-
cus of foreign policy largely shifted to the singular force of militant Islamist 
discourse in its various forms. By singular force, I refer to the concentration 
of Islamic discourse—regardless of its heterogeneity—conceptualized as a 
totality in opposition to the hegemonic and material expansion of the US. 
While Islamic discourse is not without historical unity, it is not operational-
ized in the real social world by focusing on an essential enemy. Rather, mil-
itant Islamic discourse demonstrates tremendous flexibility in its ability to 
(re)ground itself within the domain of power. For instance, the assumption 
that Islamists were simply funded by the US to fight the Soviets in Afghan-
istan demonstrates itself to be simplistic and false by the 1990s, a decade 
characterized by a new unipolar globality. During this period, Islamists 
took US hegemony as its fundamental opponent with tremendous moral 

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46 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 35:2

and political seriousness. Between 1996–2001, the emergence of the Taliban 
as a governing force signified a transition from Islamic insurgency against 
foreign occupiers (in the ’80s) towards a re-theorization of classical gover-
nance. 1996 is also the year of Osama Bin Laden’s relocation from Sudan 
to Afghanistan, inaugurating a new, tensed yet functional moral-political 
relationship between al-Qa‘ida and the Taliban. In the ’90s, the overlapping 
and simultaneous development of Islamic governance on one hand, and 
militarization on the other, created strategic pressure on US hegemony and 
Zionist ideology. This becomes evident in Hamas’s creation of the al-Qa-
ssam Brigades in 1991, which works independently of Hamas’s political 
wing. This period also marked Hizbullah’s entry into the mainstream polit-
ical sphere in Lebanon. These developments indicate how Islamism works 
through the distribution of tasks without isolating particular elements from 
the larger scope of its discursive tradition. In 1997, Hizbullah’s leadership 
in forming multi-confessional Lebanese Brigades demonstrates Islamism’s 
extra-discursive potential and political imagination beyond self-identi-
ty. Not only do we see the collaboration between various elements within 
the Islamic discourse itself, but also an interest to influence other forces 
of politics that are identified as functionally effective against Israeli polit-
ical-geography. Because of the concretization of Islam as the main enemy 
in foreign lands after the end of the Cold War, it is not surprising to see 
representations in media and feminist discourse to be more direct in their 
Islamophobia.

Contrary to the 1980s, the representation of Islam between 1991–2001 
in the NYT is interventionist in a more pronounced way. The interven-
tions—both political and intellectual—are rooted in a liberal, humanist 
internationalism. A collection of essays written between 1990–1997 by re-
nowned feminist philosopher Martha Nussbaum under the title Sex and So-
cial Justice is representative of this framework. Although her text is a broad, 
philosophically illuminating elaboration on liberal categories (e.g. justice, 
rights, universals, equity, reason, liberty), she is blunt about its purpose 
when she states in the introduction,

The approach defended here refuses to take that step [of cultural rela-
tivism], arguing that an account of the central human capacities and 
functions, and of the basic human needs and rights, can be given in a 
fully universal manner, at least at a high level of generality, and that this 
universal account is what should guide feminist thought and planning.41



 47

Nussbaum uses Aristotle to conceptualize notions of “human functioning” 
and “capability” in order to make a philosophically grounded political case 
for liberalism. She thinks through the works of Kant and Rawls for the pur-
poses of examining and justifying concepts like dignity, liberty, and justice. 
She also re-interprets John Stuart Mill via Aristotle to think of his work 
outside of utilitarianism. It is curious that while this philosophical-political 
project aims to reconstitute liberalism, by returning to Aristotle—an an-
cient philosopher—it grounds liberal categories in a discourse that is almost 
as old as philosophy itself. By doing this Nussbaum’s philosophical project 
of “Kantian/Aristotelian liberalism” slips into a transhistorical imperative. 
Her text’s emphasis on liberalism, which claims to ground itself in univer-
sally valid concepts of justice and rights, actually grounds itself uncritically 
within a naturalized vision of capitalist property relations.42

Nussbaum specifically addresses Islam with the following quoted 
conversation at the beginning of chapter 3, titled “Religion and Women’s 
Human Rights.” Here, a Bangladeshi woman involved with a literacy and 
skills program sponsored by the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Commit-
tee asserts,

The mullahs say: “When they will die we shall not bury them.” Villagers 
say, “Wherever they want, they go. They do not cover their heads. They 
talk with men. They will be sinners.” I said: “If Allah does not see us when 
we stay hungry then Allah has sinned.”

This is not simply an articulation related to concerns about women’s rights, 
but rather, an anti-theist questioning that foundationally and negatively 
interrogates Islam. The concept of Allah becomes reliant upon liberal cat-
egories. In fact, in this line of reasoning, it is only through liberalism that 
Islam can legitimize itself. Nussbaum’s rhetoric against the Islamic Republic 
of Iran signals her political complicity in contemporary anti-Islamism. She 
defends her liberal universalist position by suggesting that Islamic tradition 
and history has many examples of toleration, and therefore, her critique 
of specific practices under the name of Islam is not a totalizing critique 
of Islam. While it is true that Islam has within itself a tremendous history 
that covers many spatio-temporal contingencies, it is misleading to think 
that Islam does not carry within itself its own systematicity that gives it a 
historical unity. One can think about this systematicity in a genealogical 
way, therefore not essentializing the internal history of Islam, which allows 
for both the maintenance of a certain kind of orthodoxy as well as recon-
stitution of its social dynamic within particular histories. There is much 

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48 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 35:2

scholarly work on orthodoxy in relation to distribution of power and the 
immanent development of an authoritative discourse within the Islamic 
tradition. To reduce this corpus of knowledge to a matter of basic plural-
ism for the purposes of teasing out values commensurable to liberalism is 
anti-Islamist in the most elemental sense: it denies Islam its internal con-
sistency, objectifies it as a simple whole with many parts, and breaks it up 
according to the rules of liberalism. Nussbaum, who in the introduction to 
her book openly rejects relativism in order to revive liberal universalism, 
paradoxically justifies plurality within Islam to select parts of it for the pur-
poses of disciplining and domesticating Islam within a structure of liberal 
feminism.

Articles published in the NYT in the 1990s are less nuanced, and more 
directly anti-Islamist. They are consistent with Nussbaum’s intellectual in-
terest in women’s human rights and her universalism. Here is an excerpt 
from an article titled “Turks March in Campaign To Preserve Secularism”43 
published in 1997: 

Thousands of Turks, most of them women, marched through the streets 
of Ankara today in the first major public protest against the policies of 
the Islamic-led Government...‘Let Turkey shout ‘Down with Sharia!’ they 
chanted. One banner proclaimed, ‘Women’s Rights are Human Rights,’ 
while another simply, ‘Women Exist.’  

This article frames local women in an Islamic country as authentic yet sub-
versive subjects who question Islamic law. The specific focus on the Sharia 
works as a technique to reduce Islamic governance into a particular orien-
talist imagination of religious jurisprudence. The NYT, of course, has no 
interest in the details of the massive history of jurisprudence and law in the 
Islamic tradition, and therefore, this kind of selective reporting does little 
more than supply the anti-Islamic historical unconscious of the Western 
reader with more raw data to help reproduce racial archetypes. 

Barbara Crossette’s article “Women’s Rights Gaining Attention Within 
Islam” (1996)44 focuses on women in various Muslim majority countries 
who are organizing to develop specific sets of demands that are consistent 
with liberal values. Crossette writes:

Throughout the Islamic world, from North Africa and the Middle East to 
Southeast Asia, a diverse assortment of individuals and women’s rights 
groups, different in cultures but sharing a powerful faith, are creating a 
momentum for change that few would have predicted a few years ago. 



 49

While the status of women can vary widely from country to country in 
the Islamic world, advocates of Muslim women’s rights share a core group 
of demands. They want the right to education, both secular and religious, 
which is often denied to girls. They seek changes in economic practices 
to allow them to own and inherit property, enjoy the freedom to start 
businesses and share in decisions on the distribution of family income. 
They also want reform in Muslim family laws that often leave them at the 
mercy of men who can divorce them without warning, take away their 
children, deny them the right to travel and bequeath them as chattel to 
the next male relative.

This article demonstrates direct, structural similarity with Nussbaum’s ar-
guments, insofar as it locates women in Muslim countries who, in efforts to 
‘modernize’ Islam, advocate for human rights. In this sense, Islam becomes 
a site for liberal interventions.

Another article by Barbara Crossette (1998)45 focuses on Afghanistan 
and vilifies Islamic militants. Here it becomes clear that the reasoning struc-
ture of anti-Islamism forcibly reduces and compares historically different 
regimes of power by essentializing women’s autonomy: 

The circle of teachers, a doctor and several homemakers—sitting cross-
legged on the carpeted floor of a mud-walled house—wanted to tell Ms. 
Bellamy, a woman to woman and without inhibitions, what life was like in 
Afghanistan after decades of political upheaval, a Soviet invasion, a holy 
war, a civil war and now an era marked by enforces of Islamic militancy 
riding around in jeeps and pickups beating up sinners. 

In this article, “Soviet invasion,” “holy war,” and “civil war,” three different 
regimes of power, are portrayed as commensurate and culminate in an “Is-
lamic militancy” that restricts women’s autonomy. Woman as a category 
becomes central in this discourse, and is used as a way to promote internal 
tension within Afghan society. The following quote illustrates this logic: 

In the midst of the session, when a man tried to deliver a message to Ms. 
Bellamy through an intermediary, she said firmly: “No men here! This is 
a meeting for women.” Faces around the room broke into smiles.  

This kind of framing strategically manipulates the discourse to not only 
compare different regimes, but to highlight Islam as the higher point of 
domination. It also falsely identifies a cultural logic instead of an econom-
ic one for patriarchy, and fails to address the centrality of modern power 

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50 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 35:2

within imperialist history. All of these errors contribute to the discursive 
rationale of anti-Islamism.  

Islamic polygyny is frequently at the center of representational tech-
niques that frame Islamic jurisprudence as a force of patriarchy. This par-
ticularly controversial subject helps to locate patriarchy within the instru-
mentalization of religion itself. The NYT published a Letter to the Editor in 
1991 that critiques polygamy:

The institution of polygamy is legal in Islam, but most Muslim countries, 
under the pressure of women’s rights groups and others interested in 
strengthening social welfare, have since the 1960s placed legal restraints 
on its practice. These include requiring the prospective polygamist to ob-
tain the written consent of his first wife before marrying a second. This 
consent is rarely given. The legitimacy of polygamy in Islam originated 
in the need to provide legal and social protection to widowed women 
and their children, as well as to unmarried women with little chance of 
finding a spouse, when Muslims were few in number and severely per-
secuted by the pagan Arabs among whom they dwelt…The Koran is ex-
plicit, however, in making polygamy conditional on a man’s being able 
to provide equally for all his wives, a theoretical possibility that is highly 
unlikely in fact.46

Another article published in 1990 reduces the heterogeneity internal to Is-
lamism in a manner that allows for liberal interventions against a supposed 
coherent enemy: the category of the fundamentalist.47 The article begins by 
recognizing how Islamists in specific places (Algeria, Egypt, Jordan) have 
come to power through peaceful means, but “[e]lsewhere, Islamic funda-
mentalists are seeking or consolidating power through the use of arms and 
intimidation.” The article continues, “In the Sudan, a military dictatorship 
is implementing religious edicts by force. In Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, and 
Morocco, armed fundamentalists are seeking to overturn secular regimes.” 
Not only does the representational technique dominant in this article es-
sentialize the formation of Islamism, but it also involves an inversion in 
which it appears that “Islamic fundamentalists” have full agency to “break 
with secularism.” This kind of inversion fails to grasp the genealogy of his-
torical power that comes with secularism. To suggest that Islamists have 
political agency and can simply attempt to “overturn secular regimes” is to 
miss the force with which Eurocentrism establishes the secular—not only 
as a political doctrine, but as an epistemic field. To give Islamists full agency 
within secular modernity—a category with a particular genealogy in En-



 51

lightenment history—is to misconceptualize the materiality of the secular 
political episteme. The article suggests that “Islamic fundamentalists” share 
a common dream of disrupting secularism. Such journalistic attempts re-
veal a historical unconscious deeply anxious about the return of Islam—an 
unconscious beneath the spectacle of the modern West’s self-perception.

2001–2011: War on Terror and Discourse of Ethics
9/11 inaugurated a new global history. Two planes flew into the Twin Tow-
ers, a third plane  managed to damage the western side of the Pentagon, 
and a fourth plane aiming to hit the White House fell short. The state im-
mediately blamed al-Qa‘ida and considered the attacks an act of war, and 
al-Qa‘ida took responsibility through the release of a video. September 11 
is objectively the most comprehensive attack on the security, intelligence, 
and economy of the global superpower. Even though 9/11 clearly repre-
sented a global jihadist attack on the political and economic structure of 
Western domination, much of the commentary in the immediate aftermath 
of the attacks—leftist as well as rightist—involved civilizational, cultural, 
and identitarian explanations. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the Af-
ghan Taliban government fell and refused to hand over Bin Laden to the 
US, launching a full-fledged war. The war in Iraq, however, took a differ-
ent form. Within the Sunni resistance, under the leadership of Abu Musab 
al-Zarqawi, al-Qa‘ida in Iraq began a series of terrorist attacks and suicide 
operations. Zarqawi also released several beheading videos during this 
time. The central leadership of al-Qa‘ida criticized Zarqawi, and considered 
his brutal sectarian tactics antithetical to the values of global jihad. De-
spite such internal critiques of political sectarianism, however, in this de-
cade sectarianism became mainstream political culture—particularly given 
Iran’s major role in re-configuring the governing powers of the Iraqi state. 
The 2006 July War in Lebanon between Hizbullah and the Israeli Defense 
Forces, however, demonstrated an exception: the possibility of Islamic uni-
ty. Specifically, the collaboration between Shia Hizbullah and Sunni Hamas 
demonstrated the type of Islamist political action that, as Salman Sayyid 
claims, sustains Islam itself and keeps the tradition from dissolving into its 
constituent parts.

During this decade after the London bombings of 7/7, there was also 
a shift inward. Western and secular states not only focused on the exter-
nal enemy combatant, but also conducted sophisticated and detailed sur-
veillance of potential homegrown terrorists. By 2009, with the beginning 
of the Obama presidency, US foreign policy moved towards contingency 

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52 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 35:2

operations and precision warfare through the full-scale use of drones. The 
war expanded in depth and precision, and the state rhetorically and dip-
lomatically shifted from emphasizing civilizational differences towards 
promoting a moderate “reformation” from within Islam. On June 4, 2009, 
Obama delivered a historic speech in Cairo in which he acknowledged the 
history of colonialism and tension between the West and Muslim world, but 
emphasized a dialogic ethical discourse:

I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and 
Muslims around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual 
respect; and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not ex-
clusive, and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share 
common principles—principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the 
dignity of all human beings.

This decade’s state interest in promoting a (liberal) reformation within Is-
lam parallels scholarly developments during the same period.

Seyla Benhabib’s The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the 
Global Era (2002) provides a detailed theoretical grounding for this form 
of state intervention in a world shaped by a universalizing globalism. Her 
argument is a critique of naive cultural relativism in the post 9/11 era, and a 
call for a “discourse of ethics,” a framework that allows for all morally auton-
omous individuals and social/cultural groups to arrive at a meeting point 
acknowledging each participant as a moral equal. “Discourse ethics” is in-
formed by critical theorist Habermas’s notion of “communicative ethics.”48 
For Habermas, unlike the first generation of Frankfurt School thinkers, 
modernity is an unfinished project. Habermas encourages the maintenance 
of Enlightenment-based values and believes that while history took a dev-
astating turn with the Holocaust, revitalizing the modern project remains 
important. Benhabib’s “discourse ethics” relies on this concept of modernity 
and remains open to all except indigenous people and “fundamentalists” 
(read: Islamists). She writes, 

It is the rejectionist fundamentalists who find it most difficult to live in a 
globalized world of uncertainty, hybridity, fluidity, and contestation. Un-
able to make the daily compromises that the practice of any firmly held 
religious belief in the contemporary world would require, these groups 
declare war on global civilization or consume themselves in acts of apoc-
alyptic fervor… the ‘true Islam’ dreams of the twenty-first century—are 



 53

doomed to failure, but not before they cause a great deal of mischief and 
human suffering, instability, and fear.49

The specter of 9/11 looms behind the state policies, intellectual produc-
tion, and popular media representations of this decade. Media represen-
tations during this decade reflect a realization that overtly interventionist 
approaches within the logic of imperialism have been ineffective, and that 
9/11 may epitomize this failure of liberal-humanism. This decade involves 
a strategic shift from the militarist exportation of liberal values towards the 
encouragement of reformation within Islam itself.50 In this decade the ques-
tion of “women’s rights” in Islam becomes a site of central contestation, and 
Islamic women interested in projects of liberal reform are represented as 
active actors working to challenge the threat of Islam from within.

While Benhabib’s Habermasian notion of “discourse of ethics” gives us 
a quick preview of the epistemic environment during this period, it does 
not tell us much about Muslim scholars and their involvement in further-
ing the agenda of this decade. During this decade, not only secular fem-
inists but some Muslim women scholars also participate in the discourse 
of internal reform. Through Quranic hermeneutics, these scholars attempt 
to overhaul the orthodox tradition of Islam from within, to free Islamic 
orthodoxy from patriarchal interpretations and other forms of exegetical 
distortion. Asma Barlas—a scholar critical of making hybrid Quranic and 
Western/Feminist epistemologies—suggests that patriarchal readings of Is-
lamic discourse result from historical patriarchy at particular periods, not 
from the Quran itself.51 Her aim is to return to a hermeneutic arrangement 
in which the Quran—as Divine ontology and Divine speech—is at the very 
center, and other secondary texts of the Sharia like the hadith corpus are 
read with a close eye on historical contingencies. Along with Barlas, Ke-
cia Ali and Amina Wadud also publish texts dealing with similar themes 
during this decade. While the authors of these works have different political 
investments, during the 2001–11 period, Quranic hermeneutics as a genre 
was ideologically mobilized in conjunction with the reformist agenda of a 
“discourse of ethics.”             

A similar pattern is noticeable in NYT articles during 2001–11. For 
instance, in an article titled “Daughter of the Revolution Fights the Veil” 
(2003)52 we see the representation of this reformist argument from within 
the authentic representation of the Islamic revolution in Iran. The article 
suggests that there is internal tension within the Khomeini family about 

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54 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 35:2

the status of the veil in revolutionary/reformist Islamic discourse. Elaine 
Sciolino writes,

When it comes to credentials in Iran’s Islamic Republic, Zahra Eshraghi’s 
are cast in gold. Her grandfather was Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the 
cleric who overthrew a king and led a revolution in the name of Islam. 
Her husband’s brother is the reformist president, Mohammad Khatami. 
And her husband, Mohammad Reza Khatami, is the head of the reform-
ist wing of Parliament. In a society where women can derive enormous 
power from the men in their lives, those three pillars give Ms. Eshraghi 
enormous standing. Yet the 39-year-old government official and mother 
of two has a confession to make. She feels trapped by her family history. 
And she hates wearing the black veil known as the chador.

The author is suggesting that Eshraghi is perfectly positioned within the 
discourse of Shi‘i Islamic orthodoxy to question the Islamic Republic’s nor-
mative legal focus. In another article, titled “Half the Afghans, the Women, 
Fight to Establish Their Rights” (2002),53 Barbara Crossette more openly 
highlights internal tensions within the discourse of Islam to promote wom-
en’s rights. She discusses the significance of ideologically training women in 
Afghanistan so that they can question the Islamic legitimacy of the Taliban, 
and establish “clandestine home schools for girls”. She writes,

Ms. Kabuli, 41, was among those who stayed and worked underground, 
and she is now a judge dealing with youthful offenders...During Taliban 
rule, from 1996 until last fall, she ran one of hundreds of clandestine 
home schools for girls. Ms. Kabuli said the problem with the Taliban was 
not that they were Muslims. “Islam brought a certain equality to men and 
women,” she said. “The laws that the Taliban brought were from pre-Is-
lamic times, based on traditional law.”

The author, in this case, is using an argument similar to scholars of Qura-
nic hermeneutics, namely de-authenticating one normative gender focus 
in traditional Islam on the basis of another, particular liberatory reading of 
Islam. 

Sabrina Tavernise explores similar concerns in her article, “In Quest for 
Equal Rights, Muslim Women’s Meeting Turns to Islam’s Tenets” (2009).54 
She discusses the patriarchy demonstrated by the National Fatwa Council 
in Malaysia in their call against the practice of yoga. The journalist uses lo-
cal women’s voices that argue for reform within Islam, instead of the 1990s 
tactic of dwelling on secular feminist critiques. Tavernise observes,



 55

[Muslim women’s] mission was to come up with ways to demand equal 
rights for women. And their tools, however unlikely, were the tenets of 
Islam itself. “Secular feminism has fulfilled its historical role, but it has 
nothing more to give us,” said Ziba Mir-Hosseini, an Iranian anthropol-
ogist who has been helping to formulate some of the arguments. “The 
challenge we face now is theological.”

This article fits neatly with the imperatives of Quranic hermeneutics and 
discourse of ethics, namely discourse within Islam via interpretive and 
reading strategies to dispel patriarchy. The article also provides an inter-
esting periodization, demonstrating how secular feminism exhausts its 
utility, giving way to a reformist agenda concerned with theology. This is 
interesting, given the fact that the decade prior to 2001–11, as explained in 
the last section, was a decade of internationalist and interventionist secular 
feminism.

In an article titled “Turkish Terror Victim Espoused a Tolerant Islam,”55 
Stephen Kinzer represents Islamists as violent against Muslim feminists 
who fight for women’s rights. The article suggests that male domination is 
not part of the essence of Islam, and is the result of a perversion. Kinzer 
writes,  

The woman, Konca Kuris, was often described as a Muslim feminist. In 
books, articles, lectures and television appearances, she had described Is-
lam as a religion that guarantees women’s rights, and asserted that male 
commentators over the centuries had twisted its essence in ways that led 
to the oppression of women.

The message in this article resonates with the arguments in Barlas’ mono-
graph. The main point in this article is to historicize the orthodoxy of Islam 
as patriarchal. In other words: keep Islam, but deconstruct and dispel its 
orthodox structure. In this sense, the “discourse of ethics” has a reductionist 
agenda. Islam’s massive corpus, systematized over fourteen hundred years, 
is reduced to a certain modernist interpretation of the Quran. Much of the 
hadith corpus and Sharia are questioned, and selective texts from different 
periods in Islamic history are kept so long as they adjust to modernist sen-
sibilities. In NYT articles like the one by Kinzer above there is a tendency 
not only to show that interpretive textual manipulation and “perversion” 
create the basis of patriarchal societies, but to insist that Islamist men are 
also obsessively violent and perverted in their responses to feminism.

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56 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 35:2

Interpretive openness is central for both Quranic hermeneutics and 
discourse of ethics. An article titled “In Jeans or Veils, Iraqi Women are Split 
on New Political Power” (2005)56 illustrates this method well. The author 
expresses concerns about the future of Iraqi women, cites a scholar who 
argues for pluralism within Islamic thought, and suggests that this inter-
nal diversity may allow for women’s rights and other forms of reform from 
within Islam’s discursive tradition. The article states: 

Many secular women in the assembly agree that Western models cannot 
always apply in Iraq, and that Islam must play an important role. But, like 
Dr. Raja al-Khuzai, they argue that there are many schools of thought 
within Islam, and plenty of room for differing views, and they worry 
that Islamists will make inroads into Iraq’s secular family law, which was 
established in 1959 and remains among the most liberal in the region. 
Today, for example, men can take more than one wife only under strict 
conditions.

While it is certainly true that Islam’s corpus of texts, reasoning structure, 
and scholars are full of contradictions and paradoxes, there is still a sys-
tematization of knowledge in which an orthodoxy is articulated. And to 
assume that the complex mechanism through which this articulation takes 
place over a period of fourteen hundred years is simply a determination of 
history is to commit tremendous violence upon Islamic epistemology and 
methodology. The multiple contradictions and the existence of plurality of 
thought within the epistemic unity of Islam does not necessarily negate, 
undermine, or delegitimize orthodoxy. To assume such a delegitimization 
is to essentialize difference. 

Concluding Remarks
This paper’s primary aim is to reveal a structural homology between two 
forms of secular representational strategies vis-à-vis Islam: media and fem-
inism. My analysis covers the years 1979–2011, which I divide into three 
periods—1979–1990; 1991–2001; and 2001–11—according to signature Is-
lamist events. I examine how media and feminist discourse for each period 
overlap in their assumptions and disarticulation of Islamism. I also demon-
strate that modern feminism (with three key exceptions) and Islamism are 
incompatible in their foundational assumptions—not only in terms of how 
they articulate subjectivity, but also how they contradict (and antagonize) 
each other’s visions of the world. Though I find three exceptions to this 
secular paradigm of feminism in Thobani, Spillers, and Spivak, I do not 



 57

attempt to redeem feminism through them. Rather, I want to consider how 
their works generate, map, and deconstruct the categories of gender/sex 
outside the frame of anti-Islamism that modern feminism upholds. In this 
sense, there is a primary difference in their desires. At the risk of sounding 
too metaphysical, one may remark that at the most elemental level, there is 
a difference in each respective tradition’s ethical dispositions.    

The killing of Osama Bin Laden in 2011 marks the end of a particular 
history of contemporary jihad. With the Arab uprisings in full effect, many 
Western and secular journalists and critics during this time begin to discuss 
the Arab Spring in relation to what they predict to be an “Islamist Winter.”57 
In other words, there is a re-mobilization of a binary between Islam and the 
secular. Similarly, in 2012 controversial philosopher Slavoj Žižek suggests 
that the 1979 revolution in Iran was an authentic moment until the Isla-
mists de-authenticated it by taking over its direction, and locates in Iranian 
reformist Mousavi (during the 2009 election scandal) the possibility of a 
political “return of the repressed [Leftists and secularists].” Elsewhere Žižek 
writes of Tahrir Square: “But then there are the Arab uprisings. Do they not 
offer an example of a collective act of resistance that avoids this false alter-
native between self-destructive violence and religious fundamentalism?”58 
For Žižek and others, the period between 1979 and 2011 is a history of 
political defeat and repression. And, the period in the aftermath of the Arab 
Spring and death of Bin Laden is a time for the renewal of secularity. Of 
course, we know by now that the seductive dream of a new secularism ends 
very quickly—already we have witnessed Hamas militants firing rockets at 
Israeli forces in response to the Gaza massacre, a full-fledged and uncom-
promising jihad in Syria with hundreds of local rebel groups with more 
than fifty thousand fighters, and a number of deadly attacks in the heart of 
Europe. Perhaps we have entered a new history of jihad with a new ensem-
ble of problems and potentialities.

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58 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 35:2

Endnotes

1. See Mohammed Sidiq Seddon, Dilwar Hussain, and Nadeem Malik, British 
Muslims Between Assimilation and Segregation: Historical, Legal and Social 
Realities (Leicester: Islamic Foundation, 2004); Annelies Moors and Rubah 
Salih, “‘Muslim Women in Europe’: Secular Normativities, Bodily Perfor-
mances, and Multiple Publics,” Social Anthropology 17, no. 4 (November 
2009): 375–378; Abdoolkarim Vakil and Salman Sayyid, Thinking Through 
Islamophobia: Global Perspectives (New York: Columbia University, 2010); 
Sohail Daulatzai, Black Star, Crescent Moon The Muslim International and 
Black Freedom beyond America (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 
2012); Tariq Modood, “Multiculturalism, Interculturalisms, and the Majori-
ty,” Journal of Moral Education 43, no. 3 (2014): 302-315.

2. By de-essentializing, I mean Islam is forcibly conceptualized through a mod-
ernist discourse of state-based individual and group identity, instead of the 
Sharia. Islamic discourse is de-essentialized when the primary focus of the 
discourse is to figure out how Muslims can live within the national and inter-
national imagination of the history of the state.

3. The majority of my analysis of NYT articles in this paper emerged out of 
research conducted in the Suad Joseph Lab at the University of California, 
Davis, as part of a larger project on the representation of Muslim women in 
media. I accessed the articles by searching for key terms on ProQuest. The 
search was wide: it covered specific countries including Iran, Saudi Arabia, 
Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, Pakistan, and Egypt; various terms related to the 
veil (e.g. veil, hijab, chador, niqab), terms related to women and Islam (e.g. 
women’s rights, women in Islam, women and Islam, Muslim women), Islamic 
law and jurisprudence (e.g. various spellings of Sharia), and names of key 
figures and organizations (e.g. Khomeini, Hamas, Hizbullah, Taliban).

4. Sunera Thobani, “White Wars: Western Feminisms and the ‘War on Terror,’” 
Feminist Theory 8, no. 3 (2007): 174. 

5. See Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge, MA: Harvard 
University Press, 1982) and Frank Wilderson, Red, White & Black: Cinema 
and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms and Slavery and Social Death (Durham: 
Duke University Press, 2010). 

6. Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar 
Book,” diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 67.

7. Ibid., 68.
8. Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, in Colonial Discourse and 

Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 
1994), 74.

9. Ibid. 
10. Ibid., 85.



 59

11. Ibid., 84.
12. Ibid., 93.
13. Ibid., 102.
14. Chandra Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial 

Discourses,” boundary 2 12/13, no.3/1 (1984): 333-358; Rey Chow, Wom-
an and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading Between West and East 
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); Ranjana Khanna, Dark 
Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 
2003); Khanna, Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation, 1830 to the Present 
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).

15. In Talal Asad’s conceptualization of Islam as a “discursive tradition,” the 
relation between Islam and Islamism is grounded in a specific description 
of orthodoxy, which he defines in his now classic 1986 essay: “Orthodoxy 
is crucial to all Islamic traditions […] [O]rthodoxy is not a mere body of 
opinion but a distinctive relationship—a relationship of power. Wherever 
Muslims have the power to regulate, uphold, require, or adjust correct prac-
tices, and to condemn, exclude, undermine, or replace incorrect ones, there 
is the domain of orthodoxy.” See Asad, “The Idea of an Anthropology of Is-
lam” (Washington, DC: Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown 
University, 1986). Islamism, then—as part of Islam’s discursive tradition—is 
quite explicitly reliant upon the mobilization of orthodoxy. The contestations 
and disputations on whether orthodoxy is ontological or historical are ir-
relevant for a genealogical understanding of Islamism. For genealogists, the 
important question is not whether orthodoxy is real or true, or if it is contest-
able, but rather the manner in which orthodoxy is mobilized, and what such 
a mobilization enacts. This paper, then, should not be taken as a defense of 
orthodoxy but rather as an elaboration on how Islamism structurally legit-
imizes itself through a concrete engagement with orthodoxy, and therefore 
must have the appearance of a system of orthodoxy. In parts of the paper 
where I use “Islamic orthodoxy” instead of simply “Islamism,” I do so to en-
sure that readers understand that the antagonism secular feminism has with 
Islamism is due to its reliance upon the mobilization of orthodoxy. In other 
parts, where I do not explicitly mention orthodoxy, it should be assumed as 
inherent in my definition of Islamism. Moreover, it must be added that sec-
ular feminism’s antagonism may also extend to forms of Islamic orthodoxy 
that do not necessarily fall within the explicit social, historical, and political 
projects of Islamism. For this reason, I cannot delimit my reading of femi-
nist antagonism to the realm of Islamism alone. Feminism appears to have a 
broader antagonism with Islam itself—as long as it reflects orthodoxy—re-
gardless of whether it organizes an Islamist programmatism.

16. Salman Sayyid, A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Isla-
mism (London: Zed Books, 1997), 27.

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60 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 35:2

17 Max Haiven, “Silvia Federici, On Capitalism, Colonialism, Women and Food 
Politics,” Politics and Culture 2 (2009): 32.

18. There are significant works in religious studies that examine Islamism as one 
form of “religious violence” (e.g. Juergensmeyer’s Terror in the Mind of God) 
or “fundamentalism” (e.g. Lawrence’s Defenders of God). In his Shattering the 
Myth: Islam Beyond Violence (1998), however, Bruce Lawrence moves be-
yond essentialist accounts that represent Islam as violent, and suggests that 
the tradition is not a monolith. Bruce Lincoln, on the other hand, in the text 
Holy Terrors: Thinking About Religion After September 11 (2002) identifies 
religious reasoning behind the 9/11 attacks, and discursively investigates 
speeches and documents to suggest that figures like George W. Bush and 
Osama Bin Laden are similar insofar as they both share a Manichean worl-
dview. While this literature raises important points, it understates relations 
of power, and fails to specify Islam’s dynamic with global secularity. In other 
words, to conceptualize Islam through the category of “religion” is to already 
be entrapped in a secular logic. Moreover, the main point in my article is to 
show how the secular—both as media and feminism—is exceptionally op-
positional and antagonistic to Islam in particular, not necessarily religion in 
general. 

19. Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: 
Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 
2005), 241.

20. Sayyid writes about the relation between Islam and Islamism in terms of 
“availability.” He writes, “Islamism is not the mere reflection of Islam, but 
rather it is a political discourse that takes the availability of Islam as a means 
of undermining the Kemalist anciens régimes. Islamism makes use of the 
availability of Islam, but, at the same time, it increases the availability of Is-
lam. In other words Islamism is organized around Islam, but this is a two-
way process since Islamism also organizes Islam” (A Fundamental Fear, 77).

21. See Wael Hallaq, The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral 
Predicament (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012) for his use of Carl 
Schmitt’s conception of central domain to discuss the significance of jihad in 
the Islamic tradition.

22. Yaroslav Trofimov, The Siege of Mecca: The 1979 Uprising at Islam’s Holy 
Shrine (New York: First Anchor Books, 2008), 7.

23. Another iteration of the same simplistic assertion is that Islamism changed 
its form from “culturalism” to “economism” due to capitalist crisis. Islamism’s 
critique of colonialism in an earlier moment in history had cultural, econom-
ic, political, and ethical dimensions, and therefore, other than pointing at the 
general directional structure of capitalism, such assertions fail to recognize 
even the most elemental grammar and syntax of Islam.



 61

24. Hakeem Naim, “Friends and Foes: The Pragmatic Liberal Biases in Repre-
sentation of Saudi Women vs. Iranian Women in The New York Times,” in a 
yet-unpublished volume edited by Suad Joseph. 

25. I use counter-revolutionary here specifically to mean any set of political ar-
ticulations that deliberately attempted to subvert the massive clerical orien-
tation of struggle in the late ’70s.

26. Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 114.
27. Lena Meari, “The Material Life of Representation: ‘Veiled Muslim Women’ in 

The New York Times,” in a yet-unpublished book edited by Suad Joseph.
28. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, 

trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of 
Minnesota Press, 1984), xxiv.

29. Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, On Intersectionality: Essential Writings of Kim-
berlé Crenshaw (New York: Perseus Distribution Services, 2012); Angela Y. 
Davis, Women, Race, & Class (New York: Random House Inc, 1981); bell 
hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Cambridge: South End 
Press, 1984).

30. Nawal El Saadawi, The Nawal El Saadawi Reader (Zed Books, 1997), 93.
31. Ibid., 74.
32. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973).
33. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Chris-

tianity and Islam (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1993), 32.
34. Steven R. Weisman, “Dispute Over a Moslem Divorce Ensnarls Gandhi,” The 

New York Times, 9 February 1986: A3.
35. “Islam: Feminists vs. Fundamentalists,” The New York Times, 25 July 1985.
36. “The Moslem Veil in the City: A Matter of Tradition,” The New York Times, 24 

September 1984: B7.
37. Elaine Sciolino. “Saudi Arabia’s Gospel Columnists,” The New York Times, 5 

May 1985: E9.
38. “Pakistan’s Grim Islamic Law is Not Just a Threat,” The New York Times, 17 

September 1981: A2.
39. “The ‘Islamization’ of Pakistan: Still Moving Slowly and Still Stirring Debate,” 

The New York Times, 10 August 1986: A10.
40. “Pakistani Women Take Lead In Drive Against Islamization,” The New York 

Times, 17 June 1988: A1.
41. Martha Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice (New York: Oxford University 

Press, 1999), 8.
42. Nussbaum defines “control over one’s environment” as the ability “to hold 

property… having the right to seek employment on an equal basis with oth-
ers… In work, being able to work as a human being, exercising practical rea-
son and entering into meaningful relationships of mutual recognition with 
other workers” (Ibid., 42).

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62 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 35:2

43. Stephen Kinzer, “Turks March In Campaign To Preserve Secularism,” The 
New York Times, 16 February 1997: 4.

44. Barbara Crossette, “Women’s Rights Gaining Attention Within Islam,” The 
New York Times, 12 May 1996: 3.

45. Barbara Crossette, “Afghan Women Demanding End To Their Repression by 
Militants,” The New York Times, 6 April 1998: 1.

46. Sarah Akhtar, “For Women, Polygamy’s Just a Rotten Deal,” The New York 
Times, 2 June 1991: 169.

47. Youssef M. Ibrahim, “Islamic Fundamentalism is Winning Votes,” The New 
York Times, July 1, 1990.

48. Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousnesses and Communicative Action, trans. 
Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge: Massachu-
setts Institute of Technology, 1990).

49. Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global 
Era (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 186.

50. Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and 
the Roots of Terror (New York: Three Leaves Press, 2004).

51. Asma Barlas, “Believing Women” in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpreta-
tions of the Qur’an (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002).

52. “Daughter of the Revolution Fights the Veil,” The New York Times, 2 April 
2003: A6.

53. Barbara Crossette, “Half the Afghans, the Women, Fight to Establish Their 
Rights,” The New York Times, 7 June 2002: A7.

54. Sabrina Tavernise, “In Quest for Equal Rights, Muslim Women’s Meeting 
Turns to Islam’s Tenets,” The New York Times, 16 February 2009: A8.

55. Stephen Kinzer, “Turkish Terror Victim Espoused a Tolerant Islam,” The New 
York Times, 26 January 2000: A3.

56. Worth, “In Jeans or Veils, Iraqi Women Are Split on New Political Power.” 
The New York Times, 13 April 2005: A1.

57. Rabah Ghezali, “Arab Spring, Islamist Winter?” (HuffPost, 2012); Micheal J. 
Totten, “Arab Spring or Islamist Winter?” (World Affairs, 2012).

58. Slavoj Žižek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously (London: Verso Books, 
2012), 61.