The Road Not Taken to Arabo-Islamic Feminism. Defaulting the Differand of a Dislocated Epistemology

in La rivista di Arablit, a. XII, n. 24, dicembre 2022, pp. 43-80.

This chapter aims to explore the way feminine scholarship on nascent Islamic Feminist trajectories aspires to “construct intercultural relations across (dislocated) communities and nations across the Arabo-Islamic world. The literature in the field does transgress language barriers, trespass ideological tensions and cross conflicting paradigms to push back inherited orthodoxies in order to redesign new exits towards reconstructing a beyond position to reframe the perspective and draw new lines of discrepancies, draft codes of disruptions to bridge asymmetrical old differences and create hybrid moments of new hudud/encounters. Crafting transpositions of a “synthetic difference” in what may be qualified as the intellectual trajectory of a Moroccan feminist enlightenment, Fatema Mernissi’s bulk of publications, invoked the necessity to scrutinize the “theological unconscious” within Moroccan post-colonial male, grand narratives with the objective to pre-view a rhetoric of adjacent feminist theories, which might be held accountable for the drafting of a poetics of feminist cultural politics. Drawing from a theoretical paradigm from within, this chapter will then focus on three Moroccan women activists and scholarly advocates, who have helped push the debate a step further in the right direction to implement synthetic conditions of epistemological encounters glocally and suggest strategic plans of applicable social reform projects to enhance women’s rights in the MENA post Arabspring region and beyond. Crafting transpositions of difference in what may be qualified as the intellectual trajectory of a Moroccan feminist enlightenment, three lead figures, each with her own weight, have invoked the necessity to scrutinize the “theological unconscious” within Moroccan post-colonial male, grand narratives with the objective to review a rhetoric of adjacent feminist theories, which might be credited for the drafting of a poetics of feminist cultural politics. Re-examining power relations in the Moroccan post-colonial society, Fatema Mernissi’s bulk of works consistently strive to ascribe a new status to discarded local feminist activism, edging imported theories as inappropriate paradigms of a sustainable feminist authorship. Again, contesting existing inherited discourses, Asma Lamrabet would argue that the historical legacy of an Arabo-Islamic feminism remains a misunderstood and mishandled corpus unable to prescribe an epistemological hegemony among its newly “thinkable” subjects. Eventually transcending contested borders of a dismantled, albeit conducive, pseudo-Islamic feminist theories, from without, Fatima Sadiqi’s research projects aspire to implement the tools of a “re-Islamization process” liable to foreground an authorship of an indigenised feminism, adopting a homo-gendered, decolonized perspective/reflection from within.

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This is an Article from La Rivista di Arablit - Anno XII, numero 24, dicembre 2022

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L’Autore

Najib Mokhtari |