CSSAAME - Latest Issue (Duke Univ.)

Hijab Martyrdom, Headscarf Debates: Rethinking Violence, Secularism, and Islam in Germany

Fereshta Ludin’s struggle to be appointed as a public school teacher while wearing a hijab received massive media attention in Germany, while the xenophobically motivated murder of Marwa el-Sherbini, who was eventually dubbed the "hijab martyr" internationally, elicited muted response. Yet interpreting the reactions to these two cases together reveals much about the existence of racism and Islamophobia in contemporary Germany. In this article I juxtapose the public discussions of these two cases to consider the potential for a critique of headscarf discourse. I suggest that interrogation of headscarf discourse is only possible by turning the very notion of critique against itself in order to interrogate the conditions of secularism.

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The Role of Symbolic Capital in Protest: State-Society Relations and the Destruction of the Halabja Martyrs Monument in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq

This essay examines state-society relations in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq through a case study of the March 2006 protest in Halabja, during which protesters destroyed a memorial built to honor the victims of the 1988 chemical bombing of the city. The article suggests that contradictions between word and deed fueled local perceptions that the Kurdistan Regional Government was exploiting Halabja’s symbolic and material legacy. The essay’s main argument is that these contradictions, along with Halabja’s symbolic capital, gave student protesters leverage for renegotiating the terms of the relationship between authorities and local people. They mobilized the politics of shame to pressure officials, transformed the monument site and the commemoration into a theater for conveying their challenge, and acquired influential allies capable of substantiating and institutionalizing their demands.

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Seductive Piety: Faith and Fashion through Lipovetsky and Heidegger

Martin Heidegger broadened the meaning of art to a truth-disclosing event akin to seemingly disparate events such as the founding of a political state, Jesus’s sacrifice for all humankind, and the questioning of a philosopher. Art makes us pay attention to it by presenting the familiar in a new and unfamiliar context and unsettles our presuppositions and reconceptualizes our way of thinking. I begin by explicating the Heideggerian interpretation of the nature of art by looking at the key concepts that make a work of art work. Then I argue that by themselves, the concept of veiling and the concept of fashion are very familiar concepts to Indonesians, but that the practice of combining these two ideas brings something unfamiliar to that society. This new practice reveals a way of Being that combines religious piety with our current, late-modern, consumer society. The combination of fashion and veiling for piety discloses, in the Heideggerian sense, a new "world" that undermines secular and fundamentalist narratives about the religious agent while still remaining an authentic Indonesian art piece.

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Gender, Performance, and the Politics of Space: Germany and the Veil in Popular Culture

Since the 1990s, the headscarf has played a powerful role in negotiating questions of national and cultural belonging, gender identity, and definitions of urban space in Germany. This essay examines examples of veiling depicted in popular culture and theorizes the relationship between the headscarf and gendered and racialized spaces and the headscarf’s potential as a symbol of defiance in Germany. The two examples, the television comedy Turkish for Beginners and the performances of Berlin hip-hop artist Sahira Awad, illustrate how young Muslimas (female Muslims) inhabit a precarious space as mediators between cultures. In spite of being rather prescriptive, the mediator role also opens up spaces for critical intervention in the German media landscape.

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Introduction: Veiled Constellations: The Veil, Critical Theory, Politics, and Contemporary Society

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From Traditional Mahallehs to Modern Neighborhoods: The Case of Narmak, Tehran

Most cities in developing countries experience unprecedented changes in their physical and social structures during the process of modernization. This article investigates daily life in a modern neighborhood of Tehran, Narmak, designed in 1951 based on Western ideas, through the application of qualitative research methods to examine the transformation of this neighborhood from a Gemeinschaft community to a more urban community. This article uses the public spaces of the neighborhood as a tool to monitor daily life and the changes that have emerged in the neighborhood. It considers the social interactions in the public spaces of the neighborhood as a synthesis between the new norms stemming from the modern culture and the traditional cultural and religious norms reflected in gender, family, and neighborhood relations. The findings reveal that despite Narmak’s modern design and planning, a synthesis between traditional and modern culture can be observed in this neighborhood. Five decades after its design, the original low-density residential neighborhood has been transformed into a mixed-use, medium-density neighborhood with new migrants consisting of half of its population. Observations suggest differences both with the old mahallehs (neighborhoods), such as the blur of the previously more clear-cut public-private boundaries and the use of public spaces by youths and women, and with qualities inherited from traditional mahallehs, such as a sense of community, the exclusion of strangers, cul-de-sacs, and so forth.

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World Metaphor, Metametaphor: Veils in Literature, Literature as Veil

For the past decades, public discourse on veils in Western societies has mainly focused on the Islamic veil. In the Western history of thought, however, veils have frequently been used as symbols in epistemological contexts, too, both in literary and in theoretical primary texts. Astonishingly, an overwhelming majority of secondary sources concerned with veils as epistemological symbols in Western culture continue to talk about "the veil" — as if there were only one. Indeed, veils have usually been used in similar epistemological contexts, albeit expressing completely different worldviews depending on the degree of transparency or opacity, the material structure, and — most important — the veils’ position in relation to the subject. Consequently, "the veil" as such does not exist; there is rather a plurality of different types of veils, for example, the veil of Isis, the metaphysical veil, the discursive veil, the veil of perception, the psychological veil, or the veil between subjects, all of which contribute to an all-encompassing veil in the sense of a "world metaphor." Different literary texts from the corresponding periods in literary history use veils as epistemological metaphors, too, and thereby reflect the conception of reality dominant in the respective epoch.

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Seyyed Hasan Taqizadeh: Three Lives in a Lifetime

Taqizdeh’s extraordinary career involves three distinct but interrelated phases. In the first he is an influential young intellectual of the constitutional revolution and becomes a leading spokesperson of the Democrat party. This is the "first Taqizadeh" who in 1910 goes into voluntary exile in Europe and does not return until 1923, having in the meantime led the Berlin National Committee of Iranian intellectuals against the Anglo-Russian intervention in their country. The second phase of Taqizadeh’s life — beginning with his membership of the fifth Majlis in 1923 and ending with his dismissal as the Iranian minister counselor in Paris in 1934 — shows him as a mature politician, no longer idealistic but still hoping to contribute to Iran’s sociopolitical development under Reza Shah Pahlavi’s new regime. It is in this phase that he signs the Anglo-Iranian oil agreement of 1933 against his own will and eventually ends up as an exile, this time as a professor at the University of London. In the third phase, Taqizadeh returns to Iran in 1947, having been Iranian ambassador to London for five years, and becomes a Majlis deputy and then chairman of the Senate. He is now far too advanced for Iranian politics and, although still a public figure until the early 1980s, keeps to the margins of political life. He then confides to Iraj Afshar his deep regret that he had vehemently opposed any compromise with Mohammad Ali Shah Qajar when the latter had willy-nilly tried to reach a settlement with the constitutionalists.

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The Specter and Reality of Corruption in State and Civil Society: Privatizing and Auditing Poor Relief in Turkey

Based on ethnographic and archival research conducted at the headquarters of the non-governmental association Deniz Feneri [Lighthouse] Aid and Solidarity Association (DF) in Istanbul and its local branch in Izmir, Turkey, this article aims to add to the literature on accountability and corruption by critically examining technologies of accountability and transparency foregrounded by DF to counter possible corruption allegations against the association. Through an ethnographic study of various governance processes, the study aims to reach a comprehension of both corruption and accountability experienced and discussed as social practice. The research points to the fact that the overarching concern over corruption and accountability should be seen not as a reaction to the neoliberal agenda of deregulation and privatization favored by the government but as the neoliberal agenda reasserting itself through "good governance" and "audit culture" in an effort to ensure the public’s and donors’ trust in the effectiveness of neoliberal accountability as the poor are continuously categorized and made visible.

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Four Daughters of Tokoldosh: Kyrgyz Actresses Define Soviet Modernity

This article analyzes the lives of four stage personalities whose lives, career paths, and achievements connect us to the cultural makeup of Soviet Kyrgyzstan during the second half of the twentieth century. The stories of Sabira Kumushalieva, Saira Kiyizbaeva, Baken Kydykeeva, and Darkul Kuiukova take us back to an era when Kyrgyz women first took charge of their lives in a public forum. These "four daughters of Tököldösh" established the modern conventions of Kyrgyz stage and film. They helped construct idealized models for Kyrgyz women and fashioned a new Kyrgyz identity that redefined the meaning of "Sovietness."

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State as Socionatural Effect: Variable and Emergent Geographies of the State in Southeastern Turkey

This article draws on recent interventions related to everyday states, state-natures, and political ecologies of the state, as well as Timothy Mitchell’s concept of "state as effect," to detail and analyze ongoing changes in southeastern Turkey associated with the large-scale Southeastern Anatolia Project (Guneydogu Anadolu Projesi, or GAP). Using interviews and survey data, the essay details changing narrations and understandings of the Turkish state among villagers of Turkey’s southeast, revealing the importance of social and historical processes, as well as differentiated biophysical conditions and changing access to water resources for these imaginaries. The case study explains both ways that state-society relations evolve as well as ways that the state is expressed as distinct from society, in part in relation to the varied and important changes associated with the ongoing damming and diversion of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Apart from contributions to understandings of the state and state-society dynamics in the long-contested southeastern Anatolia border region, the work also advances state theory. Specifically, the article builds on arguments related to the importance of political ecology and socionatural approaches, detailing key analytics related to these approaches that provide important insights for state theory—spatiotemporalities, inequality and differentiated access to resources, scalar dynamics, and materialities of nature. Harris argues that these analytics have considerable potential to advance state theory and state-nature approaches, particularly to draw out ways that the state emerges as seemingly distinct from society—the "state effect." Scale, Harris argues, may be particularly useful toward this end and to expose other key processes of importance for states and stateness as they relate to development and nature.

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Literary Paradigms in the Conception of South Asian Muslim Identity: Muhammad Iqbal and Muhammad Hasan Askari

Literature has always played a synthesizing role in the history of Islam. The same can be said for the Urdu language and literature. Urdu was produced as a result of the mingling of Arabo-Persian-Turkish language with the indigenous languages and cultures primarily of north India. However, the Urdu language became politicized in British India first by the colonizers and then by the nationalists who insisted on giving it a specific Muslim identity distinct from Hindi. More complicated was the position of Urdu within the unity of Indian literature. After the creation of Pakistan, the dilemma for Urdu writers was how to construct a Pakistani literature that would be different from Indian Urdu. Farooqi’s essay asks the following questions: How would cultural identities be reflected in the new literature? Would Urdu in Pakistan shed the Indic part of its identity and become simply a language of Islam? Muhammad Hasan Askari, Urdu’s premier literary critic, maintained that there was a difference between Islamic and Muslim culture: Muslim culture was Islam plus local culture.

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Discursive Constructions of Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon: From the Israel-Hezbollah War to the Struggle over Nahr al-Bared

Focusing on th e particularly volatile period between the Israel-Hezbollah war (July–August 2006) and the prolonged struggle over Nahr al-Bared refugee camp (March–October 2007), this article outlines and historicizes the complex and altering landscape of discursive constructions of the Palestinian refugee presence in Lebanon. Examining some of the more prominent discursive strands that emerge in relation to Palestinian refugee presence in Lebanon, the article argues that although the recent problematization of Hezbollah initially dwarfed the Palestinian "problem," Palestinian presence in Lebanon was quickly reproblematized in the context of the protracted struggle over Nahr al-Bared and the increasing instability in and around Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp. Yet while past discursive strands have reemerged, a discursive shift is also apparent, tending in the direction of the establishment of a more conciliatory relationship between Palestinian refugees and the Lebanese state and the latter’s interest in a partial regularization of Palestinian refugee presence.

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Performing Veiled Women as Marketable Commodities: Representations of Muslim Minority Women in Germany

Why do narratives of Muslim women find a large audience in the European cultural market? In particular, stories that portray Muslim women as victims of patriarchal traditions buttress the notion of liberal freedom that excludes these women pitied for their lack of agency. This essay explores a recent German theater performance (Black Virgins, 2006) that poses itself against such victimization stories. The analysis of the performance shows, however, that the subjectivity of Muslim minority women is framed by their ability to unveil in speech and talk freely about sexuality.

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Alternative Narratives of the Veil in Contemporary Art

The Muslim veil is a heavily charged site in mainstream Western culture and media. However, its continued use as a visual shorthand for the oppressed Muslim woman, and by extension for the misogyny and violence of Islam, stands in sharp contrast to the numerous depictions of the veil present in contemporary artistic practice. This article analyzes mainstream representations of the veil and their various subtexts, before charting three alternative narratives of the veil found in contemporary art produced by artists of Muslim descent who now exhibit, and often live, in Europe and North America. The specific works examined and the new narratives of the veil they bring forward reorient the gaze. By displacing the veil, a site of cross-cultural mistranslation, they remap the world and uncover the possible spaces of transnational literacy and communication.

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A Door Ajar: National Borders and the Character of Islam in Pakistan

The modern nation-state has a national space and national borders. Yet borders are not always for defense. In Pakistan, since 2001, and from as far back as the 1980s, the premise (or implied threat) of unsecured borders on the North-West Frontier has become an unadmitted aspect of state policy which can be partly explained by a distinctive factor: the commitment of the post–General Zia state (or part of it) to a militant version of Islam. Pakistan owes its being to Islam. In August, 1947, the eastern border of the new state was opened to the flow of Muslim refugees from India. Even in those early days, the "homeland for the Muslims of India" was conceived (ideally) in two guises: either as a container for the Muslims that lived or migrated there, or as a project for making Pakistanis. The Indian Islam of large sections of the existing population was not of a kind to be respected by all architects of the new project. Before the 1980s, the state took a defensive (though sometimes accommodating) attitude toward the demands of a radical minority that society in Pakistan be brought into accord with Islamic norms. But state-sponsored processes of Islamization have since come to be deeply entwined with the cross-border conduct of policy and war in Afghanistan. Drawing particular attention to the Munir Report (1954), an inquiry into civil disturbances soon after the foundation of the country, this paper considers the events of more recent times in terms of the interdependence of two kinds of question: that of the nation-state and its borders, and that of the character of Islam in a particular country.

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The Mythology of the Veil in Europe: A Brief History of a Debate

The Islamic headscarf became an issue of controversy in Western European countries beginning in the late 1980s. This controversy increasingly began to include diverse issues such as the integration of Muslim immigrants into their host countries, the politicization of Islam, the ghettoization of Muslim populations, and the congruity of Islam with modernity. This article provides a history of this debate, with a focus on its emergence, with the aim to address the different contexts and issues raised in France, Britain, and Germany. It adopts a semiological approach in understanding the social dimensions through which an object, a form of clothing, can bear contested meanings and rouse debates that evoke unresolved problems related to immigration, secularism, and the reception of Islam in the West. The first section provides a historical narrative of the emergence of the headscarf debate in Western Europe and compares the different discursive contexts in France, Britain, and Germany. The second section proposes a mythological reading of the veil by using the notion of myth as employed by Roland Barthes. The third section argues that the myth of the veil demonstrates the conflicts between religion and society that were thought to have been resolved. Furthermore, the myth of the veil, as it emerged in European countries, functions both to present the Muslim presence in Europe as a new and sudden occurrence without a history and to distance the religious and colonial history of Europe in its search for its identity.

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Poetry, Power, Protest: Reimagining Muslim Nationhood in Northern Pakistan

This article examines the role of poetry in illuminating and challenging the meaning of citizenship in the border region of Gilgit-Baltistan, which is located in the north of Pakistan and is internationally considered as forming part of Pakistani Kashmir. Ali discusses how poetic performances constitute a critical public arena for protesting political dispossession and for nurturing a postsectarian, religious harmony in the region. The article also complicates our understanding of the state, as several of the poets in Gilgit work for the local government. From this overlapping position as local inhabitants and state officials, they seek to create spaces of poetic reflection that can help reshape the state as well as society in Gilgit-Baltistan.

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The Colonial State and Its Multiple Relations: A Case Study of Egypt

This article examines the nature of the colonial state as it existed in Egypt at the turn of the twentieth century. It delves into issues surrounding the multiple societal relations that the colonial state had to maintain to ensure its continued existence. It also considers the very nature of the colonial relationship as exemplified by the attitudes and actions of British colonial administrators in Egypt at the turn of the twentieth century.

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Contributors

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