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Engaged Surrender in the Void: Post-Secularist “Human” Rights Discourse and Muslim Feminists [sic]+

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 April 2015

Emily Albrink Hartigan
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Extract

“Human” rights discourse is inherently multicultural, and multicultural discourse is messy. The academese for that goes something like this: I am an “agnostic and ambivalent subject of a double, decentered multicultural choice” (see the following quotations) and my text comes from a minority stance in a “different context.”

“[A]ffirmative multi-culturalism” can bring no such closure and composure to the subject of cultural choice. Its subjectivity is performatively constituted in the very tension that makes knowledge of cultural difference dense, conglomerative, and nondeliberative. What emerges is an agonistic and ambivalent subject of a double, decentered multicultural choice. (emphasis added)—Homi K. Bhabha

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Law and Religion , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , 2006 , pp. 131 - 151
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University 2006

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Footnotes

+

See the text accompanying infra n. 35-36.

References

1. That stance is then reversed: I presented this as an openly post-secular Quatholic at a staunchly secular Feminism and Legal Theory Workshop in March 2006 at Emory Law School, but now publish it in a journal in which the voice of religion is primary. Hartigan, Emily A., Workshop Presentation, Engaged Surrender in the Void: Post-Secularist “Human” Rights Discourse and Muslim Feminism (Emory L. Sch., 03 4, 2006)Google Scholar (copy of audio on file with Emory L. Sch. L. Lib).

2. Bhabha, Homi K., On Cultural Choice, in The Turn to Ethics 181, 187 (Garber, Marjorie, Hanssen, Beatrice, Walkowitz, Rebecca L. eds., Routledge 2000)Google Scholar.

3. Daly, Mary, Amazon Grace: Re-Calling the Courage to Sin Big 19 (Palgrave Macmillan 2006)Google Scholar (quoting Daly, Mary, Webster's First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language, Conjured in Cahoots with Jane Caputi (Beacon Press 1987)Google Scholar).

4. Id. at 21, 29.

5. al-Hibri, Azizah Yahia, Muslim Women's Rights in the Global Village: Challenges and Opportunities, 15 J.L. & Religion 37, 64–65 (2000–2001)Google Scholar.

6. Williams, Patricia J., The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Harv. U. Press 1991)Google Scholar.

7. Id. at 3.

8. Daly notes that the “deadly seriousness that prevails in the early twenty-first century is appalling to those women who can see this as a sign of spiritual decay” and calls for Elemental Laughing as a declaration of independence from the prevailing mentality. Daly, supra n. 3, at 37.

9. The absence of women and of any Muslims at a major conference on religion and postmodernism was duly noted by Jacques Derrida, and that notation picked up by Marie Ashe. Marie Ashe, Limits of Tolerance, infra n. 42, at 614.

10. Bhabha, supra n. 2, at 198.

11. Derrida, Jacques, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (Bass, Alan trans., U. Chi. Press 1987)Google Scholar.

12. Sommer, Doris, Attitude, Its Rhetoric, in The Turn To Ethics 201 (Garber, Marjorie, Hanssen, Beatrice & Walkowitz, Rebecca L. eds., Routledge 2000)Google Scholar.

13. If indeed there is what my tradition calls a Resurrection, an Other-life, then all tears will be washed away—perhaps by tears of laughter—and life is an indescribably rich Cosmic Joke. Of course, that's if I'm right and both you (the reader) and I and the atheists and the Methodists and the Zoroastrians are Resurrected.

14. Sommer, supra n. 12, at 206.

15. And risk, in my own way, the colonial (my primary referent for “colonial”—being from Virginia originally—involves old brick and dentals) penalty: public humiliation, having locked myself in the stocks of my printed text.

16. Smith, James K.A., Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-Secular Theology (Baker Academic 2004)Google Scholar; Blond, Phillip, Post-Secular Philosophy: Between Philosophy and Theology (Routledge 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Asad, Talal, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam Modernity (Stanford U. Press 2003)Google Scholar; Cooey, Paula, Willing the Good: Jesus, Dissent and Desire (Fortress Press 2006)Google Scholar.

17. Damasio, Antonio R., Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (Putnam 1994)Google Scholar. A particularly sophisticated but accessible recent discussion of the role of emotion in public discourse and law is Abrahm, Kathryn, Legal Feminism and the Emotions: Three Moments in an Evolving Relationship, 28 Harv. J.L. & Gender 325 (2005)Google Scholar.

18. Cooey, supra n. 16, at 124.

19. See Cornell, Drucilla, The Philosophy of the Limit (Routledge 1992)Google Scholar.

20. Cooey notes that Eastern versions of secularism are more socialist (in the case of some Islamic versions, I would suggest familial and communal). Cooey, supra n. 16, at 113.

21. Id.

22. See e.g. Fehrenbach, T.R., Politically Speaking, Christian Liberals Left Behind, San Antonio Express-News 3H (12 11, 2005) (available at http://www.mysanantonio.com/opinion/Columnists/trfehrenback/stories/MYSA121105.3H.fehrenbach.1bba79cf.html)Google Scholar.

23. Wallis, Jim, God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It (HarperSanFrancisco 2005)Google Scholar.

24. Asad, sapra n. 16, at 62.

25. Id. at 66.

26. Id. at 208-209.

27. Id. at 253.

28. Id. at 256.

29. Id.

30. Despite its odor of polytheism, yes, Catholics do Gaia. See McFague, Sallie, The Body of Cod: An Ecological Theology (Fortress Press 1993)Google Scholar; Zayac, O.P. Sharon Therese, Earth Spirituality in the Catholic and Dominican Traditions (Sor Juana Press 2003)Google Scholar.

31. al-Hibri, Azizah Yahia, Islam, Law and Custom: Redefining Muslim Women's Rights 12 Am. U. J. Intl. L. & Policy 1 (1997)Google Scholar.

32. Id. at 3.

33. Id. at 3-4.

34. Id. at 4.

35. Wadud, Amina, Qur'an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Texts from a Woman's Perspective xviii (2d ed., Oxford U. Press 1999)Google Scholar.

36. The initial title failed to include [sic], which now signals the inherent incompleteness of any such “multicultural” texts.

37. Sommer, supra n. 12, at 207.

38. The (non) grounding is there to see, however—Wadud does not elaborate on “engaged surrender” in her text for Muslim women; but in academic meta-conversation, she directly traces this idea of Islam to “the sufis, or Muslim mystics.” Wadud, Amina, Alternative Qur'anic Interpretation and the Status of Muslim Women, in Windows of Faith: Muslim Women Scholar-Activists in North America 3, 11 (Webb, Gisela ed., Syracuse U. Press 2000)Google Scholar. Similarly, in describing her path to Islam in the same book, Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons says she was drawn by “its mystical and spiritual aspects” as taught by a Sufi, who initiated her into Sufistic practice and stories. Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons, Striving for Muslim Women's Human Rights—Before and Beyond Beijing: An African American Perspective, in Windows of Faith, supra at 197, 201.

39. Sommer, supra n. 12, at 37. Sommer refers to the reader of a “fragile text” but I attribute this excellence and delicacy to these women in their address within the dominant discourses they must navigate.

40. Williams, Rowan, The Necessary Non-Existence of God, in Weil, Simone, Philosophy of Culture: Readings Toward a Divine Humanity 52, (Bell, Richard ed., Cambridge U. Press 1993)Google Scholar.

41. Carrette, Jeremy R., Foucault and Religion: Spiritual Corporality and Political Spirituality (Routledge 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42. See e.g. Derrida, Jacques & Caputo, John D., Deconstruction in a Nutshell: a Conversation with Jacques Derrida (Fordham U. Press 1997)Google Scholar.

43. Ashe, Marie, Limits of Tolerance: Law and Religion After the Anti-Christ, 24 Cardozo L. Rev. 587 (2003)Google Scholar.

44. Williams, Rowan, Archbishop of Canterbury, Sermons and Speeches, Remarks at a reception to mark the inaugural meeting of the Christian-Muslim Forum, 01 24, 2006, ¶ 11-12, http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/sermons_speeches/060124.htm (accessed Aug. 24, 2006)Google Scholar.

45. Id. ¶ 12.

46. McLaren, Brian D., A Generous Orthodoxy: Why I Am a Missionai, Evangelical, Post/Protestant, Liberal/Conservative, Mystical/Poetic. Biblical, Charismatic/Contemplative, Fundamentalist/Calvinist, Anabaptist/Anglican, Methodist, Catholic, Green, Incarnational, Depressed-yet-Hopeful, Emergent, Unfinished CHRISTIAN (Zondervan 2004)Google Scholar.

47. Williams, supra n. 43, ¶ 11.

48. Fulkerson, Mary McClintock, Changing the Subject: Women's Discourse and Feminist Theology 332 (Fortress Press 1994)Google Scholar.

49. Many atheists and agnostics are, in my experience, superb practitioners of the Affirmative Impossible.

50. Much of the post-Nietzsche “religion” of the People of the Book in this space of awareness of not-knowing is elegantly explored by Marie Ashe. Ashe, supra n. 9, at 587.

51. Wadud, supra n. 35, at xxv.

52. Id. at xviii.

53. It amazes me that some people think that they have thought of more reasons why the Catholic Church is impossible than have I, who have to live with it every day, and who left it for fifteen years to sit as an agnostic among non-theistic Quakers. It's like thinking you know better than someone else what their relationship with their partner is, after they've been in therapy for years, only it tends to be more intellectually presumptuous than that.

54. It's a Mystery, for Mary's sake. Get over it. See also Tracy, David, Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion and Hope (Harper & Row 1987)Google Scholar.

55. Al-Hibri, supra n. 5, at 39.

56. Wadud supra n. 38, at 8.

57. Id.

58. Id. at 9.

59. Id. at 15.

60. Wadud, supra n. 35, at 52.

61. Id.

62. Id. at 52.

63. Id. at 55.

64. al-Hibri, Azizah Y., An Introduction to Muslim Women's Rights, in Windows of Faith: Muslim Women Scholar-Activists in North America 51, 54 (Webb, Gisela ed., Syracuse U. Press 2000)Google Scholar.

65. Al-Hibri, supra n. 5, at 47.

66. al-Hibri, Azizah, Qur'anic Foundations of the Rights of Muslim Women in the Twenty-First Century, in Women in Indonesian Society: Access, Empowerment and Opportunity 3, 9 (Mudzhar, M. Athoet al. eds., Sunan Kalijaga Press 2001) (available at http://www.karamah.org/docs/azizah_quranicfoundationsofmwr.pdf)Google Scholar.

67. Id. at 14-15.

68. Id. at 19-20.

69. PBS NOW, “Bill Moyers Interviews Azizah al-Hibri” (PBS Feb. 15, 2002) (TV broadcast, transer.) (available at http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_alhibri.html).

70. Bhabha, supra n. 2, at 198 (emphasis in original).