The desire to perform “good” Muslim citizenship has inevitably altered the politics of Muslim American communities after 9/11. It has heightened class and religious cleavages within targeted communities and reinforced distinctions between “good” and “bad” Arabs, and “good” and “bad” South Asians, similar to those between “good” and “bad” Muslim citizenship.
Furthermore, it has profound implications for movements resisting the War on Terror, particularly feminist movements. As Pakistani activist Farida Shaheed commented, the “self-serving use of women’s rights as a U.S. flagstaff” for the war on Afghanistan or other interventions in the Middle East is dangerous for indigenous feminist movements, for it can lead to the perception that they are complicit with U.S. imperial policies, creating false polarities on the ground.47 However, if what was hijacked on September 11, 2001, was not just the airplanes that crashed into the World Trade Center and Pentagon but also a particular feminist discourse, there are strategies for walking the fine line between apologizing for fundamen- talism and patriarchy and justifying imperial policies that depend on a deeper analysis of the linkages between Orientalism, feminism, and U.S. imperialism. (Sunaina Maira)
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“Good citizenship” is performed by Muslim American individuals and organizations in a variety of ways, testifying loyalty to the nation and asserting belief in its democratic ideals, often through public testimonials that emphasize that Muslims are peaceful, loyal U.S. citizens. An “imperative patriotism” that deems dissent against state policies unpatriotic has long been used by the United States to suppress radical movements, such as the American Indian movement and the Black Panthers, which were considered enemies of “American values.” Although the hyperpatriotic nationalism of the post-9/11 moment has been widely acknowledged, Steven Salaita traces this imperative patriotism to the history of settler colonialism and the “need to create a juridical mentality that professes some sort of divine mandate to legitimize [the settlers’] presence on indigenous land” by dividing chosen peoples from uncivilized savages. These foundational myths continue to underwrite discourses about barbarism and civilization that legitimate the occupation of Muslim and Arab nations and the regulation, surveillance, and torture of Muslim and Arab subjects. U.S. Orientalism has legitimated imperial interventions overseas that, unlike older European forms of colonialism, often rest on covert interventions, indirect control, and a discourse of benevolent em- pire that masks the internal exclusion and violence against native peoples, African Americans, and others.
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The politics of rescue of Muslim women is also steeped in liberal concepts of individualism, autonomy, and choice that shape a binary and neo-Orientalist world view. A resurgent imperial feminism assumes that it is the United States or Western culture that must bring “freedom” to certain areas of the world, even if paradoxically via a military force– another case of white men (and white women) trying to save brown women from brown men. Missionary feminism has long produced a cultural discourse of saving Muslim women in different colonial encounters with terrorists or insurgents, ignoring the indigenous women’s movements and the complexities of race, nationalism, and class at work.
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As Razack observes, contemporary imperial feminists are only con- cerned with the violence against Third World women associated with patriarchal traditions and not with “the violence of poor educational and job access or the dislocation and forced migration of large numbers of Muslims through war.” These material issues of globalization and imperi- alism trouble “culture talk” and raise questions about the role of the United States. Such imperial feminists show little sympathy for the Afghan (and now Pakistani) women and children bombed by the United States and U.S.-backed forces, for girls who were raped and murdered by U.S. soldiers in Iraq, or for Palestinian women who live under an illegal occupation funded and supported by the United States.
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Native informants/Orientalists are crucial for this project of co-opting the liberal discourse of rights, based on gender as well as sexuality. Joseph A. Massad and Jasbir Puar have shown how the internationalizing of Western feminism has been paralleled by a universalizing discourse of rights for queer subjects that focuses on the “liberation” of gays and lesbians in the Muslim countries. NGOs focusing on gay rights have promoted a culturally specific epistemology and ontology of “rights and identities” to be imposed on non-Western societies, according to Massad, and have also collaborated with the U.S. State Department and Congress to threaten sanctions against Arab nations for their policies toward gay men; what Massad calls the “Gay International,” like international feminism, is embroiled with U.S. foreign policy. These critics do not deny that homophobia and patriarchy exist in Muslim and Arab societies, but they high- light the colonialist and Orientalist impulses that often underlie activism targeting gender and sexual politics in these societies or diasporic communities and the generally obscured ways these are linked with state policies. Feminism needs to account for state-sponsored violence and state-sanc- tioned terror inflicted on women or queers–not just abuses associated with cultural “tradition” or religion–as radical and anti-imperialist feminists have long argued.
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