ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I share a set of concerns about the unanticipated complexities involved in writing and activism on women’s issues in Muslim societies today. I do so by critically analyzing how discourses on fatwas2 ‘against women’ in Bangladesh – accounts of which first made international headlines in the mid1990s, and which have re-emerged as an issue of national concern in 2009 – travel across political, cultural and geographical spaces.3 I map the frames through which the production, circulation and social meanings of fatwas that originate in the Bangladeshi countryside quickly take on transnational social lives of their own.4 The meanings of these ostensibly religious rulings, used locally to justify the actions of informal village tribunals against ‘unruly’ and usually impoverished women, shift as they move across national and transnational spaces. At the local level, fatwa cases tend to be enmeshed in local power struggles, and are rarely about contested interpretations of religious texts. For the urban nationalist intelligentsia, however, the rise and fall in reports of fatwas in remote localities indexes the degree of fundamentalist threats to the national body politic. In the international context, the word fatwa recalls the Rushdie episode and related spectres of religious militancy underlying even so-called moderate Muslim societies. Finally, in the spaces of transnational feminism, fatwa stories fit into existing narratives of harmful cultural practices in the third world as well as the general fundamentalist threat to women’s human rights. I begin with an exploration of the politics of representation of issues relat-
ing to Muslim women in the post 9/11 world. I go on to argue that dominant framings of the subject inside Bangladesh – in the popular imagination and in policy/activist circles – are over-determined by both the global and national contexts. Globally, the rising hegemony of culture talk, to use Mahmood Mamdani’s phrase, not only dehistoricizes the construction of political identities but also encourages the culturalization/Islamization of politics itself in Muslim societies (Mamdani 2002).5 The circulation of reconstituted transnational scripts of a deracinated (and patriarchal) Islam sets the stage for and works in conjunction with a longstanding nationalist ambivalence toward Islam in Bangladesh to produce highly reductive readings of what the fatwa problem is about, or even what a fatwa is. The subsequent reluctance to mark
the distance between generalized patriarchal domination and religion/Islam – the tendency to reduce the problem to one of Islam – casts a long shadow on feminist and legal activism.
