Intercultural Education,

Vol. 18, No. 4, October 2007, pp. 271280

EDITORIAL

Reading Muslim women and Muslim

women reading back: transnational
feminist reading practices, pedagogy
and ethical concerns
Jasmin Zinea*, Lisa K. Taylorb and Hilary E. Davisc
aWilfrid

Laurier University, Ontario, Canada; bBishops University, Quebec, Canada;

College, York University, Toronto, Canada

cAtkinson
LisaTaylor
40Taylor
18
lisataylorbishopsu@gmail.comltaylor@ubishops.ca
000002007
&
Intercultural
10.1080/14675980701605139
CEJI_A_260365.sgm
1467-5986
2007
Editorial
andFrancis
(print)/1469-8439
Francis
Education
(online)

This special issue of Intercultural Education traces its origins to a conference panel
examining the reception and teaching of Azar Nafisis 2003 memoir Reading Lolita in
Tehran. In mid-2004 when the panel was conceived, Nafisis text was the most
popular among an explosion of memoirs, novels, nonfiction and childrens literature
by and about Muslim and Arab women being enthusiastically marketed and
consumed in North America. The papers on this panel focused on how Nafisis text
was being taken up within an Islamophobic global context in which Muslim women
were increasingly the subject of neo-Orientalist pity, fear and fascination produced
through a complex nexus of societal and imperial aggression. Now in 2007, the
surge of writing and cultural production by and about Muslim and Arab women
continuestexts which both challenge and perpetuate the currency of Orientalist
writing and representation. Within the context of the current global and geo-political
landscape and the war on terror, competing imaginariesWestern imperialist,
Orientalist, imperialist feminist as well as transnational feminist, anti-colonial and
Islamicform a contested terrain of knowledge production upon which the lives,
histories and subjectivities of Muslim women are discursively constituted, debated,
claimed and consumed through a variety of literary, academic and visual forms of
representation.
This special issue seeks to critically examine the ways these forms of representation are taken up in various educational sites and also to interrogate and reflect on
*Corresponding author. Department of Sociology, Wilfrid Laurier University, 75 University
Avenue, Waterloo, ON, N2L 3C5, Canada. Email: jzine@wlu.ca
ISSN 1467-5986 (print)/ISSN 1469-8439 (online)/07/04027110
2007 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14675980701605139

272 J. Zine et al.

pedagogies which focus on the politics and ethics of reading. To this end, we have
included scholarly papers, teacher reflections and interviews that explore the literary,
academic and cultural genres through which Muslim women are represented in relation to the pedagogical considerations, ethical concerns and political challenges arising from them.
Writing Muslim women: imperialist feminists and native informants
Since 9/11 and the ongoing war on terror, narratives by and about Muslim women
have been increasingly commodified, circulated and uncritically consumed, particularly in the West. As part of this process, a proliferation of books promising to take
the Western reader behind or beyond the veil of Muslim society and demystify
the lives of Muslim women have been fodder for a fetishistic voyeurism rooted in the
Orientalist and Western feminist preoccupation with unveiling Muslim womens
bodies and lives. Of particular interest and concern to this special issue is the
predominant paradigm framing the production, circulation and reception of these
narratives. A great deal of earlier feminist writing about Muslim women occurs
within the genre of imperialist feminism problematized by Sudbury (2000) as
feminist analyses that do not take into account the historical and structural conditions that underscore the North/South balance of power and social configurations:
To bemoan the oppression of Third World women without acknowledging the role of
racism, colonialism and economic exploitation is to engage in what black British
feminist filmmaker Pratibha Parmar calls imperial feminism, a standpoint which
claims solidarity with Third World women and women of color, but in actuality contributes to the stereotyping of Third World cultures as barbaric and uncivilized.
(Sudbury, 2000)

Transnational feminists such as Mohanty (1991), Amos and Parmar (1984), Lazreg
(1988) have critiqued imperialist feminism for its representation of subaltern
Muslim women through the binary relations of the North/South balance of power
and the corresponding construction of Muslim and Third World women as an
abject, essentialized category of other. Such representation plays into the
Manichean racial and religious divide underscoring the clash of civilizations thesis
and holds Muslim womens lives and experiences in a seemingly irreconcilable
tension with dominant Western sensibilities and democratic imperatives. Texts like
Geraldine Brooks (1994), Nine parts of desire or Jan Godwins (1995), Price of honour
provided the Western reader with authentic glimpses into the mysterious world of
the subaltern Muslim woman residing in exotic locales leading imperilled lives in
which they lack agency and voice, and require their First World sisters to become
their intellectual vanguards and political advocates. In response, trans-national
feminist discourses have centered their politics of representation on exposing the
North/South imbalance of power that has allowed feminist scholars of the North
greater access to laying claim to discursive authority over women in the South as the
objects of academic enquiry, or through more paternal and politicized tropes of
rescuing the Other.

Editorial

273

According to Lazreg, imperialist feminist writers showcase women to vent their

anger at their societies and in so doing enact a form of epistemic violence. She
argues that while they appear on the feminist stage as representatives of the
millions of women in their own societies, to what extent they do violence to the
women they claim authority to write and speak about is a question that is seldom
raised (Lazreg, 1988, p. 89). The Western/Orientalist construction of Muslim
women, therefore, with the help of dubious, yet first-hand, corroboration from
such native informants, helps maintain a certain academic currency, despite the
fact that they present distorted and static images which serve to essentialize
Muslim women through tropes of abject difference. As a result, Muslim women
have been viewed and consumed with a mixture of imperial fascination and
humanist pity, locating them at the nexus of ambivalent articulations of desire and
disavowal. In her essay Eating the Other, bell hooks takes up these contradictory
impulses arguing that: The desire to make contact with those bodies deemed
Other with no apparent will to dominate, assuages the guilt of the past, even
takes of the form of a defiant gesture where one denies accountability and
historical connection (hooks, 1992, p. 25). In the context of the Western feminist
imaginary and the representation of Muslim women, discursive moves such as
hooks describes, serve to shore up the positional superiority of white Western
feminists vis--vis other women. This creates a space of innocence where the
complicity of imperial feminists in creating this subaltern archetype can be silenced
and denied.
Playing the role of the native informant some Muslim feminist scholars have also
framed their analysis of Islam and gender in imperialist feminist terms, thus replicating, rather than undermining, the colonial discourse on Muslim women (Zine &
Bullock, 2002). In particular, sensationalist biographic tell all books like Canadian
journalist, Irshad Manjis The trouble with Islam (2003) or Dutch politician, Ayaan
Hirsi Alis Infidel (2007) represent insider truths about Islam and Muslims through
what Marnia Lazreg has termed a search for the disreputable (Lazreg, 1988, p. 89).
Read in a climate of post 9/11 war mongering against the radical Islamic Other, Azar
Nafisis memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran serves similar discursive and political aims
as an example of what can be seen as the Orientalism of Orientals. According to
Iranian scholar Hamid Dabashi (2006), Nafisis role as native informant has
allowed for an indigenized Orientalism to become valorized at the expense of antiimperial feminist politics and struggle:
[T]hrough the instrumentality of English literature, recycled and articulated by an
Oriental woman who deliberately casts herself as a contemporary Scheherazade,
[Reading Lolita in Tehran] seeks to provoke the darkest corners of the Euro-American
Oriental fantasies and thus neutralise competing sites of cultural resistance to the US
imperial designs both at home and abroad, while ipso facto denigrating the long and
noble struggle of women all over the colonised world to ascertain their rights against
both domestic patriarchy and colonial domination. (Dabashi, 2006)

Texts such as Nafisis must be read against the imperial politics that galvanize their
popularity as authorizing texts of Muslim womens imperiled lives.

274 J. Zine et al.

Creating new modalities for reading increasingly ubiquitous Orientalist
narratives as well as resistant interventions is a necessary pedagogical project that
must begin with unraveling the representational practices that shape and define
our access to understanding and making sense of Muslim womens lives. AntiOrientalism as a political and pedagogical project is engaged through developing
counter narratives to the clichd images of Muslim women represented through
victim-centered tropes and instead positions new readings based on critical
hermeneutic practices that dismantle these racially and religiously degenerative
constructs.
From post-colonial critique to anti-colonial praxis: pedagogical interventions
In discussing the politics of knowledge production, Edward Said (1978) has argued
that: because of Orientalism, the Orient was not (and is not) a free subject of
thought or action, meaning that the terms for entering into discussions of the Orient
and of Muslims or Muslim women, have already been discursively determined. As a
result, there is no pure space from which to create counter-narratives that capture
the complexity which recurrent archetypes obscure and deny (Zine, 2002). The
hegemony of neo-Orientalist imaginaries within the contemporary political and
discursive landscape therefore must be continually and vigilantly challenged in order
to make space for new articulations of Muslim womens lives and lived experiences.
While this discursive space will always bear the imprint of imperial legacies and
contemporary forms of Islamophobia, new pedagogies of dissent are needed to
counter the continuing miseducation within the political and public sphere. We see
this as a form of anti-colonial pedagogy that moves beyond the space of post-colonial
critique toward anti-colonial praxis.
It is important to clarify that we locate this feminist anti-Orientalist political and
pedagogical project in the public sphere and not only in classrooms. We understand
these diverse sites of literary and, more broadly, cultural production, circulation and
active consumption as the terrain of a broad Freirean pedagogical project within
which we learn to read the world through different regimes of truth and to imagine
our way into particular subject positions and against others.
In this issue, Catherine Burwell and Mehre Khan draw our attention to the
accelerated, commercialized traffic(king) in textual and visual representations of
subaltern Muslim women within a hyper-mediated public sphere as well as
academic spaces of teaching and research. Burwell, for example, proposes that
educational researchers concerned with the cultural politics of empire might fruitfully examine book clubs as an important site of public pedagogy, offering a
detailed analysis of the increased targeting of such clubs in literary marketing
through the example of Nafisis memoir. Khan argues that the interactive nature
of contemporary art can contribute to anti-racist dialogue not only in the
museum or gallery but also the feminist classroom. Both authors remind educators and cultural producers that our work lies very much in the realm of public
imaginaries.

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275

The post-9/11 years have also witnessed a surge of resistant and reconstructive
writing by Muslim authors, artists and scholars, one which builds upon a long
history of anti-colonial and anti-patriarchal cultural politics/expression. For example, Lila Azam Zanganehs anthology, My sister guard your veil; my brother guard your
eyes: uncensored Iranian voices (2006) and Keshavarz autobiographical Jasmine and
stars: reading more than Lolita in Tehran (2007), intervene directly in the marketing
and reception of Nafisis memoir, providing the cultural, political and historical
context suspiciously excluded in the latter. Significantly, Keshavarz book jacket
presents two brightly and casually veiled fashionable Tehrani demonstrators and
translates the feminist demands on their placards. This publishing decision responds
directly to the iconic burglary of Nafisis bookjacket, in which a photo of Tehrani
college students reading the leading reformist newspaper Mosharekat in front of a
poster of the reformist politician, Mohammad Khatami, has been cropped down to
the isolated, stereotyped image of two womens bowed, darkly veiled heads
(Dabashi, 2006). Likewise, in this special issue, Lindsey Moore juxtaposes counterrepresentations to the photographic imaginary harem (Alloula cited in Moore,
2007) and visual discursive economies of French colonization of Algeria mounted by
Malek Alloula, Frantz Fanon and contemporary novelist/filmmaker Assia Djebar
and artist Zineb Sedira. Moore examines the Algerian woman, as a contested and
mobile signifier, read as produced by, but always in excess of, historically-specific
discourses and differently-embodied reading/spectating positions (Moore, 2007).
Her unpacking of the Muslim woman as a semiotic subject, provides a politically
subversive hermeneutics.
Anti-Orientalist resistance is not only deconstructivecritiquing Imperialist
stereotypes and assumptions about Western superioritybut also constructive in
offering alternative contemporary and traditional representations of Muslim
women which resist easy identifications and pat understandings of Islam. Most
importantly, the audiences of these new cultural and scholarly productions are not
monolithic but rather multiple and overlapping, dynamic and often emergent. For
example, author Mohja Kahf (interviewed in this issue) describes her audiences as
diverse and intersectingnot only Muslim, Arab, faith-based, and academicbut
also (in her words), Boomer leftists, conservative young Christians. Afro-centric
African Americans. White suburbanites. Urban people of color with scathing
critiques of mainstream white America. Grandmothers next door, students who
graduate and write me (Davis et al., 2007). Similarly, in Little mosque on the prairie,
Canadian filmmaker Zarqa Nawaz (interviewed in this issue) subverts both
Orientalist expectations and the television comedy format to offer complex and
contemporary interpretations of what are usually stock characters and situations
while stimulating debate within a diaspora of faith-based communities of viewers.
And Mona Hatoum (discussed in Khan in this issue), a Palestinian-Lebanese-British
performance, video, and installation artist uses text, taped conversation, photography, and voice-over narration which juxtaposes Arabic and English to explore the
trauma of war and exile and new affiliations/identities these engender. Recent
anthologies, like Sarah Husains Voices of resistance: Muslim women on war, faith and

276 J. Zine et al.

sexuality (2006) (reviewed in this issue), also create a diasporic dialogue among their
selections of poetry, literature, and nonfiction.
Arguing that we live in many times, not just the new time of advertising and the
media (Shohat & Stam, cited in Burwell, 2007), Burwell reminds us that, just as
time is palimpsestic, so pedagogies of public imaginaries must also be continually
reasserted within and against the legacies of imperial history. For example, the
billboard artwork of Jamelie Hassan (interviewed in this issue), Because there was and
there wasnt a city of Baghdad (1991- ) in its current prominent location on the
University of British Columbia campus, juxtaposes and repositions disparate formations of public memory in the context of the ongoing US-led war and occupation of
Iraq. Hassan uses a 1978 photograph of a mosque to evoke both an imaginary
Baghdad of Orientalist myth as well as the actual destruction of the contemporary
citythe Baghdad that never was and the Baghdad that is no more.
The task for anti-racist feminist cultural and knowledge workers is to intervene in
these public pedagogies by building communities capable of critically and reflexively
reading and imagining within and against our complex locations. This project
returns us to the pedagogical challenge implied in Spivaks famous query: [c]an the
subaltern speak. We need to address the related question can the subaltern be
heard?: that is, what pedagogical conditions and reading strategies, what forms of
critical reflexivity, visual, literary and aesthetic and epistemic literacy might ground a
practice of listening and imagining for First World embedded readers (Hunt &
Rygiel, 2006)? In response to this question, an important landmark for this special
issue is Amireh and Majajs Going global: the transnational reception of third world
women writers (2000) which argues that such a practice implies both demystifying
axiomatic imperial constructions (such as victim, escapee, fundamentalist, traditional
(Kahf, 2007)) and rendering visible the ideological and material relations structuring
the reading encounter (Amireh & Majaj, 2000). This attention to the politics of
reception recognizes that even resistant texts cannot secure deconstructive readings,
but are always already worlded (Said, 1993) within particular material and
discursive relations of exchange (Amireh & Majaj, 2000, p.12) as well as reading
formations which produce particular reading dispositions and desires.
Spivaks question draws our attention to the complicity of epistemic and material
violence within the cultural politics of representation and imagination. Signaling the
double meaning of representation (darstellenportrayingand vertretenacting as
proxy), she proposes an ethical practice in which readers resist the tendency to
constitute broad, monolithic identities in the name of whom we read as, read about,
and speak/act on behalf of (Spivak, 1988, pp. 276279; 1990, pp. 108110). These
modalities of reading are learned and contested within the public pedagogies of
empire and have immediate consequences in terms of the forms of violence and
resistance they incite/licence. In Bush/Cheneys 2004 electoral campaign, for
example, the slogan W stands for Women re-constructed a slippery, structurally
exclusionary category of women, inviting North American feminists to read about
Afghani and Iraqi womens violated living conditions as innocent sister saviors and
to support the US Afghan and Iraqi missions on behalf of all womens rights despite

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277

this governments ongoing refusal, alone in the industrialized world, to ratify the
Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (Eisenstein,
2006).
Spivaks ethics of reading encourages a suspicion of those identity categories
mobilized in the act of reading, speaking and acting as, about, for and against and
instead challenges differently positioned readers to earn the right to criticize
(Spivak, 1990, p. 62) by doing the homework required to historically contextualize
texts and readers, and thus to learn to read and act in relation to. This pedagogical
attention to how we read, speak and act in relation to is crucial to visual artist Jamelie
Hassan (interviewed in this issue), for example, as her activist interventions into
public spaces grow out of relations of solidarity and collaboration with First Nations
and other anti-colonial and antiwar struggles.
Mehre Khan, Alnaaz Kassam, zlem Sensoy, Asma Barlas and Lisa K. Taylors
pieces propose pedagogical strategies in different settings which ground a practice of
reading in relation to differently positioned authors, characters and audiences, and
reading in relation to differently imagined epistemologies, collectivities, affiliations,
historical memories and desired futures.
All five educators address the politics of representation centrally in their pedagogy
as they foreground in their practice the tensions inherent to the complex subject
locations from which they teach and read. Sensoy teaches explicitly from the
complexity of her subject location as a white Turkish immigrant academic in urging
her teacher candidates to situate and redefine the locations from which they
construct racialized relations of ethnicity, faith, citizenship and East/West. Kassam
challenges Eurocentric canons and dominant secondary school literature curriculum, selecting texts and creating a classroom environment of critical anti-racist literacy and dialogue within which her students are encouraged to read as dynamic
subjects complexly located within intersecting relations of historical memory,
spiritual affiliation, global citizenship, cultural consumption and geographies of
migration and assimilation.
Khan argues that Hatoums post-colonial autobiographical video art uniquely
facilitates her undergraduate students development of a critically reflexive visual
literacy in relation to the Western memory museum of (neo)Orientalist visual economies (Sontag in Khan, 2007): it does so by utilizing the personal and familiar to
demystify notions of the foreign and troubling the seeming transparency of experiential and televisual knowledge. In challenging students to examine [their] own
relationship to dominant modes of visual communication, colonialist histories,
gendered and racialized political economies, she maintains that such interactive art
establishes alternative spectatorships which reflexively read in relation to insurgent
and diasporic identities mobiliz[ing] desire, memory, and fantasy where identities
are not only the given of where one comes from but also the political identification
with where one is trying to go (Shohat in Khan, 2007).
Spivaks challenge for educators and students to historicize critically the geopolitical locations from which they read, speak and make knowledge claims incites an
array of refusals and negotiations explored by Barlas whose students struggle to

278 J. Zine et al.

redefine epistemological and ontological taxonomies within which to read and speak
about Islam, Christianity and secularism. Barlas confides that her most intimate
struggle itself lies in the epistemic stakes in her own embodied pedagogy as a Muslim
professor: whether one can inhabit a subject from the inside and still treat it as
open (Barlas, 2007).
Critically examining the reading modalities promoted by dominant contemporary
approaches to teaching multicultural and transnational literature in schools
multicultural education and reader response pedagogyTaylor speculates on the
forms of reflexivity made possible when teacher candidates are asked to critically
situate their responses to the work of diverse Muslim feminists authors in relation to
diverse audiences, discursive contexts of reception and embodied locations within
racialized political economies. This analysis grounds her proposal of a recursive
pedagogy that critically historicizes and situates an embodied ethics of reading.
The critical literacy demanded by Spivaks ethics of reading implies interdisciplinary
strategies learned not only from postcolonial criticismSaids (1978, 1993) contrapuntal analysis which geopolitically and discursively situates textsbut also feminist
anti-colonial pedagogies which both situate the production of differently embodied
reading subjectivities and build critically reflexive, politically engaged communities of
practice. Echoing Hussain (2006), then, we hope this special issue both invokes and
convokes an expanding community of critical and creative pedagogical practice.
Acknowledgements
The editors wish to express our deepest appreciation to the peer reviewers of this
special edition for their generous and expert contributions.
Peer reviewers
Nahla Abdo, Carleton University
Ali Asgharzadeh, York University
Safoi-Babana Hampton, Michigan State University
Kathy Bullock, University of Toronto
Catherine Burwell, OISE/UT, University of Toronto
Nombuso Dlamini, University of Windsor
Michelle Hartman, McGill University
Yasmin Jiwani, Concordia University
Shahnaz Khan, Wilfrid Laurier University
Farzeneh Milani, University of Virginia
Shabana Mir, Independent Scholar
Wendy OShea Meddour, Oxford University
Meena Sharify-Funk, Wilfrid Laurier University
Jyotsna Singh, Michigan State University
Goli-Rezai Rashti, University of Western Ontario
Sonia James-Wilson, University of Rochester

Editorial

279

Notes on contributors
Jasmin Zine (PhD OISE/UT, University of Toronto) is an Assistant Professor in the
Department of Sociology at the Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada.
She teaches in the area of critical race and ethnic studies and education and
social justice. Her research and publications have focused on anti-racism education and inclusive schooling, as well as Muslims and education in the Canadian
diaspora. In the area of Muslim womens studies, she has published articles on
Islamic feminism in the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion and the Muslim
World Journal of Human Rights.
Lisa K. Taylor (PhD OISE/UT, University of Toronto) is an Associate Professor at
Bishops University in Quebec, Canada. She teaches in the area of social justice
education, critical race and ethnic studies in education and literature education.
Her research and publications have focused on social justice teacher education,
critical multicultural, multilingual and multiliteracies curriculum, with a
particular focus on postcolonial feminist perspectives on language and literacy
education (in TESOL Quarterly and Critical Inquiry in Language Studies).
Hilary E. Davis (PhD OISE/UT, University of Toronto) currently teaches in the
School of Arts and Letters, Atkinson College, York University, Toronto,
Ontario, Canada and has also taught in the Philosophy Department at York
University and the Philosophy of Education Program at OISE/UT. Her areas of
research combine feminist aesthetics, critical approaches to multicultural literature education, and continental philosophy. She has published on feminist and
anti-racist approaches to an aesthetics of reading in Educational Theory, New
Literary History, and The Proceedings of the Philosophy of Education Society.

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