Femonationalism is the term I introduce to describe both how nationalist right-wing parties exploit feminist ideas within Islamophobic campaigns, and the ways some feminists and femocrats endorse anti-Islam agendas in the name of women’s rights. I analyze how and why parties such as the Northern League in Italy, the National Front in France, and the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands have shown “concern” for Muslim women, describing them as “victims to be rescued,” while stigmatizing Muslim and other non-Western male immigrants as women’s worst enemies. {. . .} I wrote this book mostly because I wanted to introduce a political-economic perspective into the scholarly and activists’ debates on the new faces of Islamophobia. What I note in the book, more specifically, is that we should pay attention to the gendered double standard the mainstream media apply to migrant men and women, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. We need to decipher its economic rationality alongside its “culturalist” expressions.
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Islamic law from below: Between trust and distrust
by
Anver Emon
Rumee Ahmed’s Sharia Compliant begins with a letter to his Muslim readers. The Arabic term for “letter” is risala, a term that begins the titles of important historical sources of Islamic law. Muhammad b. Idris al-Shafi’i’s legal theory (usul al-fiqh) text is simply entitled al-Risala, or the Epistle of al-Shafi‘i (al-risala li’l-Shafi‘i). Reviewing Ahmed’s Sharia Compliant, I could not help but feel that Ahmed is reaching out and turning the pages for me as I read his own risala. Indeed, Ahmed’s latest work reflects the voice of an author who cares about both his subject and, most importantly, his reader. His study is about Islamic law, and in particular, the possibilities of reform. . . . To center the textuality of law—and all that it implies by way of training, expertise, and the resulting elitism of legal analysis—ultimately reinstantiates the dominant paradigm of law, where the authority granted to the text masks the elitism of those who make an exclusive (and exclusionary) claim of competence and expertise to read them. This critique is not unique to Islamic law. The field of legal studies is peppered with a number of studies about law “from below,” where the hierarchy embedded in expertise and professionalization is the subject of critique.