Individualism

In his 2015 book The Militant, author and researcher Muhammad Amir Rana published dozens of interviews that he conducted of young Islamist militants who had ...

Once formed and reinforced through political and ideological tools, the identity is proliferated and becomes an identity of a community or a group. To justify the adoption of traditional aesthetics, many Islamic feminists spent a lot of energy in trying to pass a camel through the eye of a needle. Islamic feminism largely appeared during a period when a persecution complex and sense of victimhood in the West was engulfing Muslims residing there. Their aim is not to question the male gaze, for example, but to dim the critical gaze of secular feminism on Islamic feminism. Faced with the spectre of Islamophobia in the West, they gave themselves the role of saviours who wanted to ‘prove’ that the reasons behind any violence committed by Islamists had their roots in colonialism, the forced imposition of modernity and that of secularism. They were still in the midst of romanticising Islamic traditionalism to justify the new self-orientalist stereotypes that they had helped create, when the hijab debates and protests exploded in Iran. But the Muslims seem to be okay with this because the new stereotypes were constructed to attract the attention of the West, to stand apart but within a willfully ghettoised group that encourages homogeneity and demonises the whole idea of choice. Indeed, this is one way of doing it, but Islamic feminism seeks a mild, middle path in which women venture into male-dominated spheres and spaces only after agreeing to adopt garments of ‘modesty’ so as not to attract the male gaze. More disconcerting is the way in which assembly-line-individuality has seeped into the corridors of the academia. It was curious because it could be adopted by a large body of people all at once and outside the context of bureaucratised nationalism. Nevertheless, the need to adopt an identity and become part of a group never went away. Rapid changes in various fields in the last 150 years birthed a need in many to adopt at least some form of individualism.