Justice as Righteous Duty: Notes from an Islamic Feminist Movement in India
The question of gender justice vis-à-vis minority religious communities has been understood in liberal political theory either in terms of the discourse of multiculturalism and the preservation of a cultural identity or in terms of the accommodation of religious reasons by universal liberal categories of freedom, equality, and autonomy. This paper instead illuminates the female religious subject’s constitution of a vocabulary of rights using a category of moral agency. It illustrates the imbrication of a discourse of rights by ideas of everyday justice forged in a site of negotiation between the normative and the contingent. Building upon participant observation in the training sessions of a movement for gender justice by Muslim women in Mumbai inspired by a global discourse of Islamic feminism, this article argues for a new way of thinking about justice vis-à-vis the minority identity that escapes the ethnocentrism of universal liberal categories while arguing for a rethinking of identity as an entry point into rights discourses.
Date: 31 October 2018, 14:00
Venue: St Antony's College, 62 Woodstock Road OX2 6JF
Venue Details: Dahrendorf Room
Speakers: Sagnik Dutta (University of Cambridge), Prof. Faisal Devji (University of Oxford)
Organisers: Udit Bhatia (University of Oxford), Amogh Dhar Sharma (University of Oxford)
Organiser contact email address: amogh.sharma@wolfson.ox.ac.uk
Part of: South Asian Political Thought Discussion Group
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Public
Editor: Udit Bhatia