The private is political: Women and family in intellectual Islam
Abstract
In Hiba Ra'uf's Woman and Political Work, she argues that the family is the basic
political unit of the Islamic community or nation (the umma). Her thesis is both feminist
and Islamist, as she argues that the 'private is political'. By drawing analogies
between family and umma, family and caliphate, the personal and the political, the
private and public, Ra'uf seeks to dismantle the oppositions of secular society, to
challenge the division of society into discrete spheres. This entails an implicit
challenge to the secular state, but effected through the politics of the family. An
Islamic family, she argues, is a powerful site for the transformation of socio-political
institutions; a politics of the microcosmic with macrocosmic ramifications, effected
through the very embodiment and practice of an Islamic ethos at a grassroots, capillary
level. However, though Ra'uf contests liberal secularism's division of spheres with
feminist and Islamist critical methods, she reproduces some of its fundamental assumptions
about the nature of the family: as the domain of religion, in opposition to the secular
state; as rooting community, in opposition to the individualism of the citizen; as
an ethics grounded in affect; and as an essentially feminine world. In making the
family the sphere of Islamic politics, Ra'uf re-enacts secularism's division of spheres,
sacralizing the affective bonds of intimate relations and making the family the domain
of religion. Furthermore, by emphasizing the family as the domain of women's political
work, she reinscribes the family as a feminine sphere, so that woman's vocation is
familial, as is her ethical disposition. © The Author(s) 2010.
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https://hdl.handle.net/10161/6954Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1177/1464700110366805Publication Info
McLarney, E (2010). The private is political: Women and family in intellectual Islam. Feminist Theory, 11(2). pp. 129-148. 10.1177/1464700110366805. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/6954.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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Ellen McLarney
Associate Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

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