In Hajar's Footsteps: a De-Colonial and Islamic Ethic of Care by Sarah Munawar M.A., the University of British Columbia, 2014
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In Hajar’s Footsteps: A De-Colonial and Islamic Ethic of Care by Sarah Munawar M.A., The University of British Columbia, 2014 B.A., The University of Toronto, 2013 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (Political Science) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) December 2019 © Sarah Munawar, 2019 The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the dissertation entitled: In Hajar’s Footsteps: A De-Colonial and Islamic Ethic of Care submitted by Sarah Munawar in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science Examining Committee: Dr. Barbara Arneil Co-Supervisor Dr. Ayesha Chaudhry Co-Supervisor Dr. Joan Tronto Supervisory Committee Member Dr. Glen Coulthard University Examiner Dr. Renisa Mawani University Examiner Additional Supervisory Committee Members: Supervisory Committee Member Supervisory Committee Member ii Abstract This dissertation radically reimagines the boundaries of political theory as a practice and as a tradition in three ways. First, I surface the ableist and colonial paradigm of recognition that shapes the study of Islam and the “Muslim Other” in comparative political theory and care ethics. The colonial legacy of political theory lives on within the textual sensibilities of political theorists, inherited from white-orientated reading practices, epistemic white privilege, and matricide as an epistemological orientation. Refusing to (un)learn how colonial histories of sense-contact have shaped our practices of reading and writing compromises the witnessing capacities of political theorists. In turn, we become complicit in authoring and authorizing colonial world-building practices. Second, I trace how white-orientated and heteropatriarchal conceptions of citizenship travel through the inheritance of the nation-state. Imperial readings of disability, (inter)dependency and care, both within and outside the Islamic tradition, render Muslim women and disabled Muslims as misfits in our knowledge relations. Through auto- ethnography I argue care-based modes of knowing Islam are needed to theorize accessibility because 1) disabled Muslims and care-givers remain visible only through frames of charity or tragedy; 2) situations of dependency care render one ontologically and epistemically incapable of sensing and knowing the Islamic; 3) interpretive authority is sanctioned by legal scholars, Muslim men, or white and secular scholars; and 4) narratives of informal care-giving, care-based epistemologies of Islam and the epistemic authority of disabled Muslims and Muslim women are denigrated within the ecology of Islamic knowledges. I design various care-based and intersectional Islamic technologies by which (non)Muslims can harness care as a critical sensibility that orients how we read, write and think about what is “Islamic”, whose bodies we iii identify as interpretive authorities, and which types of knowledge we authorize as “Islam.” Third, I turn away from imagining moral epistemologies of care to focus on the praxis behind care-based epistemologies of Islam and its vast potential for coalitional politics and de-colonial movement building. By de-centering whiteness, I re-conceive what it means to be a Muslim on Turtle Island and practice Islam in a settler-colonial society. iv Lay Summary In the traditions of political theory and Islam, disability, care and dependency are perceived as tragedies, punishments and tests that seriously limit one’s ability to be an independent, free and rational person. Just as racist political theorists have written off Muslims as passive, uncivilised, dependent and obedient followers of Islam, the contributions of disabled Muslims and Muslim women are cast to the margins of Islamic knowledge systems. By reflecting on my family’s situation in a relationship of dependency care, I offer a care-based way of knowing Islam and doing political theory that radically re-imagines how we understand tradition, knowledge production and personhood. A method that centres care-work and interdependency helps us not only account for the colonial legacy of the Islamic tradition and political theory as a practice, but it also opens up space to re-imagine relations of interdependency (and responsibility) between Muslims and Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island. v Preface I identified and designed this research program in consultation with my supervisory committee. vi Table of Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iii Lay Summary ................................................................................................................................. v Preface ........................................................................................................................................... vi Table of Contents ......................................................................................................................... vii List of Tables ................................................................................................................................. xi Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................... xii Dedication .................................................................................................................................... xvi Chapter 1: In the Horizons and In the Selves ............................................................................. 1 1.1 Breaking the Bell Jar of Political Theory ........................................................................ 5 1.2 Inhabiting A Fractured Loci: Positionality and Complicit Scholarship ........................ 13 1.3 Political Theory as a Care-Based Epistemology ........................................................... 19 1.4 In the Horizons: Sense, Sensibility and Sense as an Ability ......................................... 25 1.5 Travel and Empathy: White-Orientated Modes of Knowing ........................................ 30 1.6 Hearing Different Voices .............................................................................................. 36 1.7 Connection-Based Modes of Knowing ......................................................................... 47 1.8 With Loving Eyes: The Political Theorist as a Witness ................................................ 52 1.9 Research Questions ....................................................................................................... 62 Chapter 2: In the Waiting Room of History ............................................................................. 68 2.1 The Plight of Zaynab and Bishan Singh ........................................................................ 68 2.2 Through Whiteness or By Death: The Colonial Politics of Recognition ...................... 76 2.3 Forced Intimacy and the Master’s Refusal to Respond ................................................. 87 vii 2.4 Darkness à Light / Dependency à Freedom .............................................................. 96 2.5 The White Body as a Body that Reads, Feels ............................................................. 103 2.6 The Relational Phenomenology of Sense as an Ability: Translation as Sanitization and Domestication .......................................................................................................................... 109 2.7 Resistant Texts and Mis-Fits ....................................................................................... 115 2.8 Hermeneutical Injustice and Epistemic Privilege ........................................................ 124 2.9 The Poetics of Mourning: Maternity and the Mother(land) as Sites of Violence ....... 130 2.9.1 Mourning the Motherland .................................................................................... 133 2.9.2 The Dead Body in the Master’s Chambers .......................................................... 136 2.9.3 A Childless Mother and the Spectre of the Colonial Metropole ......................... 140 Chapter 3: In the Belly of the Whale ....................................................................................... 147 3.1 Body-Sense, Radical Relationality and the Witness ................................................... 149 3.2 Mapping Points of Arrival ........................................................................................... 152 3.3 Islam as a De-Colonial Theology of Liberation .......................................................... 155 3.4 To be a Maker of Islam ............................................................................................... 159 3.5 The Narrative Textures of a Living Tradition ............................................................. 165 3.6 Islamic-Medical Model of Reading Disability and Dependency ................................ 166 3.7 Re-Reading Code Blue ................................................................................................ 169 3.8 Reading in the Dark with Yunus ................................................................................. 175 3.9 Zulumāt as Radical Subjectivity: The Land and Body as Witness .............................. 181 Chapter 4: In Hajar’s Footsteps .............................................................................................