Islam in Liberalism Islam in Liberalism Joseph A. MAssAd The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London joseph a. massad is professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. He is the author of Desiring Arabs (2007), The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinian Question (2006), and Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan (2001). The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2015 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2015. Printed in the United States of America 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5 ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 20622- 6 (cloth) ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 20636- 3 (e- book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226206363.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Massad, Joseph Andoni. 1963– author. Islam in liberalism / Joseph A. Massad. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-226-20622-6 (hardcover : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-20636-3 (e-book) 1. Orientalism. 2. Liberalism—Moral and ethical aspects. 3. Islam—Relations. 4. Middle East—Foreign public opinion, Western. 5. East and West. I. Title. DS61.85.M37 2015 306.6'97—dc23 2014021594 a This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1 992 (Permanence of Paper). For Neville Hoad Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction: The Choice of Liberalism 1 1 The Democracy Offensive and the Defenses of “Islam” 14 2 Women and/in “Islam”: The Rescue Mission of Western Liberal Feminism 110 3 Pre- Positional Conjunctions: Sexuality and/in “Islam” 213 4 Psychoanalysis, “Islam,” and the Other of Liberalism 275 5 Forget Semitism! 312 Works Cited 343 Index 373 Acknowledgments I have been thinking about the modern intellectual and se- mantic history of the term “Islam” for a few years and began my work on the “Genealogies of Islam” in 2008, soon after my last book, Desiring Arabs, had come out. As soon as I be- gan to research the book, however, I realized that I needed to explain my point of departure for this endeavor, namely the uses to which the term “Islam” has been put by Euro- pean and Euro- American liberalism (and increasingly by Arab and Muslim liberals) since the eighteenth century. I initially decided to do so in a long introduction to the proj- ect but quickly realized that an introduction would not suffice as the issues multiplied and needed a more exten- sive scholarly treatment. This is when I decided that I had to write a book on the topic to contextualize my forthcom- ing project. This is how Islam in Liberalism was born. The book was written over a protracted period of time. The first drafts of chapters 3, 4, and 5 were written in the fall of 2008 and the spring of 2009 in Cairo, while I was on a research sabbatical, and were expanded in subsequent years in New York, Amman, and Cairo. I thank Tim Sullivan for facilitating my affiliation with the American University in Cairo during my sabbatical. Parts of chapter 1 were also written in Cairo in the fall of 2010 during a one- semester sabbatical I had that year. The rest of chapter 1 and chap- ter 2 were written mostly in New York between 2011 and 2013, but redrafted in Cairo and Amman in the summers of 2012 and 2013. The introduction was written during the summer of 2013 in Amman when the book was finalized. ix