Read on Twitter
I know that if I want to find discourse on this I'd have to seek it out, but it would be nice for it to be more prevalent in our discussions. There are problems we face as Arabs or non-Western Muslims living in a Westernized world. We want to maintain our indigenous identity https://twitter.com/EduAfs_/status/1303089183699931137
in the face of threat and in response to colonization and Western cultural hegemony, but we don't want to do that at the risk of cultural or religious chauvinism. So what we do? The internet, being a reflection of the social world we occupy, is increasingly divisive.
The tweets we see on our timelines usually belong to popular accounts, or are viral because they appeal to a popular worldview, and these popular figures and world views tend to represent one very strict set of ideas. So what do we do? Where do we go to find discourse that
addresses our problems? Discourse that specifically recognizes the dissonance we face living at the psychological intersection of East and West. I've been thinking about Lyotard's concept of the "differend" lately and how a group's attempt to establish a narrative for themselves
further marginalized other groups that exist within the periphery of the American cultural hegemony. Perhaps unintentionally, people like us have no language to articulate our discomfort with the clash of our tradition and the narratives we've imported from the West.
I find that feminism is a very good example of this. Your tradition tells you one thing, Western narratives tell you another, which do you privilege? How do you go about even attempting to reconcile these worldviews without the scholarship of the West guiding you? How do you even
begin to analyze whether you should or should not go about reconciling these worldviews? How do you even establish the normative grounds that premise your investigation to begin with? Will your initial premises be inspired by tradition or Western narratives?
With respect to feminism, I don't even have the language to articulate my discomfort with speaking to people who can't conceive of a world where abortion is immoral and people who can't conceive of a world where the niqab is inegalitarian.
I usually find myself prefacing my opinions with layers and layers of justification just to be able to get through people's firewalls before entertaining a discussion about abortion or the niqab. Even then, I find that my words aren't truly expressive of my narrative.
I'm always mincing my words, self-censoring, hedging. I have no doubt that there are many people like me. Our views are ambiguous and in flux. We're constantly drawn to opposing sides, made to choose between opposing narratives, antagonized even for entertaining the wrong ideas.
This is a difficult situation to be in, it's a difficult narrative to depict in words, it's a a difficult task. Our cultural (and virtual) milieu does not facilitate difficult conversations and does not encourage asking difficult questions.
I don't have a solution for this, I'm only thinking out loud. I'm gravitating more and more towards locally produced ideas, and I'm finding that it's my fault for not having done that from the beginning but a lot of it still definitely echoes left vs. right Western cultures.
Just some thoughts inspired by the tweet above.
