Feb 3: Middle East Beyond Borders Workshop: Kirsten Wesselhoeft

Date: 

Tuesday, February 3, 2015, 6:00pm to 7:30pm

Location: 

Kresge Room, Barker Center.

RSVP, please to: Mary Elston, melston@fas.harvard.edu

Kirsten Wesselhoeft. (PhD Candidate, Committee on the Study of Religion)

"Ethical Critique in a Time of Crisis: Concepts of Moral and Social Transformation in the Paris-area Islamic Sphere"

Based in 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork in a network of Paris-area Muslim educational and activist associations, this paper analyzes three closely interrelated moral concepts that together animate religious education, activism, and intellectual debate in French Muslim circles, particularly in the Paris area: discontent, disagreement [ikhtilāf], and dissent. All three are different modes of expressing critique of the status quo with a constructive moral force, both within the French Muslim community and with respect to the place of French Muslims in France as a whole, particularly in a period of national crisis that has recently become much more acute, with the attacks of January 7, 8, and 9. These concepts operate in different registers: where the “ethics of discontent” is best described as a mood, attitude, or emotion, the “ethics of disagreement” is cultivated as a set of rhetorical practices that draw on the classical tradition of adab al-ikhtilāf, and the “ethics of dissent” is enjoined as a pattern of political action, whether on a very small scale within a single mosque, or on a national or even transnational scale. The present paper, part of a broader project on ethical pedagogy and activism in Paris-area Muslim networks, draws these three concepts together to develop a theoretical model that 1) understands ethical development to be imbricated from the beginning with economic conditions, 2) considers "the community," in addition to the individual self, as a primary target of moral cultivation and formation, and 3) in so doing, offers a multidirectional model of ethical authority marked by skepticism, debate, and mutual critique.

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