Page 136 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

by elderly women or by women from the more popular sections of the popula-
tion. While the former have increasingly started to participate in public, the lat-
ter have become increasingly marginalized. 20

The “Not-Yet Conscious”
The understandings proposed by Women in the Sun about debates on
family law and the previously mentioned academic writings support each other
in many ways. Both point to the wide variety of actors involved in these debates
and zoom in on the ways in which women activists address family law reforms.
Still, the visual nature of the documentary ¤lm takes us beyond the verbal state-
ments of major protagonists to such issues as body language and styles of dress.
If in these debates few Islamist women take the ®oor as speakers, they have a
presence of their own as active audience. As a visual medium Women in the Sun
enables not only a reading that highlights how Islamists may impede women’s
participation in the public sphere but also one that points to the exclusion of
women who seem supportive of an Islamist stance. In the ¤rst instance these
two readings appear to take off from opposite positions. Yet an analysis of the
ways in which notions of agency and power are implicated points to major con-
vergences. Both those who consider secularization as a precondition for the de-
velopment of a modern public sphere, and those who acknowledge the oppor-
tunities a Muslim public sphere offers, consider education and the media crucial
in enabling women to participate in the public sphere. The difference, of course,
rests on which practices and participants are to be included and excluded in the
public sphere.
Employing a discourse of emancipation and freedom, those arguing for a
secular public sphere tend to overlook the fact that, also in that case, women
had to develop certain forms of discipline in order to be allowed to participate
“in public.” Those stating that the development of a Muslim public sphere has
meant the participation of a greater variety of women in the public, including
“religious women,” often fail to recognize that their cultural politics may simul-
taneously restrict the options of others. Still, more interesting than this inver-
sion of exclusions is the ways in which both distance themselves from “tradi-
tional women,” that is, women who have (not yet) reached the required level of
self-re®exivity, knowledge, and consciousness to count in the modern public
sphere. In doing so they reinvent, as it were, another contrast scheme, not one
of religious versus secular but rather one of “traditional” versus “modern,” with
the former seen as habitually conforming to existing structures and the latter
as self-conscious and re®exive agents. The opposition of “conscious Muslims”
(or, for that matter, “conscious secularists”) versus those simply living according
to their traditions needs to be recognized for what it is, a modern construction
that produces the past as the Other. If “the modern” tend to overstate their re-
®exivity and consciousness, they also far too easily construct the not-yet modern /
not-yet conscious as engaging in “unthinking conformity” (Asad 1986, 16). This

Representing Family Law Debates in Palestine 125