Imagining Muslim Women in Secular Humanitarian Time

Abstract

Images are important to campaigns that champion the rights of Muslim women against the gender inequalities that ostensibly inhere in Islam. The force of such images derives in part from their intended purpose to disrupt, evoke, or incite responses of compassion and solidarity. The temporal context that both produces and mandates these images, however, is also critical to their power. This article thus attempts to conceptualize and name this time, the time that permits and demands only certain images. The concept of secular humanitarian time is formulated to capture the politics and atmosphere that allow images to transform social and political contexts: an atmosphere in which some images of Muslim women are representable and others are not.