Ayesha Chaudhry

Based on interviews with members of a Shi’i Muslim community in Vancouver, British Columbia, this dissertation explores the politics of victimhood and subtle acts of resistance and agency in their everyday life in Canada. Shi’i Muslims who participated in this research reference the historical narrative of Hussein which guides their self-understanding as a group. As I will argue, this narrative has multiple meanings and can be understood as a vehicle for personal and community transformation. Insistence on remembering the story of Hussein, its representation, perception and symbolism creates a capacity for agency where remembrance is political and victimhood, a motivating force. In this study, I shed light on this aspect of the Shi’i identity in the diaspora, as I argue that amidst the mourning and the remembrance of the story of Hussein, agency and resistance take shape, sometimes in the most subtle forms in the everyday. In exploring the connection between resistance and identity of members of this diasporic community, I demonstrate that acts of resistance, no matter how small and subtle, when motivated by religious convictions, inevitably create religio-political identities. As such, these identities insist on active citizenship as a way to reject (re)victimization and marginalization as they seek equal recognition and equal participation as a minority within a minority in Canada. I illustrate this through stories gathered from the everyday lives of the participants in this study.

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This dissertation radically reimagines the boundaries of political theory as a practice and as a tradition in three ways. First, I surface the ableist and colonial paradigm of recognition that shapes the study of Islam and the “Muslim Other” in comparative political theory and care ethics. The colonial legacy of political theory lives on within the textual sensibilities of political theorists, inherited from white-orientated reading practices, epistemic white privilege, and matricide as an epistemological orientation. Refusing to (un)learn how colonial histories of sense-contact have shaped our practices of reading and writing compromises the witnessing capacities of political theorists. In turn, we become complicit in authoring and authorizing colonial world-building practices. Second, I trace how white-orientated and heteropatriarchal conceptions of citizenship travel through the inheritance of the nation-state. Imperial readings of disability, (inter)dependency and care, both within and outside the Islamic tradition, render Muslim women and disabled Muslims as misfits in our knowledge relations. Through auto-ethnography I argue care-based modes of knowing Islam are needed to theorize accessibility because 1) disabled Muslims and care-givers remain visible only through frames of charity or tragedy; 2) situations of dependency care render one ontologically and epistemically incapable of sensing and knowing the Islamic; 3) interpretive authority is sanctioned by legal scholars, Muslim men, or white and secular scholars; and 4) narratives of informal care-giving, care-based epistemologies of Islam and the epistemic authority of disabled Muslims and Muslim women are denigrated within the ecology of Islamic knowledges. I design various care-based and intersectional Islamic technologies by which (non)Muslims can harness care as a critical sensibility that orients how we read, write and think about what is “Islamic”, whose bodies we identify as interpretive authorities, and which types of knowledge we authorize as “Islam.” Third, I turn away from imagining moral epistemologies of care to focus on the praxis behind care-based epistemologies of Islam and its vast potential for coalitional politics and de-colonial movement building. By de-centering whiteness, I re-conceive what it means to be a Muslim on Turtle Island and practice Islam in a settler-colonial society.

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