Page - 98 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/01

98 | Elham Manea www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/1, 91–110 cities and met their leading sheiks, including the only woman on any of these panels. I also interviewed experts and lawyers, as well as activists in civil society and women’s rights groups, especially from within the Muslim communities, and also politicians who are calling for reform of this legal “model”.20 The more I looked into the subject, the clearer it became that the issue is not merely a matter of a group of scholars sup- porting a specific legal system. Their discourse represents a paradigm of thought that sees the world through the prism of a group’s religious and cultural identity and thus constructs Muslim identity as a group identity that shapes every aspect of the lives of the members of this religious community, including the Muslim Woman. The image of the oppressed, veiled Muslim Woman and the treatment of a piece of cloth as synonymous with her whole identity are products of the essentialist para- digm of thought and its fixation with group identity. From this perspective, the con- struction of Muslim identity and the construction of the Muslim Woman are two sides of the same coin. As the notion of group identity and the collective rights of a group has proved so important, in the following section I critically discuss this notion, fo- cusing on the ideas of Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, who in my opinion has strongly influenced the essentialist discourse. GROUP IDENTITY AND RIGHTS Charles Taylor, the father of legal pluralism, famously espoused group identity and group rights.21 His concept of a politics of recognition, introduced in the edited vol- ume Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (1994), has permeated much of the thinking within the essentialist paradigm. He refers to the politics of mul- ticulturalism in terms of demands for recognition of minority or subaltern groups. The thesis is that our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, with recognition often misrecognition. A person or group of people can suffer real dam- age, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirrors a confining or de- meaning or contemptible picture of themselves. Nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm and can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being.22 Taylor tends to see identity and with it culture and society as static, as a whole that has inherent, given traits. For Taylor, identity is “who we are, where we are coming from, and thus the background against which our tastes and desires and opinions and aspirations make sense”.23 In his paradigm, identity does not exist in a vacuum. It is very much intertwined with “authenticity”, as he terms it: “There is a certain way of being human that is my way. I am called upon to live my life in this way and not in imi- 20 Manea, forthcoming 2016. 21 This section is based on Manea, forthcoming 2016, chapters 2–3. 22 Taylor 1994, 25, emphasis in the original. 23 Taylor 1994, 30.