There’s something about the often tortured language of academia that makes me want to scream. I begin to suspect that the reason that the phrasing is so labyrinthine is that because the emperor (or the empress) ain’t wearing no clothes.
Here’s a typical example. Salam Al-Mahadin writing in the Guardian and claiming that "Bookshops are using Muslim women’s autobiographies to peddle a bogus canon of Islamic oppression". Well, that’s what the sub-editor has put as the summary of her piece. For myself, I found it difficult to comprehend when wading through such motions as:
"In individualising their experiences via lengthy narratives, these women contributed to the annihilation of that individuality.These accounts emerged in a discursive space already fraught with the polemics of generalisations. The veracity of the individual narratives may not be in dispute but the problematic of their deployment and the danger inherent in their exclusionary mechanisms is.Thus "truths" about Islam, like any other truths, are produced by a paradigm of inclusion and exclusion, constraints and circulation. This is quite unique to these biographies.The brown/black woman of the erstwhile colonial discourse may have spoken. But the din of the few voices that have been heard produce a totalising, essentialist mythology about Islam. They are heard as a symphony rather than solo concertos."
Er, hello? Is there any sense in there?
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