Does the confidence of our political vision as feminists ever run up against the responsibility that we incur for the destruction of life forms so that "unenlightedned" women may be taught to live more freely? Do we fully comprehend the forms of life that we want to so passionately to remake so that Muslim women and men may live a more enlightened existence? . . . Would an intimate knowledge of life worlds that are distinct from, and perhaps even opposed to, our cosmopolitan lifestyles ever lead us to question the certainty with which we prescribe what is good for all humanity? At a time when feminist and democratic politics run the danger of being reduced to a rhetorical display on the placard of Islam's abuses, these questions offer the slim hope that perhaps a dialogue across political and religious differences . . . can yield a vision of coexistence that does not require making certain life worlds extinct or provisional. It requires us to entertain the possibility . . . that one does not always know what one opposes and that a political vision at times has to admit its own finitude in order to even comprehend what it has sought to oppose.

QUESTION: This raises deep questions about how feminist universalism interacts with cultural difference and the ethics of remaking others' lifeworlds. Worth chasing into the fuller argument about cosmopolitanism's blind spots.

Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ Th…, loc. 585