Imagining Muslim Women in Secular Humanitarian Time I mages have agency. This makes them crucial to politics and public feelings. According to W. J. T. Mitchell (1996), the force of images lies not only in what they do but also in "what [they] really want" (71). In other words, their power lies not merely with how they are interpreted but in the relationship between the image and the viewer, and how that relationship transforms the social contexts it also reveals. Images of Muslim women that feature the injustices they are subjected to as Muslim women are the focus of this article. The force of these images derives in part from their intended purpose to disrupt, evoke, or incite responses of compassion and solidarity and also from the respectability of the organizations that circulate them. Organizations such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) have considerable status and authority, which also attaches to the images they circulate. But the power of the images is also partially attributable to the charged environment that precedes their circulation. The temporal context that both produces and mandates these images, we argue, is critical to their power. In turn we claim that their presentation and circulation produces this time and its atmospherics anew. So while this article draws attention to the politics and political consequences of the content and messages of the images, it gives principal consideration to time. We thus attempt to conceptualize and name this time, the time that permits and demands certain images. Our concept of "secular humanitarian time" is formulated to capture the politics and atmosphere that allow only some images to transform social and political contexts: an atmosphere in which only some images of Muslim women are representable, and others are not.Relationships between time and morality in the contemporary era preoccupy a range of scholars, anthropologists in particular. In his attempt to convey something of the moral present, Didier Fassin (2012) emphasizes the current temporal dominance of moral sentiment over politics. The ascendance of what he calls "humanitarian reason" is evident in the contemporary discursive focus on suffering over systemic inequalities and unequal power relations. Similarly, Lila Abu-Lughod (2013) questions the contemporary moment where a hegemonic movement of global common sense
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