Translating Disability in a Muslim Community: A Case of Modular Translation

Abstract

This study examines how Muslim religious leaders (imams) introduce the liberal notion of disability to their communities in Israel. The project described, initiated and supported by an American NGO, provides a case for exploring how the secular notion of disability rights is cast and recast in a Muslim world of meaning. It focuses on the mediation strategy that I call modular translation, employed by imams in sermons delivered for the purpose of altering or improving the status and conditions of people with disabilities. This strategy, as it emerged from the analysis, entails decoupling norms of conduct from their underlying justifications. It thus suggests that norms of conduct are open to change so long as the believers' cosmology remains intact. As such, this turn may offer new avenues of thinking and acting about globalizing human rights within the arena of health and disability.

Sociology in the Garden: Beyond the Liberal Grammar of Contemporary Sociology

“…This line of inquiry involves a close examination of links between networks, local attempts to weave new networks, and the identification of intermediaries who might act as bridges between social networks. These intermediaries could participate in what I have termed elsewhere 'modular translation', meaning the adaptation and transformation of elements from one world of meaning to another (Mizrachi 2014). They could also promote what Taylor (1999) describes as 'narrow agreements' between groups regarding norms of behavior and policies that do not necessitate agreement regarding their justification, but only their outcomes.…”

“…To be sure, in the Israeli context, liberal ideology is not the provenance of Ashkenazim alone. A number of Mizrahi NGOs, such as the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow, a movement of liberal intellectuals, activists, and academics that emerged in the 1990s, embraced a liberal, universalistic form of identity politics, an event I have defined as 'liberal isomorphism' (see Mizrachi 2012Mizrachi , 2014 in the context of social movements in liberal democracies that promote a specific form of identity politics. Liberal isomorphism thus refers to mimetic behavior.…”

Shades of Universality: Variation of Performances in the Glocalized Israeli Human Rights Discourse

“…In fact, while former studies focused on cross-national comparison have captured only a small elite section of secular and global organizations in the field of human rights (Bush 2007), the various organizations presented in this intranational analysis do not necessarily adopt western ideological premises nor do they think of the global institutions as the source of authority for human rights (see Taylor 2016). These organizations, it can be said, engage in what Mizrachi calls modular translation, an adjustment of meaning components that involves differentiation between the rights' norms of conduct and their underlying liberal justifications (Mizrachi 2014). The six-dimensional analysis suggested here invites further inquiry of human rights, not solely as a unified legal doctrine but as a social concept in which meanings are negotiated and "competing voices contest the ownership of this language" (O'Byrne 2012:831).…”