
dynamic, disorderly, liminal, and transgressive, and he demarcates the “breakdown”
moment in which the very norms and morals by which one ordinarily lives are
themselves problematized and become objects of reflection—“it is the moral break-
down, or the moment of problematization, that I call the ethical moment” (ibid). Within
this understanding, the primary goal of ethics is to move back into the world and to
once again dwell in the unreflective comfort of the familiar (Zigon 2007). This return
from the ethical moment is however never a return to the same unreflective moral
dispositions, “the very process of stepping-out and responding to the breakdown in
various ways alters, even if ever so slightly, the aspect of being-in-the-world that is the
unreflective moral dispositions. It is in the moment of breakdown, then, that it can be
said that people work on themselves, and in so doing, alter their very way of being-in-
the-world” (ibid.:138). Zigon points out that we should look to those moments of moral
breakdown in which reflection and critique of moral norms are intensified, and in
which our ways of being in the world are altered. When talking to Hassan about the
moral experience that presents itself in the exercise, he mentions how he wants to be
remembered as someone who was there, “someone that my kids could talk to, and
come to with their day-to-day problems.” To realize this vision, Hassan ha s to
reorganize his week, so that he can go fishing with his son on a regular basis, and he
makes sure to put aside his phone and computer during the afternoon so that he can
help with his daughter’s homework. In my analytic approach to Hassan story, I adopt
the dynamic and altering moral experience that Zigon has described as the ethical
moment. However, where Zigon refers to this disturbance as a moral breakdown, I
suggest a twist in the analytic framework. I frame this ethical moment as a moment of
moral envisioning in which an imaginative space of the ultimate good is created.
Looking at it this way, Hassan becomes a beholder that observes how his life and
legacy as a father is enmeshed into the lives of future generations. This perspective
resonates well with Cheryl Mattingly’s idea of narrative re-envisioning, as she refers to
narrative re-envisioning as the activity of coming to see oneself in a new way, and
coming to reform one’s sense of possibility and reframe one’s commitments (Mattingly
2014). It is this exact idea of reorientation and moral transformation that I want to
capture and unfold by introducing moral env isioning as a gateway to a deeper
understanding of how Hassan comes to articulate and act out his role as a father in
an alternative and new way. Hassan’s case shows how the moment of moral
envisioning provides an ethical weight to ordinary life in which small events and acts
of care like playing, fishing, or helping with homework become a way of responding to
and working towards a realization of the ultimate good that in envisioned while doing
the exercise. Having gone through these transformative moments of moral envisioning
means that even a small act of care between a father and his child gives a broader and
fundamental sense of moral direction. Mattingly suggests that there is a mutually
constitutive relationship between the self and one’s moral projects (Mattingly 2014),
and in Hassan’s story, we see glimpses of the way in which a sense of self emerges in
moments of caring interacting between him and children. By attending to the moment
of moral envisioning, we can understand how these moments of “stepping out of the
world,” and into the realm of the imaginative, might inform and push forward everyday
acts of care. Hassan would often explain the imaginative space at the gravesite with
reference to the Islamic idea of barzakh, “I try to visualize myself being in the realm of
the barzakh - somewhere between paradise and hell,” he would say. The Islamic
Contemporary Islam