Do Muslim Women Need Saving? The Western crusade to rescue Muslim women has reduced them to a simpl

[Ibtisam]

Do Muslim Women Need Saving? The Western crusade to rescue Muslim women has reduced them to a simpl

Somaliland floods means I can catch up with my reading!

 

I am not too familiar with Lila Abu-Lughod but I was a big fan of her father Ibrahim Abu-Lughod may he rest in peace:

 

Her writing on this issue has been compared to Edward Said work!!

 

It would be nice to have the era of educated Arab intellectuals who provided an alternative view- particularly on Middle East discourse; I miss Edward Said, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Ibqbal (although technically he was Pakistani).

 

 

Anyway enjoy reading.

 

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A moral crusade to rescue oppressed Muslim women from their cultures and their religion has swept the public sphere, dissolving distinctions between conservatives and liberals, sexists and feminists. The crusade has justified all manner of intervention from the legal to the military, the humanitarian to the sartorial. But it has also reduced Muslim women to a stereotyped singularity, plastering a handy cultural icon over much more complicated historical and political dynamics.

 

As an anthropologist who has spent decades doing research on and with women in different communities in the Middle East, I have found myself increasingly troubled by our obsession with Muslim women. Ever since 2001, when defending the rights of Muslim women was offered as a rationale for military intervention in Afghanistan, I have been trying to reconcile what I know from experience about individual women’s lives, and what I know as a student of the history of women and of feminism in different parts of the Muslim world, with the stock images of Muslim women that bombard us here in the West. Over the past decade, from the girls and women like Nujood Ali, whose best-selling memoir I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced was co-written, like so many of the others, by a Western journalist, to Malala Yousafzai, they have been portrayed as victims of the veil, forced marriage, honor crimes or violent abuse. They are presented as having a deficit of rights because of Islam. But they don’t always behave the way we expect them to, nor should they.

 

(MORE: Forbidden to Drive: A Saudi Woman on Life Inside the Kingdom)

 

Take the veil, for example. We were surprised when many women in Afghanistan didn’t take them off after being “liberated,” seeing as they had become such symbols of oppression in the West. But we were confusing veiling with a lack of agency. What most of us didn’t know is that 30 years ago the anthropologist Hanna Papanek described the burqa as “portable seclusion” and noted that many women saw it as a liberating invention because it enabled them to move out of segregated living spaces while still observing the requirements of separating and protecting women from unrelated men. People all over the globe, including Americans, wear the appropriate form of dress for their socially shared standards, religious beliefs and moral ideals. If we think that U.S. women live in a world of choice regarding clothing, we need to look no further than our own codes of dress and the often constricting tyrannies of fashion.

 

As for Malala, she was subjected to horrible violence by the Taliban, but education for girls and Islam are not at odds, as was suggested when atheist Sam Harris praised Malala for standing up to the “misogyny of traditional Islam.” Across the Muslim world girls have even been going to state schools for generations. In Pakistan, poverty and political instability undermine girls’ schooling, but also that of boys. Yet in urban areas, girls finish high school at rates close to those of young men, and they are only fractionally less likely to pursue higher education. In many Arab countries, and in Iran, more women are in university than men. In Egypt, women make up a bigger percentage of engineering and medical faculties than women do in the U.S.

 

A language of rights cannot really capture the complications of lives actually lived. If we were to consider the quandaries of a young woman in rural Egypt as she tries to make choices about who to marry or how she will make a good life for her children in trying circumstances, perhaps we would realize that we all work within constraints. It does not do justice to anyone to view her life only in terms of rights or that loaded term, freedom. These are not the terms in which we understand our own lives, born into families we did not choose, finding our way into what might fulfill us in life, constrained by failing economies, subject to the consumer capitalism, and making moral mistakes we must live with.

 

(MORE: Brides Before Bombs: Nigerian City Fights Terrorism With Mass Weddings)

 

There is no doubt that Western notions of human rights can be credited for the hope for a better world for all women. But I suspect that the deep moral conviction people feel about the rightness of saving the women of that timeless homogeneous mythical place called Islamland is fed by something else that cannot be separated from our current geopolitical relations. Blinded to the diversity of Muslim women’s lives, we tend to see our own situation too comfortably. Representing Muslim women as abused makes us forget the violence and oppression in our own midst. Our stereotyping of Muslim women also distracts us from the thornier problem that our own policies and actions in the world help create the (sometimes harsh) conditions in which distant others live. Ultimately, saving Muslim women allows us to ignore the complex entanglements in which we are all implicated and creates a polarization that places feminism only on the side of the West.

 

 

 

Read more: Lila Abu-Lughod: Do Muslim Women Need Saving? | TIME.com http://ideas.time.com/2013/11/01/do-...#ixzz2kS7Oc4iz

[Safferz]

She rocks. She's one of the reasons Columbia is one of the most dynamic universities in critical theory and scholarly work much in the spirit of Edward Said (who was a professor there for many years)... her husband Timothy Mitchell, Partha Chatterjee, Gayatri Spivak, Hamid Dabashi, Rashid Khalidi, Mahmood Mamdani, Joseph Massad, Judith Butler, etc are all faculty there. Also in New York but not at Columbia is Talal Asad, among others. I'm jealous

 

[Ibtisam]

Safferz- you are not too far to pop along from years to year

 

I can't imagine I would ever venture out that faaaaaaar- although I'd love to be in that environment!

 

I wonder what happened to Edward daughter Nelia I think she was called? or even his son- the Palestinian course is almost but forgot with all the problems in the Middle East!

 

Found lots of talks by Leila on Youtube- lets hope my internet stays!

[STOIC]

Ibti, Edward Said daughter has a new book out.I just read it the other day in Barnes and Nobles.It was more of a memoir.It offered a great glimpse into the life of Said.He was a great Scholar and a family man..Iqbal Ahmed was a funny man..Few of his youtube videos are down right entertaining..Especially a video he did before September Eleven put the Osama Bin-Laden Alqaida in perspective...

[magicbird]

And never will the Jews or the Christians approve of you until you follow their religion. Say, "Indeed, the guidance of Allah is the [only] guidance." If you were to follow their desires after what has come to you of knowledge, you would have against Allah no protector or helper. (Baqarah:120)

They're not after Muslim women, they're not after our resources, they're after our way of life.

[Ibtisam]

Stoic- that is great to hear- living in Somaliland means I dont always get to read whatever I want or get leisure time to read! I did my undergrad thesis on American Foreign Policy impact on Palestine & Israel so I got very intimate and personal with the scholars of that time- great sadness at their loss. Just the other day I was re-watching on youtube Edward last interview- I think it was his 11th anniversary- youtube recommended it.

 

Good times

[STOIC]

Same problem in Kenya.When I was Kenya this past Summer I was really frustrated with the culture of not reading.I couldn't find a good place to read leisure books..Even though my doctorate is in the Science I love love the power of stories and words..

[SomaliPhilosopher]

*Ibtisam;985648 wrote:

Stoic- that is great to hear- living in Somaliland means I dont always get to read whatever I want or get leisure time to read!

Hey, enough with these half-truths! You have have Alpha's library!

[Ibtisam]

^^^Lol Sii dacaad aha ayaan uu qosley! lol

[Safferz]

magicbird;985647 wrote:

They're not after Muslim women, they're not after our resources,

they're after our way of life

.

A tad simplistic, no? Muslims aren't the only ones to experience Western intervention. There have been more American invasions of the Caribbean and Latin America than anywhere else, and they are Christians for the most part. What people like Edward Said show is how culture becomes the colonialist logic to justify what's fundamentally political and economic exploitation and extraction. That's what feigned concern over the "oppressed" Muslim woman is all about.

 

Ibti, you may also like Janice Boddy's work -- she wrote a history of British efforts to end female circumcision in colonial Sudan using a similar lens, I think it's called "Civilizing Women." Leila Ahmed's book "Women and Gender in Islam" has a good chapter on the discourse surrounding the hijab that I can scan for any of you if you'd like, and she recently wrote a full length book on the hijab's resurgence that I'm told is quite good (my mom stole my copy before I had the chance to read it, and she enjoyed it very much lol). Saba Mahmood's book "The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject" is also great in how it discusses Muslim women's subjectivity and how their agency is perceived by Western feminists, but her writing is quite dense :mad: She's actually speaking at nearby campus in a few hours but I still haven't decided whether or not to go.

[Safferz]

Safferz;985657 wrote:

Ibti, you may also like Janice Boddy's work -- she wrote a history of British efforts to end female circumcision in colonial Sudan using a similar lens, I think it's called "Civilizing Women." Leila Ahmed's book "Women and Gender in Islam" has a good chapter on the discourse surrounding the hijab that I can scan for any of you if you'd like, and she recently wrote a full length book on the hijab's resurgence that I'm told is quite good (my mom stole my copy before I had the chance to read it, and she enjoyed it very much lol). Saba Mahmood's book "The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject" is also great in how it discusses Muslim women's subjectivity and how their agency is perceived by Western feminists, but her writing is quite dense :mad: She's actually speaking at nearby campus in a few hours but I still haven't decided whether or not to go.

lol so looking through my laptop, it seems I took some AWESOME notes in a past life on the Saba Mahmood and Leila Ahmed books I mentioned, so if anyone is interested in my summary, I can share.

 

I happened to have a PDF of Janice Boddy's book introduction (not all of it, just the parts I needed at the time), so here it is.

[STOIC]

Saf, I have watched a video of Leila Ahmed.I still didn't get it whether she was saying Hijab was a symbol of intolerance or she thinks Hijab was not always mandatory in Islam? You can put up her work if you have the time. I love to read her work on this subject.I'm not familiar with hr work.

[Ibtisam]

Safferz, that is great! thanks!!

 

If the notes dont infringe on copy right post them! would love to read them

 

Who knows how long this storm might last- for now starting on Janice book! thank you

[Ibtisam]

Except it is upside down/sideways- can't figure out how to turn it sideways.

[SomaliPhilosopher]

*Ibtisam;985656 wrote:

^^^Lol Sii dacaad aha ayaan uu qosley! lol