Do Muslim Women Need Saving?

Lila Abu-Lughod

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780674727502
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Frequent reports of honor killings, disfigurement, and sensational abuse have given rise to a consensus in the West, a message propagated by human rights groups and the media: Muslim women need to be rescued. Lila Abu-Lughod boldly challenges this conclusion. An anthropologist who has been writing about Arab women for thirty years, she delves into the predicaments of Muslim women today, questioning whether generalizations about Islamic culture can explain the hardships these women face and asking what motivates particular individuals and institutions to promote their rights.In recent years Abu-Lughod has struggled to reconcile the popular image of women victimized by Islam with the complex women she has known through her research in various communities in the Muslim world. Here, she renders that divide vivid by presenting detailed vignettes of the lives of ordinary Muslim women, and showing that the problem of gender inequality cannot be laid at the feet of religion alone. Poverty and authoritarianism—conditions not unique to the Islamic world, and produced out of global interconnections that implicate the West—are often more decisive. The standard Western vocabulary of oppression, choice, and freedom is too blunt to describe these women's lives. Do Muslim Women Need Saving? is an indictment of a mindset that has justified all manner of foreign interference, including military invasion, in the name of rescuing women from Islam—as well as a moving portrait of women's actual experiences, and of the contingencies with which they live.

CHAPTER 1

Do Muslim Women (Still) Need Saving?

Commentators noted the political timing of Time magazine’s cover story about a beautiful young woman from Afghanistan whose nose had been cut off. The unsettling photograph of Bibi Aysha, whose Taliban husband and in-laws had punished her this way, appeared on newsstands in August 2010. Eight months earlier, President Obama had authorized a troop surge, but now there was talk about bringing some Taliban into reconciliation talks. The juxtaposition between the photograph and the headline—“What Happens if We Leave Afghanistan?”—implied that women would be the first victims. Unremarked was the fact that this act of mutilation had been carried out while U.S. and British troops were still present in Afghanistan.¹

Time had selected this photograph from a large number of possible images. The talented South African photographer who took it explained the backstory at the award ceremony when it was declared World Press Photo of the Year. Jodi Bieber had been on assignment in Afghanistan taking portraits of women. She had photographed politicians, documentary filmmakers, popular television hosts, and women in shelters and burn hospitals.²

Time’s managing editor defended his decision to feature this shocking photograph in both moral and political terms. Even if it might distress children, he wrote (and he had consulted child psychologists), they needed to know that “bad things happen to people.” The image, he also argued, “is a window into the reality of what is happening—and what can happen—in a war that affects and involves all of us.” He was not taking sides, he said, but he would “rather confront readers with the Taliban’s treatment of women than ignore it.” He continued: “The much-publicized release of classified documents by WikiLeaks has already ratcheted up the debate about the war … We do not run this story or show this image either in support of the U.S. war effort or in opposition to it. We do it to illuminate what is actually happening on the ground … What you see in these pictures and our story is something that you cannot find in those 91,000 documents: a combination of emotional truth and insight into the way life is lived in that difficult land and the consequences of the important decisions that lie ahead.”³

Bibi Aysha had been photographed in a shelter in Kabul run by an American organization with a large local staff, Women for Afghan Women (WAW). She was waiting there to be sent to the United States for reconstructive surgery, thanks to the generosity of donors and the Grossman Burn Foundation. Both the photographer and WAW were broadsided by the publicity following the Time cover. WAW tried to protect Bibi Aysha from the glare, eventually preventing all interviews and photographs. By then they were sheltering her in New York, hoping she would recover enough from her trauma for surgery to take place.

A member of WAW’s board nevertheless echoed Time’s political message. She predicted “a bloodbath if we leave Afghanistan.” Bibi Aysha’s plight was to remind the public of the atrocities the Taliban had committed. Esther Hyneman rejected the suggestion made by Ann Jones in the Nation that the Taliban were being singled out for demonization when they were not much different from other misogynous groups in Afghanistan, including those in the U.S.-backed government. If the Taliban were to come to power, she warned, “the sole bulwarks against the permanent persecution of women will be gone.” These bulwarks were the international human rights organizations and “local” organizations like her WAW.⁴

The controversy over Bibi Aysha indicates how central the question of Afghan women’s rights remains to the politics of the War on Terror that, almost from its first days in 2001, has been justified in terms of saving Afghan women.⁵ As an anthropologist who had studied women and gender politics in another part of the Muslim world for so many years, I was not convinced at the time by this public rationale for war, even as I recognized that women in Afghanistan do have particular struggles and that some suffer disturbing forms of violence.

Like many colleagues whose work focuses on women in the Middle East and the Muslim world, I was deluged with invitations to speak at the time of heightened interest in 2001. It was the beginning of many years of being contacted by news programs, as well as by departments at colleges and universities, especially women’s studies programs. I was a scholar who had by then devoted more than twenty years of my life to this subject, and it was gratifying to be offered opportunities to share my knowledge. The urgent desire to understand our sister “women of cover” (as President George W. Bush had so marvelously called them) was laudable. When it came from women’s studies programs where transnational feminism was taken seriously, it had integrity. But I was uncomfortable.

Discomfort with this sudden attention led me to reflect on why, as feminists in or from the West, or simply as people concerned about women’s lives, we might be wary of this response to the events and aftermath of September 11, 2001. What are the minefields—a metaphor sadly too apt for a country like Afghanistan (with the world’s highest number of mines per capita)—of this obsession with the plight of Muslim women? What could anthropology, the discipline whose charge is to understand and manage cultural difference, offer us as a way around these dangers? Critical of anthropology’s complicity in a long history of reifying cultural difference, linked to its ties with colonial power, I had long advocated “writing against culture.” So what insights could I contribute to this public discourse?

Cultural Explanations and the Mobilization of Women

In an essay I published in 2002, less than a year after I gave it as a lecture at Columbia University, I argued that we should be skeptical regarding this sudden concern about Afghan women. I considered two manifestations of this response: some conversations I had with a reporter from the PBS NewsHour; and the radio address to the nation on November 17, 2001, given by then first lady Laura Bush. The presenter from NewsHour first contacted me in October 2001 to see if I would be willing to provide some background for a segment on Women and Islam. I asked her whether they had done segments on the women of Guatemala, Ireland, Palestine, or Bosnia when the show covered wars in those countries. But I agreed to look at the questions she was going to pose to panelists. I found them hopelessly general. Do Muslim women believe X? Are Muslim women Y? Does Islam allow Z for women? I asked her if she would ask the same questions about Christianity or Judaism. I did not imagine she would call me back. But she did, twice. The first was with an idea for a segment on the meaning of Ramadan, which was in response to an American bombing during that time. The second was for a program on Muslim women in politics, following speeches by Laura Bush and Cherie Blair, wife of the then British prime minister.

What is striking about these three ideas for news programs is that there was a consistent resort to the cultural, as if knowing something about women and Islam or the meaning of a religious ritual would help one understand the tragic attack on New York’s World Trade Center and the U.S. Pentagon; how Afghanistan had come to be ruled by the Taliban; what interests might have fueled U.S. and other interventions in the region over the past quarter of a century; what the history of American support for conservative Afghan fighters might have been; or why the caves and bunkers out of which Osama bin Laden was to be smoked “dead or alive,” as President Bush announced on television, were paid for and built by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

To put it another way, why was knowing about the culture of the region—and particularly its religious beliefs and treatment of women—more urgent than exploring the history of the development of repressive regimes in the region and the United States’ role in this history? Such cultural framing, it seemed to me, prevented the serious exploration of the roots and nature of human suffering in that part of the world. Instead of political and historical explanations, experts were being asked to give religious or cultural ones. Instead of questions that might lead to the examination of internal political struggles among groups in Afghanistan, or of global interconnections between Afghanistan and other nation-states, we were offered ones that worked to artificially divide the world into separate spheres—re-creating an imaginative geography of West versus East, us versus Muslims, cultures in which first ladies give speeches versus others in which women shuffle around silently in burqas.

Most troubling for me was why the Muslim or Afghan woman was so crucial to this cultural mode of explanation that ignored the complex entanglements in which we are all implicated in sometimes surprising alignments. Why were these female symbols being mobilized in the War on Terror in a way they had not been in other conflicts? As so many others by now have pointed out, Laura Bush’s radio address on November 17, 2001, revealed the political work such mobilization accomplished. On the one hand, her address collapsed important distinctions that should have been maintained. There was a constant slippage between the Taliban and the terrorists, so that they became almost one word—a kind of hyphenated monster identity: the “Taliban-and-the-terrorists.”⁶ Then there was the blurring of the very separate causes of Afghan women’s suffering: malnutrition, poverty, class politics, and ill health, and the more recent exclusion under the Taliban from employment, schooling, and the joys of wearing nail polish. On the other hand, her speech reinforced chasmic divides, principally between the “civilized people throughout the world” whose hearts break for the women and children of Afghanistan and the Taliban-and-the-terrorists, the cultural monsters who want to, as she put it, “impose their world on the rest of us.”

The speech enlisted women to justify American military intervention in Afghanistan and to make a case for the War on Terror of which it was a part. As Laura Bush said, “Because of our recent military gains in much of Afghanistan, women are no longer imprisoned in their homes. They can listen to music and teach their daughters without fear of punishment … The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women.”⁷

These words have haunting resonances for anyone who has studied colonial history. Many who have studied British colonialism in South Asia have noted the use of the woman question in colonial policies. Intervention into sati (the practice of widows immolating themselves on their husbands’ funeral pyres) and child marriage were used to justify rule. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak famously put it, “white men saving brown women from brown men.”⁸ The historical record is full of similar cases, including in the Middle East. In turn-of-the-century Egypt, what Leila Ahmed has called “colonial feminism” governed policy on women.⁹ There was a selective concern about the plight of Egyptian women that focused on the veil as a sign of their oppression but gave no support to women’s education. The champion of women was the same English governor, Lord Cromer, who had opposed women’s suffrage back home.

Marnia Lazreg, a sociologist of Algeria, has offered vivid examples of how French colonialism enlisted women to its cause in Algeria:

Perhaps the most spectacular example of the colonial appropriation of women’s voices, and the silencing of those among them who had begun to take women revolutionaries … as role models by not donning the veil, was the event of May 16, 1958 [just four years before Algeria finally gained its independence from France after a long struggle and 130 years of French control]. On that day a demonstration was organized by rebellious French generals in Algiers to show their determination to keep Algeria French. To give the government of France evidence that Algerians were in agreement with them, the generals had a few thousand native men bused in from nearby villages, along with a few women who were solemnly unveiled by French women … Rounding up Algerians and bringing them to demonstrations of loyalty to France was not in itself an unusual act during the colonial era. But to unveil women at a well-choreographed ceremony added to the event a symbolic dimension that dramatized the one constant feature of the Algerian occupation by France: its obsession with women.¹⁰

Lazreg gives memorable examples of the way in which the French had even earlier sought to transform Arab girls. The Eloquence of Silence describes skits at the award ceremonies at the Muslim Girls’ School in Algiers in 1851 and 1852. In the first skit, written by “a French lady from Algiers,” two Algerian girls reminisce about their trip to France with words including: “Oh! Protective France: Oh! Hospitable France!… Noble land, where I felt free Under Christian skies to pray to our God: … God bless you for the happiness you bring us! And you, adoptive mother, who taught us that we have a share of this world, we will cherish you forever!”¹¹

These girls are made to invoke the gift of a share of this world, a world where freedom reigns under Christian skies. This is certainly not the world the Taliban-and-the-terrorists would “like to impose on the rest of us.”

Just as we need to be suspicious when neat cultural icons are plastered over messier historical and political narratives, so we need to be wary when Lord Cromer in British-ruled Egypt, French ladies in Algeria, and First Lady Laura Bush, all with military troops behind them, claim to be saving or liberating Muslim women. We also need to acknowledge the differences among these projects of liberating women. Saba Mahmood points particularly to the overlap today between the liberal discourses of feminism and secular democracy; the missionary literature from earlier eras, like the Algerian school skit, show instead that the earlier language was not secular.¹²

Politics of the Veil

Let us look more closely at those Afghan women who were said to be rejoicing at their liberation by the Americans. This necessitates a discussion of the veil, or the burqa, because it is so central to contemporary concerns about Muslim women. This sets the stage for some thoughts on how anthropologists, feminist anthropologists in particular, contend with the problem of difference in a global world and gives us preliminary insights into some of what’s wrong with the rhetoric of saving Muslim women.

It is commonly thought that the ultimate sign of the oppression of Afghan women under the Taliban is that they were forced to wear the blue burqa. Liberals sometimes confess their surprise that women did not throw off their burqas after the Taliban were removed from power in Afghanistan in 2001. Someone who has worked in Muslim regions would ask why this should be surprising. Did we expect that once “free” from the extremist Taliban these women would go “back” to belly shirts and blue jeans or dust off their Chanel suits? We need to be more sensible about the clothing of “women of cover,” and so there is perhaps a need to make some very basic points about veiling.

First, it should be recalled that the Taliban did not invent the burqa. It was the local form of covering that Pashtun women in one region wore when they went out. The Pashtun are one of several ethnic groups in Afghanistan and the burqa was one of many forms of covering in the subcontinent and Southwest Asia that had developed as a convention for symbolizing women’s modesty or respectability. The burqa, like some other forms of cover has, in many settings, marked the symbolic separation of men’s and women’s domains, part of the general association of women with family and home rather t...