Do Muslim Women Need Saving? - Hardcover

Abu-Lughod, Lila

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674725166 ISBN 13: 9780674725164

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2013

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Lila Abu-Lughod is the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University, where she teaches anthropology and women's studies.

Reviews

Focusing here on stories of individual women, Columbia University social scientist Abu-Lughod (Veiled Sentiments) deconstructs the idea of saving oppressed Muslim women and takes a sobering look at issues including the honor crime, arranged marriages, the burqa, and veiling. In accessible, lucid prose, Abu-Lughod explains how sensationalized memoirs, or pulp nonfiction, have perpetuated stereotypes and made Muslim women a symbol of an alien culture. The author dispassionately points out the hypocrisy of colonial feminism, and how more often than not, there is a clear political agenda behind the liberation of the women of cover and how the role of the U.S. is often overlooked. The women presented here see their Islamic faith as a source of strength to fight injustice, not the cause of it. They&'re not asking to be rescued from their religion, the author contends, but from the discriminatory legal system, poverty, outdated patriarchal family traditions, and border controls that continue to inhibit their freedom. While offering no easy solution, the author recommends observation over moral crusades, stating: Anyone seriously interested in Muslim women&'s rights must follow them as they move. This book is an excellent place to begin. (Nov.)

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674725166
• ISBN 13: 9780674725164
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336