Gender and Islam

Do Muslim women really need saving? Anthropoligical reflections on cultural relativism and its others Abu-Lughod, Lila . American Anthropologist ; Oxford  Vol. 104, Iss. 3,  (Sep 2002): 783-790.

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ABSTRACT Abu-Lughod explores the ethics of the current "War on Terrorism," asking whether anthropology, the discipline

devoted to understanding and dealing with cultural difference, can provide a critical purchase on the justifications

made for American intervention in Afghanistan in terms of liberating, or saving, Afghan women.

FULL TEXT Headnote

Ethics Forum: September 11 and Ethnographic Responsibility

Headnote

ABSTRACT This article explores the ethics of the current "War on Terrorism," asking whether anthropology, the

discipline devoted to understanding and dealing with cultural difference, can provide us with critical purchase on

the justifications made for American intervention in Afghanistan in terms of liberating, or saving, Afghan women. I

look first at the dangers of reifying culture, apparent in the tendencies to plaster neat cultural icons like the Muslim

woman over messy historical and political dynamics. Then, calling attention to the resonances of contemporary

discourses on equality, freedom, and rights with earlier colonial and missionary rhetoric on Muslim women, I argue

that we need to develop, instead, a serious appreciation of differences among women in the world-as products of

different histories, expressions of different circumstances, and manifestations of differently structured desires.

Further, I argue that rather than seeking to "save" others (with the superiority it implies and the violences it would

entail) we might better think in terms of (1) working with them in situations that we recognize as always subject to

historical transformation and (2) considering our own larger responsibilities to address the forms of global

injustice that are powerful shapers of the worlds in which they find themselves. I develop many of these

arguments about the limits of "cultural relativism" through a consideration of the burqa and the many meanings of

veiling in the Muslim world. [Keywords: cultural relativism, Muslim women, Afghanistan war, freedom, global

injustice, colonialism]

WHAT ARE THE ETHICS of the current "War on Terrorism," a war that justifies itself by purporting to liberate, or

save, Afghan women? Does anthropology have anything to offer in our search for a viable position to take

regarding this rationale for war?

I was led to pose the question of my title in part because of the way I personally experienced the response to the

U.S. war in Afghanistan. Like many colleagues whose work has focused on women and gender in the Middle East, I

was deluged with invitations to speak-not just on news programs but also to various departments at colleges and

universities, especially women's studies programs. Why did this not please me, a scholar who has devoted more

than 20 years of her life to this subject and who has some complicated personal connection to this identity? Here

was an opportunity to spread the word, disseminate my knowledge, and correct misunderstandings. The urgent

search for knowledge about our sister "women of cover" (as President George Bush so marvelously called them) is

laudable and when it comes from women's studies programs where "transnational feminism" is now being taken

seriously, it has a certain integrity (see Safire 2001).

My discomfort led me to reflect on why, as feminists in or from the West, or simply as people who have concerns

about women's lives, we need to be wary of this response to the events and aftermath of September 11, 2001. I

want to point out the minefields-a metaphor that is 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. I hope to show some way

through them using insights from anthropology, the discipline whose charge has been to understand and manage

cultural difference. At the same time, I want to remain critical of anthropology's complicity in the reification of

cultural difference.

CULTURAL EXPLANATIONS AND THE MOBILIZATION OF WOMEN

It is easier to see why one should be skeptical about the focus on the "Muslim woman" if one begins with the U.S.

public response. I will analyze two manifestations of this response: some conversations I had with a reporter from

the PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and First Lady Laura Bush's radio address to the nation on November 17, 2001.

The presenter from the NewsHour show first contacted me in October to see if I was willing to give some

background for a segment on Women and Islam. I mischievously asked whether she had done segments on the

women of Guatemala, Ireland, Palestine, or Bosnia when the show covered wars in those regions; but I finally

agreed to look at the questions she was going to pose to panelists. The questions were hopelessly general. Do

Muslim women believe "x"? Are Muslim women "y"? Does Islam allow "z" for women? I asked her: If you were to

substitute Christian or Jewish wherever you have Muslim, would these questions make sense? I did not imagine

she would call me back. But she did, twice, once with an idea for a segment on the meaning of Ramadan and

another time on Muslim women in politics. One was in response to the bombing and the other to the speeches by

Laura Bush and Cherie Blair, wife of the 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, or how Afghanistan had come to be ruled

by the Taliban, or what interests might have fueled U.S. and other interventions in the region over the past 25

years, or what the history of American support for conservative groups funded to undermine the Soviets might

have been, or why the caves and bunkers out of which Bin Laden was to be smoked "dead or alive," as President

Bush announced on television, were paid for and built by the CIA.

In other words, the question is why knowing about the "culture" of the region, and particularly its religious beliefs

and treatment of women, was more urgent than exploring the history of the development of repressive regimes in

the region and the U.S. role in this history. Such cultural framing, it seemed to me, prevented the serious

exploration of the roots and nature of human suffering in this part of the world. Instead of political and historical

explanations, experts were being asked to give religiocultural ones. Instead of questions that might lead to the

exploration of global interconnections, we were offered ones that worked to artificially divide the world into

separate spheres-recreating an imaginative geography of West versus East, us versus Muslims, cultures in which

First Ladies give speeches versus others where women shuffle around silently in burqas.

Most pressing for me was why the Muslim woman in general, and the Afghan woman in particular, were so crucial

to this cultural mode of explanation, which ignored the complex entanglements in which we are all implicated, in

sometimes surprising alignments. Why were these female symbols being mobilized in this "War against Terrorism"

in a way they were not in other conflicts? Laura Bush's radio address on November 17 reveals the political work

such mobilization accomplishes. 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. Then there was the blurring

of the very separate causes in Afghanistan of women's continuing malnutrition, poverty, and ill health, and their

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, primarily 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."

Most revealingly, the speech enlisted women to justify American bombing and intervention in Afghanistan and to

make a case for the "War on Terrorism" of which it was allegedly 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" (U.S. Government 2002).

These words have haunting resonances for anyone who has studied colonial history. Many who have worked on

British colonialism in South Asia have noted the use of the woman question in colonial policies where intervention

into sati (the practice of widows immolating themselves on their husbands' funeral pyres), child marriage, and

other practices was used to justify rule. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988) has cynically put it: white men

saving brown women from brown men. The historical record is full of similar cases, including in the Middle East. In

Turn of the Century Egypt, what Leila Ahmed (1992) has called "colonial feminism" was hard at work. This was a

selective concern about the plight of Egyptian women that focused on the veil as a sign of oppression but gave no

support to women's education and was professed loudly by the same Englishman, Lord Cromer, who opposed

women's suffrage back home.

Sociologist Marnia Lazreg (1994) has offered some vivid examples of how French colonialism enlisted women to

its cause in Algeria. She writes:

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

bloody struggle and 130 years of French control-L.A.]. 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. [Lazreg 1994:135]

Lazreg (1994) also gives memorable examples of the way in which the French had earlier sought to transform Arab

women and girls. She describes skits at awards 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 Arab girls reminisced about their trip to

France with words including the following:

ON 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! [Lazreg 1994:68-69]

These girls are made to invoke the gift of a share of this world, a world where freedom reigns under Christian skies.

This is not the world the Taliban-and-the-terrorists would "like to impose on the rest of us."

Just as I argued above that 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 Laura Bush, all with military troops behind them, claim to be saving or liberating Muslim women.

POLITICS OF THE VEIL

I want now to look more closely at those Afghan women Laura Bush claimed were "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 will set the stage for a discussion of how anthropologists, feminist

anthropologists in particular, contend with the problem of difference in a global world. In the conclusion, I will

return to the rhetoric of saving Muslim women and offer an alternative.

It is common popular knowledge that the ultimate sign of the oppression of Afghan women under the Taliban-and-

the-terrorists is that they were forced to wear the burqa. Liberals sometimes confess their surprise that even

though Afghanistan has been liberated from the Taliban, women do not seem to be throwing off their burqas.

Someone who has worked in Muslim regions must ask why this is so surprising. Did we expect that once "free"

from the Taliban they 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 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 has 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 spheres, as part of the general association

of women with family and home, not with public space where strangers mingled.

Twenty years ago the anthropologist Hanna Papanek (1982), who worked in Pakistan, described the burqa as

"portable seclusion." She noted that many saw it as a liberating invention because it enabled women to move out

of segregated living spaces while still observing the basic moral requirements of separating and protecting women

from unrelated men. Ever since I came across her phrase "portable seclusion," I have thought of these enveloping

robes as "mobile homes." Everywhere, such veiling signifies belonging to a particular community and participating

in a moral way of life in which families are paramount in the organization of communities and the home is

associated with the sanctity of women.

The obvious question that follows is this: If this were the case, why would women suddenly become immodest?

Why would they suddenly throw off the markers of their respectability, markers, whether burqas or other forms of

cover, which were supposed to assure their protection in the public sphere from the harassment of strange men by

symbolically signaling to all that they were still in the inviolable space of their homes, even though moving in the

public realm? Especially when these are forms of dress that had become so conventional that most women gave

little thought to their meaning.

To draw some analogies, none of them perfect, why are we surprised that Afghan women do not throw off their

burqas when we know perfectly well that it would not be appropriate to wear shorts to the opera? At the time these

discussions of Afghan women's burqas were raging, a friend of mine was chided by her husband for suggesting

she wanted to wear a pantsuit to a fancy wedding: "You know you don't wear pants to a WASP wedding," he

reminded her. New Yorkers know that the beautifully coiffed Hasidic women, who look so fashionable next to their

dour husbands in black coats and hats, are wearing wigs. This is because religious belief and community

standards of propriety require the covering of the hair. They also alter boutique fashions to include high necks and

long sleeves. As anthropologists know perfectly well, people wear the appropriate form of dress for their social

communities and are guided by socially shared standards, religious beliefs, and moral ideals, unless they

deliberately transgress to make a point or are unable to afford proper cover. If we think that U.S. women live in a

world of choice regarding clothing, all we need to do is remind ourselves of the expression, "the tyranny of fashion."

What had happened in Afghanistan under the Taliban is that one regional style of covering or veiling, associated

with a certain respectable but not elite class, was imposed on everyone as "religiously" appropriate, even though

previously there had been many different styles, popular or traditional with different groups and classes-different

ways to mark women's propriety, or, in more recent times, religious piety. Although I am not an expert on

Afghanistan, I imagine that the majority of women left in Afghanistan by the time the Taliban took control were the

rural or less educated, from nonelite families, since they were the only ones who could not emigrate to escape the

hardship and violence that has marked Afghanistan's recent history. If liberated from the enforced wearing of

burqas, most of these women would choose some other form of modest headcovering, like all those living nearby

who were not under the Taliban-their rural Hindu counterparts in the North of India (who cover their heads and veil

their faces from affines) or their Muslim sisters in Pakistan.

Even The New York Times carried an article about Afghan women refugees in Pakistan that attempted to educate

readers about this local variety (Fremson 2001). The article describes and pictures everything from the now--

iconic burqa with the embroidered eyeholes, which a Pashtun woman explains is the proper dress for her

community, to large scarves they call chadors, to the new Islamic modest dress that wearers refer to as hijab.

Those in the new Islamic dress are characteristically students heading for professional careers, especially in

medicine, just like their counterparts from Egypt to Malaysia. One wearing the large scarf was a school principal;

the other was a poor street vendor. The telling quote from the young street vendor is, "If I did [wear the burqa] the

refugees would tease me because the burqa is for 'good women' who stay inside the home" (Fremson 2001:14).

Here you can see the local status associated with the burqa-it is for good respectable women from strong families

who are not forced to make a living selling on the street.

The British newspaper The Guardian published an interview in January 2002 with Dr. Suheila Siddiqi, a respected

surgeon in Afghanistan who holds the rank of lieutenant general in the Afghan medical corps (Goldenberg 2002). A

woman in her sixties, she comes from an elite family and, like her sisters, was educated. Unlike most women of her

class, she chose not to go into exile. She is presented in the article as "the woman who stood up to the Taliban"

because she refused to wear the burqa. She had made it a condition of returning to her post as head of a major

hospital when the Taliban came begging in 1996, just eight months after firing her along with other women. Siddiqi

is described as thin, glamorous, and confident. But further into the article it is noted that her graying bouffant hair

is covered in a gauzy veil. This is a reminder that though she refused the burqa, she had no question about wearing

the chador or scarf.

Finally, I need to make a crucial point about veiling. Not only are there many forms of covering, which themselves

have different meanings in the communities in which they are used, but also veiling itself must not be confused

with, or made to stand for, lack of agency. As I have argued in my ethnography of a Bedouin community in Egypt in

the late 1970s and 1980s (1986), pulling the black head cloth over the face in front of older respected men is

considered a voluntary act by women who are deeply committed to being moral and have a sense of honor tied to

family. One of the ways they show their standing is by covering their faces in certain contexts. They decide for

whom they feel it is appropriate to veil.

To take a very different case, the modern Islamic modest dress that many educated women across the Muslim

world have taken on since the mid-1970s now both publicly marks piety and can be read as a sign of educated

urban sophistication, a sort of modernity (e.g., Abu-Lughod 1995, 1998; Brenner 1996; El Guindi 1999; MacLeod

1991; Ong 1990). As Saba Mahmood (2001) has so brilliantly shown in her ethnography of women in the mosque

movement in Egypt, this new form of dress is also perceived by many of the women who adopt it as part of a bodily

means to cultivate virtue, the outcome of their professed desire to be close to God.

Two points emerge from this fairly basic discussion of the meanings of veiling in the contemporary Muslim world.

First, we need to work against the reductive interpretation of veiling as the quintessential sign of women's

unfreedom, even if we object to state imposition of this form, as in Iran or with the Taliban. (It must be recalled that

the modernizing states of Turkey and Iran had earlier in the century banned veiling and required men, except

religious clerics, to adopt Western dress.) What does freedom mean if we accept the fundamental premise that

humans are social beings, always raised in certain social and historical contexts and belonging to particular

communities that shape their desires and understandings of the world? Is it not a gross violation of women's own

understandings of what they are doing to simply denounce the burqa as a medieval imposition? Second, we must

take care not to reduce the diverse situations and attitudes of millions of Muslim women to a single item of

clothing. Perhaps it is time to give up the Western obsession with the veil and focus on some serious issues with

which feminists and others should indeed be concerned.

Ultimately, the significant political-ethical problem the burqa raises is how to deal with cultural "others." How are

we to deal with difference without accepting the passivity implied by the cultural relativism for which

anthropologists are justly famous-a relativism that says it's their culture and it's not my business to judge or

interfere, only to try to understand. Cultural relativism is certainly an improvement on ethnocentrism and the

racism, cultural imperialism, and imperiousness that underlie it; the problem is that it is too late not to interfere.

The forms of lives we find around the world are already products of long histories of interactions.

I want to explore the issues of women, cultural relativism, and the problems of "difference" from three angles. First,

I want to consider what feminist anthropologists (those stuck in that awkward relationship, as Strathern [1987] has

claimed) are to do with strange political bedfellows. I used to feel torn when I received the e-mail petitions

circulating for the last few years in defense of Afghan women under the Taliban. I was not sympathetic to the

dogmatism of the Taliban; I do not support the oppression of women. But the provenance of the campaign worried

me. I do not usually find myself in political company with the likes of Hollywood celebrities (see Hirschkind and

Mahmood 2002). I had never received a petition from such women defending the right of Palestinian women to

safety from Israeli bombing or daily harassment at checkpoints, asking the United States to reconsider its support

for a government that had dispossessed them, closed them out from work and citizenship rights, refused them the

most basic freedoms. Maybe some of these same people might be signing petitions to save African women from

genital cutting, or Indian women from dowry deaths. However, I do not think that it would be as easy to mobilize so

many of these American and European women if it were not a case of Muslim men oppressing Muslim

womenwomen of cover for whom they can feel sorry and in relation to whom they can feel smugly superior. Would

television diva Oprah Winfrey host the Women in Black, the women's peace group from Israel, as she did RAWA, the

Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan, who were also granted the Glamour Magazine Women of the

Year Award? What are we to make of post-Taliban "Reality Tours" such as the one advertised on the internet by

Global Exchange for March 2002 under the title "Courage and Tenacity: A Women's Delegation to Afghanistan"?

The rationale for the $1,400 tour is that "with the removal of the Taliban government, Afghan women, for the first

time in the past decade, have the opportunity to reclaim their basic human rights and establish their role as equal

citizens by participating in the rebuilding of their nation." The tour's objective, to celebrate International Women's

Week, is "to develop awareness of the concerns and issues the Afghan women are facing as well as to witness the

changing political, economic, and social conditions which have created new opportunities for the women of

Afghanistan" (Global Exchange 2002).

To be critical of this celebration of women's rights in Afghanistan is not to pass judgment on any local women's

organizations, such as RAWA, whose members have courageously worked since 1977 for a democratic secular

Afghanistan in which women's human rights are respected, against Soviet-backed regimes or U.S.-, Saudi-, and

Pakistanisupported conservatives. Their documentation of abuse and their work through clinics and schools have

been enormously important.

It is also not to fault the campaigns that exposed the dreadful conditions under which the Taliban placed women.

The Feminist Majority campaign helped put a stop to a secret oil pipeline deal between the Taliban and the U.S.

multinational Unocal that was going forward with U.S. administration support. Western feminist campaigns must

not be confused with the hypocrisies of the new colonial feminism of a Republican president who was not elected

for his progressive stance on feminist issues or of administrations that played down the terrible record of

violations of women by the United State's allies in the Northern Alliance, as documented by Human Rights Watch

and Amnesty International, among others. Rapes and assaults were widespread in the period of infighting that

devastated Afghanistan before the Taliban came in to restore order.

It is, however, to suggest that we need to look closely at what we are supporting (and what we are not) and to think

carefully about why. How should we manage the complicated politics and ethics of finding ourselves in agreement

with those with whom we normally disagree? I do not know how many feminists who felt good about saving

Afghan women from the Taliban are also asking for a global redistribution of wealth or contemplating sacrificing

their own consumption radically so that African or Afghan women could have some chance of having what I do

believe should be a universal human right-the right to freedom from the structural violence of global inequality and

from the ravages of war, the everyday rights of having enough to eat, having homes for their families in which to

live and thrive, having ways to make decent livings so their children can grow, and having the strength and security

to work out, within their communities and with whatever alliances they want, how to live a good life, which might

very well include changing the ways those communities are organized.

Suspicion about bedfellows is only a first step; it will not give us a way to think more positively about what to do or

where to stand. For that, we need to confront two more big issues. First is the acceptance of the possibility of

difference. Can we only free Afghan women to be like us or might we have to recognize that even after "liberation"

from the Taliban, they might want different things than we would want for them? What do we do about that?

Second, we need to be vigilant about the rhetoric of saving people because of what it implies about our attitudes.

Again, when I talk about accepting difference, I am not implying that we should resign ourselves to being cultural

relativists who respect whatever goes on elsewhere as "just their culture." I have already discussed the dangers of

"cultural" explanations; "their" cultures are just as much part of history and an interconnected world as ours are.

What I am advocating is the hard work involved in recognizing and respecting differences-precisely as products of

different histories, as expressions of different circumstances, and as manifestations of differently structured

desires. We may want justice for women, but can we accept that there might be different ideas about justice and

that different women might want, or choose, different futures from what we envision as best (see Ong 1988)? We

must consider that they might be called to personhood, so to speak, in a different language.

Reports from the Bonn peace conference held in late November to discuss the rebuilding of Afghanistan revealed

significant differences among the few Afghan women feminists and activists present. RAWA's position was to

reject any conciliatory approach to Islamic governance. According to one report I read, most women activists,

especially those based in Afghanistan who are aware of the realities on the ground, agreed that Islam had to be the

starting point for reform. Fatima Gailani, a U.S.-based advisor to one of the delegations, is quoted as saying, "If I go

to Afghanistan today and ask women for votes on the promise to bring them secularism, they are going to tell me

to go to hell." Instead, according to one report, most of these women looked for inspiration on how to fight for

equality to a place that might seem surprising. They looked to Iran as a country in which they saw women making

significant gains within an Islamic framework-in part through an Islamically oriented feminist movement that is

challenging injustices and reinterpreting the religious tradition.

The situation in Iran is itself the subject of heated debate within feminist circles, especially among Iranian

feminists in the West (e.g., Mir-Hosseini 1999; Moghissi 1999; Najmabadi 1998, 2000). It is not clear whether and

in what ways women have made gains and whether the great increases in literacy, decreases in birthrates,

presence of women in the professions and government, and a feminist flourishing in cultural fields like writing and

filmmaking are because of or despite the establishment of a socalled Islamic Republic. The concept of an Islamic

feminism itself is also controversial. Is it an oxymoron or does it refer to a viable movement forged by brave

women who want a third way?

One of the things we have to be most careful about in thinking about Third World feminisms, and feminism in

different parts of the Muslim world, is how not to fall into polarizations that place feminism on the side of the

West. I have written about the dilemmas faced by Arab feminists when Western feminists initiate campaigns that

make them vulnerable to local denunciations by conservatives of various sorts, whether Islamist or nationalist, of

being traitors (Abu-Lughod 2001). As some like Afsaneh Najmabadi are now arguing, not only is it wrong to see

history simplistically in terms of a putative opposition between Islam and the West (as is happening in the United

States now and has happened in parallel in the Muslim world), but it is also strategically dangerous to accept this

cultural opposition between Islam and the West, between fundamentalism and feminism, because those many

people within Muslim countries who are trying to find alternatives to present injustices, those who might want to

refuse the divide and take from different histories and cultures, who do not accept that being feminist means being

Western, will be under pressure to choose, just as we are: Are you with us or against us?

My point is to remind us to be aware of differences, respectful of other paths toward social change that might give

women better lives. Can there be a liberation that is Islamic? And, beyond this, is liberation even a goal for which all

women or people strive? Are emancipation, equality, and rights part of a universal language we must use? To quote

Saba Mahmood, writing about the women in Egypt who are seeking to become pious Muslims, "The desire for

freedom and liberation is a historically situated desire whose motivational force cannot be assumed a priori, but

needs to be reconsidered in light of other desires, aspirations, and capacities that inhere in a culturally and

historically located subject" (2001:223). In other words, might other desires be more meaningful for different

groups of people? Living in close families? Living in a godly way? Living without war? I have done fieldwork in

Egypt over more than 20 years and I cannot think of a single woman I know, from the poorest rural to the most

educated cosmopolitan, who has ever expressed envy of U.S. women, women they tend to perceive as bereft of

community, vulnerable to sexual violence and social anomie, driven by individual success rather than morality, or

strangely disrespectful of God.

Mahmood (2001) has pointed out a disturbing thing that happens when one argues for a respect for other

traditions. She notes that there seems to be a difference in the political demands made on those who work on or

are trying to understand Muslims and Islamists and those who work on secular-humanist projects. She, who

studies the piety movement in Egypt, is consistently pressed to denounce all the harm done by Islamic movements

around the world-otherwise she is accused of being an apologist. But there never seems to be a parallel demand

for those who study secular humanism and its projects, despite the terrible violences that have been associated

with it over the last couple of centuries, from world wars to colonialism, from genocides to slavery. We need to

have as little dogmatic faith in secular humanism as in Islamism, and as open a mind to the complex possibilities

of human projects undertaken in one tradition as the other.

BEYOND THE RHETORIC OF SALVATION

Let us return, finally, to my title, "Do Muslim Women Need Saving?" The discussion of culture, veiling, and how one

can navigate the shoals of cultural difference should put Laura Bush's self-congratulation about the rejoicing of

Afghan women liberated by American troops in a different light. It is deeply problematic to construct the Afghan

woman as someone in need of saving. When you save someone, you imply that you are saving her from

something. You are also saving her to something. What violences are entailed in this transformation, and what

presumptions are being made about the superiority of that to which you are saving her? Projects of saving other

women depend on and reinforce a sense of superiority by Westerners, a form of arrogance that deserves to be

challenged. All one needs to do to appreciate the patronizing quality of the rhetoric of saving women is to imagine

using it today in the United States about disadvantaged groups such as African American women or working-class

women. We now understand them as suffering from structural violence. We have become politicized about race

and class, but not culture.

As anthropologists, feminists, or concerned citizens, we should be wary of taking on the mantles of those

19thcentury Christian missionary women who devoted their lives to saving their Muslim sisters. One of my favorite

documents from that period is a collection called Our Moslem Sisters, the proceedings of a conference of women

missionaries held in Cairo in 1906 (Van Sommer and Zwemmer 1907). The subtitle of the book is A Cry of Need

from the Lands of Darkness Interpreted by Those Who Heard It. Speaking of the ignorance, seclusion, polygamy,

and veiling that blighted women's lives across the Muslim world, the missionary women spoke of their

responsibility to make these women's voices heard. As the introduction states, "They will never cry for themselves,

for they are down under the yoke of centuries of oppression" (Van Sommer and Zwemer 1907:15). "This book," it

begins, "with its sad, reiterated story of wrong and oppression is an indictment and an appeal.... It is an appeal to

Christian womanhood to right these wrongs and enlighten this darkness by sacrifice and service" (Van Sommer

and Zwemer 1907:5).

One can hear uncanny echoes of their virtuous goals today, even though the language is secular, the appeals not

to Jesus but to human rights or the liberal West. The continuing currency of such imagery and sentiments can be

seen in their deployment for perfectly good humanitarian causes. In February 2002, I received an invitation to a

reception honoring an international medical humanitarian network called Medecins du Monde/Doctors of the

World (MdM). Under the sponsorship of the French Ambassador to the United States, the Head of the delegation of

the European Commission to the United Nations, and a member of the European Parliament, the cocktail reception

was to feature an exhibition of photographs under the clicked title "Afghan Women: Behind the Veil."

The invitation was remarkable not just for the colorful photograph of women in flowing burqas walking across the

barren mountains of Afghanistan but also for the text, a portion of which I quote:

For 20 years MdM has been ceaselessly struggling to help those who are most vulnerable. But increasingly, thick

veils cover the victims of the war. When the Taliban came to power in 1996, Afghan Women became faceless. To

unveil one's face while receiving medical care was to achieve a sort of intimacy, find a brief space for secret

freedom and recover a little of one's dignity. In a country where women had no access to basic medical care

because they did not have the right to appear in public, where women had no right to practice medicine, MdM's

program stood as a stubborn reminder of human rights .... Please join us in helping to lift the veil.

Although I cannot take up here the fantasies of intimacy associated with unveiling, fantasies reminiscent of the

French colonial obsessions so brilliantly unmasked by Alloula in The Colonial Harem (1986), I can ask why

humanitarian projects and human rights discourse in the 21st century need rely on such constructions of Muslim

women.

Could we not leave veils and vocations of saving others behind and instead train our sights on ways to make the

world a more just place? The reason respect for difference should not be confused with cultural relativism is that it

does not preclude asking how we, living in this privileged and powerful part of the world, might examine our own

responsibilities for the situations in which others in distant places have found themselves. We do not stand

outside the world, looking out over this sea of poor benighted people, living under the shadow-or veil-of oppressive

cultures; we are part of that world. Islamic movements themselves have arisen in a world shaped by the intense

engagements of Western powers in Middle Eastern lives.

A more productive approach, it seems to me, is to ask how we might contribute to making the world a more just

place. A world not organized around strategic military and economic demands; a place where certain kinds of

forces and values that we may still consider important could have an appeal and where there is the peace

necessary for discussions, debates, and transformations to occur within communities. We need to ask ourselves

what kinds of world conditions we could contribute to making such that popular desires will not be overdetermined

by an overwhelming sense of helplessness in the face of forms of global injustice. Where we seek to be active in

the affairs of distant places, can we do so in the spirit of support for those within those communities whose goals

are to make women's (and men's) lives better (as Walley has argued in relation to practices of genital cutting in

Africa, [1997])? Can we use a more egalitarian language of alliances, coalitions, and solidarity, instead of salvation?

Even RAWA, the now celebrated Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, which was so

instrumental in bringing to U.S. women's attention the excesses of the Taliban, has opposed the U.S. bombing

from the beginning. They do not see in it Afghan women's salvation but increased hardship and loss. They have

long called for disarmament and for peacekeeping forces. Spokespersons point out the dangers of confusing

governments with people, the Taliban with innocent Afghans who will be most harmed. They consistently remind

audiences to take a close look at the ways policies are being organized around oil interests, the arms industry, and

the international drug trade. They are not obsessed with the veil, even though they are the most radical feminists

working for a secular democratic Afghanistan. Unfortunately, only their messages about the excesses of the

Taliban have been heard, even though their criticisms of those in power in Afghanistan have included previous

regimes. A first step in hearing their wider message is to break with the language of alien cultures, whether to

understand or eliminate them. Missionary work and colonial feminism belong in the past. Our task is to critically

explore what we might do to help create a world in which those poor Afghan women, for whom "the hearts of those

in the civilized world break," can have safety and decent lives.

Footnote

NOTES

Footnote

Acknowledgments. I want to thank Page Jackson, Fran Mascia-Lees, Tim Mitchell, Rosalind Morris, Anupama Rao,

and members of the audience at the symposium "Responding to War," sponsored by Columbia University's

Institute for Research on Women and Gender (where I presented an earlier version), for helpful comments,

references, clippings, and encouragement.

References

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Ahmed, Leila

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Alloula, Malek

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AuthorAffiliation

LiLA ABu-LUGHOD Department of Anthropology, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027 DETAILS

Subject: Culture; Women; Political persecution; Anthropology; Terrorism

Location: United States US Afghanistan

Publication title: American Anthropologist; Oxford

Volume: 104

Issue: 3

Pages: 783-790

Number of pages: 8

Publication year: 2002

Publication date: Sep 2002

Publisher: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Place of publication: Oxford

Country of publication: United Kingdom, Oxford

LINKS Check for full text via Journal Finder

Publication subject: Anthropology

ISSN: 00027294

CODEN: AMATA7

Source type: Scholarly Journals

Language of publication: English

Document type: Feature

ProQuest document ID: 198217752

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Copyright: Copyright American Anthropological Association Sep 2002

Last updated: 2017-10-31

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