Do Muslim Women Need Saving? Lila Abu-Lughod

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Author and Scholar Lil Abu-Lughod presents her findings... 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, who has been writing about Arab women for thirty years, challenges this conclusion in DO MUSLIM WOMEN NEED SAVING? The book 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. It offers a detailed, moving portrait of the actual experiences of ordinary Muslim women, and of the contingencies with which they live.

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.
Related Links

At the Washington Post blog Monkey Cage, read an analysis of Lila Abu-Lughod’s central premise as it relates to women’s rights in Jordan
At the Muslimah Media Watch blog, read the story of one Muslim woman’s intellectual and emotional appreciation for Abu-Lughod’s efforts to “save Muslim women from being saved”
At the New York Times blog ArtsBeat, watch a brief video in which Abu-Lughod discusses the gap between popular Western beliefs about the constructed group “Muslim women” and the variegated population that exists in reality
Read Abu-Lughod’s essay in The National about the activist group Femen, who protest for women’s rights while topless, and an online counter-protest by more conservative women who argue that Femen does not speak for them
Read a Time Magazine essay by Abu-Lughod on the Western crusade to rescue Muslim women
Read an excerpt from Do Muslim Women Need Saving? at the Daily Beast
At JSTOR, read Abu-Lughod’s 2002 American Anthropologist article, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others” (subscription or site license required)

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