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Do Muslim Women Need Saving?

These days the public discourse in our western world is poisoned by stereotypes. Stereotypes rendering permanent the division in ‘we’ (in Dutch ‘de autochtonen’) and ‘they’ (the newcomers often with that threatening religion, the Islam). A choice: ‘The Islam is backward’; ‘the Islam is non-democratic’; ‘they are taking over’; ‘we are now in the final clash, after the battles of Poitiers and Vienna’; ‘the women in this culture are oppressed’.

It is a relief to read a book in which the author comes to conclusions which are uncommon in this time. ‘Do Muslim Women Need Saving?’ is the good chosen title of this book and the author is Lila Abu-Lughod, Professor of Social Science at Columbia University. She is teaching there anthropology and women’s studies.

Lila Abu-Lughod spoke with a lot of muslim-women and the result is that she had the feeling that she was ‘writing against culture’. ‘Pundits tell us that there is a clash of civilizations or cultures in our world. They tell us there is an unbridgeable chasm between the West and the “Rest”. Muslim women, in this new common sense, symbolize just how alien this culture is’. Lila Abu-Lughod writes that since September 11, 2001 ‘the images of oppressed Muslim-women became connected to a mission to rescue them from their cultures’. These views ‘rationalize American and European international adventures across the Middle East and South Asia’.

Characteristic is a conversation about her research from Lila Abu-Lughod with a woman, Zaynab, in Egypt in 2010. She told that she was writing a book about how people in the West believe that Muslim women are oppressed. Zaynab answered: ‘But many women are oppressed! They don’t get their rights in so many ways –in work, in schooling, in …’. Lila Abu-Lughod said: ‘but is the reason Islam? They believe that these women are oppressed by Islam’. Zaynab was shocked: ‘What? Of course not! It’s the government. (…). Poverty is hard. Men suffer from this too’.

Like Zaynab many other women in Egypt are ‘puzzled, even offended by some of the ways they are being viewed and judged’. Necessary is to take time to listen, it is difficult ‘to hear through the noise of the familiar stories’. By listening better one discovers that matters are nor so simple. The contexts, shaped by global politics, international capital and modern state institutions have important impacts on family and community.

Lila Abu-Lughod writes that the sufferings that Muslim women, like other women, undergo, are of many sorts. Few of these sorts are related with religious traditions or cultural formations. Caricaturising works anti-productive. In her vision one can speak about a moral crusade to rescue oppressed Muslim women. This crusade has justified all manner of intervention from legal to military. The conviction about the rightness of saving women of ‘that timeless homogeneous mythical place called Islamland’ is fed by geopolitical factors.

About the veil. We forget, following Lila Abu-Lughod, that people all over the globe wear the dress which is most appropriate for the social standards, religious belief and moral ideals. Women in the West also have to deal with the often constricting tyrannies of fashion.

In our time of frequently biased information the book of Lila Abu-Lughod is very interesting and stimulating.

Dick Mantel