Purdue Global Do Muslim Women Really Need saving reading essay please check the attached files. follow the instruction the instructor is very restricted ab

Purdue Global Do Muslim Women Really Need saving reading essay please check the attached files. follow the instruction the instructor is very restricted about the grading policy. Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism
and Its Others
Author(s): Lila Abu-Lughod
Source: American Anthropologist, Vol. 104, No. 3 (Sep., 2002), pp. 783-790
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3567256
Accessed: 09-08-2018 00:39 UTC
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LILA ABU-LUGHOD
H ,
Ethics Forum: September 11 and Ethnographic Res
Do Muslim Women Really Need Savi
Anthropological Reflections on Cultu
Relativism and Its Others
ABSTRACT This article explores the ethics of the current “War on Terrorism,” asking whether anthropology, the di
to understanding and dealing with cultural difference, can provide us with critical purchase on the justifications made f
intervention in Afghanistan in terms of liberating, or saving, Afghan women. I look first at the dangers of reifying cult
the tendencies to plaster neat cultural icons like the Muslim woman over messy historical and political dynamics. Then, ca
to the resonances of contemporary discourses on equality, freedom, and rights with earlier colonial and missionary rhet
women, I argue that we need to develop, instead, a serious appreciation of differences among women in the world
different histories, expressions of different circumstances, and manifestations of differently structured desires. Furth
rather than seeking to “save” others (with the superiority it implies and the violences it would entail) we might better th
(1) working with them in situations that we recognize as always subject to historical transformation and (2) considering
responsibilities to address the forms of global injustice that are powerful shapers of the worlds in which they find them
many of these arguments about the limits of “cultural relativism” through a consideration of the burqa and the many m
ing in the Muslim world. [Keywords: cultural relativism, Muslim women, Afghanistan war, freedom, global injustice, co
programs where “transnational feminism” is no
W HAT ARE THE ETHICS of the current “Warstudies
on
being taken seriously, it has a certain integrity (see Safire 2001
Terrorism,” a war that justifies itself by purport-
My discomfort led me to reflect on why, as feminists
ing to liberate, or save, Afghan women? Does anthropol-
from the West, or simply as people who have concerns
ogy have anything to offer in our search for a viable or
posiabout
women’s lives, we need to be wary of this response
tion to take regarding this rationale for war?
the events and aftermath of September 11, 2001. I want t
I was led to pose the question of my title in part because
point
of the way I personally experienced the response to the
U.S.out the minefields-a metaphor that is sadly too a
war in Afghanistan. Like many colleagues whose workfor
has a country like Afghanistan, with the world’s highe
number
of mines per capita-of this obsession with th
focused on women and gender in the Middle East, I was
delplight
of
Muslim women. I hope to show some way throug
uged with invitations to speak-not just on news programs
them using insights from anthropology, the discipline who
but also to various departments at colleges and universities,
especially women’s studies programs. Why did this not charge
please has been to understand and manage cultural differ
ence.
At the same time, I want to remain critical of anthro
me, a scholar who has devoted more than 20 years of her
life
complicity in the reification of cultural difference.
to this subject and who has some complicated personalpology’s
con-
nection to this identity? Here was an opportunity to spread
CULTURAL EXPLANATIONS AND THE MOBILIZATION
the word, disseminate my knowledge, and correct misunder-
OF WOMEN
standings. The urgent search for knowledge about our sister
“women of cover” (as President George Bush so marvelously
It is easier to see why one should be skeptical about the fo
called them) is laudable and when it comes from women’s
cus on the “Muslim woman” if one begins with the U.S
AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST 104(3):783-790. COPYRIGHT ? 2002, AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION
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784 American Anthropologist * Vol. 104, No. 3 * September 2002
public response. I will analyze two manifestations of thisism” in a way they were not in other conflicts? Laura Bush’s
response: some conversations I had with a reporter fromradio address on November 17 reveals the political work
the PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and First Lady Laura Bush’s such mobilization accomplishes. On the one hand, her adradio address to the nation on November 17, 2001. The
dress collapsed important distinctions that should have
presenter from the NewsHour show first contacted me in been maintained. There was a constant slippage between
October to see if I was willing to give some background for the Taliban and the terrorists, so that they became almost
a segment on Women and Islam. I mischievously asked one word-a kind of hyphenated monster identity: the
whether she had done segments on the women of Guate- Taliban-and-the-terrorists. Then there was the blurring of
mala, Ireland, Palestine, or Bosnia when the show covered
the very separate causes in Afghanistan of women’s conwars in those regions; but I finally agreed to look at the tinuing malnutrition, poverty, and ill health, and their
questions she was going to pose to panelists. The ques- more recent exclusion under the Taliban from employtions were hopelessly general. Do Muslim women believe ment, schooling, and the joys of wearing nail polish. On
“x’? Are Muslim women “y”? Does Islam allow “z” for the other hand, her speech reinforced chasmic divides,
women? I asked her: If you were to substitute Christian or primarily between the “civilized people throughout the
Jewish wherever you have Muslim, would these questions world” whose hearts break for the women and children of
make sense? I did not imagine she would call me back. But Afghanistan and the Taliban-and-the-terrorists, the culshe did, twice, once with an idea for a segment on the tural monsters who want to, as she put it, “impose their
world on the rest of us.”
meaning of Ramadan and another time on Muslim
women in politics. One was in response to the bombing
Most revealingly, the speech enlisted women to jusand the other to the speeches by Laura Bush and Cherie tify American bombing and intervention in Afghanistan
Blair, wife of the British Prime Minister.
What is striking about these three ideas for news pro-
and to make a case for the “War on Terrorism” of which it
was allegedly a part. As Laura Bush said, “Because of our
grams is that there was a consistent resort to the cultural,
recent military gains in much of Afghanistan, women are
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
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).
U.S. and other interventions in the region over the past 25
These words have haunting resonances for anyone
who has studied colonial history. Many who have worked
years, or what the history of American support for conser-
on British colonialism in South Asia have noted the use of
ruled by the Taliban, or what interests might have fueled
vative groups funded to undermine the Soviets might
the woman question in colonial policies where intervention into sati (the practice of widows immolating themselves on their husbands’ funeral pyres), child marriage,
announced on television, were paid for and built by the and other practices was used to justify rule. As Gayatri
have been, or why the caves and bunkers out of which Bin
Laden was to be smoked “dead or alive,” as President Bush
CIA.
In other words, the question is why knowing about
the “culture” of the region, and particularly its religious
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.
beliefs and treatment of women, was more urgent than ex-
In Turn of the Century Egypt, what Leila Ahmed (1992)
ploring the history of the development of repressive re-
has called “colonial feminism” was hard at work. This was
gimes in the region and the U.S. role in this history. Such
a selective concern about the plight of Egyptian women
that focused on the veil as a sign of oppression but gave
cultural framing, it seemed to me, prevented the serious
exploration of the roots and nature of human suffering in
no support to women’s education and was professed loudly
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
by the same Englishman, Lord Cromer, who opposed wo-
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
men to its cause in Algeria. She writes:
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 cru-
cial 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 Terror-
men’s suffrage back home.
Sociologist Marnia Lazreg (1994) has offered some
vivid examples of how French colonialism enlisted woPerhaps 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 fi-
nally 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
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Abu-Lughod * Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? 785
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 cere-
mony added to the event a symbolic dimension that
dramatized the one constant feature of the Algerian occu-
pation 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:
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! [Lazreg 1994:68-69]
These girls are made to invoke the gift of a share of
First, it should be recalled that the Taliban did not in-
vent 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 associa-
tion 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
would “like to impose on the rest of us.”
the
case,
why would women suddenly become immodest?
Just as I argued above that we need to be suspicious
Why
would
they suddenly throw off the markers of their
when neat cultural icons are plastered over messier historirespectability,
markers, whether burqas or other forms of
cal and political narratives, so we need to be wary when
cover,
which
were
supposed to assure their protection in
Lord Cromer in British-ruled Egypt, French ladies in Algeria, and Laura Bush, all with military troops behind them, the public sphere from the harassment of strange men by
symbolically signaling to all that they were still in the inclaim to be saving or liberating Muslim women.
violable space of their homes, even though moving in the
public realm? Especially when these are forms of dress that
POLITICS OF THE VEIL
had become so conventional that most women gave little
I want now to look more closely at those Afghan women
thought to their meaning.
Laura Bush claimed were “rejoicing” at their liberation by
the Americans. This necessitates a discussion of the veil, or To draw some analogies, none of them perfect, why
are we surprised that Afghan women do not throw off
the burqa, because it is so central to contemporary contheir
cerns about Muslim women. This will set the stage for a burqas when we know perfectly well that it would
not be appropriate to wear shorts to the opera? At the time
discussion of how anthropologists, feminist anthropolothese discussions of Afghan women’s burqas were raging,
gists in particular, contend with the problem of difference
a friend of mine was chided by her husband for suggesting
in a global world. In the conclusion, I will return to the
she wanted to wear a pantsuit to a fancy wedding: “You
rhetoric of saving Muslim women and offer an alternative.
know
It is common popular knowledge that the ultimate you don’t wear pants to a WASP wedding,” he reminded her. New Yorkers know that the beautifully coifsign of the oppression of Afghan women under the Taliban-and-the-terrorists is that they were forced to wearfed
theHasidic women, who look so fashionable next to their
this world, a world where freedom reigns under Christian
skies. This is not the world the Taliban-and-the-terrorists
dour husbands in black coats and hats, are wearing wigs.
burqa. Liberals sometimes confess their surprise that even
This is because religious belief and community standards
though Afghanistan has been liberated from the Taliban,
of propriety require the covering of the hair. They also alwomen do not seem to be throwing off their burqas.
ter boutique fashions to include high necks and long
Someone who has worked in Muslim regions must ask
sleeves.
why this is so surprising. Did we expect that once “free” As anthropologists know perfectly well, people
wear the appropriate form of dress for their social commufrom the Taliban they would go “back” to belly shirts and
nities
blue jeans, or dust off their Chanel suits? We need to
be and are guided by socially shared standards, religious beliefs, and moral ideals, unless they deliberately
more sensible about the clothing of “women of cover,”
transgress to make a point or are unable to afford proper
and so there is perhaps a need to make some basic points
cover. If we think that U.S. women live in a world of
about veiling.
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786 American Anthropologist * Vol. 104, No. 3 * September 2002
Finally, I need to make a crucial point about veiling.
choice regarding clothing, all we need to do is remind ourselves of the expression, “the tyranny of fashion.”
Not only are there many forms of covering, which them-
What had happened in Afghanistan under the Taliban
is that one regional style of covering or veiling, associated
selves have different meanings in the communities in
which they are used, but also veiling itself must not be
with a certain respectable but not elite class, was imposed
on everyone as “religiously” appropriate, even though pre-
confused with, or made to stand for, lack of agency. As I
viously 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 bur-
qas, most of these women would choose some other form
of modest headcovering, like all those living nearby who
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 ur-
ban sophistication, a sort of modernity (e.g., Abu-Lughod
1995, 1998; Br…
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