Do Muslim Women Still Need Saving? : How Lila Abu-Lughod Interprets Today’s Political Reality
By Mariam Syed
With less than ten minutes left in the quiz show, all eyes are on Open University. The team is up 80 points against their opponent, the University of East Anglia (UEA), and will likely qualify for the 53rd quarterfinals of the University Challenge. Aired on BBC, University Challenge is a popular highbrow British show in which universities from around the UK compete. Open University’s team captain, Ann Gavaghan, remains calm as host Amol Rajan hurls questions. Gavaghan’s UEA rivals are frantic. They rarely click the buzzer on time, and when they do, they often get the answers wrong. Aside from a slight hiccup regarding questions about computations, Open University is performing beautifully, answering before Rajan even finishes orating the questions. The odds are in their favor. That is until minute nineteen.
Rajan tells the Open University team that they have three bonus questions, all pertaining to the work of famed Palestinian-American anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod.
He looks towards the Open University team and asks in his friendly and fast cadence: “What single word completes the title of a 2003 book by Abu-Lughod that questions dominant Western narratives of Muslim women’s experiences—‘Do Muslim Women Need …’ what?” (The book was actually published in 2013, not 2003).
Gavaghan’s eyes widen. She turns desperately to her teammates for assistance. They return blank stares. Then one teammate hesitantly whispers, “Education?” and shrugs.
“Education,” Gavaghan tells Rajan.
“No,” he corrects her, “it’s ‘Saving.’”
Lila Abu-Lughod is widely regarded as a leading scholar in anthropology and gender studies. As the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University, her achievements include awards from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for Humanities, as well as election to the renowned American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Of the ten books written and edited by Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving? is her magnum opus. The book challenges the Western caricatures of Muslim women as oppressed and uneducated. These racist and Islamophobic archetypes, Abu-Lughod argues, reduce Muslim women’s humanity and construct them as objects in need of saving. Evidently, the Open University team hasn’t read Abu-Lughod’s work. Their timid answer of “Education” is shrouded in the pervasive stereotypes she seeks to dismantle. The University Challenge segment aired on November 13th, 2023, a day after the tenth anniversary of the book’s publishing.
Over the decades, Abu-Lughod’s scholarship has become canonical in gender and anthropological studies for combatting anti-Muslim stereotypes. Her seminal essay, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?,” denounced the United States’ 2001 invasion of Afghanistan as a mechanism to liberate Muslim women. A decade later, her book, with a similar title, emphasized an appreciation of differences among Muslim women across the world. The narrative—part theory, part ethnography—constructs intimate portraits of Egyptian women to highlight the complexity of Muslim women’s lives.
The book has been translated into Japanese, Malayalam, Turkish, Arabic and French, and last month, the launch of the French translation was honored in a roundtable discussion organized by the Arab Center for Research & Political Studies in Paris. This past August, Abu-Lughod’s latest book, The Cunning of Gender Violence, co-edited with Rema Hammami and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, was published.
For the past few weeks, I’ve interviewed Lila Abu-Lughod to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of her essay and the tenth anniversary of her book Do Muslim Women Need Saving?. We discussed the ongoing and heightened significance of her projects given our new political reality: Muslim women are leading global liberation efforts, the United States has withdrawn from Afghanistan, and most recently, has staunchly supported the Israeli army’s full-scale assault on Gaza. This interview was conducted over email.
1. Do Muslim Women Need Saving is an extension of your 2002 essay. Why did you decide to expand on the essay and write this book?
The essay, which has had quite an extraordinary life, began as a talk at a teach-in. My goal was to offer reflections on how we might think differently about the project of a military invasion in the name of, or as Gayatri Spivak put it, on the alibi of saving oppressed Afghan women. I struggled against one of the more basic of core anthropological values – understanding or valuing cultural difference. This is often called cultural relativism, by which we mean that we should not or cannot judge others by our own values but should try to understand them in terms of their own values. I made clear that I was not pleading for cultural relativism, understanding Afghan difference regarding women’s values, as opposed to being ethnocentric; it was a plea to do two things at once. First, I argued that we needed to shift the terms so that we could appreciate, or at least consider, that women in other places might be working with different values, which if they were Muslim, might prioritize family and God over individual freedoms. The late anthropologist Saba Mahmood, author of an important book called Politics of Piety about women in the piety movement in Egypt, labeled these kind of values ‘illiberal,’ in that they didn’t conform to secular liberal values such as individualism or freedom. Second, though, I argued that our responsibilities, as feminists in communities that had the potential to destroy the lives of others through military intervention and violence, included not just respecting other women’s desires but actually seeking ways to enhance, not shut down, the possibilities for internal debate within communities elsewhere in the world. This would ensure that values that we might consider important, and that were often shared by some members of those communities, could at least have a chance to be freely discussed and evaluated. Militarism does the opposite. It polarizes.
2. This is in an academic book, though in parts, it reads like narrative nonfiction. Through your ethnographic research, you constructed intimate portraits of rural Egyptian women. Why did you decide to focus on Egyptian women? Why did you feel these personal narratives were an effective tool in forming your argument?
Ethnography is the genre of anthropologists. Many of us hone the craft of representing the social and imaginative lives of those with whom we have had the privilege of living, even while we have become increasingly sensitive to the political effects of these representations and the inevitable ethical concerns about what we have revealed and the limits of our understandings. I lived in Egypt for a few years of my childhood and it seemed natural to return there for my PhD dissertation research.
I first wrote about a community of Bedouins in Egypt’s Western Desert who call themselves Awlad ‘Ali, focusing on a genre of oral poetry/song in which women, and to some extent men, expressed intimate sentiments about love and life, that they distanced themselves from in many more formal social contexts. Yet my turn to storytelling, what you might call narrative nonfiction, was the result of my frustration with the genre of anthropological analysis evident in Veiled Sentiments, my first book. I didn’t feel that I had been able to capture the rich quality of ‘life as lived,’ as my college mentor Paul Riesman had put it. So I returned in the mid-1980s to live with the same families I had known. I wanted to record their stories. I wrote Writing Women’s Worlds: Bedouin Stories based on my conversations with them, and conversations overheard. This took me to the 1990s when I became fascinated by the reception of television dramas, which are so popular all over the country. My third ethnography, Dramas of Nationhood, told stories about a very different community I lived in rural Upper Egypt, not the Northwest Coast. Their stories gripped me and the struggles in their lives, as a poor community in a disadvantaged part of the country, troubled me. When the US and allied invasion of Afghanistan and then Iraq happened, with moral justifications tied up with women’s rights, I could not help being outraged. I wanted to offer, on the basis of what I knew already, a more direct rebuttal of the absurd simplifications in the Western media and popular culture, ones that seemed to fault Islam for oppressing women in the region.
Lila Abu-Lughod in Upper Egypt, December 2023.
Courtesy of Lila Abu-Lughod
I returned to the village in Egypt about which I’d written in my book on television soap operas. I wanted to draw a picture of how women saw and fought for their rights. In addition to analyzing the media depictions and their effects in justifying wars and military occupations, something that many cultural theorists can do much better than I ever could, I wanted to draw from my own experiences with women I had come to know and respect relevant stories from their everyday lives. This was what, as an anthropologist, I felt was my unique skill and what I could contribute. I offered these women’s stories as counter-narratives. I wanted again, as with Writing Women’s Worlds, to bring to life the dynamism and complexity of people’s lives in this one village—lives that defied simplification in terms of freedom and bondage, consent and coercion, or patriarchy. And I wanted to broaden the frame to include the many sorts of violence with which they live.
So I opened the book, which I titled Do Muslim Women Need Saving? with a conversation with one woman who asked me what I was going to be writing about this time. She and her daughters had helped me understand television in my earlier visits. I told her that in the West, many believe that women are oppressed by Islam. She was outraged. Instead, she pointed her finger at the government—a government whose agents harassed her and her family and that did nothing, she charged, to bring people like her out of poverty. It is analyses like hers that must be our starting point. And it is stories about her daily life, her dreams, and her struggles for her family that I consider powerful antidotes to the Islamophobic stereotypes that justify geopolitical violence.
3. The book problematizes the logic that military interventions, specifically the 2001 Afghanistan invasion, will liberate Afghan women and, by extension, Muslim women at large. In the decade since the publication of your book, American troops have withdrawn from Afghanistan, leaving the country in a worse state, especially for Afghan women. The United States, in turn, has lost much of its moral high ground with the rise of white supremacy and the curtailment of human and women's rights through troubling court rulings like the reversal of Roe v. Wade and the President's refusal to call for a ceasefire. How can your book's findings help us understand this current political moment?
These are excellent observations about what has transpired in the twenty years since I began researching and writing this book. When I wrote my first article that led to this book, I was convinced that it was so well received because so many in the US knew there was something wrong with the rhetoric around the military invasion but didn’t have the regional expertise to put their finger on why it was so problematic. As scholars, we hope that our research and careful analyses can offer paths to others who sense something amiss. I am especially concerned that feminists not join the chorus of those claiming moral superiority and bolstering their sense of superiority through destructive Euro-American political ventures.
Can my book help? I don’t know. I hope so, and see the more recent work I have done being even more directly relevant. I and my Palestinian colleagues Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian and Rema Hammami organized a multi-year international collaboration among critical feminist scholars to study the ways gender-based violence and violence against women had been taken up as feminist causes. The Cunning of Gender Violence was just published by Duke University Press. Here we worried about the collusion of feminists in international organizations with securitization, legal institutions dominated by Western powers and thus selective in the perpetrators they punished, humanitarianism that dared not confront the creators of the crises, and the power of media. This book addresses current issues in ways that I, working alone in one country, could not. Drawing conclusions from those with deep regional expertise on the Middle East and South Asia, as well as international legal regulation of violence, we came to see how geopolitics and feminism were so often tied to ‘the Muslim question,’ including by racializing Muslims as particularly violent. My own contribution wasn’t even based on my work in Egypt. It was about a group of feminists who worked to mainstream gender concerns into international NGOs and government agencies by focusing on CVE (Countering Violent Extremism)—I call them ‘securofeminists’—and show how dangerous their embrace of this phantom is.
4. Over the past few years, Muslim women have been at the forefront of liberation efforts as journalists and organizers in Palestine, Sudan, Iran, and the United States (just to name a few). How does their visible role in resistance change/challenge the West's understanding of Muslim women?
I never like to lump together Muslim women as they are as diverse as any others. But indeed Palestinian, Iranian, Sudanese, Egyptian and other women from the regions where Muslims live have been perhaps more visible lately as activists, spokespeople, and even journalists in the international media. Perhaps these women are more visible to you as a young person, but you should know that there is a very long history of women’s activism and participation in politics. I prefer to think about their participation more broadly—as transforming their societies. In the course I have taught at Columbia for two decades, a Global Core course called ‘Women and Gender Politics in the Muslim World,’ we read about the Algerian women who participated in the anti-colonial independence struggle against France in the 1950s. We read about the militant Palestinian women of the 1970s and 80s who were part of the liberation struggle. There is terrific scholarship on Iranian student activists working against the Shah in Iran, as well as their perhaps surprising successors who worked from within the Islamic Republic that succeeded his reign. A new book by my Barnard colleague Manijeh Moradian called The Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States is well worth reading. We study women at the turn of the twentieth century who pioneered Muslim girls’ education in South Asia and we read about women in today’s piety movements from Egypt to Indonesia who are critical of the secularization of society.
The feminist scholarship we now have is amazingly rich and deep, scholarship that was unavailable when I was just starting out as a graduate student. This does not mean that I’m not thrilled to find women activists, journalists, filmmakers, and writers in the forefront in demonstrations in Beirut, the uprising in Egypt, and currently in the protests by brave students in universities in the US and around the world against the genocidal war on Gaza. But I’d rather see these young women as in a long line of women who have never been passive. A key to understanding the diversity of women’s political engagements is to learn from Saba Mahmood, again. We cannot work with a narrow understanding of what constitutes women’s agency. Agency can take many forms beside taking to the streets to demand personal liberation or equal rights, or the fall of a regime. Their choices, within different historical contexts, transform their societies but not necessarily in the direction that Euro-American secular feminists expect or want. Or even Muslim feminists.
5. Based on your response to question 3, it seems that The Cunning of Gender Violence might give us a way to frame the current responses to the genocide in Gaza. In the past ten weeks, Israel has targeted hospitals, schools, refugee camps, maternity wards, and homes, killing more than 22,500 people, with women and children making up 70% of the victims. Yet, feminist organizations have been accused of being silent, both on what happened on October 7 and in the murderous months since as the Israeli army has launched its full-scale assault on the people of Gaza. How do you explain this accusation, or silence if it is that? (The numbers are based on data collated on January 9th, 2024)
I don’t know a single feminist scholar or activist who has found the right place to stand regarding burning questions about gender and violence in the genocidal war on Gaza. The many in the West who are protesting and volubly drawing attention to the horrifying situation you have described for Gaza may be especially pained by wanton violence targeting women and children; but we should remember that they are not the only innocents in this situation. Men too, their beloved fathers, brothers, husbands and sons, are being maimed and killed, imprisoned, driven out of their homes with no safe places to go and no way to sustain themselves and those they care about. The whole population is under siege and bombardment.
What we argued in our book, The Cunning of Gender Violence, is that the gendered lens of feminism is crucial, but it must be wide-angled. We cannot just be concerned with domestic violence against women or sexual violence in conflict, abhorrent as these are, but with violence of all sorts, the most egregious of which are systemic, whether state violence, militarism, racialization, poverty and more. Feminist politics must include the seeking of limits or ends to slow violence and devastating destruction, injury, and deprivation. Feminists have been at the forefront of outrage and despair about what is being done by Israel to the whole Palestinian population in Gaza, not just women. As Rema Hammami urged, in the context of her study of the humanitarian industry in Gaza before this latest Israeli war on its people, we must listen to women themselves about what hardships they see as most damaging to their lives. Her chapter in our book is called ‘Catastrophic Aid.’ Similarly, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian revealed the everyday violence Palestinian schoolgirls in Jerusalem experience at checkpoints where they are threatened with rifles and dogs, losing their trust in families and communities that cannot protect them from this or from house demolitions and arrests.
The success feminists have had in getting gender violence recognized as an ill has come at a cost—the cost of narrowing the definition of gender violence, and especially singling out the highly emotive issue of sexual violence in war (as indicated by the title Karen Engle’s important book The Grip of Sexual Violence in Conflict). This makes possible the weaponization of sexual violence as a sensationalized tool for selectively condemning certain groups—often ethnicized and racialized—as uncivilized. Often long after the fact, we learn that wars and violent conflicts involve lamentable forms of sexual violence. We all must condemn these forms of violence and it is due to the hard work of feminists that have brought them to light and forced us not to accept them as inevitable. But equally often, long after the fact, we discover that some sexual forms of violence have been concocted or exaggerated to vilify political enemies.
For example, Engle writes about the media stories pushed by hawkish politicians trying to justify American military actions in Libya. As Hillary Clinton has done self-righteously now regarding October 7, she called then for condemnation of the sexual violence implied by the Viagra allegedly found in Libya among Qaddafi’s troops as a way to justify military aggression. Yet even as the media hysteria about alleged sexual violations of Israeli and foreign women continues, the evidence is being picked apart to throw serious doubt on the narratives being pushed by the Israeli government. The accusations against feminists for their failures to condemn this alleged violence distracts from their desire to call out the unconscionable violence Israel is perpetrating against women in Gaza as they are killed, maimed, losing their homes, families and livelihoods. It only cheapens feminist arguments against sexual violence if the charges are sensationalized and weaponized for political agendas, and meant to distract and silence criticism of a truly brutal assault.
