Do Muslim Women Need Saving?

3. Schirin Amir-Moazami, Free University, Berlin, Germany. Email: schirin.amir-moazami@fu-berlin.de

At first glance, Lila Abu-Lughod’s book addresses a rhetorical question: Do Muslim women need saving? Having read and enjoyed the book, I think the question is less rhetorical: it is meant to force us to shift the direction of the very question that it poses: not towards the ‘Muslim woman’ in need of being saved, but to those who, with different goals and using different means and techniques, think that Muslim women are in need of some kind of saving. The book, in other words, leads us to turn to our gaze to the often unmarked and naturalized presuppositions with which the claims for saving the Muslim woman are articulated. It urges us to unsettle the question itself and to look at where it is located, why it is asked over and over again, on which power relations it relies, how it is tied to geopolitics and upon what kinds of normative presuppositions and epistemologies it is built. I read Abu-Lughod’s rich book as much as a practice to complicate the very categories at stake when the empty signifier of the Muslim woman is evoked as I considered it a call for shifting the focus. This book is all the more timely as rescue narratives seem to have gained an unprecedented currency, too often based on paternalistic and developmental understandings of individuals and populations as being in need of reshaping.

One of the strongest merits of this contribution is that Abu-Lughod dismantles, on various levels, the discursive production and structures of these rescue narratives in a thought provoking and accessible way. She carefully engages with local and global NGOs who, with their aim of fighting against violations of human rights, too often reproduce discursive structures juxtaposing free and coerced gender regimes through different temporal frameworks. She dwells on various human rights’ discourses and shows how these are easily turned into both dividing practices and fixed norms. And she looks at the figure of the ‘native informant’ who, by dwelling on her own experiences of suffering oppressive gender practices, has become a co-opted spokesperson for representing entire cultures to a global audience. Abu-Lughod carefully balances her critique of such ‘shorthanded’ interpretations as fulfilling certain functions (such as reproducing epistemological and moral hegemony), with a geopolitical order or legitimacy to intervene in various ways (from pedagogical incentives to military actions).

The coupling of human rights as both a specific location of Western Enlightenment and as a spreadable good throughout the world, indeed, finds particular expression in the words of native informants such as Ayan Hirsi Ali. Abu-Lughod deals with these figures mainly by showing how such personal life stories, even if often co-authored by journalists who turn them into spectacles with a partly ‘porno/graphic’ touch (as Abu-Lughod so adequately puts it), are able to seduce all kinds of audiences throughout various enlightened public spheres. These stories are read by millions as if they lived in a world in which the present can be disentangled from history and in which entire cultures can be captured and represented compactly through the narratives of some individuals. But how is it possible that the life stories of a few can speak the truth about entire populations? And why this proliferation of a genre in which some experiences count more than others like those of Abu-Lughod’s interlocutors in rural areas of Egypt so beautifully recalled throughout her book? Why this explosion of ‘pulp non-fiction’, as Abu-Lughod so compellingly calls it?

Abu-Lughod’s contribution goes well beyond a critique of the caricatured way in which these books juxtapose Islam as provoking all evil in the world and Western freedom as the remedy. Rather, she positions them within a broader web of discursive practices (ranging from governmental feminism, local and global human rights activism and established scholarship a la Appiah). Abu-Lughod, therefore, convincingly shows that we cannot understand the successes of these particular narratives without understanding them as part and parcel of the broader dynamics of knowledge production and marketing of the sensational, widely responsible for their very status as authentic speakers for Muslim cultures.

It seems that today every European immigration country has its own Hirsi Ali, and much more work could be done here in order to understand the dynamics of a widespread desire to capture the substance of ‘cultures’ through the eyes of (former) victims who have succeeded in finding their path out of the oppressive culture into the sunny heavens of Western freedom. Abu-Lughod’s book traces a path for us so we obtain an idea of where to start.

Further research would also be necessary in order to look more carefully into the dynamics of authentification and authorization of certain voices and genres, and the entanglement of pulp non-fiction and political intervention. In Germany, for example, Necla Kelek, the author of the bestseller Die Fremde Braut (2005) in dealing with forced and arranged marriages and relating them to the particular structures of Islam, has turned into one of the most important ‘Muslim advisors’ on all kinds of questions related to gender, sexuality and Islam. She has actually been complicit in various forms of governmental interventions geared towards turning Muslims into good German citizens – from headscarf legislation, to drafting the questions of citizenship tests addressed to Muslims through to male circumcision. We can trace here a quite direct line between the discursive production and its material effects on the subjects considered to be in need of saving.

I also think that authenticity and the position of the native informant would be worth analysing more thoroughly in light of their entangled genealogies. Abu-Lughod’s book could also inspire further efforts to explore the genealogy of the close relationship between the underlying patterns of authentic speakers and a particular notion of religion as compactly representable, and as authentic and acceptable only if tied to inner belief. Also the force of what Sara Ahmed termed the ‘affective economies’ (Ahmed, 2004) might be worth analysing for its historicity and productivity. Abu-Lughod mentions, several times, the emotional ties responsible for a widespread sympathy for certain native informants and the related aversion towards the cultural entities they have supposedly left behind. I consider it worth thinking through the productivity of emotions here as mobilizing the bonds of those who feel compelled to rescue.

Affect also seems to be central in the questions surrounding ‘honor killings’ – a particularly difficult and delicate issue, which very few scholars have dared to touch upon in any intelligible way. Abu-Lughod’s sensitive analysis does a very important job: it disentangles honour from violence per se, interpreting the complexity of honour and reminding us that it is never based on a purely archaic (i.e. immovable) cultural essence that can be made responsible for encouraging violence and killing as its most central component. The act of killing a relative (often the daughter by the father or the sister by the brother), although indeed often justified in terms of family honour, needs to be understood in a complex web of social relations, class and – especially in immigration contexts – racialized minoritization. The instance of Hatun Sürücü, which Abu-Lughod discusses with reference to Pratt-Eving’s Stolen Honor, is a case in point for this. It shows that the kinds of violent acts conducted by marked minorities in the name of honour cannot be understood independently from the kinds of violence (post)migrants are facing, including the epistemic violence entailed in the discursive (re)production of Muslim gender regimes as essentially violent and in need of being acted upon.

I find it worth thinking further about Abu-Lughod’s concerns about why all other kinds of sexual violence and killings within white, non-migrant families are neither mediatized to a similar extent nor related to any kind of moral framework. Let me recall her reminder (quoting Leti Volpp) that ‘violent or abusive behavior gets attributed to culture only when it occurs in minority or alien cultural, racial or national groups’ (p. 127). Again, what Abu-Lughod shows here is how much the framing and representation of acts of honour killing are dependent on the gaze and hence on the power to frame and to represent it. In the case of honour killing it is most notably the mediatized gaze that acts as exceptionally tied to a holistic cultural system supposedly reproducing itself independently from time and space.

Throughout her book Abu-Lughod pertinently describes how many of the rescue narratives she engages with consider rights to be the antidote to gender inequalities and how the deeply ingrained legalistic structures of modern nation-states have produced proliferations of what Abu-Lughod calls ‘rights work’. Against the grain of the growing belief in rights as the remedy to all kinds of injustices, and in alliance with the critical theoretical scholarship of Wendy Brown and Janet Halley, Abu-Lughod’s evaluation of the capacity of rights is rather deflating. While mindful of the fact that human rights discourses are often deliberately complicit of polarization and problematic intervening practices, Abu-Lughod is also critical of the adoption of rights discourses by many Islamic feminists. These tend to compel Muslim women (and men) to adjust to a certain kind of self, which seems to be modelled by the experiences of an academic middle class.

While I understand why rights are never able to capture complex social relations and often, by necessity, produce reifications of identity and sometimes also injuries, I wonder how much these different webs of discursive practices Abu-Lughod critically engages are actually connected with each other (e.g. to what extent have Islamic feminists’ rights discourses also been shaped by liberal discourses of rights based on freedom and individual choice?). I would also have liked to see a bit more on the traveling from rights talk to the kinds of intervening practices Abu-Lughod that strongly criticizes.

While Abu-Lughod articulates a considerable doubt that rights are able to capture the complex social realities of gender relations in dwelling on her long-term and patient fieldwork in rural areas of Egypt, I consider that an interesting path worth pursuing further could be the complex social lives of these rights and their genealogies themselves. I think Asad’s preliminary attempt (quoted several times in the book) to problematize the notion of the ‘human’ of human rights discourses is a very good starting point for such further explorations. I assume that the complex life stories of rural Egyptians are not only not captured because the discursive practices are about rights, but also because they are based on a different understanding of selfhood than that of the law-abiding individual, imagined and conceptualized even in those rights-based discourses which are more inclusive towards Islamic sources and sentiments. Put differently: is it because these initiatives of different activists and scholars evoke rights per se or because they are predicated upon a set of – often unmarked – presuppositions about the (free) subject, kinship and the law-abiding individual that they fail to do what they prevent, or both, and if so, where exactly is the connection?

One question that Abu-Lughod leaves unaddressed is to what extent these presuppositions are based on, and mediated by, secular power. I find it surprising that secularism remains almost absent, although it seems to guide many of the awkward representations of Muslim women (including rights-based discourses), which are often organized according to dividing schema, distinguishing proper from improper forms of religion. I suppose that there is a reason why Abu-Lughod avoids framing her analysis of the various kinds of feminist projects she looks at in terms of the secular–religious divide. However, I wonder how this work ties in with, or departs from, recent scholarship on secularism about the pervasiveness of secular power to shape and structure the ways in which religion is expressed, justified and referenced also in rights-based discourses. I would argue that it is, at least in part, secular power that is responsible for a particular regime of embodied discursive practices and representations according to which certain religious bodily practices are considered suspicious (i.e. indicating a gender-backward regime). Secular power, as a technique of distinguishing between apt and inapt religious expressions, seems at least central for the European multicultural contexts from which many of Abu-Lughod’s examples derive.

To be clear, by secular power I do not mean only a set of regulative forces closely tied to nation-state institutions and practices which guides the borders between the religious and the secular in the public (and thereby necessarily also in the private) life, and which form and shape citizens (Asad, 2003, 2006). I am also referring to a more tacit and often unmarked set of habitualized affects, which one could call ‘secular embodiments’ (cf. Amir-Moazami, 2014). In my view, it is only by dismantling secular power as the largely unmarked, embodied and emotional backbone of liberal principles ingrained into many of the rights discourses Abu-Lughod looks at that we can start understanding the often disproportionately simplistic representations of Muslim gender regimes as static, stable and organized by an utterly backward temporality.

One recent example of how such embodied secular aversions are often publicly mobilized (to the extent of being backed up by the European Court for Human Rights (ECHR)) is the legislation against face-veils in France. Interestingly enough, the aversions against the face-veil (minor in numbers but invasive in political debates) do not only evoke rescue narratives but quite clear-cut disgust and rejection. It was also not gender equality that was considered the legitimate principle to support legislation against face-veiled women in French public spaces but the conventionalized norm of ‘vivre ensemble’ ‘living together’) taken up by the ECHR and eventually turned into a legal category. Taking the call seriously to turn the gaze from the to-be-saved-Muslim-woman to those who aim at saving, I would find it worth exploring carefully the social life of such legislations and the emotional repertoire undergirding and mobilizing them. Affective components of liberal attachments to rights, and to liberal principles more generally, should be more carefully looked at in their historicity, in order to better grasp how much secular power has actually become the unmarked matrix often guiding the regulation of multicultural societies.

One of Abu-Lughod’s conclusions is a need to reorient the direction of the gaze and to ‘intervene into the worlds of power that authorize and naturalize rights work and the sometimes dangerous understandings of human social life to which they are made to give rise’ (p. 227). I think the book is actually already such an intervention: It shows how various kinds of rescue narratives are part of a broader fabric of the powers of knowledge production which needs to be scrutinized and criticized.

It is therefore the direction of the questions and the political practices they generate which should preoccupy and bother us: Are Islamic norms and Muslim practices compatible with Western notions of freedom? Can Muslims be integrated into liberal–secular societies? Are Muslim women oppressed or emancipated? Is veiling a sign of free choice or submission? Can Islam catch up with reforms? The bottleneck of hegemonic frames like these is rather small. This makes the articulation of a critique of the discursive structures undergirding the one-dimensionality of the questions themselves very difficult, especially if it does not easily clinch in the preformatted scripts of either-or (see Bracke and Fadil, 2012).

I therefore also see Abu-Lughod’s book as an extremely inspiring exercise in starting to ask different kinds of question than those at hand. She provides a very good sense of where to begin when she urges us to make a more serious effort to listen more carefully. As much as I sympathize with this call to adhere to the complexity of individual life stories in whatever kind of locality, I also wonder about the larger implications of this practice of listening for established research agendas. And I am not thinking here of the truth claims undergirding the call for ‘reliable data’ (facts, figures and numbers) which structure much of social scientific knowledge production on Muslims these days. I am thinking more of the conceptual matters that are central to the concerns of Abu-Lughod’s study. What kind of notions of the self, of community or of gender and sexuality would emerge from such inquiries into the complex social relations and life stories of individuals? To what extent could such conceptual contributions reply to established notions of individual autonomy, gender equality or religion, so strongly inscribed into the research tools and epistemologies with which scholars have studied ‘Muslim women’ (and more recently, men)?

For me one of the most important contribution of Do Muslim Women Need Saving? is therefore that it urges us to think more seriously about other forms of knowledge production which are aware of the politicized nature of knowledge and the geopolitical dynamics always at stake.

Response to the reviewers

Lila Abu-Lughod, Columbia University, New York, USA. Email: la310@columbia.edu

I want to thank Ethnicities for having Do Muslim Women Need Saving? reviewed by such thoughtful and expert scholars. They share my concerns and we inhabit the same intellectual and political spaces, trying to think through the contemporary politics of gender and empire. I am humbled by their generous readings, grateful for their sharp presentations of my arguments and touched by their respectful ‘restraint’ (to borrow a term from Malik) in articulating some challenging critiques.

I will not try to defend at length the choices I made in writing this unusual book, neither ethnographic monograph nor comprehensive sociopolitical analysis. I tried to bridge the popular and academic because of the political urgency of the topic. Some of the book’s shortcomings, particularly what Kandiyoti calls the ‘bulky missing middle’ and the sketchiness of the analysis of the institutions and subjectivities of liberalism that Amir-Moazami notices, are perhaps the fallout of this mission.

Instead, I want to respond to the most vexing question these reviews raise for us as a feminist community with special concerns about the ‘Muslim world’ – whether Muslim-majority or -minority nations. Not only do the reviews suggest excellent ways to refine our analyses and to extend our research – all of which I appreciate and believe we can learn from – but they point to some genuine conundrums.

I still struggle with the most difficult ethical-political question they raise. How much support, Kandiyoti asks, do I offer for ‘internal critiques’ – critiques by Muslim women (and men) who want to challenge the injustices of and change the canons, norms, interpretations and laws, of their own faith group or society? Malik refers similarly to the problem of ‘authentic critical voices’ and whether I consider choice or freedom to belong to only some communities. Amir-Moazami, alarmed by anti-immigrant discourse in Germany and France, puzzles over what to do about the selective authorization of certain critical voices but not others.

I have not found a resolution, although I have to admit that increasingly I have come to value the efforts of Islamic feminist organizations like Musawah and to want to publicize the local histories of feminist activism, however blurry we know the boundaries to be between inside and outside, local and transnational. ¹ For a number of reasons, though, I background (but certainly do not erase) forms of gender subordination promoted or condoned by groups, individuals and institutions wielding conservative or retrograde interpretations of Islam. These are precisely the targets of most ‘internal’ critiques by intelligent Muslim feminists.

Why was this not my priority? First, since my touchstones are the communities in which I have done research, I have not yet had to confront directly the influence of these conservative groups. I also see ordinary women countering and resisting many aspects of gendered power, sometimes invoking their rights under Islamic law. I find it hard to point the finger at patriarchy as the key to women’s suffering. As I show in this book, it is impossible to disentangle their personal problems from the global economic policies that impoverish them, the national policies that render their families vulnerable, the class politics that deprive them of dignity and the military interventions that undermine their security.

Second, situated as I am in the U.S., Islamophobic discourse and the policies it underwrites appear as dangerous and damaging. They threaten the very possibility of establishing the conditions necessary for ‘internal’ debate and for openness to change. I am disturbed by the way some Muslim women who denounce and renounce Islam are lionized. Shortly after my book was published I ran across a new example. There was a media blitz for a documentary called Honor Diaries. Associated with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, one of the most prominent of those who denounce Islam, it was funded by the same shady foundation (Clarion) that produced Obsession, the Islamophobic film distributed free in hundreds of thousands of newspapers in swing states during the last American presidential election. Executed by a production team with ties to Israel, this film is currently trying to sell itself by offering free campus screenings, made possible by a mysterious ‘supporter’. The promotional announcements arrive with sensational headings: the subject line of the first email was STATUS UPDATE: MURDERED; the second came with the attention-grabbing subject, ‘Female Genital Mutilation: In America?’

We are all indebted to Deniz Kandiyoti’s critique of culturalist approaches in her groundbreaking 1991 volume, Women, Islam and the State. She has taught us all to look closely at the politicization of religion and the way women’s issues are drafted into political contests in nation-building. She makes the case even more eloquently in her review. By posing the question as I do in the opening conversation with my friend in an Egyptian village – asking her if she thinks Islam is to blame for her suffering – am I perpetuating the idea that ‘a faith can somehow act autonomously as a tool of oppression’? Or am I trying, perhaps clumsily, to confront this popular discourse about Islam, both in the West and, in a more subtle form, in the hostility that secular feminists elsewhere express?

A quick look at the way my book was reviewed in a right-wing Islamophobic magazine suggests why I might be right to pose the question this simplistic way. It was written by a man who is central to the Eurabia network, a loose group of bloggers and writers who warn that Muslims are ‘at the gates of Vienna’ and plotting to take over Europe in a stealth jihad. These writers were an inspiration to Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian who in July 2011 massacred 77 young people attending a Labour Party summer workshop because of their perceived sympathies for multiculturalism (read Muslims). ² After listing key arguments of my book, each of which clearly hit a nerve, the reviewer Bruce Bawer concludes,

This was a tough book to get through. I had to keep putting it down. The world-class dishonesty, the willingness to deny the real suffering of women and girls in order to prop up the poisonous religion that’s responsible for that suffering – and to impugn the motives of noble people who do care – made me livid. ³

Bawer’s review was published in the online magazine of the U.S.-based David Horowitz Freedom (sic) Center whose self-proclaimed goal is to combat ‘the efforts of the radical left and its Islamist allies to destroy American values’. This organization earlier had published a pamphlet for ‘Islamofascist Awareness Week’ that was titled ‘The Violent Oppression of Women in Islam’. The jumbled arguments that blame Islam for a wild range of abuses illustrate perfectly the way defending Muslim women’s rights is, in this world, being deployed to vilify Islam. As Sindre Bangstad explains, advocacy of Muslim women's rights in the Eurabia genre is also linked to anti-immigrant political platforms and a defence of Israeli policies. ⁵

But there is a third more serious reason why I deal cautiously with ‘internal critics’. In the book, I examine the organizations they found, especially in Egypt but also in Palestine; I ask hard questions about the causes they take up (and fail to) and their strategies; I analyse the languages of justice they mobilize, suspicious of liberal dialects of rights and empowerment because of the projects they animate and the institutions to which they are attached. Instead of taking their arguments at face value, I try to place these feminist activists in their wider social contexts, following the path opened up by other anthropologists such as Sally Engle Merry. I view these feminists’ work as a part of ‘the social life of Muslim women’s rights’. Amir-Moazami argues that I could have done even more ethnographic work on liberal and secular regimes and discourses. I agree.

The awkward problem is that those I am writing about are my colleagues, my peers and my friends. I respect them. As an anthropologist, I probably should have granted them more of the empathetic understanding that Malik notes I grant the village women whose stories I tell. The reason I am more critical is that I see them through the eyes of these less educated and privileged women and feel uncomfortable with their language, their projects and their sense of superiority. I just can’t ignore the ‘internal’ class politics of feminist activism in the region I know, any more than I can ignore the imperial smugness of Hillary Clinton’s global feminism. It is my hope that this critical perspective, grounded in both ethnography and a close reading of the increasingly sophisticated literature on liberalism, the hegemony of human rights and ‘humanitarian reason’, and offered in the spirit of shared purpose to enhance the well-being of women (and everyone), will generate serious debate and encourage us to be more reflexive. How can those who are neither ignorant nor mendacious confront the multiple axes of inequality and power that shape women’s lives? This is the conundrum.

As an anthropologist committed to learning about the everyday lives of people in communities that are different from mine, I tend to write in the register of the particular. I cannot, as Malik points out, limit myself to ‘deconstruction’ or critique, even if this book tries to unpack the assumptions, dynamics, formulae, affects and effects of popular discourses on the Muslim woman, whether in the cultural-legal realm where we get categories like the ‘honour crime’ or in the sordid genre of pulp non-fiction. (I was intrigued to discover from an Observer interview with Andrew Crofts, the most successful ghostwriter of misery memoirs, that Sold, the memoir I analyse that he co-wrote with a girl who had been sent to Yemen for a forced/arranged marriage – and one of 80 books he has written – has sold a staggering five million copies. ⁶ Would that any of the sensitive or serious studies by the many great feminist scholars we now have in this field could boast such numbers!)

Yet Kandiyoti puts her finger on the dilemma of the anthropologist. She asks whether I have not, in what Amir-Moazami calls ‘shifting the gaze’, smuggled in cultural difference, despite my appeals for recognition of a common humanity and my exposés of the dangers of ‘othering’ Muslims. As a discipline with a long tradition of using other worlds and ways to criticize the self, anthropology is inevitably invested in difference. But I don’t simply turn the tables or reverse the terms of the binaries of West and Rest, civilized and barbarian, secular and religious. Or see self and other as cleanly separable. Instead, I try to throw into relief the different languages of justice at work in our interconnected world, and their imbrications with power and with historically situated institutions. I ask, with Talal Asad, what violences might be entailed in the imposition of certain ideals. Who is excluded and what precluded in these ‘universalist’ projects. If we all agree that ‘internal’ debate needs space and security to flourish, then it seems to me that our primary responsibility is to figure out how and why these conditions are being denied to certain communities or regions. And to make sure that feminists are not complicit in this denial.