From Publishers Weekly
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Focusing here on stories of individual women,
Columbia University social scientist Abu-Lughod (Veiled
Sentiments) deconstructs the idea of saving oppressed Muslim
women and takes a sobering look at issues including the honor
crime, arranged marriages, the burqa, and veiling. In accessible,
lucid prose, Abu-Lughod explains how sensationalized memoirs, or
pulp nonfiction, have perpetuated stereotypes and made Muslim
women a symbol of an alien culture. The author dispassionately
points out the hypocrisy of colonial feminism, and how more often
than not, there is a clear political agenda behind the liberation
of the women of cover and how the role of the U.S. is often
overlooked. The women presented here see their Islamic faith as a
source of strength to fight injustice, not the cause of it.
They&'re not asking to be rescued from their religion, the author
contends, but from the discriminatory legal system, poverty,
outdated patriarchal family traditions, and border controls that
continue to inhibit their freedom. While offering no easy
solution, the author recommends observation over moral crusades,
stating: Anyone seriously interested in Muslim women&'s rights
must follow them as they move. This book is an excellent place to
begin. (Nov.)
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Review
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[A] beautiful book… It is a riveting account by an
academic who has spent many years observing women in the Middle
East and the West, and adeptly wears several hats as an
anthropologist and professor in women’s studies. Abu-Lughod is a
great listener and a sharp observer of everyday life. She
understands the struggles, joys and jealousies of Middle Eastern
women and has an ear for the stories that do not make headlines.
Refusing to treat Muslim women as a category, she focuses on
nuances and complexities. Where others see an undifferentiated
mass of individuals, she sees real women with real stories… There
are Islams, just like there are Judaisms, Christianities and
Hinduisms. We need to make the word plural to understand the wide
variety of practices and power relations. And Lila Abu-Lughod’s
Do Muslim Women Need Saving? does precisely that with its
captivating approach. (Elif Shafak Literary Review 2013-12-01)
Saving Muslim women is now a global undertaking in which the
participants are both Muslim and non-Muslim. Lila Abu-Lughod’s
book is a critical reflection on this mushrooming industry, and
its representatives, representations and bureaucracy… Abu-Lughod
succeeds in…exposing several stubbornly persistent myths. She
critically assesses the vast number of sensational
representations of women, written by Muslims and others, about
the general repression in a so-called IslamLand. She follows the
trail of global feminism in the extensive bureaucracy,
institutions and non-governmental organizations that have emerged
since the 1990s, all cling to save Muslim women… Her focus on
analyzing how individual Muslim women experience freedom, rights
and constraints brings a much-needed perspective… She offers a
panoramic view of women’s multiple experiences in their own
contexts, thereby dismissing sweeping generalizations about these
women being a geneous oppressed mass. She urges us to look at
contexts shaped by global politics, international capital and
modern state institutions that all contribute to changing
landscapes of family and community. Abu-Lughod reminds us that
rights may be universal but above all they are projects bounded
by political contexts, institutions and language…This book is
destined to unsettle the convictions of those concerned with
saving Muslim women. Many will find it shocking for its
uncompromising critique of recent moral crusades, while careful
readers will doubtless find in it enough ammunition to
deconstruct projects that may seem worth pursuing, but ultimately
are not as focused on improving women’s lives in faraway places
as they first appear. Abu-Lughod dissolves geographical
boundaries, exposes the limits of global morality, and
deconstructs the international power context that allows Muslim
women to remain that distant voiceless other, awaiting
intervention. It invites us to think not only about dominant
representations of Muslim women in images and words, but also
about our own engagement with the other, which has always taken
place in an unequal context. (Madawi Al-eed Times Higher
Education 2013-11-07)
In accessible, lucid prose, Abu-Lughod explains how
sensationalized memoirs, or ‘pulp nonfiction,’ have perpetuated
stereotypes and made Muslim women a symbol of an alien culture.
The author dispassionately points out the hypocrisy of colonial
feminism, and how more often than not, there is a clear political
agenda behind the liberation of the ‘women of cover’ and how the
role of the U.S. is often overlooked. The women presented here
see their Islamic faith as a source of strength to fight
injustice, not the cause of it. They’re not asking to be rescued
from their religion, the author contends, but from the
discriminatory legal system, poverty, outdated patriarchal family
traditions, and border controls that continue to inhibit their
freedom. While offering no easy solution, the author recommends
observation over moral crusades, stating: ‘Anyone seriously
interested in Muslim women’s rights must follow them as they
move.’ This book is an excellent place to begin. (Publishers
Weekly 2013-08-12)
Tracing connections from human rights groups and international
feminist NGOs, to philosophy and anthropology, to best-selling
memoirs of Muslim women and titillating pulp fiction accounts of
Muslim women's suffering, Abu-Lughod argues that the West's
perception of Muslim women as creatures in need of rescue is
shaped by a confluence of powerful forces. Incisively argued and
often sharply critical, Abu-Lughod's book--which will surely
spark debate--is essential reading for anyone interested in
women's rights in the Muslim world. (Leila Ahmed, author of A
Quiet Revolution: The Veil's Resurgence from the Middle East to
America)
In this passionate, sharply articulated, and engaging argument,
Lila Abu-Lughod describes how Islam has been transformed into a
genized geography 'somewhere out there' and how its women,
different as they are diverse, have become the excuse for
political and interventions. In place of the simplistic
arguments that are bandied about on the global stage, this book
reminds us to ask more important questions: who are the saviors
of Muslim women and how did they acquire the right to be the
saviors? Every thinking individual should read this book.
(Urvashi Butalia, author of The Other Side of Silence: Voices
from the Partition of India)
This is a provocative and astute challenge to the received wisdom
of our time that Muslim women need to be saved by the liberated
West. Abu-Lughod not only offers an inful critique of the
remedies offered to combat violence against Muslim women but also
helps us see their lives differently. We are forced to confront
the shared humanity between 'us' and 'them' that is both
unsettling and instructive. No one interested in questions of
gender, Islam, and human rights can choose to ignore this book.
(Saba Mahmood, author of Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival
and the Feminist Subject)
There is no one better qualified than Lila Abu-Lughod to take on
difficult questions about Muslim women and their portrayal in the
global media. Her answers shake up some fundamental assumptions
held by liberals and conservatives alike and raise new questions.
This book persuades us to consider new and more productive ways
of thinking and acting. (Mahmood Mamdani, author of Saviors and
Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror)
Lila Abu-Lughod lays bare the many factors that can collude to
produce an unhappy woman in a Muslim society: abusive her,
distant husband, bad personal decisions, and restrictive codes of
conduct, yes, but also poverty, neoliberalism, politicized NGOs,
war, and occupation. Her book tells larger, transnational
stories, bringing together activists, publishers, and women from
all over the world. (Elora Shehabuddin, author of Reshaping the
Holy: Democracy, Development, and Muslim Women in Bangladesh)
There is an ethical dimension to [Abu-Lughod's] attention to the
particularities and complexities of difference between women of
different countries, social backgrounds and cultures, and even
within cultures she’s always attuned to the differences brought
about by class and economic background…Through her in-depth
demolition of the new moral crusades brought on by the genre of
‘gendered Orientalism’ in the pulp nonfiction of books by
‘insiders,’ i.e., Muslim women who threw off their shackles or
who tore off their veils and ran away from their oppressive
Muslim homes in order to live the precise kind of life lived by a
certain class of Western woman in urban areas, Abu-Lughod zeroes
in on the treacherous hypocrisy of the seemingly well-read and
well-educated class of progressive Westerners. (Subashini
Navaratnam PopMatters 2014-02-21)
The book’s principal strengths lie in skillfully deconstructing
the symbolic significance of a range of high profile ‘moral
crusades’ involving Muslim women which have captured the global
imagination. Abu-Lughod highlights how the most basic conditions
of these women’s lives are set by political forces that are often
national or even international in origin even if they are local
in effect…She argues that concepts such as ‘oppression,’
‘choice,’ and ‘freedom’ are blunt instruments for capturing the
dynamics and quality of Muslim women’s lives in these places. In
addition to revealing such characterizations as overly
simplistic, Abu-Lughod also analyses the politics and the ethics
of the international circulation of discourses about ‘the
oppressed Muslim woman.’ She shows, for example, how debates on
the veil and discussions of honor crimes are deployed as 21st
century political projects. She writes passionately about the
salacious and voyeuristic way in which such crimes are recorded,
pointedly asking why knowing about the ‘culture’ has been seen as
more important than exploring the story of the development of
repressive regimes in the region. Equally, she highlights how in
the West such discourses are unashamedly linked to xenophobic
immigration policies. She warns of the risks entailed in such
polarizing ‘savior’ discourses whereby feminism and even
secularism are only seen as Western concepts…This book represents
a necessary if uncomfortable intervention for those who may
uncritically engage in the diverse range of clarion calls to save
Muslim women…Abu-Lughod’s book provides a richly evidenced and
easy to read deconstruction of simplistic culturalist
explanations of any phenomena which pertain to Muslim women in
all their diversity. As with other postcolonial feminists such as
Mohanty and Narayan her approach represents a useful analytical
tool to explore contemporary controversies about the experiences
of Muslim and other Other women in all their complexity. (LSE
Review of Books Naaz id 2014-02-19)
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