Do Muslim Women Need Saving?
Author: Lila Abu-Lughod
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Print Length: 336 pages
Genre: Non-Fiction / Anthropology, Social Science
Topic: Activism, Muslim, Woman and Femininity, Feminism, Gender, Gender-based Violence, Human Rights, Paternalism, Western Liberalism
This book is a long answer to the question of whether Muslim women have rights or need saving.
Frequent reports of honor killings, disfigurement, and sensational abuse have given rise to a consensus in the West, a message propagated by human rights groups and the media: Muslim women need to be rescued. Lila Abu-Lughod boldly challenges this conclusion. An anthropologist who has been writing about Arab women for thirty years, she delves into the predicaments of Muslim women today, questioning whether generalizations about Islamic culture can explain the hardships these women face and asking what motivates particular individuals and institutions to promote their rights.
[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
Table of Contents
Introduction: Rights and Lives
1. Do Muslim Women (Still) Need Saving?
2. The New Common Sense
3. Authorizing Moral Crusades
4. Seductions of the “Honor Crime”
5. The Social Life of Muslim Women’s Rights
6. An Anthropologist in the Territory of Rights
Conclusion: Registers of Humanity
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
Lila Abu-Lughod is the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University, where she teaches anthropology and women’s studies. Her work, strongly ethnographic and mostly based in Egypt, has focused on three broad issues: the relationship between cultural forms and power; the politics of knowledge and representation; and the dynamics of women’s and human rights, global liberalism, and feminist governance of the Muslim world. Current research focuses on museum politics in Palestine and other settler colonies, security discourses and Islamophobia, and religion in the global governance of gender violence.
Source: https://anthropology.columbia.edu/content/lila-abu-lughod
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