Do Muslim Women Need Saving? by Lila Abu-Lughod (review)

In 2002, when the invasion of Afghanistan was under way and the drums of war beat on insistently, Lila Abu-Lughod published an article that refused the argument that the United States was engaged in a mission to save women from the Taliban. Laura Bush had famously justified the war on terror as “a fight for the rights and dignity of women” in Afghanistan. “Because of our recent military gains,” she said in a November 2001 radio broadcast to the nation, “women are no longer imprisoned in their homes. They can listen to music and teach their daughters without fear of punishment” (32). Abu-Lughod’s article, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?,” provided many of us with an eloquent and definitive answer to Bush’s claim, rejecting the cynical and condescending notion that it was up to “us” to save “them” from the terrorists. Based on long years of ethnographic fieldwork in Egypt and on her deep understanding of the complex dynamics of the politics of the “clash of civilizations,” the piece became required reading in many course syllabi; it also figured regularly in opinion pieces, articles, and books. I do not have the figures, but I would bet that the number of its citations surpassed the record for the journal (American Anthropologist) in which it was published.

It is telling that a dozen years later Abu-Lughod needs to ask the same question. The article, which seemed to me at the time to say it all, was seven pages long; the book comes to over two hundred pages. But as its contents demonstrate, the problem has only become bigger, the assumptions that underlay Bush’s comments ever more deeply entrenched. Those assumptions posit a Muslim culture in which women are innocent victims trapped in arranged marriages, stoned for adultery and other sexual misdemeanors, murdered by their fathers and brothers for violating family honor, and generally denied the freedom to choose the lives they want to lead. The contrast to this unrelieved oppression is said to be evident in the secular Christian West, where women are freely choosing individuals whose liberation is epitomized by their right to fulfilling sex lives. The salvation narrative interrogated by the book’s title wants to bring Muslim women from their cultural backwater to Western enlightenment, from slavery to freedom.

Abu-Lughod’s critique of this narrative is pointed and severe: “Projects of saving other women depend on and reinforce a sense of superiority, and are a form of arrogance that deserves to be challenged” (47). The book’s chapters take up the challenge on a number of terrains. Abu-Lughod points to the way the work of journalists, especially the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, attributes the mistreatment of women to inflexible traditional cultures instead of examining the contemporary circumstances—global capitalism, international political dynamics, war—that limit the agency and the possibilities for women and men in Muslim societies. She turns to a popular genre of books—pulp non-fiction, she dubs it—written by women (Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Azar Nafisi, and many others) who claim to have escaped, in one way or another, the punishing discipline of patriarchal Islam. These firsthand testimonies, some of them eventually revealed as exaggerated or less than accurate, offer accounts that are “surprisingly pornographic” (107), vivid in their descriptions of sexual violence. The books “lend passion to the mission of saving women globally” (107), Abu-Lughod observes; they operate in the service of a misguided humanitarianism that confirms the alien otherness of Muslims in a manner reminiscent of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century missionaries bent on bringing civilization to the “savages.”

Honor crimes are the focus of a chapter that insists on the need to replace moral outrage with attention to the many and complex forces at work in people’s lives. These include the ways that honor structures relations between women and men, that states do or do not adjudicate family conflict, and that...