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Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism 4.2 (2004) 137-167



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The "War on Terror," and Withdrawing American Charity Some Consequences for Poor Muslim Women in Kolkata, India


The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, in New York and Washington have moved Americans to grief and anger, and much of the world to grieve with them. The attacks have also, among many Americans as well as parts of the non-Islamic world, led to the vilification of Muslims in general for exclusivist religious beliefs. For many, such beliefs have found especial focus in the perceived "repression" of (all!) Islamic women. The retaliatory U.S. bombing of Afghanistan, for which the primary objective was expressly to capture Osama bin Laden and remove the terrorist-harboring Taliban, also aimed at "liberating" Afghan women. My paper discusses the apparent consequences of the American "war on terror" for a private American donor agency working in a largely Muslim slum area in Kolkata,1 and for the women who live there.

Lila Abu-Lughod, commenting on American claims of "liberating" and "saving" Afghan women in its "war on terror" against the Taliban, refers to the old history of such rhetoric from the West (Abu-Lughod 2002). Noting Gayatri Spivak's comment on white men saving brown women from brown men (Spivak 1988), Abu-Lughod traces such rhetoric back to turn-of-the-century Egypt, where the veil was denigrated as a sign of oppression by Lord Cromer, who simultaneously opposed women's suffrage back home in England. In India, practices like sati (the immolation of widows on their husband's funeral pyres), and child marriage were used to justify British [End Page 137] colonial rule, while the French in Algeria unveiled Muslim women in "well-choreographed" ceremonies as symbolic justification for their occupation of that country (Abu-Lughod 2002, 785, citing Lazreg 1994, 135). More recently, Laura Bush couches the rhetoric of liberating the Muslim woman in terms of human (and women's) rights: "The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women" (U.S. Government 2002, cited in Abu-Lughod 2002, 784). Framing the issues in these terms, Abu-Lughod argues, ignores the political and historical explanations for human suffering. The focus, rather, is upon cultural and religious aspects of Islamic womanhood. She notes that such a focus has not been brought to bear on Christian women (in, say, Guatemala, or Ireland, or Bosnia), and concludes:

A more productive approach . . . is to ask how we might contribute to making the world a more just place. A world not organized around strategic military and economic demands; a place where certain kinds of forces and values that we may still consider important could have an appeal and where there is the peace necessary for discussions, debates, and transformations to occur within communities . . . . Where we seek to be active in the affairs of distant places, can we do so in the spirit of support for those within those communities whose goals are to make women's (and men's) lives better . . . ? Can we use a more egalitarian language of alliances, coalitions, and solidarity, instead of salvation?
(Abu-Lughod 2002, 789)

As of this writing (April 2003), the Taliban (from Southern Afghanistan) have been removed from power by the American military campaign, begun in October 2001. However, the Loya Jirga or Interim Council, composed largely of the Northern Alliance and headed by Hamid Karzai, have some ways to go before a democratic government can ensure the rights of Afghan women. The Northern Alliance warlords have a murky record on women's rights themselves. Despite the American media's claims that Afghan women have cast off their burqas (in one rather simplistic and ethnocentric view of Muslim women's "liberation"), it is noteworthy that in street or market scenes on television it is rare to see a woman without some form of "veiling," either a burqa that covers her from head to toe, or a head scarf that leaves her face bare.2 Though...

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