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

In autumn 2013, the province of Quebec’s leading party (the Parti Québécois) promoted Bill 60, which would potentially lead to a ban on all ostensible religious symbols in the public apparatus. It quickly became clear that the Parti Québécois was mostly interested in banning the hijab, therefore targeting Muslim women. The party argued that a Charter of laïcité, in this precise version, would improve equality between men and women, assuming that the latter, especially veiled women, need emancipation. But “Do Muslim Women Need Saving?” (2013), asks Lila Abu-Lughod.

As I read her most recent book, links were easily drawn with the Quebec context. This reveals the accomplishment of one of her self-defined tasks: to offer a West-reflexive discourse to challenge certain public opinions regarding Muslim women. Here, the anthropologist found inspiration outside the academic theoretical agenda. She focused rather on the necessity of questioning a dominant frame of thinking, in the global Western public, about Muslim women’s rights. More precisely, Abu-Lughod asks, “What can thinking about their circumstances teach us about values like choice and freedom in the context of human lives—any human lives?” (26). Therefore, Abu-Lughod’s book is less concerned with Muslim women than it is with power-embedded truth assumptions, themselves produced and reproduced by specific discourses in the global arena.

The book is the result of Abu-Lughod’s long intellectual journey into Muslim women’s lives, especially in rural Egypt. Methodologically, it thus reveals itself as a synthesis based on data collected in the last few decades. The author writes in a fluid, clear and welcoming style. Theoretically, she stands close to Talal Asad’s (2003) and Saba Mahmood’s (2005) post-colonial thinking. Each in their own way engage in a critique aimed at the Western secular hegemony, located in the modern discourse of the Enlightenment which frames (non-Christian) religion as its non-modern other, constantly asked to prove its adequacy to modernity by cleansing itself of particularism, violence, superstition and so on. With Mahmood, Abu-Lughod also shares in this book a critique aimed at a certain liberal feminism that often appropriates agency for itself, thus denying Muslim women’s voices and power to act for themselves, even through social constraints. Precisely, “one of the things we have to be most careful about is not to fall into polarizations that place feminism, and even secularism, only on the side of the West” (44).

To me, the book develops around two major thrusts. The first four chapters (Chapter 1, “Do Muslim Women (Still) Need Saving?”; Chapter 2, “The New Common Sense”; Chapter 3, “Authorizing Moral Crusades”; and Chapter 4, “Seductions of the ‘Honor Crime’“) are devoted to the strong reflexive argument generally aimed at “the West.” Among others, one major theme in these chapters concerns a new global genre littéraire, a “pornography of suffering” as the author calls it, based on biographical accounts of “liberated” Muslim women. In fact, these “suffering vignettes and extreme cases tell us little about the variety of ways women experience their lives and the contexts we must appreciate in order to make sense of their suffering” (78). In the final two chapters (Chapter 5, “The Social Life of Muslim Women’s Rights”; and Chapter 6, “An Anthropologist in the Territory of Rights”), Abu-Lughod shifts her gaze to the second major thrust of the book, the development discourse and the “rights” concept: “an ethnographic approach that tracks the social lives in which the concept partakes may be more useful for understanding this subject and the movement we are living than moral posturing that judges women’s rights to be either collusion with imperialism (to be denounced) or a hopeful sign of universal emancipation and progress (to be celebrated)” (170). Let us now look at the general argument of the book by outlining especially important themes, independently of the chapter they belong to.

First, the notion of “culture” is heavily counterbalanced, not...