Posts Tagged Muslim feminism

Not Oprah’s Book Club: Do Muslim Women Need Saving?

Do Muslim women need saving? Lila Abu-Lughod’s question challenges what has become, in her words, the “new common sense”: a “moral mainstreaming of global women’s rights” that urges Westerners to intervene on behalf of faraway women held hostage by “backwards” religious beliefs. As feminists, we might see reason to celebrate a global, energized focus on gender. But Abu-Lughod argues persuasively that we have to approach these appeals with caution. Her analysis upsets not only wrong-headed ideas about the “Muslim women” we seek to save, but also fantasies of freedom and consent that form the basis of Western feminism.

Do Muslim women need saving? Lila Abu-Lughod’s question challenges what has become, in her words, the “new common sense”: a “moral mainstreaming of global women’s rights” that urges Westerners to intervene on behalf of faraway women ...

A New Day in Politics: Complicated conversations about Muslim women’s rights

I have been heartened by the substantive conversation happening in thought leadership publications about the plight of women in predominantly Arab and Muslim nations. Referring to Muslim women as people with desires, agency, needs and destinies is a new direction in how “the West” has ever talked about the real lives of women within these cultural contexts. But despite this continued desire to have these conversations–larger narratives about Muslim women and their bodies and Western intervention still dictate how these conversations play out.

Much of this was spurred by Mona Eltahawy’s controversial piece in Foreign Policy linked in yesterday’s Weekly Feminist Reader that came out last week called “Why do they hate us?” Her argument is pretty provocative calling out the ...

I have been heartened by the substantive conversation happening in thought leadership publications about the plight of women in predominantly Arab and Muslim nations. Referring to Muslim women as people with desires, agency, needs and destinies is a new ...