Eurozine: Lila Abu-Lughod – The Muslim woman. The power of images and the danger of pity

Lorenz has brought to my attention (via Disparate) an interesting article by Lila Abu-Lughod (The Muslim woman. power of images and the danger of pity) at Eurozine.com.

In the common Western imagination, the image of the veiled Muslim woman stands for oppression in the Muslim world. This makes it hard to think about the Muslim world without thinking about women, sets up an “us” and “them” relationship with Muslim women, and ignores the variety of ways of life practiced by women in different parts of the Muslim world. Anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod emphasizes that veiling should not be confused with a lack of agency or even traditionalism. Western feminists who take it upon themselves to speak on behalf of oppressed Muslim women assume that individual desire and social convention are inherently at odds: something not borne out by the experience of Islamic society.

Abu-Lughod focuses in her article on veiling in such a way that it provides the UK and German headscarf debate with an interesting angle. Her starting point is the way muslim women are depicted in the media.

I have been collecting such images for years, ones that reveal clearly the citationary quality of images of “the Muslim woman”. The most iconic are those I think of as studies in black and white. One finds, for example, impenetrable Algerian women shrouded in ghostly white in the French colonial postcards from the 1930s that Malek Alloula analyzes in his book, The Colonial Harem.[3] This kind of photography, Alloula argues, was dedicated to making Algerian women accessible, if only symbolically, to French soldiers, tourists, and the people back home. And then one finds in the late 1990s covers of American media, even highbrow, such as the New York Times Magazine or the Chronicle of Higher Education, that similarly depict women whose faces are hidden and bodies covered in white or pale Islamic modest dress. These are women from Jordan or Egypt whose lives and situations are radically unlike those of women in colonial Algeria, and unlike many other women in their own countries. One also finds in Alloula’s book of postcards images of women dressed dramatically in black, with only eyes showing. Again, almost identical images appear on the covers of the New York Times Magazine and even KLM Magazine from 1990 to the present, despite the fact that the articles they are linked to are on different countries: Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Yemen. There is an amazing uniformity.

Yes, indeed. In my previous work as assistant editor of the ISIM Review I have spend many houres looking for useful pictures in the databases of press agencies. Looking for happy women you see all kinds of pictures of women in Western families and almost none from the Middle East or Africa. When you do look for pictures of women in the Middle East, you will almost only find women and girls with headscarfs.

Why should we find this disturbing? I certainly feel uncomfortable with my collection of media images because my twenty-five years of experience doing research in the Middle East, especially Egypt, has taught me that images like these do not reflect the variety of styles of women’s dress in those countries and do nothing to convey the meaning of these differences. My own family albums include photos of my Palestinian grandmother and aunt in one of these countries – Jordan – my aunt wearing a blouse and slacks, her long straight hair uncovered; even my grandmother has just a simple white scarf draped loosely over her hair. They also include an old photo of my grandmother and aunt and two of my uncles taken sometime in the 1950s, the men in suits and the women in neat dresses, their hair nicely coiffed. Even if one turns to recent news items from these countries, take Jordan for example, again, one finds small photos that include the national women’s basketball team in shorts or the Queen dining with a group of other cosmopolitan women, European and Jordanian, and you can’t tell the difference. Why are these not on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, representing Jordan, instead of the shrouded woman?

Moreover, it is odd that in many of the images from the media, the veiled women stand in for the countries the articles are about. None of these articles in the New York Times Magazine, for example, was about Muslim women, or even Jordanian or Egyptian women. It would be as if magazines and newspapers in Syria or Malaysia were to put bikini clad women or Madonna on every cover of a magazine that featured an article about the United States or a European country.

Back to the veiling again:

There are several problems with these uniform and ubiquitous images of veiled women. First, they make it hard to think about the Muslim world without thinking about women, creating a seemingly huge divide between “us” and “them” based on the treatment or positions of women. This prevents us from thinking about the connections between our various parts of the world, helping setting up a civilizational divide. Second, they make it hard to appreciate the variety of women’s lives across the Muslim or Middle Eastern worlds – differences of time and place and differences of class and region. Third, they even make it hard for us to appreciate that veiling itself is a complex practice. Let me take a little time over this third point. It is common knowledge that the ultimate sign of the oppression of Afghani women under the Taliban-and-the-terrorists is that they were forced to wear the burqa. Liberals sometimes confess their surprise that even though Afghanistan has been liberated from the Taliban, women do not seem to be throwing off their burqas. Someone like me, who has worked in Muslim regions, asks why this is so surprising. Did we expect that once “free” from the Taliban they would go “back” to belly shirts and blue jeans, or dust off their Chanel suits?

Their is this tendency of painting a very simple picture of Muslim women who wear headscarfs because they are Muslim and who are oppressed but (since they seem to maintain the burqa in the post-Taliban era) don’t know it. So either we should rescue this women, or we should force them (by banning headscarves) to become enlightened.

If one constructs some women as being in need of pity or saving, one implies that one not only wants to save them from something but wants to save them for something – a different kind of world and set of arrangements. What violences might be entailed in this transformation? And what presumptions are being made about the superiority of what you are saving them for? Projects to save other women, of whatever kind, depend on and reinforce Westerners’ sense of superiority. They also smack of a form of patronizing arrogance that, as an anthropologist who is sensitive to other ways of living, makes me feel uncomfortable.

Don’t pity them, instead look for what they have to say. The same when Muslim critics criticize the Western sexual exploitation of women, we don’t have to pity Western women. Abu-Lughod follows Saba Mahmood in stating:

[…]  we should consider the terms of the women themselves: and they say that they want to be close to God, that they want to be good Muslims. They now do so through veiling and through teaching themselves about their religion, whether how to pray properly or how to be a good person.

This does not mean to take over all the things these women say in an unreflective and uncritical manner, but to take their conviction of obeying God and to be close to God seriously.

Mahmood refuses the ideals of liberal philosophers who insist that individual choice is the prime value. She describes these Egyptian Muslim women’s strong desires to follow socially-prescribed religious conventions “as the potentialities, the ‘scaffolding’ […] through which the self is realized”, not the signs of their subordination as individuals. She argues that their desire to take the ideals and tools of self-reference from outside the self (in Islamic religious practice, texts, and law) challenges the usual separation of individual and society upon which liberal political thinking rests. She tells us we need to question the (modern American) distinction that underlies most liberal theory between “the subject’s real desires and obligatory social conventions”. As I noted above, she describes the women who want to pray and be “close to God” by veiling and being modest as involved in a project of deliberate moral cultivation. Are we to say it is not?

Choices for all of us are fashioned by discourses, social locations, geopolitical configurations, and unequal power into historically and locally specific ranges. Those for whom religious values are important certainly don’t see them as constraining – they see them as ideals for which to strive.

This way the often used discourse of individualization of Muslims in Europe and the individualizing of their religious beliefs is challenged because this way the contradiction between individualization and tradition is questioned.

We have to recognize that people don’t necessarily want to give up their cultures and their social worlds – most people value their own ways of life. They don’t like to be told to give up their religious convictions.

Abu-Lughod’s perspective transcends the dichotomy between integration and tradition, western women and Muslim women that is so apparent in many of the headscarf debates. Who thinks she is just a apologist for islam, is mistaken:

the position I’m advocating doesn’t stop us asking ourselves how we, living in this privileged and powerful part of the world, might examine our own responsibilities for the situations in which others in distant places have found themselves and the choices now open to them. Islamic movements themselves have arisen in a world shaped by the intense engagements of Western powers in Middle Eastern lives. Some of the most conservative movements that focus on women in these parts of the world have resulted from interactions with the West, including 3 billion dollars funnelled by the CIA into the conservative groups in Afghanistan that undermined a Marxist government that was engaged in forced modernization, including mass education for women.

It seems to me that if we are concerned about women, including Muslim women, maybe we can work at home to make US and European policies more humane. If we want to be active in the affairs of distant places, maybe we should do so in the spirit of support for those within the communities whose goals are to make women’s (and men’s) lives better. Whatever we do, we should begin with respect and think in terms of alliances, coalitions, and solidarity, rather than salvation, or pity. Above all, we need to resist the power of the limited and limiting black and white images of Muslim women that circulate in our midst.

Although her picture of how Western society thinks about Muslim women is slightly exaggerated in my opinion, her perspective that takes into account the power of traditions, institutions and forces that work upon women in a modern society is very relevant.