Abu-Lughod, L. Do Muslim Women Need Saving (2013)

Do Muslim Women Need Saving?
Do Muslim Women
Need Saving?
Lila Abu-Lughod
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England
2013
Copyright 2013 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Abu-Lughod, Lila.
Do Muslim women need saving? / Lila Abu-Lughod.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-674-72516-4 (alk. paper)
1. Muslim womenSocial conditions. 2. Muslim womenCivil rights. 3. Womens
rightsIslamic countries. I. Title.
HQ1170.A346 2013
305.48'697dc23
2013005846
For my mother,
who watched me struggle
CONTENTS
Introduction: Rights and Lives
1. Do Muslim Women (Still) Need Saving?
27
2. The New Common Sense
54
3. Authorizing Moral Crusades
81
4. Seductions of the Honor Crime
113
5. The Social Life of Muslim Womens Rights
143
6. An Anthropologist in the Territory of Rights
173
Conclusion: Registers of Humanity

Notes 229
201
Bibliography 279 Acknowledgments 305 Index 309
Do Muslim Women Need Saving?
Introduction
Rights and Lives
On a bright December day in

2010, I was having tea with Zaynab, a woman who lives in a
village in southern Egypt.1 I had known her for many years, and
as we caught up on each others news, she politely asked me about
the subject of my new research. I explained that I was writing a
book about how people in the West believe that Muslim women
are oppressed. Zaynab objected, But many women are oppressed! They dont get their rights in so many waysin work,
in schooling, in . . .
I was surprised by her vehemence. But is the reason Islam? I
asked. They believe that these women are oppressed by Islam.
It was Zaynabs turn to be shocked. What? Of course not!
Its the government, she explained. The government oppresses
women. The government doesnt care about the people. It doesnt
care that they dont have work or jobs, that prices are so high
that no one can afford anything. Poverty is hard. Men suffer
from this too.
This was just three weeks before the day that Egyptians took
to the streets and the world watched, riveted, as they demanded
D O M U S L I M W O M E N N E E D S AV I N G ?
rights, dignity, and the end of the regime that had ruled for thirty
years. Zaynab had a particular reason for her anger that day. I
had arrived that morning to find her household in distress. The
caf that had been made out of the old living room of her house
was shuttered. Inside, her son lay on the couch, despondent. He
was the one who ran the caf; the youngest of her sons, he was
practical and hardworking. He had been a bright and eager kid
when we first met him, watching closely when my husband
helped Zaynab fix her washing machine and delighting us with
the motor-driven toys he made. He had always been the first to
hitch the donkey cart to go off to get fodder for the sheep and
water buffalo that Zaynab had kept for milk and income.
Zaynab had just returned from the police station and she was
agitated. She had gone to find out why they had picked up the
boy who helped her son in the caf. She explained what had happened. The local security officer had come in demanding breakfast. Another customer was served first. It seems that the security
officers and the military police came in regularly, or sent an underling to get them food. Zaynab dramatically described all the
good food her son would prepare for them: fava beans smothered in real clarified butter, eggs, cheese, pickles, and a mountain
of bread. They never offered the full price; sometimes they didnt
pay at all. This time, they had the waiter arrested.
As she drank strong tea for her headache, I tried to cheer up
the family by making a facetious suggestion. How about posting
their menu and prices on a board so that everyone would know
what things cost? And to shame the police and military, have a
second column listing the special discounted prices just for them.
Neither Zaynab nor her son was amused. They were tired of this
harassment.
The problem, Zaynab explained, was that no one dared stand
up to them. With just a word, these men could have her shop or
INTRODUCTION
caf closed down. She already had to pay off the security police
and the tourist police daily. I had seen Zaynab seethe when the
uniformed men or plainclothes police came by asking for packets of cigarettes and then refused to pay. They saw her as an ignorant peasant, her face dark with years of work in the fields,
her black robes marking her as uneducated. They knew she was
powerless. No wonder she blamed the government for womens
oppression.2
I had been close to Zaynab and her family for almost twenty
years. Her youngest child was the same age as my twins; we had
met when they were infants. I admired the way Zaynab had
raised her children and run the household more or less on her
own. Her husband had left to find work in Cairo, as did so many
from this depressed region, and only returned for short vacations.3 Intelligent and knowledgeable about everything from poetic funeral laments to the economics of farming, she had been
indefatigable in building a good life for her family. In recent
years, when her children were old enough to help, she finally was
able to capitalize on her location, which was near the buses that
brought tourists to her hamlet to visit a well-preserved Pharaonic temple. She set up a small kiosk selling cigarettes, batteries,
and chewing gum, and then expanded to sell bottled water, sodas, and snacks. Endlessly moving things indoors and out, serving customers, arranging for supplies, applying for permits, and
paying bribes and fines, the headaches were regular and the income inconsistent.
Zaynabs individual circumstances are unique, of course. She
lives in a poor region of Egypt. Her marriage had not been ideal.
Active and independent, she had a head for business and managed a complicated farming enterprise more or less on her own
for years. She regretted that she had never gone to schoolmany
girls didnt when she was growing upbut she was sharp and
wondered why she seemed to understand more about the world

than her children, all of whom had gone to school.
Yet her reaction to the subject of my book on the Muslim
woman confirmed something I had seen across the Arab world.
She lived with hardships, but she was always thinking about
how to do the best for her family. She was keenly aware of the political circumstances that shaped her life and her possibilities,
whether they came from a security state or from being part of the
international tourist economy. Her shock at my suggestion that
anyone would think she was oppressed by her religion was significant. Like so many women I have known across the Arab world
from university professors and businesswomen to villagersher
identity as a Muslim is deeply meaningful to her, and her faith in
God is integral to her sense of self and community.
Thinking like an Anthropologist

Because I have known women like Zaynab through my years doing ethnographic research, I am often bewildered by what I read
or hear about the Muslim woman. It is hard to reconcile my
experiences with the women I have met in rural Egypt with what
the American media present, or with what people say to me casually at dinner parties, in doctors offices, and on the sidelines
at my childrens soccer games when they learn that I write about
the Middle East. I am surprised by how easily people presume
that Muslim women do not have rights.
This book is the result of my intellectual journey to make
sense of the disjuncture between my experiences and these public attitudes. When defending the rights of Muslim women was
offered as part of the justification for U.S. military intervention
in Afghanistan in 2001, I had already spent twenty years writing
about womens lives in various communities in Egypt. In the late
1970s, I lived for two years in a Bedouin community in Egypts
INTRODUCTION
Western Desert. I was then a graduate student in anthropology

doing fieldwork for my dissertation. The book I eventually published based on this experience was called Veiled Sentiments.4 It
presented the surprising things that the poems so precious to
women in this community could tell us about how they felt
about men, relationships, and life. The women who expressed
themselves through poignant oral poetry first taught me just
how complicated cultural and moral life was in at least one Arab
Muslim community.
Worried that the academic style and arguments of my first
book had stood in the way of conveying the liveliness of the
women I had come to know, not to mention the nuances of their
social relations and attitudes, I returned again to live in this
community for about six months in the mid-1980s. Based on
this research, I wrote a second book that was composed only of
narratives. In Writing Womens Worlds, I used the everyday stories of individual women to try to capture something of the
spirit of their world.
By presenting womens dreams, desires, anger, and
disappointmentsin their own wordsI hoped to lay to rest
some stereotypes. Some of the women longed desperately for children; others were frazzled by having too many. Some wanted to
marry; others shied awayor pretended to. Some had husbands
who were close life partners; others had husbands who hurt their
feelings. Some escaped bad marriages; others were bound to
them, as so many women are, by love of their children. The stories were about jealousies, arguments, deep interdependencies,
and the changes women underwent as they grew older. Some of
the women I wrote about clearly felt embraced by their large
families and were confident and powerful; some were lonely and
poor. Some women were defiant and proud; others were resigned
to what fate had brought them. Some young women wanted to
escape what they perceived as their communitys flaws, even if

they fiercely defended central values and argued in terms of becoming better Muslims. All had a keen sense of their rights.
The individuality of these womens experiences and their reflections on life and relationships challenged what I felt was anthropologys tendency to typify cultures through social scientific
generalizations. I imagined feminists as another audience for my
second book; I hoped that the narratives would persuade them
that it is not so easy to talk about patriarchy or to put ones
finger on how power works. I wanted my years of research to
offer something unusual to a public that had little understanding
of, but strong views about women in the Middle East. Trying to
remain true to my experiences of living in this small community
in Egypt for so many yearswatching children grow up, women
struggle to build families, people figure out how to realize their
dreams, relationships and roles shift, and hopes sometimes turn
to resignationI did my best to convey the texture of life as
lived.5
I called what I was doing writing against culture. I was convinced that generalizing about cultures prevents us from appreciating or even accounting for peoples experiences and the contingencies with which we all live. The idea of culture increasingly
has become a core component of international politics and common sense.6 Pundits tell us that there is a clash of civilizations or
cultures in our world. They tell us there is an unbridgeable chasm
between the West and the Rest. Muslims are presented as a
special and threatening culturethe most homogenized and the
most troubling of the Rest. Muslim women, in this new common
sense, symbolize just how alien this culture is.
Western representations of Muslim women have a long history.7 Yet after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the images of
oppressed Muslim women became connected to a mission to
INTRODUCTION
rescue them from their cultures. As I explore in this book, these

views rationalize American and European international adventures across the Middle East and South Asia. The media enthusiastically took up stories about the status and suppression of
women. Feminists joined the cause. Popular memoirs by Muslim
women who exposed the plights of their benighted sisters in Iran,
Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia became best sellers in the West.
Womens organizations headed off to Afghanistan alongside a
battery of humanitarians and legal experts. Later, these groups
set up shop in Iraq, a country in which, ironically, women had
previously enjoyed the highest levels of education, labor force
participation, and even political involvement in the Arab world.8
The line between progressives and right-wingers has blurred
in this shared concern for Muslim women. Some conservatives
accuse American feminists of failing to protest glaring injustices, including especially the subjection of women in Muslim
societies.9 They accuse feminist scholars of being so consumed
by a toxic anti-Americanism or so obsessed with a patriarchy
that prevails everywhere (not to mention being wary of femininity, antifamily, and hostile to traditional religion) that they dont
criticize heinous practices beyond our shores. On the other
side, observers of the U.S. feminist movement have argued that
the revitalization of American feminism in the 1990s came with
a shift from domestic to global issues. Farrell and McDermott,
for example, attribute the stagnation of U.S. feminism after the
1970s to the conservative backlash that challenged earlier gains
in affirmative action, education, employment, and sexual rights
(at the same time that minority criticisms of U.S. feminism for
racism were debilitating it). The mainstream turn to global or
international feminism, they say, was a strategic diversion from
a fragmented domestic politics. American feminists began to
focus on spectacularly oppressive practices that were easy to
mobilize around: female genital cutting, enforced veiling, or the

honor crime. Promoting causes far from home, they could secure
themselves a niche in larger political discussions around the
role of United States as the beacon of humanitarianism.10
As an anthropologist who had lived for so long with women
in communities where everyone was Muslim, I was forced by all
these developments to reflect on what I could or should do with
the perspective my ethnographic work had given me. The first
principle of ethnography, which involves participating in daily
life over a long period, is to listen and watch. I had already spent
twenty years trying to understand something about womens lives
in what now was being homogenized as the Muslim world,
where womens rights needed defending. So I embarked on a project to articulate why the emerging Western common sense about
the plight of Muslim women did not capture what I knew from
experience and from reading history. This book is my attempt to
figure out how we should think about the question of Muslim
women and their rights.
I do not just analyze or criticize media representations. Nor
do I only study the ways popular rhetoric is put to political use.
I am committed to taking seriously the lives of individual women
I have known.11 Each of the women whose lives I introduce in
this book forces us to question dogmas. Each taught me something important about the inadequacy of contemporary understandings of the rights that Muslim women enjoy (or dont), even
as they taught me that women live deeply gendered lives. Some
face restrictions on mobility. Most have strong ideals of comportment and morality, work with laws and norms that distinguish mens and womens rights and responsibilities, and struggle with choices. I use their cases to bridge the gulf between the
specific dilemmas and hardships they face in particular places
INTRODUCTION
and times and the common Western story of the hapless Muslim
woman oppressed by her culture.
Alternative Voices
I am not alone in raising doubts about the images of Muslim
women we are offered in the West. Nor am I the only one to
question the connection between these images and the prevailing
politics of violence. Informed interventions and sensible dissenting voices can be found in the American public sphere. On April
13, 2011, a website called Muslimah Media Watch that monitors representations of Muslim women uploaded a striking
poster from a German human rights campaign.12 At first glance,
one sees plastic trash bags lined up against a mud wall; some are
black, some are blue. A closer look reveals that hunched up
among these bags is a figure shrouded in a blue burqa (Afghanstyle full covering). The German rights campaign slogan reads:
Oppressed women are easily overlooked. Please support us in
the fight for their rights. A writer on another feminist website
picked up the poster and retorted that agency is easily overlooked if you actively erase it.13 The feminists, Muslim and nonMuslim alike, who drew attention to this campaign poster are
among those who ask us why so many, including human rights
campaigners, presume that just because Muslim women dress in
a certain way, they are not agentic individuals or cannot speak
for themselves. These feminists are not ignoring the abuses the
women suffer; to the contrary, they are suggesting that we ought
to talk to them to find out what problems they face rather than
treating them as mute garbage bags.
Martha Nussbaum, a feminist philosopher, also publicized
the problems with presuming that veiling or covering might signal oppression. In a 2010 article in the New York Times blog
10
about the proposed bans of burqas in several European countries, she framed her arguments against the ban around the principle of freedom of conscience that is so central to American law
and historical values and on the human rights principle of equal
respect.14 Her erudite demolition of the usual arguments put
forward in support of banning an item of womens clothing was
not just persuasive but amusing.
First, she dismissed arguments that the burqa is a symbol of
male domination and coercion by pointing out that those who
criticize this item of dress neither know the first thing about Islamic symbols nor would they support banning most practices
commonly associated with male domination in our own society.
These include commercial exploitation of women, plastic surgery, and fraternity violence, to name a few familiar examples.
Nussbaum offered some everyday examples to show the inconsistencies in the other two arguments in favor of the ban: (1) security requires people to show their faces when appearing in public
places and (2) the kind of transparency and reciprocity proper
to relations between citizens is impeded by covering part of the
face. She wrote: It gets very cold in Chicagoas, indeed, in
many parts of Europe. Along the streets we walk, hats pulled
down over ears and brows, scarves wound tightly around noses
and mouths. No problem of either transparency or security is
thought to exist, nor are we forbidden to enter public buildings
so insulated. Moreover, many beloved and trusted professionals
cover their faces all year round: surgeons, dentists, (American)
football players, skiers and skaters.
In a later post, Nussbaum responded to readers who objected
that the burqa was different because it portrayed women as nonpersons (think trash bags). Much of our poetry treats eyes as the
windows of the soul, she noted. Then she again described her
own experience. During a construction project in her office at
INTRODUCTION
11
the University of Chicago she had to cover everything but her

eyes because she wanted to protect her singing voice from dust.
Students soon got used to it, she said: My personality did not
feel stifled, nor did they feel that they could not access my individuality.15 She concluded that if we accept that human beings
are entitled to equal dignity, we have to recognize that each of
the arguments put forth in support of these bans is discriminatory. As she later elaborated in her book The New Religious Intolerance: Overcoming the Politics of Fear in an Anxious Age,
what motivates these proposals to ban covering is not any
problem with face covering but a fear of Muslims.16
None of those speaking out against the stereotyping of Muslim women is silent on the issue of womens suffering. Nussbaum
herself has drawn attention to the gross inequities that are based
on gender and the repugnant violence against women that occurs around the world.17 I share the sentiments of all those who
want to see a world in which women do not suffer as much as
they do nowwhether from hunger, poverty, domestic abuse,
sexual exploitation, or practices that compromise their health or
dignity. Anyone concerned with womens well-being must pursue moral and political ideals, however utopian. Yet as a scholar
and someone who has lived with the kinds of women most often
held up as prime and even exceptional examples of the grossly
oppressed, I insist that we must analyze carefully the nature and
causes of womens suffering. A good place to begin is to take seriously the insights of women like Zaynab.
Where Is Feminism?
The last two decades have been momentous for the development
of new international instruments of womens rights and for the
consolidation of feminist concern about women worldwide. In
the 1990s, with the Fourth World Conference on Women in
12
Beijing in 1995 and the successful campaign to claim womens

rights as human rights, we entered a new era of international exchange among women, activism by nongovernmental organizations devoted to womens empowerment, a growing feminist elite
in other parts of the world, and the involvement of Western feminists in other regions. The UN Convention on the Elimination of
All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) provided
an important framework and set of ancillary institutions for
pursuing gender equality.18 In the academy and elsewhere, lively
debates have taken place. Liberal feminists who condemn patriarchy in other cultures and advocate universal standards of gender equity have been confronted by third world feminists and
women of color in the West who insist that racial difference,
class position, and geographic location shape womens experiences differently.19 How can we treat women as an undifferentiated category?
The sharp debate within feminist circles about whether women
share enough to constitute a singular category (woman) has
implications for the subject of this book. Should we be working
with the similarly homogenized subcategory of the Muslim
woman? I have taken her as my subject because others, some
outside and some inside Muslim communities, are framing womens rights issues this way. Yet all of the cases of particular women
I analyze in this book are drawn from the Arab world, and most
are from the rural communities in Egypt where I have done
research. This leap from the general to the particular requires
explanation.
Muslim women live on all continents. More Muslims live in
South and Southeast Asia, by far, than live in the Middle East.
Many important developments in law and culture have emerged
from these regions. Scholars have written about gender issues
in all the nations in which Muslim women live. Womens
INTRODUCTION
13
experiences living in these other contexts can teach us different

lessons than I can, with my focus on Egypt. Each country in which
Muslims live has inherited a different history. In some countries,
Muslims are minorities; in others, they are majorities. In a few
countries, most are wealthy; in others, they are poor. The careful
ethnographies that anthropologists and sociologists have written; the vivid documentary films that have been produced; the
historical studies that those who work in the archives have published; the fiction, poems, and essays that women from these
communities have created; the studies of law and legal reforms
that experts have contributedall confirm the tremendous
diversity.
If I were a specialist on India, I would have drawn on a vast
variety of experiences and situationsdating back hundreds of
years and differentiated by regionto bring home this diversity.
The dynamics that shape Muslim womens rights and lives in the
subcontinent are dizzying. From their vulnerability in the tragic
communal riots in Gujarat to their earlier use as pawns during
Partition, when they (like Hindu and Sikh women) were booty
of war and then reclaimed in the aftermath of independence for
national honor, their identities as Muslims were key to what
happened to them. Battles over a proposed Uniform Civil Code
for family law in India have been pitched for years. Mobilized by
a divorce case taken up by Indian feminists (mostly Hindu), the
Muslim community protectively entrenched itself by insisting on
preserving Muslim personal status law.20
Some of the more sensationalized abuses of Muslim women
that have garnered world attention come from parts of the world
other than where I have lived and worked. Because troops have
been on the ground in Afghanistan since 2001, U.S. newspapers
have regularly featured the problems that women in Afghanistan
face. The focus has tended to be on cultural practices rather
14
than war injuries or other consequences of militarization or the

dislocations of war, as I explore in Chapter 1. It is important to
look behind the headlines.
Bangladesh entered the limelight with publicity about incidents in which acid has been thrown at women, notably a major
American television documentary called Faces of Hope. Elora
Chowdhury, who studied both the problem and the publicity,
discovered that the issue of acid violence had been tackled in
local campaigns by dedicated Bangladeshi feminists for years.
They had set up organizations and laid the groundwork for providing services for survivors. Bangladeshi campaigners and victims (some the same) mobilized international support for their
work, but then, as Chowdhury shows, the efforts of these groups
were erased in the award given to the American documentary by
the international rights organization Amnesty International.21
More disturbingly, she traced how the incidents and the shifting
demographics of the problem were simplified to fit a narrative of
progress in which downtrodden Muslim women were given new
lives by enlightened saviors who rescued them from savages.22 The messiness of the factswho the acid throwers were
and why the victims were attacked (for anything from rejection
of sexual advances to family or land disputes)were set aside.
Even more worrying was what had happened to the victims
whose causes were adopted by well-meaning benefactors. Interventions transformed their lives, but subjected them to novel
pressures including Christian proselytizing. Some girls were criticized for making choices that went against the rescuers scripts
for them. In short, the story behind the news was complicated. It
did not fit the story of Muslim women oppressed by their
culture.
Muslim womens issues regularly stir up international debate
in ways that concerns about women elsewhere in the world do
INTRODUCTION
15
not. Dina Mahnaz Siddiqis meticulous research into the highprofile legal cases of rape in Bangladesh that were taken up by
international womens rights groups shows neatly how stories
get distorted when they go global. Siddiqi discovered that in
many of the controversial cases where judges ruled that women
should marry their rapists, womens testimonies and lawyers
explanations revealed that what we had instead were consensual
relationships gone awry. The charges of rape or seduction were
being brought forward when a pregnancy had exposed a relationship or when a relationship did not end in a promised marriage. Portraying the women as innocent victims of rape saved
face and social respectability, and brought pressure on men to
marry their girlfriends. International human and womens rights
groups portray such resolutions as hideous violations of girls
rights when the problem is that the social ideals of female respectability, the stigma of sexuality, and the narrowness of the
legal system limit womens options. Such gendered limits should
not be confused with hideous crimes against women. They also
have nothing to do with Islamic law because the legal system in
which the cases are pressed is the secular state court system.23
In recent years, Shariathe term people use loosely to refer
to law that derives from Islamic legal traditionshas become an
international symbol of Muslim identity and, to many in the
West, a dreaded and traditional enemy of womens rights. The
impact and implications of imposing Sharia law are sharply
debated.24 In Southeast Asia, something called Sharia law was
imposed in Aceh after a protracted conflict with the Indonesian
state and in the wake of autonomy and post-tsunami wealth.25
Its violation of local gender norms and its connection to the political conflict reveal it to be anything but traditional. In nearby
Malaysia, however, an innovative group of Muslim feminists calling themselves Sisters in Islam emerged to challenge conservative
16
interpretations of Islamic law. In 2009 an international movement for legal reform of Islamic family law grew out of this
organization.26
These examples from different parts of the Muslim world illustrate the variety of situations in which Muslim women find
themselves, the sorts of debates and strategies they engage, and
how frequently their experiences are misunderstood and the
complexities of their situations ignored. These analyses of whats
wrong with the simple story of Muslim womens oppression
hold cautionary tales for us. Abuses and infringements of womens rights must be acknowledged. This is true everywhere they
occur, whether in sex trafficking in Seattle, Tel Aviv, or Dubai;
rape in Belgium, Cambodia, or Bosnia; or domestic violence in
Chicago, Capetown, or Kabul. At the same time, we have to recognize the everyday forms of suffering that women endure
from insecurity to hunger and illnessthat are not always gendered or specific to particular cultures or religious communities.
We have to keep asking hard questions about who or what is to
blame for the problems that particular women face. What responses might be most effective for addressing problems that we
do find, and who is best situated to understand or respond to
these problems? Muslim women activists have been addressing
gender issues in their communities for more than a century in
places like Egypt, Syria, and present-day Bangladesh. As Elora
Shehabuddin notes, these reform movements were initially led by
men, but by the late nineteenth and early twentieth century . . .
Muslim women themselves were making passionate pleas for
change.27
For the past decade, I have been trying to think through both
the politics and the ethics of the international circulation of discourses about oppressed Muslim women. Inspired less by debates in my discipline of anthropology than by what is happening
INTRODUCTION
17
in the world, I have been following the very active social life of
Muslim womens rights. If the prominent use of the sad figure
of the oppressed Muslim woman for a war in Afghanistan in
2001 set me on the path to thinking through the issues, I have
nevertheless felt that the best way to approach the problem is to
go deeply into the specifics and what I know. That is why I draw
heavily on my experiences living in some small communities in
Egypt. I do not claim that the women whose lives I analyze are
representative or can stand in for all others. Instead, I use them
to suggest that intimate familiarity with individuals anywhere
makes it hard to be satisfied with sweeping generalizations about
cultures, religions, or regions, or to accept the idea that problems have simple causes or solutions. I am more drawn to the
detail and empathy of the novelist than to the bold strokes of
the polemicist.
Confounding Choices
Even if many are willing to set aside the sensationalized stories
of oppression that capture media attention and contribute to the
widespread sense of certainty about the direness of the situation
of the Muslim woman, most people still harbor a stubborn
conviction that womens rights should be defined by the values
of choice and freedom, and that these are deeply compromised
in Muslim communities. This obsession with constraint is shared
by outsiders and secular progressives within the Muslim world.
It is expressed perfectly in persistent worries about the veil
(hijab/niqab/burqa/head scarf). Women who cover themselves
are assumed to be coerced or capitulating to male pressure, despite the fact that wearing an enveloping cover is mandatory (in
public) in only a few settings and that educated Muslim women
in the past thirty years have struggled with the opposite problem: They must defy their families and sometimes the law to take
18
on what they value as pious Islamic dress. Womens decisions to

take on the veil in what Leila Ahmed has called a quiet revolution are shaped by a long history of controversy over its meanings.28 Can dress symbolize freedom or constraint? How can we
distinguish dress that is freely chosen from that which is worn
out of habit, social pressure, or fashion? A cartoon on a 2007
cover of the major New York literary magazine the New Yorker
captures this dilemma wonderfully. Three young women sit side
by side in a New York subway car. One is in full black niqab
with just her eyes showing. Next to her sits a blond who is wearing large sunglasses, shorts, a bikini top, and flip-flops revealing
painted toenails. Next to her sits a kindly looking, bespectacled
nun wearing a habit. The caption reads: Girls will be girls.
Because of the terms in which Muslim womens lives are represented and debated in the West, no book about women in the
Muslim world can avoid confronting the question of how to
think about choice and what it means to assert freedom as the
ultimate value. I return again and again to these issues that lie at
the heart of the matter. Born into families, we all find ourselves
in particular social worlds. We are placed in certain social classes
and communities in specific countries at distinct historical moments. Our desires are forged in these conditions and our choices
limited by them. This is not to say that some individuals and communities do not enjoy more choice and more power to choose
than othersafter all, Virginia Woolf taught us in A Room of
Ones Own that at least in Britain up until the Second World
War, these have usually been men.29 But is the relative power to
choose defined solely by sex or by culture? We need to reflect on
the limits we all experience in being agents of our own lives. And
beyond that, we have to ask ourselves what we think about
those for whom choice may not be the only litmus test of a worthy life. Most religious traditions are built on the premise that
INTRODUCTION
19
people do not fully control what happens to them. Even the ancient Greeks saw hubrisexcessive pride or belief that one could
defy the godsas a tragic flaw.
Questions like these are crucial for thinking about Muslim
women and their rights. In considering the strange idea that liberal democracies want to legislate what Muslim women should
wear, Wendy Brown reminds us that secularism has not brought
womens freedom or equality in the West. Our views, Brown
says, are based on the tacit assumption that bared skin and
flaunted sexuality is a token if not a measure of womens freedom and equality.30 The women who are going to the mosques
to learn how to be better Muslims and who are embracing a new
kind of veiling as religious duty would be nonplussed.31 My
friend Zaynab, in her black overdress and head covering, would
be shocked by this assumption. Our convictions about Muslim
womens relative lack of choice, Brown concludes, ignore the
extent to which all choice is conditioned by as well as imbricated
with power, and the extent to which choice itself is an impoverished account of freedom.
How such simplistic ideas about freedom are maintained is a
running theme of this book. I look both at political rhetoric and
popular culture. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali migr whose voice
has been so crucial in the past decade to defining North American and European views on women and Islam, refers to Muslim women as caged virgins. She presents herself as a Muslim
woman who has freed herself from the cage, rejecting the tribal
sexual morality that she ascribes to Islam and emancipating
herself through atheism.32 She gives step-by-step advice to young
Muslim girls about how to run away from home.33 Massmarket paperbacks about abused Muslim women buttress such
views with metaphors of caged birds, trapped flies, and spiders
in jars.
20
The Wounded Bird

The contrast between the free and unfree is at the core of contemporary American feminism, drawing on a powerful national
ideology and political philosophy. One of the most poetic and
familiar evocations is the title of Maya Angelous classic memoir,
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Her autobiographical story
of emancipation from both racism and sexual abuse turns on a
contrast between the caged bird and the free. The caged birds
shadow, in Angelous poem, shouts on a nightmare scream.34
I want to set beside this classic contrast another song about a
nightmare scream, one that I heard in Jordan. This other song invites us to think differently about women and freedom because
it speaks to the new context in which we live, a context dominated by a popular discourse like Ayaan Hirsi Alis, which pits
Western freedom against imprisonment by Islam. This song is a
sober reminder that we must situate such images and ground our
thinking about the meanings of freedom in the everyday lives of
individuals, on the one hand, and the imperial politics of intervention, on the other. We will find that it is rarely a case of being
free or oppressed, choosing or being forced. Representations of
the unfreedom of others that blame the chains of culture incite
rescue missions by outsiders. Such representations mask the histories of internal debate and institutional struggles over justice
that have occurred in every nation. They also deflect attention
from the social and political forces that are responsible for the
ways people live.
I heard this song from one of my favorite aunts (technically
my fathers first cousin, but we called her aunt). Widowed a
decade ago, she had decided to move to Jordan to be near her
brother and sisters. The family was scattered after their expulsion from Palestine in 1948, but her siblings were gathering again
INTRODUCTION
21
after they, like many Palestinians, were driven out of Kuwait in

the first Gulf War. I had not seen her for many years, but when a
conference took me to Jordan, I got in touch. In her late seventies now, she remained beautiful and glamorous. She still wore
tasteful makeup and had her hair pulled up in a bun with a colorful clip. Wearing an elegant, long black skirt and trendy ankle boots, she also carefully draped a chiffon scarf loosely over
her head when we went to pay a call on some relatives.
As long as Id known her, she had been punctual about
prayers, and on her lips were the same entreaties to God and
expressions of faith that are familiar to anyone who has spent
time in the Muslim world. But my aunt also loved to sing. That
day, she wanted to sing for us. Of the many songs she had written, this plaintive song was the one, she said, that best expressed
her feelings. It was intriguing to me that it played on the same
images as the poem in Angelous book on freedom.
Im a wounded bird
Living in the world, a stranger . . .
I search, search for my country
I find nothing but my laments . . .
The wound in me is deep
And will need years to heal . . .
I am screaming inside
But no one but me can hear
She interpreted her song for me, not sure I would understand
the Arabic or the deep meaning. Everyone, she said, thinks she is
happy because she is so warm and fun-loving on the outside.
Vivacious and funny, she is indeed a lively raconteur and someone
who appreciates peoples foibles. When she complained about her
bad knee or her failing eyesight, she would say with a twinkle,
You know how hard it is when you get to be thirty-seven and a
22
half years old! She confided to me that she had composed this
song after her daughter (who was about my age and had been
dear to me, too) was killed in a car accident with college friends
in Wisconsin. She didnt leave the house for months. But she
sings the song with new feeling nowshortly after her husband
passed away, she lost her eldest son to cancer.
My aunt has not had the life she deserved. With her talents
and intelligence, and her origins in a good family from Jaffa, she
had what looked initially like a good marriage. She married a
man who was considerably older but well educated by the Jesuits. He had a respectable job working for the British customs office at Lydda (now Ben Gurion) Airport. In the black-and-white
studio photograph of her on their wedding day, which she had
enlarged and hung in her bedroom, she sits demurely on a chair,
her hair in curls, and a white pearl necklace around her neck, her
young body feminine in a long, white lace dress. But their life took
an unexpected turn.
A few years after they were married, fighting broke out in
Jaffa with the settlers in Tel Aviv who wanted Palestine as a Jewish state. During the troubles, her husband took her and their
two young sons on holiday to Egypt. They had two suitcases
with them. She tells the story of what happened when they got
the news that Jaffa had fallen to the Zionists. They were in a hotel in Cairo when they learned that the Zionist settlers had taken
by force what, even under the partition plan imposed by the
United Nations (UN), belonged to the part of Palestine to have
been left to the Palestinians. The state of Israel was declared and
it included Jaffa. Her husband beat his head against the wall.
Never able to return, they spent the next twenty years living a
modest life in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in Cairo.
I got to know them in the late 1950s, when my father took a
job working for the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and
INTRODUCTION
23
Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Egypt. We loved to play

with our cousins, her children. My aunt would cook us delicious
food, sing as she worked around the house, and let us play
pranks on the neighbors. She kept the household going without
much companionship from her husband. As a refugee, her husband found it hard to find work and was often forced to be
away. He was a dour man anyway, at least by the time I knew
him, proud that he spoke many languages (Arabic, French, English, and Hebrew) and often buried in a book. He did not share
her zest for life or music. They raised four children, sending them
off, one by one, to the United States for college. The eldest became an engineer and eventually sent for his parents, setting them
up in a Midwestern suburb.
There is so much in her life that seems unfair. As a girl growing up in Jaffa in the 1930s and 1940s, she married too early to
get an education. As a refugee, like hundreds of thousands of
Palestinians who lost everything, she was cut off from her family
in 1948. As someone who spent more than fifty years married to
a man who was not a good match for her, she could not flourish,
though she made the best of it. Singing kept her going. The song
about herself as a wounded bird, though, was about more than
her personal plight. She explained to me, I am like Palestine. My
wounds are deep. We Palestinians are all wounded and strangers
in this world. There was no way to separate her personal situation from the particular historical and political circumstances
that gave it shape and limits.
My aunt finds comfort in her songs and takes pleasure in family. But I noticed when we talked that she also finds inner peace
through prayer. She struggles to read a part of the Quran every
day, even though she did not have the benefit of an education
that would make this easy. With her eyes bright, she tells me that
in the Quran she has found marvels. She comments, You begin
24
to be philosophical about life. You have to accept what life

brings you.
My aunt has had it easier financially than Zaynab has. She
never had to work in the fields or confront security police. She
now lives in middle-class comfort in her own apartment decorated with dried flower arrangements and framed photographs of
those she has loved and lost. Yet no more than the village woman
in her black robes living in a mud brick house would my aunt
recognize herself in that figure of the popular American imagination: the Muslim woman who submits slavishly to an uncaring
God and accepts abject confinement and harsh treatment by
men because of some verses from the Quran. Love of family and
faith in God keep her going.
These womens lives show us just how varied and complicated the sources of any one womans suffering might be. From
the abuse of power by security police in Egypt in 2011 to the
injustices of colonial British support for Zionist expulsion of
Palestinians from their land and homes in 1948, we see that the
most basic conditions of these womens lives are set by political
forces that are local in effect but national and even international
in origin. Neither woman had a husband who was able to help
her flourish, whether because of personality or precarious financial and political circumstances. The confidence of these women
and even their public face was sometimes shaken by these men,
who nevertheless did their best to provide for their families, burying their own humiliations and insecurity. Is it because they are
Muslim men that they were less than perfect husbands?
And how are we to account for these womens resilience and
initiative? Both threw themselves into making good lives for
their children, living for and through them. My aunts losses anguished her; she tried to manage this grief through her faith in
INTRODUCTION
25
God. Zaynab has been consumed by the struggles and failings of

her sons, by her eldest daughters loneliness, and by her youngest
daughters diabetes. Zaynabs trust in God gives her strength and
perspective.
The lives of women like Zaynab and my aunt reveal terms
like oppression, choice, and freedom to be blunt instruments for
capturing the dynamics and quality of their lives. Such terms do
little to help us understand the tireless efforts of these women,
their songs of loss and longing, and their outbursts about rights.
Both women would find it bizarre to imagine that people could
think they were caged by their culture or oppressed by their religion, even though they have not had easy lives and some of what
they suffer is indeed gendered. Images of caged birds and trash
bags by the side of a road obscure their social realities and their
creative responses to hard situations.
Politics of the Everyday

This book seeks answers to the questions that presented themselves to me with such force after September 11, 2001, when
popular concern about Muslim womens rights took off. I worry
about the ways that representations of Muslim womens suffering
and arguments about their lack of rights have been working politically and practically. I follow the concept of Muslim womens
rights as it travels through debates and documents, organizes
womens organizations and activism, and mediates lives in refugee
camps and the halls of the United Nations. I try to uncover what
this framework that describes distant womens lives only in terms
of rights, present or absent, hides from us about both everyday
violence and forms of love. I ask what evaluating lives in terms of
rights does for (and against) different kinds of women. Along the
way, I uncover how key symbols of Muslim womens cultural
26
aliennessfrom the veil to the honor crimeare deployed in

twenty-first-century political projects, and why these symbols
grip us.
Trying to understand peoples lives is for me a passion. It is
also my vocation as an anthropologist. That is why I seek answers to these big questions through the lives of particular women
I know. These are women who are trying to lead good lives and
who are making choices that are sometimes hard, limited by the
constraints of the present and the uncertainties of the future. I
have known them for many years, as individuals living in families, communities, countries, and the world. How do they see the
problems they are facing? What do they say they want? How
should this make us think about that mythical place where Muslim women, undifferentiated by nation, locality, or personal circumstance, live lives that are totally separate and different from
our own? What can thinking about their circumstances teach us
about values like choice and freedom in the context of human
livesany human lives?
These women, I believe, can help us reflect critically on the
groundswell of support for global womens rights that has emerged
in the past decade, and the special concerns about the rights (or
wrongs) of the Muslim woman. How is the current moral crusade to save Muslim women authorized? What worldly effects
do well-meaning concerns have on the suffering of women elsewhere in the world? How does the proposition that such women
live caged in their cultures undergird fantasies of rescue by the
world community?35 These are questions that troubled me because I knew from experience how surprised women like Zaynab and my aunt would be by the contours of this concern.
CHAPTER
Do Muslim Women
(Still) Need Saving?
Commentators noted the political timing of Time magazines cover story about a beautiful young
woman from Afghanistan whose nose had been cut off. The unsettling photograph of Bibi Aysha, whose Taliban husband and
in-laws had punished her this way, appeared on newsstands in
August 2010. Eight months earlier, President Obama had authorized a troop surge, but now there was talk about bringing some
Taliban into reconciliation talks. The juxtaposition between the
photograph and the headlineWhat Happens if We Leave
Afghanistan?implied that women would be the first victims.
Unremarked was the fact that this act of mutilation had been
carried out while U.S. and British troops were still present in
Afghanistan.1
Time had selected this photograph from a large number of
possible images. The talented South African photographer who
took it explained the backstory at the award ceremony when it
was declared World Press Photo of the Year. Jodi Bieber had
been on assignment in Afghanistan taking portraits of women.
She had photographed politicians, documentary filmmakers,
28
popular television hosts, and women in shelters and burn

hospitals.2
Times managing editor defended his decision to feature this
shocking photograph in both moral and political terms. Even if
it might distress children, he wrote (and he had consulted child
psychologists), they needed to know that bad things happen to
people. The image, he also argued, is a window into the reality
of what is happeningand what can happenin a war that affects and involves all of us. He was not taking sides, he said, but
he would rather confront readers with the Talibans treatment
of women than ignore it. He continued: The much-publicized
release of classified documents by WikiLeaks has already ratcheted up the debate about the war . . . We do not run this story or
show this image either in support of the U.S. war effort or in
opposition to it. We do it to illuminate what is actually happening on the ground . . . What you see in these pictures and our
story is something that you cannot find in those 91,000 documents: a combination of emotional truth and insight into the
way life is lived in that difficult land and the consequences of the
important decisions that lie ahead.3
Bibi Aysha had been photographed in a shelter in Kabul run
by an American organization with a large local staff, Women for
Afghan Women (WAW). She was waiting there to be sent to the
United States for reconstructive surgery, thanks to the generosity
of donors and the Grossman Burn Foundation. Both the photographer and WAW were broadsided by the publicity following the
Time cover. WAW tried to protect Bibi Aysha from the glare,
eventually preventing all interviews and photographs. By then
they were sheltering her in New York, hoping she would recover
enough from her trauma for surgery to take place.
A member of WAWs board nevertheless echoed Times political message. She predicted a bloodbath if we leave Afghanistan.
D O M U S L I M W O M E N ( S T I L L ) N E E D S AV I N G ?
29
Bibi Ayshas plight was to remind the public of the atrocities the
Taliban had committed. Esther Hyneman rejected the suggestion
made by Ann Jones in the Nation that the Taliban were being
singled out for demonization when they were not much different
from other misogynous groups in Afghanistan, including those
in the U.S.-backed government. If the Taliban were to come to
power, she warned, the sole bulwarks against the permanent
persecution of women will be gone. These bulwarks were the
international human rights organizations and local organizations like her WAW.4
The controversy over Bibi Aysha indicates how central the
question of Afghan womens rights remains to the politics of the
War on Terror that, almost from its first days in 2001, has been
justified in terms of saving Afghan women.5 As an anthropologist who had studied women and gender politics in another part
of the Muslim world for so many years, I was not convinced at
the time by this public rationale for war, even as I recognized that
women in Afghanistan do have particular struggles and that
some suffer disturbing forms of violence.
Like many colleagues whose work focuses on women in the
Middle East and the Muslim world, I was deluged with invitations to speak at the time of heightened interest in 2001. It was
the beginning of many years of being contacted by news programs, as well as by departments at colleges and universities, especially womens studies programs. I was a scholar who had by then
devoted more than twenty years of my life to this subject, and it
was gratifying to be offered opportunities to share my knowledge.
The urgent desire to understand our sister women of cover (as
President George W. Bush had so marvelously called them) was
laudable. When it came from womens studies programs where
transnational feminism was taken seriously, it had integrity. But I
was uncomfortable.
30
Discomfort with this sudden attention led me to reflect on why,

as feminists in or from the West, or simply as people concerned
about womens lives, we might be wary of this response to the
events and aftermath of September 11, 2001. What are the minefieldsa metaphor sadly too apt for a country like Afghanistan
(with the worlds highest number of mines per capita)of this obsession with the plight of Muslim women? What could anthropology, the discipline whose charge is to understand and manage
cultural difference, offer us as a way around these dangers?
Critical of anthropologys complicity in a long history of reifying
cultural difference, linked to its ties with colonial power, I had
long advocated writing against culture. So what insights could
I contribute to this public discourse?
Cultural Explanations and the

Mobilization of Women
In an essay I published in 2002, less than a year after I gave it as
a lecture at Columbia University, I argued that we should be
skeptical regarding this sudden concern about Afghan women. I
considered two manifestations of this response: some conversations I had with a reporter from the PBS NewsHour; and the radio address to the nation on November 17, 2001, given by then
first lady Laura Bush. The presenter from NewsHour first contacted me in October 2001 to see if I would be willing to provide
some background for a segment on Women and Islam. I asked
her whether they had done segments on the women of Guatemala, Ireland, Palestine, or Bosnia when the show covered wars
in those countries. But I agreed to look at the questions she was
going to pose to panelists. I found them hopelessly general. Do
Muslim women believe X? Are Muslim women Y? Does Islam
allow Z for women? I asked her if she would ask the same questions about Christianity or Judaism. I did not imagine she would
31
call me back. But she did, twice. The first was with an idea for a
segment on the meaning of Ramadan, which was in response to
an American bombing during that time. The second was for a
program on Muslim women in politics, following speeches by
Laura Bush and Cherie Blair, wife of the then British prime
minister.
What is striking about these three ideas for news programs is
that there was a consistent resort to the cultural, as if knowing
something about women and Islam or the meaning of a religious
ritual would help one understand the tragic attack on New
Yorks World Trade Center and the U.S. Pentagon; how Afghanistan had come to be ruled by the Taliban; what interests might
have fueled U.S. and other interventions in the region over the
past quarter of a century; what the history of American support
for conservative Afghan fighters might have been; or why the
caves and bunkers out of which Osama bin Laden was to be
smoked dead or alive, as President Bush announced on television, were paid for and built by the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA).
To put it another way, why was knowing about the culture of
the regionand particularly its religious beliefs and treatment
of womenmore urgent than exploring the history of the development of repressive regimes in the region and the United States
role in this history? Such cultural framing, it seemed to me, prevented the serious exploration of the roots and nature of human
suffering in that part of the world. Instead of political and historical explanations, experts were being asked to give religious
or cultural ones. Instead of questions that might lead to the examination of internal political struggles among groups in Afghanistan, or of global interconnections between Afghanistan and other
nation-states, we were offered ones that worked to artificially
divide the world into separate spheresre-creating an imaginative
32
geography of West versus East, us versus Muslims, cultures in

which first ladies give speeches versus others in which women
shuffle around silently in burqas.
Most troubling for me was why the Muslim or Afghan woman
was so crucial to this cultural mode of explanation that ignored
the complex entanglements in which we are all implicated in
sometimes surprising alignments. Why were these female symbols being mobilized in the War on Terror in a way they had not
been in other conflicts? As so many others by now have pointed
out, Laura Bushs radio address on November 17, 2001, revealed
the political work such mobilization accomplished. On the one
hand, her address collapsed important distinctions that should
have been maintained. There was a constant slippage between the
Taliban and the terrorists, so that they became almost one
worda kind of hyphenated monster identity: the Taliban-andthe-terrorists.6 Then there was the blurring of the very separate
causes of Afghan womens suffering: malnutrition, poverty, class
politics, and ill health, and the more recent exclusion under the
Taliban from employment, schooling, and the joys of wearing nail
polish. On the other hand, her speech reinforced chasmic divides, principally between the civilized people throughout the
world whose hearts break for the women and children of Afghanistan and the Taliban-and-the-terrorists, the cultural monsters
who want to, as she put it, impose their world on the rest of us.
The speech enlisted women to justify American military intervention in Afghanistan and to make a case for the War on Terror
of which it was a part. As Laura Bush said, Because of our recent military gains in much of Afghanistan, women are no longer imprisoned in their homes. They can listen to music and
teach their daughters without fear of punishment . . . The fight
against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of
women.7
33
These words have haunting resonances for anyone who has

studied colonial history. Many who have studied British colonialism in South Asia have noted the use of the woman question
in colonial policies. Intervention into sati (the practice of widows immolating themselves on their husbands funeral pyres)
and child marriage were used to justify rule. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak famously put it, white men saving brown women
from brown men.8 The historical record is full of similar cases,
including in the Middle East. In turn-of-the-century Egypt, what
Leila Ahmed has called colonial feminism governed policy on
women.9 There was a selective concern about the plight of Egyptian women that focused on the veil as a sign of their oppression
but gave no support to womens education. The champion of
women was the same English governor, Lord Cromer, who had
opposed womens suffrage back home.
Marnia Lazreg, a sociologist of Algeria, has offered vivid examples of how French colonialism enlisted women to its cause in
Algeria:
Perhaps the most spectacular example of the colonial appropriation
of womens voices, and the silencing of those among them who had
begun to take women revolutionaries . . . as role models by not donning the veil, was the event of May 16, 1958 [just four years before
Algeria finally gained its independence from France after a long
struggle and 130 years of French control]. On that day a demonstration was organized by rebellious French generals in Algiers to show
their determination to keep Algeria French. To give the government
of France evidence that Algerians were in agreement with them, the
generals had a few thousand native men bused in from nearby villages, along with a few women who were solemnly unveiled by French
women . . . Rounding up Algerians and bringing them to demonstrations of loyalty to France was not in itself an unusual act during the
colonial era. But to unveil women at a well-choreographed ceremony
34
added to the event a symbolic dimension that dramatized the one

constant feature of the Algerian occupation by France: its obsession
with women.10
Lazreg gives memorable examples of the way in which the

French had even earlier sought to transform Arab girls. The Eloquence of Silence describes skits at the award ceremonies at the
Muslim Girls School in Algiers in 1851 and 1852. In the first
skit, written by a French lady from Algiers, two Algerian girls
reminisce about their trip to France with words including: Oh!
Protective France: Oh! Hospitable France! . . . Noble land, where
I felt free Under Christian skies to pray to our God: . . . God bless
you for the happiness you bring us! And you, adoptive mother,
who taught us that we have a share of this world, we will cherish
you forever!11
These girls are made to invoke the gift of a share of this
world, a world where freedom reigns under Christian skies. This
is certainly not the world the Taliban-and-the-terrorists would
like to impose on the rest of us.
Just as we need to be suspicious when neat cultural icons are
plastered over messier historical and political narratives, so we
need to be wary when Lord Cromer in British-ruled Egypt,
French ladies in Algeria, and First Lady Laura Bush, all with
military troops behind them, claim to be saving or liberating
Muslim women. We also need to acknowledge the differences
among these projects of liberating women. Saba Mahmood
points particularly to the overlap today between the liberal discourses of feminism and secular democracy; the missionary literature from earlier eras, like the Algerian school skit, show instead that the earlier language was not secular.12
35
Politics of the Veil

Let us look more closely at those Afghan women who were said
to be rejoicing at their liberation by the Americans. This necessitates a discussion of the veil, or the burqa, because it is so central to contemporary concerns about Muslim women. This sets
the stage for some thoughts on how anthropologists, feminist
anthropologists in particular, contend with the problem of difference in a global world and gives us preliminary insights into
some of whats wrong with the rhetoric of saving Muslim women.
It is commonly thought that the ultimate sign of the oppression of Afghan women under the Taliban is that they were forced
to wear the blue burqa. Liberals sometimes confess their surprise
that women did not throw off their burqas after the Taliban
were removed from power in Afghanistan in 2001. Someone
who has worked in Muslim regions would ask why this should
be surprising. Did we expect that once free from the extremist
Taliban these women would go back to belly shirts and blue
jeans or dust off their Chanel suits? We need to be more sensible
about the clothing of women of cover, and so there is perhaps
a need to make some very basic points about veiling.
First, it should be recalled that the Taliban did not invent the
burqa. It was the local form of covering that Pashtun women in
one region wore when they went out. The Pashtun are one of
several ethnic groups in Afghanistan and the burqa was one
of many forms of covering in the subcontinent and Southwest
Asia that had developed as a convention for symbolizing womens modesty or respectability. The burqa, like some other forms
of cover has, in many settings, marked the symbolic separation of
mens and womens domains, part of the general association of
women with family and home rather than public spaces where
strangers mingle.
36
Hanna Papanek, an anthropologist who worked in Pakistan

in the 1970s, has described the burqa as portable seclusion. She
notes that many saw it as a liberating invention because it enabled women to move out of segregated living spaces while still
observing the basic moral requirements of separating and protecting women from unrelated men.13 Ever since I came across
her phrase portable seclusion, I have thought of these enveloping robes as mobile homes. Everywhere, such veiling signifies
belonging to a particular community and participating in a
moral way of life in which families are paramount in the organization of communities and the home is associated with the sanctity of women.
The obvious question that follows is this: If this were the case
in Pakistan or Afghanistan, why would women suddenly want
to give up the burqa in 2001? Why would they throw off the
markers of their respectability that assured their protection from
the harassment of strangers in the public sphere by symbolically
signaling to all that they were still in the inviolable space of their
homes and under the protection of family, even though moving
about in public? In fact, these forms of dress might have become
so conventional that most women gave little thought to their
meaning.
To draw some analogies (none of them perfect), why should we
be surprised that Afghan women did not throw off their burqas
when we know perfectly well that in our society it would not be
appropriate to wear shorts to the Metropolitan Opera? At the
time these discussions of Afghan womens burqas were raging, a
wealthy friend of mine was chided by her husband for suggesting that she wanted to wear a pantsuit to a wedding: You know
you dont wear pants to a WASP wedding, he reminded her.
New Yorkers know that the beautifully coiffed Hasidic women,
who look so fashionable next to their somber husbands in black
37
coats and hats, are wearing wigs. This is because religious belief
and community standards of propriety require the covering of
the hair. They also alter boutique fashions to include high necks
and long sleeves. People wear the appropriate form of dress for
their social communities and their social classes. They are guided
by socially shared standards and signals of social status. Religious beliefs and moral ideals are also important, including as
targets for transgressions to make a point (one thinks of Madonna here). The ability to afford proper and appropriate cover
affects choice. If we think that U.S. women live in a world of
choice regarding clothing, we might also remind ourselves of the
expression, the tyranny of fashion.
What happened in Afghanistan under the Taliban was that
one regional style of covering or veilingassociated with a certain respectable but not elite classwas imposed on everyone as
religiously appropriate, even though previously there had been
many different styles that were popular or traditional with different groups and classes. There had been different ways to mark
womens propriety or, in more recent times, piety. Even before
the Taliban, the majority of women in Afghanistan were rural
and non-elite. They were the only ones who could not emigrate
to escape the hardship and violence that has marked Afghanistans recent history. If liberated from the enforced wearing of
burqas, most of these women would choose some other form of
modest head covering, like those living across the region who
were not under the Talibantheir rural Hindu counterparts in
the North of India (who cover their heads and veil their faces
from in-laws) or their fellow Muslims in Pakistan.
Even the New York Times carried a good article in 2001 about
Afghan women refugees in Pakistan, attempting to educate readers about this local variety of modes of womens veiling.14 The
article described and pictured everything from the now-iconic
38
blue burqa with embroidered eyeholes, which a Pashtun woman

explains is the proper dress for her community, to large scarves
they call chadors, to the new Islamic modest dress that wearers refer to as hijab. Those wearing the new Islamic dress are
characteristically students heading for professional careers, especially in medicine, just like their counterparts from Egypt to Malaysia. One wearing the large scarf was a school principal; the
other was a poor street vendor. The telling quote from the young
street vendor was, If I did [wear the burqa] the refugees would
tease me because the burqa is for good women who stay inside
the home.15 Here you can see the local status in the Afghan refugee community that is associated with the burqait is for good,
respectable women from strong families who are not forced to
make a living selling on the street. It has nothing to do with being
mute garbage bags by the side of the road, as the German human
rights poster described in the introduction was to insinuate a decade later.
The British newspaper the Guardian published an interview
in January 2002 with Dr. Suheila Siddiqi, a respected surgeon in
Afghanistan who held the rank of lieutenant general in the Afghan
medical corps.16 A woman in her sixties then, she came from an
elite family and, like her sisters, was educated. Unlike most women
of her class, she had chosen not to go into exile. She was presented in the article as the woman who stood up to the Taliban
because she refused to wear the burqa. She had made it a condition of returning to her post as head of a major hospital when
the Taliban came begging in 1996, just eight months after having
fired her along with other women. Siddiqi is described as thin,
glamorous, and confident. But further into the article, it is noted
in passing that her graying bouffant hair is covered in a gauzy
veil. This is a reminder that though she refused the burqa, she had
no question about wearing the chador or scarf. Over the past
39
decade, the demographics and meaning of wearing (and not

wearing) the burqa in public have changed, varying especially
between the cities and countryside.17
Veiling must not be confused with, or made to stand for, lack of
agency. Not only are there many forms of covering, which themselves have different meanings in the communities where they
are used, but veiling has become caught up almost everywhere
now in a politics of representationof class, of piety, and of political affiliation. As I describe in Veiled Sentiments, my first ethnography of a Bedouin community in Egypt in the late 1970s
and 1980s, for women I knew there, pulling the black head cloth
over the face in front of older, respected men was considered a
voluntary act. One of the ways they could show their honor and
assert their social standing was by covering themselves in certain
contexts. They would decide (and debate) for whom they felt it
was appropriate to veil.18
To take a radically different case, the modest Islamic dress that
so many educated women across the Muslim world have been
adopting since the mid-1970s both publicly marks their piety
and can be read as a sign of educated urban sophistication, a
sort of modernity.19 For many pious women in the Islamic revival, this new form of dress is embraced as part of a bodily
means, like prayer, to cultivate virtue. It is, as Mahmood has
described, the outcome of their professed desire to be close to
God.20 Lara Deeb, who has written about the public piety of
women in Lebanon who are associated with Hizbollah, described
how these women see themselves as part of a new Islamic modernity, an enchanted modern.21 In some countries, and not
just Europe, women have to violate the law to take on this form
of dress. In other countries, like Iran, womens play with color or
tightness, or the revelation of a shoulder, a belly button, an ankle, or a wisp of hair mark political and class resistance.22
40
So we need to work against the reductive interpretation of

veiling as the quintessential sign of womens unfreedom, even if
we object to state imposition of this form, as in Iran or with the
Taliban. (It must be recalled that earlier in the twentieth century,
the modernizing states of Turkey and Iran had banned veiling
and required men, except religious clerics, to adopt Western dress
and wear European hats.) What does freedom mean if we accept
the fundamental premise that humans are social beings, raised in
certain social and historical contexts and belonging to particular
communities that shape their desires and understandings of the
world? Is it not a gross violation of womens own understandings of what they are doing to simply denounce the burqa as a
medieval imposition? One cannot reduce the diverse situations
and attitudes of millions of Muslim women to a single item of
clothing. And we should not underestimate the ways that veiling
has entered political contests across the world.23
The significant political-ethical problem the burqa raises is
how to deal with cultural others. How are we to deal with difference without accepting the passivity implied by the cultural
relativism for which anthropologists are justly famousa relativism that says its their culture and its not my business to judge
or interfere, only to try to understand? Cultural relativism is
certainly an improvement on ethnocentrism and the racism, cultural imperialism, and imperiousness that underlie it; the problem is that it is too late not to interfere. The forms of lives we
find around the world are already products of long histories of
interactions among those living far from each other.
I suggest that we approach the issues of women, cultural relativism, and the problems of difference from three angles. First,
we need to consider what feminists should do with strange political bedfellows.24 I used to feel torn when I received the e-mail
petitions circulating in defense of Afghan women under the
41
Taliban. I was not sympathetic to the dogmatism of the Taliban;

I do not support the oppression of women. But the provenance
of the campaign worried me. I do not usually find myself in political company with the likes of Hollywood celebrities.25 I had
never received a petition from such women defending the right
of Palestinian women to safety from Israeli bombing or daily
harassment at checkpoints, asking the United States to reconsider its support for a government that had dispossessed them,
closed them out from work and citizenship rights, and refused
them the most basic freedoms. Maybe some of these same people
were signing petitions against sensational cultural practices,
for example, to save African women from genital cutting or Indian women from dowry deaths. However, I do not think it
would be as easy to mobilize so many of these American and
European women if it were not a case of Muslim men oppressing
Muslim womenwomen of cover, for whom they can feel sorry
and in relation to whom they can feel smugly superior. Would
television diva Oprah Winfrey host the Women in Black, the
womens peace group from Israel, as she did the Revolutionary
Association of Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), which was also
granted the Glamour magazine Women of the Year Award?
To be critical of this celebration of womens rights in Afghanistan is not to pass judgment on any local womens organizations such as RAWA, whose members have courageously worked
since 1977 for a democratic secular Afghanistan in which
womens human rights are respected, against Soviet-backed regimes or U.S.-, Saudi-, and Pakistani-supported conservatives.
Their documentation of abuse and their work through clinics
and schools have been enormously important. It is also not to
fault the campaigns that exposed the dreadful conditions under
which the Taliban placed women. The Feminist Majority campaign helped put a stop to a secret oil pipeline deal between the
42
Taliban and the U.S. multinational corporation Unocal that was

going forward with U.S. administration support.
Western feminist campaigns must not be confused with the
hypocrisies of the colonial feminism of a Republican president
who was not elected for his progressive stance on feminist issues,
or of a Republican administration that played down the terrible
record of violations of women by U.S. allies in the Northern Alliance, as documented by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, among others. Rapes and assaults were widespread in
the period of infighting that devastated Afghanistan before the
Taliban came in to restore order. (It is often noted that the current regime includes warlords who were involved and yet have
been given immunity from prosecution.)
We need to look closely at what we are supporting (and what
we are not) and think carefully about why. How should we manage the complicated situation of finding ourselves in agreement
with those with whom we normally disagree? In the introduction to this book, I talk about the blurring between Left and
Right on the issue of Muslim womens rights. How many who
felt good about saving Afghan women from the Taliban are also
asking for a radical redistribution of wealth or sacrificing their
own consumption radically so that Afghan, African, or other
women can have some chance of freeing themselves from the
structural violence of global inequality and from the ravages of
war? How many are asking to give these women a better chance
to have the everyday rights of enough to eat, homes for their
families in which they can live and thrive, and ways to make
decent livings so their children can grow? These things would
give them the strength and security to work out, within their
communities and with whatever alliances they want, how to live
a good life. Such processes might very well lead to changing the
ways those communities are organized, but not necessarily in
43
directions we can imagine. It is unlikely that such changes would

not include being good Muslims, and debating, as people have
for centuries, how to define a good Muslim, or person.
Suspicion about bedfellows, I argued in those early days of
the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, was only a first step needed for
our rethinking. To figure out what to do or where to stand, I suggested that we would have to confront two more issues. First, we
might have to accept the possibility of difference. Could we only
free Afghan women to be like us, or might we have to recognize
that even after liberation from the Taliban, they might want different things than we would want for them? What would be the
implications of this realization? Second, I argued that we should
be vigilant about the rhetoric of saving others because of what it
betrays about our attitudes.
Accepting difference does not mean that we should resign
ourselves to accepting whatever goes on elsewhere as just their
culture. I have already introduced the dangers of cultural explanations; their cultures are just as much part of history and
an interconnected world as ours are, as I explore more fully in
this book. Instead, it seems to me that we have to work hard at
recognizing and respecting differencesbut as products of different histories, as expressions of different circumstances, and as
manifestations of differently structured desires. We should want
justice and rights for women, but can we accept that there might
be different ideas about justice and that different women might
want, or even choose, different futures from ones that we envision as best?26 We must consider that they might be called to
personhood, so to speak, in different languages.
Reports from the Bonn peace conference, held in late November 2001 to discuss the rebuilding of Afghanistan just after the
U.S.-led invasion, revealed significant differences among the few
Afghan women feminists and activists who attended. RAWAs
44
position was to reject any conciliatory approach to Islamic governance. According to one report, though, most women activists,
especially those based in Afghanistan who are aware of the realities on the ground, agreed that Islam had to be the starting point
for reform. Fatima Gailani, a U.S.-based adviser to one of the
delegations, was quoted as saying, If I go to Afghanistan today
and ask women for votes on the promise to bring them secularism, they are going to tell me to go to hell.27 Instead, according
to one report, most of these women looked to what might seem
a surprising place for inspiration on how to fight for equality:
Iran. Here was as a country in which they saw women making
significant gains within an Islamic frameworkin part through
an Islamic feminist movement that was challenging injustices
and reinterpreting the religious tradition.
The constantly changing situation in Iran has itself been the
subject of heated debate within feminist circles, especially among
Iranian feminists living in the United States or Europe.28 It is not
clear whether and in what ways women have made gains and
whether the great increases in literacy, decreases in birthrates,
presence of women in the professions and government, and a
feminist flourishing in cultural fields like writing and filmmaking
are despite or because of the establishment of an Islamic Republic. The concept of an Islamic feminism itself is also controversial. Is it an oxymoron or does it refer to a viable movement
forged by brave women who want a third way? In the decade
since that conference in Bonn, as we see in Chapter 6, Islamic
feminisms have been thriving and developing well beyond Iran.
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. I have written about the dilemmas
faced by Middle Eastern feminists when Western feminists initiate campaigns that make them vulnerable to local denunciations
45
by conservatives of various sorts, whether Islamist or nationalist,

for being traitors.29 As some like Afsaneh Najmabadi have argued, not only is it wrong to see history simplistically in terms of
a putative opposition between Islam and the West (as is happening in the United States now and has happened in parallel in the
Muslim world), but it is also strategically dangerous to accept
this cultural opposition between Islam and the West, between
fundamentalism and feminism. This is because there are many
people within Muslim countries who are trying to find alternatives to present injusticesthose who might want to refuse the
divide and take from different histories and cultures, who do
not accept that being feminist means being Western, and who
will be under pressure, as we are, to choose: Are you with us or
against us?
We need to be aware of differences, respectful of other paths
toward social change that might give women better lives, and
recognize that such options are set by different historical experiences. Can there be a liberation that is Islamic? Does the idea of
liberation, as I explore more fully in this book, capture the goals
for which all women strive? Are emancipation, equality, and
rights part of a universal language or just a particular dialect?30
To quote Saba Mahmood again, writing about the pious Muslim
women in Cairo: The desire for freedom and liberation is a
historically situated desire whose motivational force cannot be
assumed a priori, but needs to be reconsidered in light of other
desires, aspirations, and capacities that inhere in a culturally and
historically located subject.31 Might other desires be as meaningful for people? Might living in close families be more valued?
Living in a godly way? Living without war? I have done ethnographic fieldwork in Egypt for more than thirty years and I cannot
think of a single woman I knowfrom the poorest rural peasant
like Zaynab to the most educated cosmopolitan colleagues at the
46
American University in Cairowho has expressed envy of

women in the United States, women they variously perceive as
bereft of community, cut off from family, vulnerable to sexual
violence and social anomie, driven by selfishness or individual
success, subject to capitalist pressures, participants in imperial
ventures that dont respect the sovereignty or intelligence of others, or strangely disrespectful of others and God. This is not to
say, however, that they do not value certain privileges and opportunities that many American women enjoy.
Saba Mahmood has pointed out a disturbing thing that sometimes happens when one argues for respecting other traditions.
The political demands made on those who write about Muslims are quite different from demands made on those who study
secular-humanist projects. Mahmood, who studies the piety
movement in Egypt, is constantly pressed to denounce all the
harm done by Islamic movements around the world. Otherwise,
she is accused of being an apologist. Yet there is never a parallel
demand on those who study modern Western history, despite the
terrible violences that have been associated with the Christian
West over the past century, from colonialism to world wars, from
slavery to genocide. We ought to have as little dogmatic faith in
secular humanism as in Islamism, and as open a mind to the
complex possibilities of human projects undertaken in one tradition as the other.
Beyond the Rhetoric of Salvation

My discussion of culture, veiling, and how one navigates the
shoals of cultural difference should put First Lady Laura Bushs
self-congratulation about the rejoicing of Afghan women liberated by American troops in a different light. It is problematic to
construct the Afghan or Muslim woman as someone in need of
saving. When you save someone, you imply that you are saving
47
her from something. You are also saving her to something. What
violences are entailed in this transformation? What presumptions are being made about the superiority of that to which you
are saving her? Projects of saving other women depend on and
reinforce a sense of superiority, and are a form of arrogance that
deserves to be challenged. All one needs to do to appreciate the
patronizing quality of the rhetoric of saving women is to imagine
using it today in the United States about disadvantaged groups
such as African American, Latina, or other working-class women.
We now understand them to be suffering from structural violence. We have become politicized about race and class, but not
culture.
We should be wary of taking on the mantles of those late
nineteenth-century Christian missionary women who devoted
their lives to saving their Muslim sisters. One of my favorite documents from the period is a collection called Our Moslem Sisters,
the proceedings of a conference of women missionaries held in
Cairo in 1906.32 The subtitle of the book is A Cry of Need from
the Lands of Darkness Interpreted by Those Who Heard It.
Speaking of the ignorance, seclusion, polygamy, and veiling that
blight womens lives across the Muslim world, the missionary
women assert their responsibility to make these womens voices
heard: They will never cry for themselves, for they are down
under the yoke of centuries of oppression.33 This book, it begins, with its sad, reiterated story of wrong and oppression is an
indictment and an appeal . . . It is an appeal to Christian womanhood to right these wrongs and enlighten this darkness by
sacrifice and service.34
One hears uncanny echoes of their virtuous goals today, even
though the language is distinctly secular and the appeals are less
often to Jesus than to human rights, liberal democracy, and Western civilization, as we explore in Chapters 2 and 3. Sometimes
48
the appeals are even simpler: to modern beauty regimes and the
rights to cut hair. This was the surprising message of a group of
hairdressers who went to Kabul to open a beauty academy for
Afghan women, teaching them hair and make-up. These Australians, Americans, and exiled Afghans were part of an initiative
called Beauty without Borders, supported, not surprisingly, by
the cosmetics industry and Vogue.35
The continuing currency of the missionaries imagery and sentiments can be seen in the way they are deployed for even more
serious humanitarian causes. In February 2002, a few months
after coalition forces entered Afghanistan, I received an invitation to a reception honoring the international medical humanitarian network called Mdecins du Monde/Doctors of the World
(MdM). Under the sponsorship of the French ambassador to the
United States, the head of the delegation of the European Commission to the United Nations, and a member of the European
Parliament, the cocktail reception was to feature an exhibition
of photographs under the clichd title Afghan Women: Behind
the Veil. The invitation was remarkable not just for the colorful
photograph of women in flowing burqas walking across the barren mountains of Afghanistan but also for the text, which read
in part:
For 20 years MdM has been ceaselessly struggling to help those who
are most vulnerable. But increasingly, thick veils cover the victims of
the war. When the Taliban came to power in 1996, Afghan Women
became faceless. To unveil ones face while receiving medical care
was to achieve a sort of intimacy, find a brief space for secret freedom and recover a little of ones dignity. In a country where women
had no access to basic medical care because they did not have the right
to appear in public, where women had no right to practice medicine,
MdMs program stood as a stubborn reminder of human rights . . .
Please join us in helping to lift the veil. (emphasis added)
49
Although I do not take up here the fantasies of intimacy associated with unveilingfantasies reminiscent of the French
colonial obsessions so brilliantly unmasked by Malek Alloula
in his book, The Colonial Harem, about Algerian colonial
postcardsI can ask, and try to answer in the chapters that follow, why humanitarian projects and human rights discourse in
the twenty-first century need to rely on such stereotyped constructions of Muslim women.
It seems to me that it is better to leave veils and vocations of
saving others behind. Instead, we should be training our sights
on ways to make the world a more just place. The reason that
respect for difference should not be confused with cultural relativism is because it does not preclude asking 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 find themselves. We do not stand outside the world,
overlooking a sea of poor, benighted people living under the
shadowor the veilof oppressive cultures; we are part of that
world. Islamic movements have arisen in a world intimately
shaped by the intense engagements of Western powers in Middle Eastern and South and Southeast Asian lives; so has Islamic
feminism.
A more productive alternative might be to ask ourselves how
we could contribute to making the world a more just placea
world not organized around strategic military and economic
demands; a place where certain kinds of forces and values that
we consider important could have a wide appeal; a place where
there is the peace necessary for discussion, debate, and institutional transformation, such as has always existed, to occur and
continue within communities. We need to ask ourselves what
kinds of world conditions those of us from wealthy nations could
contribute to making, such that popular desires elsewhere will not
50
be determined by an overwhelming sense of helplessness (or angry reaction) in the face of forms of global injustice. Where we
seek to be active in the affairs of distant places, we might do so in
the spirit of support for those within those communities whose
goals are to make womens (and mens) lives better.36 And we
might do so with respect for the complexity of ongoing debates,
positions, and institutions within their countries. Many have
suggested that it would be more ethical to use a more egalitarian language of alliances, coalitions, and solidarity, rather than
rescue.
Even members of RAWA, which was so instrumental in bringing to U.S. womens attention the excesses of the Taliban, opposed
the U.S. bombings from the beginning. They did not see Afghan
womens salvation in military violence that only increased hardship and loss. They called for disarmament and for peacekeeping
forces. Spokespersons pointed out the dangers of confusing governments with people, or the Taliban with innocent Afghans who
would be most harmed. They consistently reminded audiences to
take a close look at the ways policies were being organized
around oil interests, the arms industry, and the international
drug trade. They were not obsessed with the veil, even though
they were perhaps the most radical feminists working for a secular democratic Afghanistan. Unfortunately, only their messages
about the excesses of the Taliban were heard, even though their
criticisms of those in power in Afghanistan had included previous regimes.
As U.S. involvement in Afghanistan increasingly came to resemble the quagmire in which the Soviets found themselves in
the 1980s, arguments of groups like RAWA have been proven
prescient. In a comprehensive analysis of the situation in Afghanistan six years after the invasion, Deniz Kandiyoti drew attention to two key factors adversely affecting Afghan women.
51
Looking closely at the political history of the country and at the

current political jockeying among groups in a weak and aiddependent government, she noted easy threats to womens legal
and social rights, which are readily pawned. As WAWs Esther
Hyneman had warned in her defense of the bulwarks against
retreats on womens rights, women have indeed become part of
what Kandiyoti calls a new field of contestation between the
agenda of international donor agencies, an aid-dependent government and diverse political factions, some with conservative
Islamist agendas.37
But this expert on gender in the Muslim world asks us to concentrate not on Kabul, with its politicians, technocrats, and international experts (including transnational feminists), but on
what the war economy has done to peoples social lives across
the country. In the shift from subsistence agriculture and herding
to opium production and arms smuggling, this criminal economy has funded and emboldened local warlords, including the
Taliban, while putting most rural households into debt. Families
and communities have been stripped of their autonomy and live
in a constant state of insecurity. In the rural areas, Kandiyoti
notes, we see corrosive interactions between poverty, insecurity,
and loss of autonomy. These create new forms of vulnerability
with serious consequences for women. As I describe in the introduction for Zaynab in southern Egypt, womens options in places
like Afghanistan are conditioned by the fortunes of the communities and households in which their livelihoods and everyday
lives are embedded.38 They are distant from the government
and formal legal systems, Islamic or secular. A disturbing development has been a new pattern of commodification of women.
Like Bibi Aysha, who was given to her husbands family allegedly
to settle a murder debt, daughters are now regularly given by
their impoverished or frightened families to militia commanders
52
and drug traffickers. Kandiyoti heard stories of young girls being

offered to old men in distress sales or sent away to save them
from roving bands of Taliban youth.39
These abuses are not extensions of local custom or traditional
culture. They are reactions to the current situation in Afghanistan. Kandiyoti says, What to Western eyes looks like tradition is, in many instances, the manifestation of new and more
brutal forms of subjugation of the weak made possible by a
criminal economy, total lack of security and the erosion of bonds
of trust and solidarity that were tested to the limit by war, social
upheaval and poverty.40 Traditions built on mutual obligations
have been undermined by rapidly changing, desperate economic
circumstances and by political instability. Men are no longer
able to meet their obligations to women or fulfill their ideals of
honor, protection, or generosity. This is the problem; this is the
situation on the ground.
Yet Afghanistan, with its thirty-year legacy of conflict, continues to be understood as traditional. In the 2010 Time magazine
article that accompanied the photograph of Bibi Aysha, we find
a typical example of a seamless move between Islam and tradition. A timeless culture appears directly following a quote from
the minister of the economy, leader of an Islamist party who expressed his views against coeducation: That is in accordance
with Islam. And what we want for Afghanistan is Islamic rights,
not Western rights. The article comments that traditional
ways, however, do little for women. Aishas family did nothing
to protect her from the Taliban. That might have been out of
fear, but more likely it was out of shame. A girl who runs away
is automatically considered a prostitute in deeply traditional societies, and families that allow them back home would be subject to widespread ridicule . . . In rural areas, a family that finds
itself shamed by a daughter sometimes sells her into slavery, or
53
worse, subjects her to a so-called honor killingmurder under

the guise of saving the familys name.41
I have much more to say about so-called honor killing in
Chapter 4. For now I want to suggest that rather than resorting
to such general cultural statements, we owe it to women in Afghanistan to look at their history and its impact on their current
situation. With its power rivalries and its war economy, Afghanistans circumstances are thoroughly tied up with the West, its
everyday worlds embedded in a global economy and an international War on Terror. Militarization always has hidden consequences for women; these surely have more force than culture
or tradition.42
So a first step in hearing the diverse voices of Afghan women
and the political message of groups like RAWA, which even in
2001 expressed concern about military intervention, is to break
with the language of (alien) cultures, whether to understand or
to change them. Missionary work and colonial feminism belong
in the past. We should be exploring what we might do to help
create a world in which those poor Afghan womenfor whom
First Lady Laura Bush said the hearts of those in the civilized
world breakcan have safety, decent lives, and a range of
rights. What we have learned since the United States and its allies intervened is that conflict, insecurity, impoverishment, and
international drug trafficking do not bring them closer to having
such lives.
CHAPTER
The New Common Sense
We seem to be living in remarkable times. Ever since womens rights served as a respectable
reason to support military intervention in 2001 in Afghanistan,
the language of human rights has not only been on (almost) every
tongue, but the call for womens rights has gone mainstream. The
abuses women suffer are no longer considered private matters,
swept into dark corners, or dismissed as insignificant in the international public sphere. Fifty years ago, no one could have imagined this development. The feminists who labored so hard on
legislation, health, education, consciousness raising, and international conventions should feel gratified, even if the term feminism carries a taint and is rarely claimed by those today making
universalistic calls for womens rights.
Signs of this seismic shift are everywhere, but nowhere more
apparent than in some very well-received books by writers in
the United States who address a broad, educated public. The
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and the Somali
migr Ayaan Hirsi Ali are excellent examples of writers who
have made strong public cases for global womens rights. What
THE NEW COMMON SENSE
55
developmentsin institutions, culture industries, and politics

have enabled the public to find the arguments they put forward
in their best-selling books so convincing and plausible? How has
this new common sense about the urgency of going to war for
women taken hold? A close reading of their arguments, along
with those of Kwame Anthony Appiah, a Princeton philosopher,
gives us some cluesclues that take us back to Afghanistan.
Going to War for Women

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women
Worldwide, a book by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, is
billed as a call to arms against the most shocking and widespread human-rights violation of our agegender inequality.1
Published by the venerable U.S. publisher Alfred Knopf and endorsed by movie stars like George Clooney and Angelina Jolie,
the book was recently made into a television series. The vivid
stories that Kristof and WuDunn tell in Half the Sky are about
the sufferings of women in different parts of the world. The
husband-wife journalist team has captured the publics interest
for the cause of womens rights, something that decades of resolutions by the United Nations (UN) and bureaucratic covenants
declaring the moral and legal wrongs of discrimination against
women could not.
Half the Sky brings alive for readers the disturbing experiences
sometimes brutal, sometimes banalthat women and girls endure. The book seeks to move and motivate, and is dedicated to
all those on the front lines around the globe, saving the world,
one woman at a time.2 Kristof and WuDunn believe that their
persuasive power derives from the ways they tell their stories:
they talk about individuals, not statistics. Half the Sky is populated by women who have survived against the odds, the most
admired being those who have overcome unimaginable hurdles
56
in order to change the world.3 Readers are asked to open their

hearts and their pocketbooks to them.
The moral mainstreaming of global womens rights is also
evident in a more scholarly but nevertheless quite visible book
that appeared a year after Half the Sky. Written by a well-regarded
philosopher and public intellectual who had not previously commented on womens rights issues, it is confident in tone, vivid in
illustrative case studies, and humane in its vision. The Honor
Code by Kwame Anthony Appiah appeals to our human potential to do the right thing. A philosopher and cultural critic born
in Ghana, educated at Cambridge, and now teaching at Princeton, Appiah reflects on the way a sense of honor has led societies
to shift, time and again, their understandings of what is right
and wrong. Looking back over key moments in history, he shows
that people could and have come to condemn as inhumane and
dishonorable practices that previously had seemed not just normal but noble.
Two of the four case studies in his book about moral revolutions involve practices that harm women specifically. Appiah informs us that the moral hurdle our human desire for esteem
must lead us to overcome now is to learn to find violence against
women repugnant. Just as dueling in Europe, foot binding in
China, and the slave trade in Britain came to an end when people
began to feel these practices were shameful, so we must get men
(in places like Pakistan) to find shameful the particular mistreatment of women known as the honor crime.4 In identifying this
as the most urgent moral cause we face today, Appiah joins a
chorus that includes hundreds of dedicated organizations around
the world, scholars mounting academic conferences about this
form of violence against women that has existed throughout
history and in a range of societies, and charitable foundations
57
that invite us to shop honour. For a donation, you choose between an Honour tote bag and a mens tie.5
From yet another corner of the American public sphere comes
proof that womens freedom and equality have come to be idealized across the political spectrum. Working out of a major American conservative think tank after irregularities in her asylum
application to the Netherlands made her situation there uncomfortable, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the outspoken and rebellious daughter
of the second wife of a former Somali opposition leader, has
made her name defending womens rights. Listed by Time magazine as one of the most influential people in the world, she has
been recognized by many awards, including Glamours Woman
of the Year. She has established a foundation to defend and protect the rights of women. This celebrity has become so familiar
that her publishers decided a portrait of this striking woman,
looking straight out at readers, should supplant the clichd image that marketed her first book: her shrouded nemesis, the fully
veiled Muslim woman.6
These significant voices from the liberal and conservative public spheres suggest that there has been a leap forward in the
public recognition of the seriousness of gender discrimination
and womens suffering. Their perspectives and positive reception
mark the emergence of a new common sense that gender injustice
is a legitimate concern, not a fringe issue. Building on the work of
historians, social researchers, political theorists, and philosophers,
these writers are promoting a new way of thinking: a global approach that acknowledges womens issues as major social and
moral problems, not just the concerns of feminists. Writing clearly,
simply, and directly, they turn our attention to particular places
around the world that many know little aboutSomalia, Cambodia, India, the Netherlands, Pakistan, the Congo, China, and
58
Afghanistan. They amplify, clarify, and bring to life what feminist researchers, local and transnational human and womens
rights organizations, and grassroots feminists have struggled for
so long to analyze and publicize.
The optimism of these interventions into popular public discourse makes them especially effective. They shine a harsh light
on gender oppression and then they call out to us to live up to
our highest moral values and our political ideals. They presume
that people, once they know, will not stand by, silent and apathetic. Narrating stories of progressfrom bondage to freedom,
from despair to hope, from sexual enslavement to small-scale
entrepreneurship through microcredit financingthey ask us to
join a collective moral struggle to improve the lives of women.7
But how do these writers make their case that we ought to
enter what Appiah calls the war on women? One way they do
so is by calling up the ghost of Atlantic slaveryas analogy, as
instructive case study, and as subliminal referent. This comparison is worth pausing over because a look at what historians and
social researchers have taught us about Atlantic slavery and its
aftermath leads to some cautionary questions regarding the new
consensus about womens rights. How do these writers construct
their objects and their arguments? What silences might make us
suspicious?
For Kristof and WuDunn in Half the Sky, abolition stands as
the unambiguous sign of our capacity to move beyond moral
evil. They declare: In the nineteenth century, the central moral
challenge was slavery. In the twentieth century, it was the battle
against totalitarianism. We believe that in this century the paramount moral challenge will be the struggle for gender equality
around the world.8 Abolition is a key case in the study of moral
revolutions in Appiahs The Honor Code. Slavery also makes
59
cameo appearances in Hirsi Alis work; her first book is subtitled

An Emancipation Proclamation for Women.
Our historical understanding of modern slavery is still unfolding as scholars struggle to grasp how the horror of the Atlantic slave trade could have lasted for hundreds of years and
involved the death or uprooting of millions of human beings;
what it meant for the various groups and people involved, from
British merchants to North American plantation owners, Christian missionaries and Africans of the coastal kingdoms and the
interior, and the men and women enslaved; and what its legacy is
today, including an underclass of technically free but disposable
human beings. But three lessons from the studies of slavery help
us pinpoint the contours and limits of posing the new challenge
regarding women as a call to arms for the emancipation of
women.9
Half the Sky tells a simple story about abolition. Some good
moral people in England struggled valiantly and finally persuaded and pressured others, including Parliament, to go against
national and economic interests and abolish the slave trade.10
Credit is given to the actions of ordinary individuals who signed
petitions and boycotted sugar from the West Indies. The real hero,
though, was Thomas Clarkson, who, like a present-day journalist,
documented in the 1790s the grim conditions on British slave
ships. The authors agree that he could be considered the founder
of the modern human rights movement.11
In The Honor Code, Appiah focuses on these same forces and
people, including Christian moralists, in the struggle against
slavery. But he gives more credit to the middle class and working
men who were insulted by the devaluation of human labor that
slavery implied. Appiah expresses a debt to the historian Christopher Leslie Brown, but he does not actually take up the key
60
argument that Brown makes in Moral Capital. Brown notes that

antislavery opinion in Britain had many sources: some sympathized with individual slaves, some pitied enslaved nobility, and
some were horrified by the conditions of the enslaved, while others detested the principle of slavery. Some considered slavery
unchristian or worried that it impeded the spread of Christianity
in the Americas; others worried that slavery fostered immoral
behavior. Some hated the new planter class and some agonized
over the contradictions between the ideals of liberty and the realities of colonial slavery. Some feared armed rebellionsthough
the European story of abolition rarely acknowledges the agency
of the enslaved.12
However, Browns key point is a historical one. Before the
American Revolution, he argues, no one had attempted to impose antislavery values through parliamentary legislation.13 For
him, the key question is: What actually enabled an organized
antislavery campaign to develop? What contingent historical
conditions led moral virtue to accrue to what had been, before,
scattered antislavery sentiment? If the American colonies had not
broken away, he ventures, and this sentiment and activity had
been occurring instead in a united empire, things might well
have turned out differently. In short, a number of factors came
together to make abolition not just possible, but suddenly unquestionably right. Brown gives us a real history of moral action
that builds on a complex analysis of slavery, capitalism, imperial
expansion, and the tensions between metropolitan ideology and
colonial practice. Appiah barely mentions these factors.
What Half the Sky and The Honor Code also barely mention
in the progress story they tell about abolition in Britain and its
former slaveholding colonies is how other forms of labor exploitation replaced unfree labor. Institutionalized racism was substituted for slavery. In the United States, the color line was drawn
61
by the one drop [of black blood] rule and was used to contain
blacks in the American South in a kind of apartheid known as
Jim Crow. Almost 150 years after emancipation, African Americans still struggle for equality of opportunity. Banished into
informally segregated and underfunded schools and neighborhoods; largely excluded from good jobs, respectability, and upward mobility; often sexualized and degraded; ghettoized and
criminalized, their suffering is either made invisible or blamed
on them. Mass incarceration, described by Michelle Alexander as
the new Jim Crow, has shaped a cohort of men and women.14
Ending slavery was a milestone in the history of the struggle
against human barbarity, but emancipation has not yet produced
equality.
Given this history, what lessons should we draw from the
analogy between gender oppression and slavery? First, it is not so
obvious how moral revolutions actually happen. They seem to
depend on many voices, multiple social and political factors, and
contingent historical events. Appiah, like the great German sociologist Norbert Elias, shows us that morality, like manners, actually has a history.15 Part of our job is to reflect on what might
account for, and what could stabilize, the new moral currency of
going to war for women.
Second, we must look at where the analogy breaks down. On
the one hand, gender relations are different from relations between the free and enslaved. Women and girls everywhere are
more entangled with men and boysin complex ways, including
through kinship and lovethan slaves were with their masters.
On the other hand, abolition was undertaken by the people and
communities directly responsible for the enslavement of others,
even if they disavowed and sought to undo the history of their
violence through the moral claims of abolition.16 It was the British people who convinced their own government to abolish the
62
slave trade. Abraham Lincolns Emancipation Proclamation was

addressed to his fellow Americans. In contrast, the consensus in
opposition to the kind of violence against women that Appiah
deplores is about persuading men in other places to end their
violence toward their women.
It Feels Transcendent
For all these writers, the wrongs and suffering of womenwhether
sexual slavery or mental slavery, rape or maternal mortality,
so-called honor killings or confinement to homes and brothels
are to be found in distant lands. Their arguments about gender
discrimination and inequality take a global perspective. The stories they tell are from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, or immigrant enclaves in Europe. The strange thing that happens along
the way is that womens rights issues become pertinent only
elsewhere.
The only American or European women who appear in the
280 pages of Half the Sky are altruistic high school students who
raise money to build schools in Cambodia, or women who give
up their jobs to devote themselves to working in health clinics in
Africa. Some of the small organizations these American women
started are now multimillion-dollar operations. The only American men who appear are those like Kristof himself, who rescues
prostitutes from brothels, or those, like the late dean of Columbia Universitys School of Public Health, who devote themselves
to fighting maternal mortality.
These are all good people. The cause of women does need to
be higher on the agenda. But how does this focus on global good
works erase the fact that the problems that should concern us
are not only over there? In defending their choice to make
gender issues a priority given all the pressing problems in the
world, Kristof and WuDunn say something revealing: This kind
63
of oppression feels transcendent.17 Gender injustice feels transcendent to them, I would suggest, because they do not ground it
in the world they know. An occasional jarring statistic (for example, U.S. maternal mortality rates are much higher than Italys
and are shocking compared to Irelands) sits unelaborated. Half
the Sky tells no stories about overworked lawyers who defend
women in U.S. prisons who have been convicted of killing their
abusive lovers or husbands. No quotes appear from reports like
that of the U.S. Justice Department, whose national survey indicates that one in every six American women has been raped in her
lifetime, usually by an intimate or someone she knows.18 They do
not mention Peggy Sandays research on the white, middle-class
culture of college fraternities, where getting women drunk so the
guys can score, even gang-raping their guests and boasting
about it the next day, is acceptable.19 Nothing is said about the
alarming rates of domestic violence and murder of their spouses
that shadow returning veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq. The only kind of problem American women face, according
to Kristof and WuDunn, is unwanted touching from a boss or
underfunded sports teams.20 In order to make their (legitimate)
case for concern about lethal sex discrimination, they trivialize
gender issues in the United States and Europe.
Like Cynthia Enloe, the pioneering feminist political scientist
who did so much to help us see the role of gender in international relations, Kristof and WuDunn recognize and applaud the
existence of feminist activists in other countries.21 So does Appiah, who relies on the work of Pakistani women lawyers and
feminist activists. But the overriding message of Half the Sky,
like the other popular books discussed here, is that Westerners
are the ones who must change the world, even if it has to be, as
they say, not by holding the microphone at the front of the rally
but by writing the checks and carrying the bags at the back.22
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Appiah offers us a positive precedent for such intervention.

He attributes the eradication of foot binding in China to the
positive influence of Western shaming. A painful and hobbling
practice that lasted for eight centuries and affected the majority
of the female population of China, foot binding is now considered revolting. In its heyday, it was the subject of exquisite erotic
elaboration by learned gentlemen and widely accepted by women
as a beauty ideal and a prerequisite for a good marriage. As Appiah tells the story, the end of the practice came because outsiders
Western missionaries and merchants, along with educated
Japaneseshamed a local elite into turning against it and becoming fervent reformers. When the literati abandoned the practice, confronted by the advancing industrializing world, at a
time when some of the literati had lost confidence in their own
traditions to defend them from modernizing strangers, as Appiah puts it, there was inevitably a cascade downwards of
unbinding.23
The leading specialists on foot binding tell the story somewhat less benignly. Dorothy Ko roots the late nineteenth- and
early twentieth-century reformers efforts in the colonial condition of humiliation by the West on a global stage.24 Like Appiah, she ties reform to an emerging desire for modernity, but
understands their concern about freedom as a response to a deep
political crisis induced by military defeat first by the British, then
by the French and the Japanese. The collapse of the empire in
1911 marked this total defeat. The manifestos against foot binding followed on the heels of the European imposition of treaty
ports for free trade (theirs).
Ko argues, moreover, that there can be no simple explanation for the end of foot binding because there was not one but
many foot bindings, in different eras, regions, villages, and
classes.25 Although the modernizing campaigns of the natural
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feet movement by embarrassed Chinese men were important,

scholars have explored many other factors that must be part of
any historical account of the practice and its demise. Some have
made structural economic arguments, linking the decline of foot
binding to the rise of factory-based textile production that replaced home-based spinning and weaving. Some observe that the
practice did not actually disappear in the interior until after the
Communist Revolution. This brought gender politics derived
from Marx and Engelss theories, including attention to womens
status, an ideology about the dignity of labor, links between
forms of oppression (ruler and ruled, landlord and peasant, ancestral deities and ordinary people, and men and women), and
an attempt to overturn the gendered division between production and reproduction that was seen as the prime cause of womens subordination. Early legal reforms by Mao, like the 1957
Marriage Act, outlawed concubinage and granted women the
right to divorce. Socialist ideology gave women a language to
name their oppression as feudal. Foot binding was included.26
A vast political mobilization sent cadres to villages across China
to establish conformity of practice.27
Historical research shows, therefore, that even if it paved the
way, more was needed to end the practice than the influence of
Western missionaries and invaders that shamed early twentiethcentury literati into binding their honor to the unbinding of
womens feet. And in a poignant analysis, Ko has shown that the
most immediate effect of the early reformers campaigns for most
Chinese women was a social bifurcation that humiliated and exposed them.28 In this earlier period, the honor of the enlightened
men and the few liberated women came at the price of silencing
women by speaking for them about their pain. The reformers
honor depended on distinguishing themselves from the worthless backward majority.29 Like todays German human rights
66
campaigners who relegate Afghan women to mute trashbags,

these reformers did not see Chinese women as moral and political agents. And, as it happened, their campaign was temporarily
forgotten by 1940, with the war and Japanese occupation.
This discussion of Western influence brings us back to the sentence in Half the Sky about why the cause of gender inequality
feels transcendent. This kind of oppression feels transcendent,
say Kristof and WuDunn, and so does the opportunity. We have
seen that outsiders can truly make a significant difference.30
The opportunity that womens oppression presents is for outsiders. The audience for their book and the recruits to their
battle against gender inequality are, ultimately, those who want
to end problems elsewhere. Half the Sky, like Hirsi Alis The
Caged Virgin and Nomad, and even Appiahs The Honor Code,
is an invitation to Westerners to do something elsewhere.31 These
books do not ask us to examine the role Westerners already
playwhether in their everyday practices, their governments actions, or their economic strengthin perpetuating global inequities that exacerbate (and sometimes cause) the sufferings of
women elsewhere. This is particularly the case in places like Pakistan or Afghanistan, where the War on Terror seriously complicates moral persuasion.
Fervent concern about suffering elsewhere that neither looks
close to home nor attempts to unpack the complicated dynamics
that produce suffering is worrisome. Also troubling are arguments that do not ask us to look at the privileges so many of us
in the global North enjoy by virtue of a long history of global
inequality. Among these privileges are vast consumption, safety
from military incursion, advanced medical care, the relative ability to nurture our children and have hopes for them, and educations that should give us the tools we need to analyze these
67
inequalities. We seem to accept shocking inequalities in the distribution of world resources as inevitable.
What is the effect of this insistence that we focus our gaze elsewhere? Such arguments allow those they hail to feel innocent,
moral, and purposeful. In contrast, many radical global activists
now ask us to seriously consider our responsibilities for this situation, as individual consumers and citizens, as part of nations
with enormous military spending, and as beneficiaries (though
increasingly also as victims) of corporate greed.32 Offering $80
and donating some blood to try to save a dying pregnant African
woman, as Kristof did, is better than turning away. Offering a
$25 loan to a microcredit lender so that a woman in a village
can borrow it (at 2030 percent interest, which is better, Kristof
and WuDunn assure us, than the rate of local moneylenders)33
may not be harmful. But these amounts are less than those who
feel good giving them would pay for a meal at an ordinary
restaurant.
Acknowledging that cynics might criticize projects that
send American high school students abroad to build schools for
girls (saying the money they have raised through bake sales and
soliciting rich relatives could be better spent on building more
schools), Half the Sky defends such practices. One purpose is to
expose young Americans to life abroad so that they, too, can
learn and grow and blossom.34 In Half the Sky, we learn that
aid projects have a mixed record in helping people abroad, but
a superb record in inspiring and educating donors.35 The trip to
Cambodia was for the students of one private school an essential field trip and learning opportunity.36 The learning opportunity though, was for privileged private school students who
have had and will have many other opportunities to grow and
blossom.
68
It is, of course, better that the privileged learn to care about

the world than be self-centered and selfish. It is better to know
than to be ignorant. And such trips abroad may prod students to
want to know more and to become better adults. They might
begin to ask how the failure to produce good state schooling and
health care in so many parts of the world might be connected to
them in systemic ways. Or they may question, even in their own
towns and cities, why everyone does not receive the same learning opportunities they do. Yet books like Half the Sky and The
Honor Code do not ask these questions. Instead, they induce sentiments of horror and pity about women elsewhere, mixed with
patronizing admiration for some activists abroad.
IslamLand
If the first clue to the commonsense appeal of this popular battle
for womens rights and equality can be found in the gaze that
doesnt look back at itself, the second clue can be found most
clearly in Ayaan Hirsi Alis writing. She is a complex figure. Although her autobiographical book, Infidel, is fascinating and
rich in detail, in other works she traffics in the ideological certainties of the Right, using the catchphrases they have commandeered. She invokes freedom and reason in her Manichean depiction of world affairs. She adopts Samuel Huntingtons formulation
of world politics as a clash of civilizations and Bernard Lewiss
most famous sound bite about Muslims: What went wrong?37
She disparages the soft liberalism of multiculturalism. Free and
easy with her facts, eclectic in her references, and inconsistent in
her arguments, she enjoys political patronage from the Right as
a moderate Muslim.38 She appears to be the opposite of a liberal scholar like Appiah.
Yet Hirsi Ali shares something with these others who are shaping a new common sense about going to war for women besides
69
a passionate hope that the present dangers for women can be

overcome. She constructs a fantasy space that gives force to the
popular groundswell of support for global womens rights on
which these other writers build. We can see this most clearly in
her third book, Nomad, which is characterized as a personal
journey from Islam to America. This is an odd phrase. She has
actually come from Somalia in East Africa. She spent her childhood and youth in Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and Kenya because
her father was in exile, and then she sought asylum in the Netherlands. Finally, she moved to the United States after causing a
firestorm in Europe.
Islam is not a place from which one can come. Yet IslamLand, as I would call this mythical place, annoints the call to
arms for women with transparent goodness.39 IslamLand enables those who advocate for womens rights to accrue moral
capital. Kristof, WuDunn, and Appiah may be gentler in their
politics, more humane in their liberalism, more civil and measured in their language, and more sympathetic in their hopes and
humanism than Hirsi Ali. Their intellectual armature may be
sounder. But they share two certainties with her. First, they identify with the moral we, who know whats wrong in the world
and must do something about it. Secondand this is what allows their certitude to be accepted so easilythey agree that IslamLand is the place where things are most wrong today, even if
each of them offers disclaimers to disavow any direct blame of
the religion of Islam. Hirsi Ali says, for example, I do not despise Islam. I am thoroughly conscious of the noble values that
the religion promotes, such as charity, hospitality, and compassion for the weak and poor.40 Kristof and WuDunn say, We
dont blame Ellahas difficulties on the Prophet Muhammad or
on Islam as such.41 Appiah writes authoritatively, It is widely
agreed across the world of Islam that neither the Koran nor the
70
Sunnah . . . nor the hadith . . . endorse the killing of women by

men in their own family.42 Yet each of these authors follows
such statements with a figurative but . . .
IslamLand is the problem and Islam is condensed in the figure
of the victimized Muslim woman. Half the Skys heroines and
victims are not all Muslims, it is true. They come from Cambodia, South Africa, India, the Cameroons, the Congo, and Sri
Lanka. The book opens with the redemption of Rath, a Cambodian girl who had been forced into brothels in Malaysia and
Thailand. Kristof tells her story in gruesome detail. She was
raped by the gangster brothel owners, then beaten and drugged
until she complied. She and her fellow prostitutes were kept
naked to make it more difficult for them to run away or keep
tips or other money . . . They were battered until they smiled constantly and simulated joy at the sight of customers because men
would not pay as much for sex with girls with reddened eyes and
haggard faces.43 Kristof does not shy away from (porno)graphic
details. This is his formula.44
Yet he seems to share the perspective that it is the men in IslamLand who most need to undergo a moral revolutionand
that they will do so only if induced by Western moral pressure
and shaming. Either they should redefine the bases of their right
to esteem, their honor, as Appiah encourages Pashtun men and
other fellow travelers in Muslim countries to do, or they should
be forced to live in more gender-equal societies so that they stop
acting out their testosterone-laden values, as Kristof and WuDunn recommend.
But just as Ko had to insist that there was no (single) foot binding in China because its patterns shifted, women experienced it
differently, its purposes and rationales were multiple, and its meanings varied, so I suggest that there is no Muslim woman and no
IslamLand. The situations of individuals, regions, countries, and
71
classes differ. In Chapter 1, I describe just how many forms of

cover there are in the Muslim world. In the introduction, I discuss the diversity of Muslim womens lives. Religious traditions
mean different things to different women and men. These kinds
of complexities are wiped out when you homogenize with a chapter title like the one found in Half the Sky: Is Islam Misogynistic? The chapter itself shows what is wrong with the question.
There are so many contradictions. On the one hand, the Prophet
Muhammad was progressive for his time, his wife Aisha was a
leader in passing on the Islamic tradition, and several first ladies
of Muslim countries are now leaders in education; Muslim women
had property rights long before European women; 98 percent of
people surveyed in Morocco, Lebanon, Egypt, and Jordan believe
girls have educational rights equal to boys; Islamic feminists are
reinterpreting the Quran; and outspoken Saudi women scold
Kristof for being patronizing. On the other hand, womens testimonies carry less weight in court, a quarter of Egyptians in one
survey thought women could not be president (this was long before there were free elections in 2012), and suicide bombers apparently believe they will have virgins in heavennot realizing,
says Kristof, that they have actually been promised grapes.45
Kristof (and I cite him as being the author of the chapter
because it is based on his journalism) cannot answer the question he poses because it is impossibly broad. Imagine posing this
question about more-familiar religious traditions. If you asked,
Is Christianity misogynistic? many feminist theologians who
have complained bitterly about God the Father would say yes.
Historians like Elaine Pagels have found evidence of the way the
church turned patriarchal in its early centuries, suppressing earlier visions such as those carried in the Gnostic Gospels buried in
Egypt.46 But by Christianity, would one mean Calvinists, Catholics, or the Anglicans now converting madly to Catholicism to
72
flee the ordination of women? Would one be referring to Salem

Puritans with their witch trials, Mother Teresa, or Hillary Clinton? Would one be asking about evangelists zealously working
against sex trafficking or joining Quiverfull? Christian women
in Quiverfull (backed by the American Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, which was founded in 1987 to fight
feminist influences in the evangelical church and spreads its message through the sixteen-million-member Southern Baptist Convention and the Campus Crusade for Christ) seek fulfillment
through self-abnegation to husbands and having as many children as possible.47 On the home page of the movements website
are quotes from the Bible.
Similarly, the lack of specification would be obvious if we asked
if Judaism is misogynistic. A chapter of Half the Sky opens with
a passage from Deuteronomy that prescribes the stoning of nonvirgin brides. Appiah introduces several similar quotes from the
Old Testament.48 But none of these authors has taken up the
cause of oppressed Jewish women, or questioned proud proof of
the continuity of Judaism that is pinned on genetic markers
passed down from father to son among the priestly group known
as Cohens.49 Nor did they think we should intervene on behalf
of Hassidic women who cover their hair with wigs and their legs
with thick tights, even while small groups of nonreform women
push the boundaries of Jewish law by leading prayers in New
York basements. Everyone knows that many of the most radical
twentieth-century American feminists have been Jewish, or halfJewish.50 There is variety. There are internal debates. History is
everywhere. Outsiders dont assume they should dictate.
The simple substitution reveals the question to be wrong. So
why do so few blanch when Hirsi Ali blames Islam for every violence suffered by a Muslim woman whether she is in Amsterdam
or Nairobi, Kuala Lumpur or Sweden? Proudly announcing her
73
atheism as critical to her own freedom, Ayaan Hirsi Ali even

proposes, in an odd moment, that Christian leaders now wasting precious time and resources on a futile exercise of interfaith
dialogue with the self-appointed leaders of Islam should redirect
their efforts to converting as many Muslims as possible to Christianity, introducing them to a God who rejects Holy War,51
presumably, the God of the Crusades.
What Muslim Woman?

IslamLand does not exist. Since I was five, I have been spending
time in places that would fall on that other side of the great divide between IslamLand and the West. As an anthropologist, I
have done fieldwork in several communities in Egypt. I have
visited relatives in Jordan. I have gone to school in Lebanon.
In the women I have known, I do not recognize the Muslim
woman of Hirsi Alis books or what miriam cooke has, tongue
in cheek, called the Muslimwoman.52 Would it be Hirsi Alis
mother, frail and old now, living on handouts back in Somalia,
surrounded by desert scrub and nieces who cook for her and
sweep her house? Would it be the current president of Bangladesh or the Oxford-trained former prime minister of Pakistan,
who was assassinated in 2007? Is it the filmmakers of Palestine
or the writers of Lebanon, the Bedouin women in Egypt who
weave rugs of extraordinary beauty and sing poignant songs
about love, or the fashion bloggers of Qatar featured in Harpers
Bazaar Arabia? The glossy spread about them in 2010, titled
Abaya Accessories, reported on the young women who reach
into their own closets for the latest designer wear about which
to blog. Their elegant black abayas are set off by leopard platform heels by Christian Louboutin. Their Chanel sunglasses vie
for attention with their Alexander McQueen rings and limited
edition Fendi two-tone python peekaboo bags. Are these the
74
Muslim women Hirsi Ali implores her readers to think about

when she pities the others . . . still locked in the world I have
left behind?53
There are many suffering women who are Muslims. Zaynab,
in the village in Upper Egypt, has to deal with police harassment.
My aunt suffers silently a great injustice and sings about deep
personal losses. Refugees beg on the streets in Beirut and Amman. The suffering of some of these women is not totally unconnected to expectations about gender enshrined in the Quran or
cultures in the Muslim world, or sometimes justified in terms of
interpretations of Islamic law. But in all cases, their suffering has
more complex causes. These are the sorts of causes we should
explore.
I think of Amal, for example, another village woman in Egypt
whom I have known for twenty years.54 I always stay in the
hamlet where she lives when I am there. Our daughters are close
friends. If a foreign journalist had come on assignment to her
village a few years ago, he might have written a dire column about
her. He would have found her barely able to walk. Wan and in
pain, she had just undergone what they call a womans operation. The doctor had told her she needed an operation that
would cost 1,050 Egyptian pounds, the equivalent of $200. She
explained to me quietly, You know that wasnt possible for us.
She put off seeing a doctor for too long and then finally had to
have the operation. She had it done at the ramshackle local public hospital. People believe the conditions in the local hospital
there are worse than in the private clinics. With structural adjustment, the Egyptian government has been forced to reduce funding of public health care so that patients now have to pay for the
medicines and the anesthetic. Amals husband defensively minimized the difference between the free surgery at the hospital and
the costly one at the private clinic. Its just the hands that cut,
75
he insisted. And its just a few cuts. He was embarrassed that

they could not afford the clinic, so he went on about the expensive medicines he had bought to care for her. He talked about
how much time he had spent at the hospital in the seven days she
was there.
Amal had spent a month in bed. She was just able to get up,
but would have to take it easy for three months. And she was
not to lift anything heavy for nine months, she explained. The
rest of her family had picked up her responsibilities. Fleetingly, I
thought about the impact on her conjugal life. She had a hard
time mustering a smile when her husband joked that hed have
to take a second wife. Was this, finally, a sign of Islams oppression of women?
Amal had been married for about twenty-three years at the
time. She and her husband had distinct roles and responsibilities.
Since I had known her, Amal had worked hard. She cut fodder for
her sheep; fed and milked the water buffalo; raised chickens, geese,
and rabbits; did the weekly marketing; washed clothes; cleaned
house; and cookednot to mention raising five children. Could
this be seized upon as a sign of her suffering as a Muslim woman?
I thought about her husband. He too worked very hard. I almost never saw him idle, except when he showered and shaved
to get ready for Friday prayers at the mosque. For more than
twenty years, he had worked in archeological restoration with a
foreign mission. They still had not given him any social security,
health insurance, or benefits. Paid a tiny fraction of what his European colleagues with the same masonry skills got in salary, he
set off on his bicycle every morning at 6:00 a.m. for a trip that
took him an hour. Burnished by the sun, his muscles bulged from
the heavy stonework of his job and the hoeing, irrigating, harvesting, and house building he did every day after work and on
his days off. While Amal takes care of the animals and the house
76
and does a bit of sewing on the side, he does the plumbing and
electricity, makes his own rope from palm fiber to tie up the harvest, and makes bricks by hand from mud and straw. For ten
years, he and Amal have been working surreptitiously to reclaim
a bit of desert land to grow vegetables for the family and to lay
the foundations for a house for his eldest son. The work for both
of them was especially hard in the days when their children were
too young to help, all in school.
A journalist meeting Amal the day I returned to the village to
find her in pain might have seized on Amals pain, her inadequate
medical attention, or her husbands heartless joke. They disturbed
me too. But I know that her medical and financial problems have
complex causes, not simple gender discrimination and certainly
not any kind of war on women. As we talked, I discovered that
she had been forced to sell one of her own sheep to help pay for
the medical expenses. It is worth pointing out that the sheep are
hers to raise and profit from. And this was not the first occasion
on which I had heard her husband joke about taking another
wife. Sometimes as my husband and I were sitting and drinking
tea with the family after theyd invited us to supper, Amals husband would ask if we could find him one of those rich European
women who support other young men in his tourist region. Did
Amal take this request seriously? She knew as well as we did
that every time he said something like this, his daughters would
pounce on him and pretend to pummel him, teasing him that
theyd beat him up and run his new wife out of town if he dared.
It was empty talk, even though technically his right. What lay
behind his comment was sheer exhaustion and frustration about
how unfair it was that others in this unequal world had it easier.
Like most women in the community, Amal says her prayers
regularly and covers her hair. She does not often go places without her husbands knowledge, though she never has to ask
77
permission. Social obligations in this tight-knit community are

demanding. Women drop whatever they are doing when they
hear of a death, an illness, a return from the hospital, a family
crisis, an engagement party, a wedding, or a welcome party for
those returning from the pilgrimage. The moral ideal that women
belong in the home is trumped by the value of caring about kin
and neighbors. Their reputations, and those of their family, are
on the line. No husband would dream of standing in the way.55
So why is Amal not appropriate as a representative of the
Muslim woman of IslamLand? She suffers. She has troubles. She
has to make compromises. She is poor and hardworking. But it
is clear that she and her husband are close, despite the jokes.
They are not unusual in this village, though each couples circumstances are as unique as their personalities. Amal and her
husband work hard and share in all family decisions. He is protective of her. His children proudly tell the story of how he had
beaten with a stick a large snake that was dripping venom on
their mothers face as the two of them slept out in the unfinished
house they are building across the field from the family home.
They also put their childrens well-being first. Not long before
Amals operation, someone came to ask for their eldest daughters hand. They had outfitted her with everything a bride is expected to bring into the marriagethe kitchen appliances being
the most expensive. They went into debt making sure she had a
great wedding, complete with a DJ. That was why they were especially short of money for the surgery. A couple of years later, I
found them delighted by their first granddaughter. Amals husband posed proudly for my camera, kissing the baby on her
cheek. Raising this family, the center of their lives, was a team
effort. It had not always been easy and they did not always get
along perfectly. But they had sacrificed for each other and for
their children.
78
Superficial 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.56 The
exceptions, the aberrations, and the signs of what for good reason
we call inhumanity are disturbing everywhere. We are right to
want to see them disappear. It is feminisms achievement to have
shown that they are often gendered. But it must not be forgotten
that such abuses of women are distributed across cultural, national, and religious boundaries. The war for women should not
be selective.
Hirsi Ali claims to speak from her own experience as a Muslim womanone who has managed to escape this role. Her
experiences are instructive. They teach us something about Somalis in exile and about immigrants in Europe, but not about
the Muslimwoman. She is exceptional in more than her acumen, determination, and rejection of family and religion. Her
life, as she tells it in her autobiographies, has been difficult. Her
mother was erratic and angry that her politically active husband
had abandoned her to raise the kids on her own. She suffered
skin diseases and often hit her children. Hirsi Alis brother is by
her own admission manic-depressive; her younger sister died after several years of depression and psychotic attacks. Many of
her aunts and uncles, she reports, had what Somalis call madness. She lays all problems at the door of Islam and polygamy.
But her own contingent personal story tells us that there is much
more to it than religion.57
Primed for Moral Crusades

To understand why the new common sense about going to war
for womens rights seems so right despite the flaws I have laid
outwhether its reliance on the myth of a homogeneous place
called IslamLand or its selective and moralizing imperative to
79
save others far awaywe need to look sideways. Two other

popular ways of talking about violations of womens rights that
have emerged in the past few decades lend support to the kinds
of representations of womens suffering that writers like these
present. On one side is a political and moral enterprise with tremendous legitimacy in our era: international human rights. Womens rights language and the institutional apparatus that has developed in tandem have been associated with human rights since
the 1990s: feminists began to campaign with the slogan womens
rights are human rights. Their successes have led some in legal
studies to detect the emergence of governance feminism (GF), the
domination by radical feminists of legal, bureaucratic, and political institutions around the world.58 At the center of this set of
institutions is a claim to universal values.
On the other side is a more sordid industry. This is the world
of mass-market commercial publishing. This industry commissions and promotes a genre of books that one can identify, and
judge, by their covers. We see them at airport bookstores. The
copycat images are of women wearing black or white veils, showing only their eyesor sometimes one eye. The titles are variations on a theme: A True Story of Life behind the Veil in Saudi
Arabia; Sold: One Womans True Account of Modern Slavery; My
Forbidden Face; Without Mercy; Burned Alive; Married by Force.
They are often personal stories as told to. Disdained by respectable writers like the ones I consider in this chapter, I would argue
that this genre underwrites their work.
How have these two institutions molded the imaginations of
the women being recruited to Half the Skys battle against the
most shocking and widespread human-rights violation of our
age? Wildly different as they are, these two adjacent discourses
have paved the way for the enthusiastic reception of the new
common sense about the transcendent rightness of going to war
80
for women, especially Muslim women. Some historians of the

Anglo-American world at the time of abolition argue that there
is a link between an emerging pornography of pain that took
shape in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and
humanitarian reform efforts. Karen Halttunen sees such images
of suffering as an integral aspect of the humanitarian sensibility.59 In the twenty-first century, I argue in Chapter 3, it is a genre
of pulp nonfiction about the abused Muslim woman and girl
that links up with the utopian discourse of universal human
rights to help create the new common sense and sensibility.60
CHAPTER
Authorizing Moral Crusades
How do the architects of this

new common sense about going to war for women gain such authority? Why have so many come to agree with their arguments
which manufacture consent for international engagements across
the Muslim worldwhen there are flaws in their reasoning, silences in their stories, partiality in their representations of womens
problems, and when a myth lies at their core?
These writers make their premises unassailable by drawing on
a language of human and womens rights that now has tremendous currency. This language insists that people around the
world must learn how to be just and to measure up in a universal metric of humanity that is defined, in part, by aspirations for
gender equality and womens freedom. If the authority for this
moral crusade to rescue women in other parts of the world, and
usually from their cultures or traditions, depends on associating
itself with the high ground of universal rights talk that has been
forged in a range of international institutions, its emotional persuasiveness derives from the bedrock on which such advocates
build. This is best expressed in a massively popular genre of
82
writing about the wrongs other women sufferparticularly Muslim women. The genre is graphic, even pornographic.
The two languages, one abstract and disinterested, the other
affective, bleed into each other in the new common sense about
rescuing women. Key to the vocabularies of both are consent,
choice, and freedom. The central drama is the difference between
those who choose and those who do not, between those who are
free and those who live in bondage. The way this drama unfolds
has consequences for the crusade.
We need to consider both of these languages. But the popular
genre of writing on the abused Muslim woman is particularly
fascinating. We can think of it as a form of trafficking: literary
trafficking. The weakness of the analogy between Atlantic slavery and todays gender oppression that I discuss in Chapter 2
is overcome here by some surprising similarities between slave
plantation pornography and this genre. I therefore reflect in this
chapter on the political contexts in which these books are produced and ask how they might be affecting those who consume
them. I also read against the grain of their dark titillations and
strange alchemyin which the exceptional becomes generalto
glimpse even in such formulaic stories another way of thinking
about the victim/heroines who are the objects of such intense
concern.1
The Utopian High Ground

We live in an era in which the idea of universal human rights has
been broadly accepted. The very success of the institutionalization of the concept in myriad organizations and its virtual monopoly on the high ground of global morality led feminists beginning in the 1980s to try to link the struggle for womens rights
and well-being to human rights. Activists working in the international arena waged a successful campaign to declare womens
AUTHORIZING MORAL CRUSADES
83
rights as human rights. They did so through drafting conventions, installing themselves in vast bureaucratic institutions, and
putting in place mechanisms of accountability. If the evils of
gender discrimination now seem so obvious and the language of
womens rights has such authority, we have to thank these conventions and campaigns. Among the heroines of the new common sense about global womens rights are the women activists
involved in grassroots and international institutions dedicated to
promoting rights.2
To get a sense of what the campaigns linking womens and human rights entail, we can take a quick look at some key arguments
put forth by influential feminists.3 One prominent legal scholar
who invokes universal rights in campaigns against pornography
and rape actually begins in a surprising way. She criticizes the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), faulting it and
the institutions that support it, both national and international,
for being patriarchal. Her plaintive question, When will women
be human? is meant to challenge not only the failure to apply
the UDHR universally but also its partial or exclusionary vision
of the human. After melodramatically cataloging in the first person plural all the abuses women in particular suffer in what she
sees as a global war against women (the same sorts of abuses
Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn cover so well in Half the
Sky and to which Anthony Appiahs The Honor Code gestures),
Catherine MacKinnon asserts, Women need full human status
in social reality. For this, the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights must see the ways women distinctively are deprived of
human rights as a deprivation of humanity . . . for human rights
to be universal, both the reality it [the UDHR] challenges and
the standard it sets need to change.4
Charlotte Bunch, who articulated most clearly the connection
between womens and human rights, mobilized some of the same
84
arguments. In spearheading the campaign in the 1990s, she argued that womens issues should not be treated as separate issues; they are more properly understood as neglected aspects of
global agendas for human rights and development. Governments
should be committed to womens equality as a basic human right.
Sex discrimination and violence against women, she charged, had
been excluded from the human rights agenda until the 1990s
because people had failed to see the oppression of women as political; instead, they took it as natural.5
Both of these advocates of womens rights called for a universally applied standard of gender equality. They did so by appealing to the universal rights of the human. One of the most intelligently debated statements on the urgency of making gender
equity a universal social prioritya goal promoted by Half the
Skys call to armsis Susan Moller Okins essay, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? In this essay, which Ayaan Hirsi Ali
found persuasive but many others have contested, Okin pits
feminism against any and all arguments for group rights or cultural rights. She lines up the liberal ideal of sex equity, defined as
the possibility for women to live as fulfilling and as freely chosen lives as men can6 (which she grants is not yet fully realized
anywhere) against culture. She locates culture only outside the
Westonly outside of liberal states.7 Although Okin does not
appeal explicitly to universal human rights, as do the other two,
her argument rests on the assumption that liberal culture is the
acultural norm and should be the universal standard by which to
measure societies. Those who fall short are the barbarians outside
the gates and even some who have breached the gatesimmigrants.
They are, unfortunately for women, in thrall of their cultures or
religions.8
Okin accuses all cultures of being patriarchaldefined by
mens control over women. Discrimination against women in the
85
home and family is especially pernicious, she argues, because

such practices are never likely to emerge in public, where courts
can enforce their rights and political theorists can label such
practices as illiberal and therefore unjustified violations of womens physical or mental integrity.9 But she adds that while virtually all of the worlds cultures have distinctly patriarchal pasts
somemostly, though by no means exclusively, Western liberal
cultureshave departed far further from them than others.10
She implies that the lives of women of the non-West, where communities or governments fail to support their rights or to allow
them a flourishing life (in the terms defined), are particularly
deficient. Here we see an overlap with the new common sense.
There is little doubt about who has the right answers for women
and who should lead the moral crusade for gender equality or
for the end of violence against women.
Another strand of liberal feminist thought that Martha Nussbaum represents invokes universality differently. The best way to
promote gender justice, Nussbaum argues, is to insist that there
are basic human capabilities and that our task is to reform societies and nation-states so that they will promote human flourishing in terms of these capabilities. She subscribes to what she calls
the Aristotelian position on the proper function of government,
according to which its task is to make available to each and every member of the community the basic, necessary conditions of
the capability to choose and live a fully good human life, with
respect to each of the major human functions included in that
fully good life.11 She wants to extend this function of government to modern nation-states in an international regime of
governance.
Nussbaum distinguishes her approach from the rights approach, explaining that capabilities . . . have a very close relationship to human rights, as understood in contemporary
86
international discussions. In effect they cover the terrain covered

by both the so-called first-generation rights (political and civil
liberties) and the so-called second-generation rights (economic
and social rights).12 Alert to the criticisms that have been raised
about rights talk, Nussbaum then argues that the strategic advantage of talking instead about capabilities is that it bypasses
the troublesome debate about the derivation of rights talk
from the Western Enlightenment.13 The capabilities approach, she
maintains, is not strongly linked to one particular cultural and
historical tradition, as the language of rights is believed to be.14
Appealing to universals is a powerful tool, whether by invoking the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United
Nations,15 that authorizing document for the discourses and
practices of human rights, or by insisting that our obligation is
to promote (and judge countries and societies on the basis of
their success in enabling) the functioning of human capabilities.
What is universal should or does apply or exist uniformly in a
geographic sense. It is not something local. What is universal
seems neutral in that it belongs to everyone and anyone, not to
someone particular. The opposite would be something partisan
that favors one group or grows out of its interests or traditions.
In these everyday meanings, the universal is understood through
a distinction from another term. It is the stronger, more encompassing, more general term. It is also the more abstract term because universals stand above particulars, and therefore lend tremendous authority to those who claim them.
The new common sense borrows from this powerful discourse
of universal rights that appears not to represent special interests.16 However, the silent referent, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has
put it, for the universal in schemas like Okins and Nussbaums
is an imagined and idealized liberal democracy along with a
form of modern culture and reason that, through the language
87
of universalism, it helps create.17 One must be critical of gender

subordination. As I argue in Chapter 1, however, we need to consider how womens desires and ideals of the human are formed
differently, and formed by a long history of geopolitical entanglements among the specific groups that are represented today as so
separate. How have they produced and shaped each other such
that they stand now in particular relationships to each other? The
language of universals and the dialects of womens human rights
and human development are part of this set of long historical relationships; they do not stand neutrally above, nor do the values
they promote.18
The Fantastic World of Pulp Nonction

If the new common sense about the urgency of battling for womens rights and equality gains authority through its association
with this international consensus on universal rights and the
value of choosing freely, it draws surreptitiously on a different
discourse of the American and European public spheres for its
emotional appeal. Published by trade presses, reviewed widely,
and adopted by book clubs and womens reading groups, a lurid
genre of writing on abused womenmostly Muslimexploded
onto the scene in the 1990s and took off after 9/11.
The recurrent and defining themes of this genre are force and
bondage. At one end are gentle memoirs like Azar Nafisis Reading Lolita in Tehran, journalistic accounts like Asne Seierstads
The Bookseller of Kabul, and polemics like Ayaan Hirsi Alis The
Caged Virgin and its sequels. These have been met with critical
acclaim. At the less respectable end are books with an even wider
readership. The literary scholar Dohra Ahmad has called this
genre pulp nonfiction, which may be a misnomer. Here, we are
plunged into dystopic worlds of violent abuse, our guides the
Muslim girls who have suffered and escaped. In a study of the
88
lighter books in this genre, Ahmad faults the public for regularly
mistaking these literary productions for ethnographies of actual
people and places; readers presume they are finding out something about other cultures when they read such books. Sometimes
these books are even assigned in schools. Although there is some
variety within the genre, even the few works that are sensitively
attuned to the particulars of a place and sympathetic to their heroines, Ahmad argues, get absorbed by readers into a generalized
vision of what, in Chapter 2, I call IslamLand.
There is a long tradition of representing Muslim women in
the West. Scholars give it a name: gendered Orientalism. Pictorial as well as literary, what is constant is that Muslim women
are portrayed as culturally distinct, the mirror opposites of Western women.19 In the nineteenth century, the depictions took two
forms: women of the Orient were either portrayed as downtrodden victims who were imprisoned, secluded, shrouded, and treated
as beasts of burden or they appeared in a sensual world of excessive sexualityas slaves in harems and the subjects of the gaze
of lascivious and violent men, not to mention those looking in.
Christian missionary women appealed for support by decrying
the oppression of their Muslim sisters in the first register. Artists
and writers, and even the colonial postcard photographers of the
early twentieth century, preferred the sensual and sexual.20
The late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century mass-market
paperbacks echo these themes but have their own distinct style
and character. Their protagonists are, as Ahmad notes, plucky
individualists with feminist ideals who do not want to remain
trapped in their strange and sordid worlds. They want freedom,
like the native informant celebrities such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali
and Irshad Manji, whose denunciations of Islam as causing the
oppression of women have been so warmly welcomed and whose
careers have been bolstered by powerful institutions. Their
89
personal stories are, as Saba Mahmood notes, always told in

terms of emancipation.21 In the darker versions, these books contain graphic scenes of violence and abuse, much of it sexualized.
It is hard to know whether to treat these memoirs as nonfiction; that is how they are billed. Some are unreliable because
they are based on repressed memories. Many of the protagonists
are known only by first names. Some books are based on secret
knowledge. Some, such as Norma Khouris Honor Lost, which
I discuss at length in Chapter 4, have been exposed as hoaxes.
Almost all the books are cowritten with journalists or professional ghostwriters. They are, at the least, mediated in complex
ways. To the extent that they may reflect real experiences or incidents, they are as disturbing as any incidents of abuse that we
read about in our newspapers, legal cases, or psychology case
studies of pathological behavior.
But the books work hard not to let us make these comparisons.
Although they are told in the first person of individual women,
the traumas and abuses they catalog do not present themselves
to readers as unique to these individuals. They are always contextualized by culturethe authenticating details of eking out a
living on a bare mountaintop in Yemen; the exotic color of Moroccan weddings and exorcisms; the cloistered opulence of Saudi
Arabian palaces; the damp cellars of Pakistani immigrant communities in the north of England; the fields of rural Palestine. It
does not seem to matter that many of the details of geography or
tradition are wrong, or that foreign words are misspelled. The
placement in these locations marks the abuses as cultural or collective. The bad men who abuse our heroines are Muslimeven
if Moroccan, Pakistani, Jordanian, or Yemeni. Without offering
a general picture of the communities in which our heroines live,
since these are just personal stories, these memoirs cannot give
readers any indication that such abuseswhether incest, rape,
90
beatings, or other crueltiesmight be exceptional, or might be

considered as horrifying in those communities as they would
be in ours. Without the contextual information we draw on to
judge similar stories of abuse and violence in North America or
Europe, we are led to attribute these abuses to the culture at
large. This is the selective process that Leti Volpp has called
blaming culture for bad behavior.22
Contrary to the message of uniformity that their copycat covers convey and this cultural framing implies, to someone like me
who is familiar with the kinds of communities or the countries in
which they are set, the stories seem radically specific. When one
reads against the grain, there are plenty of hints that they are
unsettling and exceptional, if based on truth. Take the trilogy of
memoirs beginning with Sold that tell the terrible tale of two
girls sold into marriage in Yemen. These are daughters of a
British working-class mother and a violent, gambling Yemeni immigrant father. Although the villain is the heartless Arab man
(this was pre-9/11, so Muslims had not yet become the obligatory
enemy), the memoirs mention that the families who bought the
underage brides were from a despised group. In the third book, it
is remarked in passing that this is a poor country where threequarters of the men leave home to look for work. Surely this must
produce an unusual situation for women, not to mention the minority of men left behind. The unhappy grooms to whom these
miserable girls were sold via their migr fathers live in a peculiarly isolated, demanding part of Yemen.
What might such details tell us? As with poor farmers in remote areas in other parts of the world, it may be hard to find
wives. In Korea, for example, they must import them because
few local women want the hard work and traditionalism of such
communities.23 It would seem from the story of Zana and
91
Nadia, and the other British/Yemeni girls whose stories the

books allude to, that the most desperate of the Yemenis may be
forced to draw on a pool of girls of Yemeni parentage who know
little about the place beforehand. For someone like me, it is puzzling that the girls are totally ignorant about the basics of Islamic
marriage. They have not given their consent, they have not received their marriage gift (mahr), and they never had wedding
celebrations. This is quite shocking for anyone who knows the
Middle East, where weddings are the highlights of social life,
even among the poor, and marriage is regulated and recognized.
These stories each use a peculiar situation without marking its
radical specificity or lack of representativeness and without giving much context. (The girls discover later, for example, that in
the cities, women dress well, eat well, are educated and have leisure, and some are feminists.) The result is that these best sellers
that trade on images of bondageZanas Sold; its sequel, A
Promise to Nadia; and their mothers Without Mercy: A Mothers
Struggle against Modern Slaverylead readers to surmise that
forced marriage is normal in the Yemeni community, that this is
Yemeni culture,24 and these women must be rescued.
A Taste of (for) Force

The genre is characterized by consistent themes: coercion and
lack of consent, absence of choice, and unfreedom. To give the
flavor of these works and to suggest how the peculiar play with
force may affect readers of the genre, I begin with a typical scene.
It is from a sequel to Sold, the story of these two British girls
sold into marriage in Yemen by their father. Writing her own
account, the girls mother Miriam, who lives in Birmingham, explains why she had to escape from the brutal Arab father of her
seven children. She has just chosen to be sterilized. Her husband
92
comes home drunk, and she confronts him again about her two
missing daughters. He tells her to forget them and locks her in
the room. Miriam recounts:
He was close now, leaning towards me, his beery breath engulfing
me. I sat, terrified, on the sofa. He came closer and held out his hand.
I slapped at it furiously, hoping he would go away. Instead he pulled
me up, his good thumb and middle finger around my throat. I fought
him off, pushing him to the floor. He grabbed at my dressing-gown
in a vain effort to save his fall, pulling the material apart, tearing it
down its length . . . Take your clothes off! All of them! Muthana
growled deeply.
. . . Well, if he thought I was going to make this into some fantasy
trip, he was mistaken. I flung my nightie into a heap on the floor,
contemptuously. His eyes travelled over my body, settling on the scar
from the operation to sterilize me. He reached out and touched the
scarred flesh. Instinctively I slapped his hand away. He laughed and
touched it again. I went to slap at his hand again when, suddenly, he
grabbed my hand by the wrist and pulled me sharply to the floor, rolling me over onto my back and jumping on top of me immediately in
a quick movement.
I scrunched my eyes shut and clanged my fists at my side. I lay
rigid on the floor as he indulged himself, crying out in his pleasure as
I cried out in my shame.25
Marital rape epitomizes absence of consent, just as does forced

marriage, the fate of her daughters. It is the latter that has captured the attention of womens groups and government officials
across Europe.26 One of the fullest treatments in pulp nonfiction comes from France.
Married by Force by Leila (no last name) is even more graphic
in its violence than Miriams account. The story of a troubled
French girl of Moroccan parentage, the book recounts incidents of violence and terrible cruelty in the family in which Leila
93
grows up. Her father is a disciplinarian; her brothers are abusive. She wants to be like French girls, but they wont let her. Her
parents force her to marry a man from Morocco, a husband she
hates. She has a frightening encounter with a sex maniac imam
hired to exorcise her because she objects. The book is written
(with a journalist, of course) in the aftermath of Leilas suicide
attempts and stays in a psychiatric hospital. Like Zana, Solds
heroine, Leila finally escapes her forced marriage and finds freedom. It is then that she tells us her story.
The reader is treated to some horrific scenes between husband
and wife. Trying desperately to provoke him to divorce her, Leila
goads her husband and insults him mercilessly. She makes him
sleep in the lounge and wont let him touch her. They argue all
the time. She recounts the turning point: One evening, at midnight, I was quietly taking a bath to relax and Id forgotten to lock
the bathroom door. He began to start a fight, me in the bath, him
on the other side of the door, being spiteful.27 They exchange insults until she reveals to him a secret about his own mother. He
calls Morocco to confirm and then is furious, his eyes popping
out of his head. Bloody bitch, bloody tart, open this door!
He charges into the bathroom and shoves her head underwater. She scratches his face. He throws her onto the floor and
punches and kicks her, yelling, Is this what you want? Here, take
that and that. She describes her feelings, lying naked on the floor
and being beaten, with a weirdly out-of-place metaphor meant
to position this bad marriage squarely in the specific context of
Islamic barbarity: It was the total shame, humiliation and horror of a woman being stoned to death.28
In another, more fanciful book, lightened by a likable heroine
who has a weakness for whiskey and extravagant shopping at
Bergdorf Goodman, the theme of force is also lashed onto Middle Eastern men. Desert Royal is the fourth in a series of popular
94
books by Jean Sasson that are presented as the first person

accounts (as told to) of Sultana, a wealthy feminist Saudi
Arabian princess who wishes to expose to the world what is really going on in her society. It includes incidents that capture the
essential unfreedom of women there. A sexual charge runs
through it.
The most sensational scene is a visit Sultana and her two teenage daughters pay to a distant cousin. They have heard rumors
that he has built a spectacular palace to replicate Paradise, and
they want to see it. Their visit is disastrous. Besides finding thousands of caged birds that one daughter madly rescues, they
come across a pavilion that is signposted Stallions. Looking
for horses, the other daughter discovers a harem of sex slaves,
purchased from their families in Asia. The young women in
tawdry halter tops and negligees are guarded by an exotic and
gnomic Sudanese eunuch. Our heroines wish to set these young
women free but are thwarted when they learn that their passports have been taken.
As Sultana explains in her apparently evenhanded condemnation of patriarchy, I knew that it was not a simple matter to
come between men and their sexual desires. It is the natural inclination of many men, and not only in the Middle East, to seek
out young girls or young women as sexual conquests.29 Yet she
surmises that their wealthy owner wants these girls for a special
cultural reason. In his eyes, she suggests, these young women
were like the seductive virgins called houris that are described
in the Koran. I suspected that I was looking at a stage intended
to provide untold delights for Faddel. Yet this must be the scene
of unspeakable hell for these women held against their will.30
Like todays Islamic feminists, Sultana didactically asserts that
most of these horrid practices involving force are violations of
true Islam. Captives are to be treated well, even if animals, she
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comments in relation to the caged birds. On the question of consent, she says, Our religion forbids the forcing of females into a
union not of their liking, but, like much that is good in our Islamic faith, this is misinterpreted or simply ignored.31
In this short book, we are treated to other stories of forced
sex, the most disturbing being the discovery by Sultana of her
nephews rape of a Pakistani girl in the servants tent set up during a family outing in the desert. Hearing a womans screams in
the quiet night, Sultana and her sister go to investigate. In their
flashlight beam, they surprise two men assaulting a woman while
another stands by. Her description is (porno)graphic, hinting at
pedophilia: One man was covering the poor victims mouth in
an effort to silence her cries . . . the second man who was on top
of the naked woman gradually turned to face us . . . The poor
girl had been stripped of her clothing. She lay naked and defenceless before us. Her face was a frightful mask of terror, and
her delicate frame was racked with sobs. She was so small that
she appeared to be more a child than a woman.32 As Sultana
confides, she knew that some of her nephews had traveled to
Thailand, the Philippines, India, and Pakistan for prostitutes,
but this was the first time I had heard of any of these nephews
actually purchasing a woman to bring her into our kingdom as
a sexual slave.33
Literary Trafcking
The public appetite for such depictions of sordid and brutal treatment of women by Muslim or Arab men is disquieting. Unlike
the many good ethnographies written by anthropologists about
womens everyday lives in these countries, these memoirs of
suffering by oppressed Muslim women enjoy spectacular and
strangely enduring popularity.34 Sold, by the Birmingham girl
who escaped from Yemen with her mothers help after thirteen
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years, was published in 1991. Zana Muhsen and Andrew Crofts,

a professional ghostwriter, are listed as coauthors. The book was
picked up by two new publishers in 1994 and reprinted almost
twice a year until 2010. A follow-up was published as A Promise
to Nadia (the sister who stayed behind). And then their mother
wrote her own story (with Jana Wain, with whom she set up an
organization to rescue girls kidnapped and sent abroad by their
foreign fathers), from which I quoted. Published in 1995, it has
been reprinted almost annually, with spikes in 1996 and 2003.
Jean Sassons Princess trilogy and its sequel have sold millions.
More disquieting is the constant reference to sex. The focus
on sexual abuse has made some of the memoir writers awardwinning activists. Jasvinder Sanghera, the author of Shame and
Daughters of Shame, who publicized the problem of forced marriage, has received many awards for inspiration and bravery, not
to mention an honorary degree from the University of Derby.
The most amazing case is that of Hannah Shah, author of The
Imams Daughter. She went public in 2009 with her gruesome
story of sexual abuse by her father, an imam in North England
of rural Pakistani origin. She says she speaks to gatherings of
5,000.35
What makes these books so appealing and their authors so
celebrated when the writing is often appalling and the stories so
extreme? To understand this, we have to place them in the contexts in which they are being read. These books are caught up in
a charged international political field in which Arabs, Muslims,
and particular others are seen as dangers to the West. Feminists
praise these far-fetched books. Fay Weldon, for example, endorsed Desert Royal as a book to move you to tears. On the
back cover of Without Mercy: A Mothers Struggle against Modern Slavery, we find Weldon again: What is astonishing about the
book . . . is the account of how downtrodden, defeated Miriam
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[the kidnapped girls mother] suddenly came to buoyant life. It

should not surprise us to discover that Fay Weldon joined the
right-wing Zionist Daniel Pipes on the board of an anti-Muslim
Danish group that was formed after the controversy of the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.36
The personal letter from Sultana that prefaces Desert Royal
openly engages international politics. Sultana frames her book
as an invitation to the West: I hope you are not weary of hearing our tragic tales, for we are gaining small freedoms here and
there, and we continue to need your attention and your support
for years to come. Without media attention and political intervention from other lands, most of our men would be most joyous to return to a time of utter darkness for the females living in
Saudi Arabia. It is a sad truth that only when they are forced will
our men allow light into our lives.37
That books about bad Arabs who force and enslave girls have
a special place in the politics of European immigration is revealed by the enthusiastic reception of such books in France.
Three of the classics I discuss in this book were first published or
publicized there: Burned Alive, the memoir by Souad and Jacqueline Thibault of an honor killing survivor (discussed in Chapter 4); Sold, the book by Zana Muhsen and Andrew Crofts
about the girls in Yemen, which became a best seller in France
before it took off in England, fanned by Zanas dramatic appearances on the prime-time show Sacre Soire and the books publication by a press owned by the son-in-law of the former French
president Giscard-DEstaing;38 and Married by Force, by Leila
and Marie-Thrse Cuny. French anxieties about North African
immigrants are particularly intense, as these Arab Muslims form
a postcolonial underclass in the restless suburbs (banlieues).39
Married by Force directs itself to a French audience troubled
by immigrants. This native who wants to escape her community
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confirms their views of the backwardness of the North Africans

they detest. Leila explains, for example: I couldnt stand this
life, but other girls who had been married by force like me put
up with it . . . All the people who used to talk about integration
could never rescue us: they didnt have all the necessary information. Even we girls from the schools and colleges would get hit
up, claiming that our parents would never do that to us. Theyd
never marry us by force to some North African immigrant, because wed say no. However, in most cases we were forced to
say yes. We were caught in a system . . . What can be done to
make families adapt and evolve?40 In her study of the politics of
humanitarianism in France, Miriam Ticktin draws a real-world
parallel. She attributes the exceptional success of one territorial
asylum case made for Zina, a Frenchwoman of Algerian background who had been forced into marriage, to the sexually imbued cultural exoticism that her personal story carried. In a
country whose president, Nicolas Sarkozy, had dramatically offered Frances protection to each martyred woman in the world,
only this sort of violence followed the proper format. The judge
gave precedence to the French Civil Code over the bilateral accords that normally regulate family matters in the case of North
Africans.41
Even the more sober memoir by Mukhtar Mai from Pakistan,
cowritten with the same Marie-Thrse Cuny who penned Married by Force and translated into English as In the Name of
Honor, with a glowing foreword by Nicholas Kristof, was also
first published in France. As her publisher Philippe Robinet explains, When journalists reported that she had been condemned
by her village tribal council to be gang-raped, the horrifying news
made headlines around the world . . . My colleagues and I made
the arduous journey to the remote village of Meerwala, where
we were welcomed by Mukhtar Mai and her friend Naseem
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Akhtar. They were amazed that we had come all the way from
France to suggest that we should write a book together, a book
that would help her in her struggle.42
In Britain in the past decadewith troops stationed in Iraq
and Afghanistan, eruptions of public hysteria about Sharia arbitration courts and burqas, fears of homegrown fanaticism instigated by the 7/11 bombings, and feminist agitation leading to
national legislation against honor crimes and forced marriageit
is Pakistanis, not Arabs, who have emerged as the new authors
of these memoirs. Andrew Croftss earlier success with the Yemeni story of Zana led to his involvement in writing another story
of abuse and freedom about a British woman from the Pakistani
community. The title of Croftss 2009 book with Saira Ahmed carries the anachronistic flavor of nineteenth-century melodrama:
Disgraced: Forced to Marry a Stranger, Betrayed by My Own
Family, Sold My Body to Survive, This Is My Story.43 The product
description on Amazon.co.uk shouts all the familiar keywords
of the genre: Brought up in a violent Muslim household, where
family honour is all, Saira is watched 24 hours a day. However,
an innocent friendship with a boy is uncovered and Saira is sent
to Pakistan, punished for dishonouring her family. There, the
nightmare really begins. Forced to marry an older stranger who
rapes her repeatedly and makes her his round-the-clock sex slave,
she eventually plots her escape but, destitute, has to return to the
family home in England . . . Disgraced is the true story of an innocence ruined and a life shattered. But it is also a tale of survival told by a woman who has finally discovered her true voice
(emphasis added).44
These are the terms of other memoirs in the genre, includingShame (2007) and Daughters of Shame (2009) by Jasvinder
Sanghera, and Unbroken Spirit: A True Story of a Girls Struggle
to Escape from Abuse (2008) by Ferzanna Riley. Consider the
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description of Sameem Alis Belonging, published in 2008. It is

about a girl, neglected by her family, who also is sent off to Pakistan: Aged just thirteen, Sameem was forced to marry a complete stranger. When pregnant, two months later, she was made to
return to Glasgow where she suffered further abuse from her family. After finding true love, Sameem fled the violence at home and
escaped to Manchester with her young son . . . Belonging is the
shocking true story of Sameems struggle to break free from her
past and fight back against her upbringing (emphasis added).45
This description makes clear that the new genre capitalizes on the
current humanitarian focus on the girl child as the exemplary
victim, as it displaces onto racial others the lurking fears of pedophilia that are so much of our own everyday worlds where we
constantly read reports of the cracking of another child pornography ring.
Slave Pornography
The pornographic element of these memoirs must be considered
directly. The dynamics are clearest in one published in Britain in
2009 at the height of the controversy over the Sharia family arbitration courts. This is the memoir that also most directly challenges the authority of Islam. It is damning, even if it is prefaced
(for fear of libel suits?) with the formulaic disclaimer we have
come to expect from crusaders of the new common sense. The
author notes in her preface, It is worth pointing out that there
are many Muslims in Britain and around the world who have
had only good experiences of growing up with their faith, including women who are free to live full, independent and liberated lives and Imams who practice lawfully and have an extremely
positive influence on their communities. This book is in no way a
denigration of Islam generally. It is a personal account of my own
life experiences.46
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Yet the villain is a horrid imam and the heroine his daughter,
alternately described as a caged bird or shackled bride. Typical
of its graphic scenes of the repeated rape and abuse of this little
girl by her father, an apparent pillar of the Muslim community
who locks her in the cellar for his work, is the following: Dad
was like a terrifying predator. I never knew when he would strike.
Once I was in the bathroom, when all of a sudden Dad just
barged in. He locked the door . . . He took down his shalwar
kamiz baggy pants, and plunked himself down on the loo. He
forced me to watch as he started touching himself and breathing
heavily. I tried to look away, in disgust, but he grabbed me by the
hair and forced my face towards himso close that I could smell
that horrible, musty smell that always made me feel so sick.
Then he grabbed my hand and forced it around his flesh.47
Here we can see most clearly how these memoirs are meant to
inspire horror and pity, followed by admiration for the heroine
survivors escapes into freedom. Freedom means escaping not
just the Muslim men who torment them but their own communities and cultures. The memoirists confess their rage, self-loathing,
and suicide attempts; they often describe themselves as having
been rebellious teenagers. This is the feminist difference of the late
twentieth century and into the twenty-first, where brown women
seem to want to be rescued by their white sisters and friends, to
adapt Spivaks famous formulation. If these Muslim girls and
women were not portrayed as wanting what we wantlove,
choice, and sexual freedom (even Christianity or atheism, in the
case of Shah and Hirsi Ali)preferring instead to be dutiful
daughters living in the bosom of their families, virgins at marriage, devoted wives partnering with their husbands, or pious
individuals seeking to live up to the moral ideals of their religion
and living according to its laws, it would be hard for Western
readers to identify.48 It would be hard for publishers to find such
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eager audiences if they offered us women and girls who challenged our assumptions about what they should want and what
is good for them. Western women would no longer be the role
models, nor would they feel needed.
The only pious women who appear in this genre of oppressed
Muslim women stories are the hapless victims, grievously betrayed by their silent God, who appear in the most extreme and
controversial examples. The mobilization of the pornography of
bondage for anti-immigrant European politics is best seen in a
short film that actually breaks with the conventions of fauxcultural and individual specificity of this dystopic genre. The context is the Netherlands in 2004. The writer is the Somali refugee
and right-wing politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The work in question is
the eleven-minute film called Submission that catapulted her to
notoriety.49
Hirsi Alis signature intellectual style of asserting direct causal
connections between decontextualized verses from the Quran
and abuses of women she has met in shelters or in her fantasies
shapes the film. There are four characters: a woman repulsed by
the husband chosen for her by her family, for whom marital sex
feels like rape; a woman who must submit to beatings by a jealous but philandering husband because he supports her financially; a modest, veiled woman who is subjected to humiliating
incest by her uncle; and a woman who fell in love but was abandoned by her lover and then lashed for fornication. The film implies that such abuses are sanctioned, if not directly caused, by
Islam, ignoring centuries of interpretationexegetical, judicial,
and everydayof the Quranic verses in question, and silent on
the abhorrence of rape or incest in the Islamic legal tradition,
not to mention all Muslim societies.
Dutch scholars, especially feminists, have had a lot to say about
this film and Hirsi Ali.50 Some have pointed out that Submission
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offers audiences an intimate erotic-religious image, which,

through the presentation of victims, serves to unveil the cruelty
and injustice of Islam.51 Annelies Moors calls it hard core Orientalism. The effect of the film depends as much on its visuals
as its voice-over.52 The women are eroticized victims. One lies in
the fetal position, her face bruised and her negligee ripped to reveal her breasts. Another stands on a prayer mat, draped only in
the sheerest of black gowns. Another is seen from behind, the
bare skin of her graceful back carved in a Quranic verse. Hirsi
Ali proudly claims these images from sadomasochistic fantasy as
her own idea, not those of the filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, who
lost his life for them.53
If we want to appreciate the allure of this genre, we must finally confront this pornographic aspect. With Marcus Wood, we
might want to ask, what are the effects of a genre of pornography
with its objectification of subjects and its depiction of violence,
sexual force, and bondagewhen it is tied to a racial politics and
a legacy of colonial or racial domination? What Wood calls plantation pornography begins with the role of eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century British writings and pictures, often placed in
the context of abolitionist literature, that depict the abuse of black
bodies in the Atlantic slave trade. It overflows into the present as
a huge business that has infiltrated literature, fine art, popular
publishing, film, video, and BDSM (bondage and discipline, domination and submission, sadism and masochism) cultures on the
web.54
Wood shows how central this pornographic genre is to the
misrepresentation of slavery. His subtle and complex reading
ofJohn Gabriel Stedmans 1790 classic text Narrative of a Five
Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam reveals a troubling double effect: For Stedman Surinam is a centre
of decadence, vice, frivolity, cruelty, sensuality, and the unequal
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distribution of wealth. His stated aim, or one of them, is to go

about and uncover the nature of this perversion and depravity.
Yet his attitude is constantly shifting between a moral outrage
that is rhetorically constructed and shrill, and an equally hysterical series of attempts to emotionally bond with the slave victim
by attempting to appropriate their pain in order to demonstrate
his own sensitivity.55 In fact, he marries a slave, Joanna, whose
narrative he makes famous.
We find a similar moral outrage in the pulp nonfiction about
the Muslim woman or girl, incited (and, perhaps, excited) by the
violations and violence of sex. But given the women authors (all
lapsed Muslims) and the intended audience (largely female
and mostly non-Muslim), we can see a slightly different dynamic
of identification and appropriation of pain put into play. This is
not the place to debate the virtues, meanings, or effects of pornography and its links to desire. Nor is it my intent to enter the
debates in the literature on humanitarianism and the pornography of violence. Key works like Deans The Fragility of Empathy
after the Holocaust, ask whether exposure to representations of
violence is numbing.56 Bernstein asks whether the pornography
of horrorthe decontextualized contemporary images of atrocity that fascinate and repulseserves the purposes of greater
understanding and political orientation or just feeds liberal attachment to ones own moral sensibilities.57
All that needs to be noted here is that Western readers, mostly
female, find these sensationalist books gripping enough to buy
them in the millions. Their identification with Muslim women
victims is a feminist one. This gives it a slightly different dynamic
than the strangely mediated empathy of the slaver or ex-slaver
with the abused slave woman victim that was found in late
eighteenth-century works like Stedmans or circulated in the abolition literature. I argue in Chapter 4 on the seductions of the
105
honor crime that such books produce a horror that indeed underwrites a confident sense of moral distinction and Western feminist superiority.
A common enemypatriarchysupposedly affirms the sisterhood. Yet in every set of acknowledgments, the memoirists thank
the English and French men who have been their editors, publishers, ghostwriters, boyfriends, or husbands. So it becomes clear
that it is actually the menacing and irremediably patriarchal Muslim man acting out his cultural script who stands as the clear evil
against which such a sisterly community can bond. Such men,
weknow, are targeted as the enemies of our police forces and
ourarmies. So then we must ask how such identifications erase
readers roles as perpetrators of violence (insofar as they belong
to a community involved in violence against Muslims abroad
and at home, which these books seem to justify), just as the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British men who empathized
with slave victims erased their racial and national culpability.
What kinds of emotional complicity do such books encourage
for women? And how do the affects these books induce in their
women readers lead them to support an imperial politics to
which they might not consciously assent if they imagine themselves to be progressive, or at least liberal?
If Wood concluded that the test of the sentimental man in the
eighteenth century was his ability to imaginatively experience the
pain of others, the production of this sublime experience slipping
into the commercial bondage fantasy in relation to slave women,
we might want to consider whether the empathetic responses of
women readers to the narratives of victimized Muslim women
confirm their own morality while shading into a commerce in
Muslims.58 This commerce takes the form of the proliferation
of books in this genre, as well as the shadowy presence on the
web in sex and bondage sites of a revival of nineteenth-century
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Orientalist paintings of harems and slave girls, including those

of Jean-Lon Grme. The consumers of such books and websites come from the very communities that are involved in military
exercises against Muslims around the world, egged on by hysterical hate and fear and accompanied by the criminal profiling of
Muslim men even in their own countries. Does the genre help absolve these perpetrators, whose empathetic tears assure them of
their morality even as fantasizing about abuse grips them? Does
their imaginative suffering over others give them not just some
kind of pleasure but the reassurance of utter distinction and separation from those who suffer?
Structuring Desires
Popular literary representations define views and structure feelings about Muslim women and their rights. Memoirs and other
forms of pulp nonfiction are not just texts whose themes and
tropes relate to earlier popular travel and missionary literature
on Muslim women. They are commercial products that publishers market and readers receive in a very specific political context.
In this regard, my analysis resembles Dabashis critique of Azar
Nafisis more literate memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran. Dabashi
focuses on the role of the native who confirms the absence of
rights for Muslim women in Iran by glorifying classics of Western literature, denigrating local culture and traditions. He shows
how the cover photograph was cropped to elide its original context (active, politically engaged women students reading about
the elections in newspapers) and to suggest instead veiled women
secretly reading Western erotic classics.59 Saba Mahmood describes Nafisis memoir as ruthless in its omissions, erasing all
traces of the extensive internal social and political critique that
has marked the period in Iran that Nafisi purports to chronicle
in this life-quenching portrayal.60
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In our world of mass media, these iconic abused-but-defiant

Muslim women are feted in elite New York circles, featured in
glossy magazines, and funded lavishly through personal charity.
They warm the hearts of those who promote them, sell their stories, and, as Sherene Razack puts it, steal their pain for profit
and personal comfort.61 As I have argued, these stories are key
ingredients in the normalization of political and military hostility toward countries like Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq.
But my analysis of the surprisingly pornographic nature of
these memoirs suggests that their most substantial and important effects are the ways they cathect readers, especially Western
women, to a fragile emotional truth. Do these readers take comfort in being above such sordid bondage? Blinded to similar
stories that occur in our midst, do these books generate fantasies
of the possibility of autonomy and freedom from such violence?
Voyeurs of cruelty, do women readers feel that they are empathetic and moral subjects simply called to action by their sisterly
feeling and their repugnance for those who violate innocent others, some only thirteen years old? Or ten years old? Like the
sympathy toward those slave women whose lashings and rapes
European humanitarians like Stedman deplored in titillating detail, the complex affects the genre inspires create a sense of virtue. They lend passion to the mission of saving women globally.
Critiques of representations always incite questions about
how else we might understand the world. It does not matter so
much whether these memoirs are truth or fiction; the question
has been how they function in the world into which they are inserted. In this book, however, I do want to offer alternatives. And
it is intriguing that one can find them even in adjacent genres, not
just the lives of ordinary women such as Zaynab, Amal, and others whose personal stories I tell. It is uncanny, for example, how
Ayaan Hirsi Alis personal story is made to follow the script and
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feed this passion. The ideal heroine of this genre, she tells us she
was beaten, oppressed, and forced into marriage. She then escaped to freedom. Granted asylum in the Netherlands, she discovered secular reason and renounced servitude to Islam. She seems
to be the authentic embodiment of that abused victim caught between force and redemption.
Yet I want to use her autobiography, Infidel, to open up the
story. In it, we discover evidence of how complicated womens
lives and social worlds can be. Infidel cant be corralled into the
story line Hirsi Ali champions in her public lectures and extreme statements. She is too intelligent for that. First, we learn
that she was never raped or forced into marriageon the contrary, she secretly ran off with and married briefly an attractive
maternal relative while on her own in Somalia; and she passionately longed for and kissed a friend of her brothers in Kenya,
deluding herself into thinking he was Muslim.
Her confrontation with Islam was ambivalent. As a young
teen, she came under the sway of a fascinating Islamist teacher in
her Kenyan school. She voluntarily threw aside her normal clothes
to take on a voluminous black cloak. She explains, It had a
thrill to it, a sensuous feeling. It made me feel powerful . . . I was
unique: very few people walked about like that in those days in
Nairobi. Weirdly, it made me feel like an individual. It sent out a
message of superiority: I was the one true Muslim . . . I was a
star of God. When I spread out my hands, I felt like I could fly.62
She prayed a lot and attended lectures to try to understand her
religion. No one forced her. In this autobiographical account, she
records in marvelous detail both the enormous differences between the Islamic ideals and practices of her Somali family and
the Saudis they briefly lived among, and the specific tensions that
arose in the 1980s and 1990s between more traditional forms of
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Islam and the new Salafi movement brought by the Muslim

Brotherhood to Kenya, Somalia, and elsewhere.
Even more revealing of an alternative story about how Muslim women are regardedwith respect and acknowledgment of
the value of consentis an incident Hirsi Ali describes in Holland after she was granted asylum (on false grounds, we now
know). As soon as her father learned of her wherabouts, the man
he had earlier arranged for her to marry in Nairobi flew in from
Canada to find out why she had not come to join him. She told
him she would not go to Canada with him and be his wife. He
returned a few days later, saying he had consulted with her father and they agreed to set up a formal gathering of the most
prominent clan elders living in Europe. The husband arrived the
next day with ten dignified men, including the Crown Prince of
the clan. Each spoke in turn, she reports, about honor, marriage,
the civil war, and what values should be upheld. At the end, the
prince said, Now we will pause so you can think about it. They
offered to reconvene the next day to hear her answer, but she was
ready to give it. Her refusal was followed by a set of questions
about why. Finally, borrowing a key concept from the Quran,
she said, It is the will of the soul . . . The soul cannot be coerced.63 The prince responded, I respect this answer. I believe
all of us should respect it. And with that, her husband agreed to
a divorce. All the men stood up then, and one after another each
man cupped my hands in their two hands, and left. They were full
of respect.64
This is a surprising procedure and resolution for a community
that Hirsi Ali would have us believein works like her film Submission and her first book The Caged Virginis under the sway
of an incorrigible religion that abuses and denigrates women.
Two visions are at war in Infidel. One is a closely observed and
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keenly felt rendering of the uncertain and contradictory experiences of a particular girl in a particular Somali family with its
unique circumstances, tensions, tragedies, vulnerabilities, and
precarious struggles to maintain life and dignity in trying times.
The second is a compulsive repetition of a formula that overlays
these poignant struggles. The formula generalizes about what Islam means and does to people. Besides promoting a strangely
decontextualized and ahistorical view of religion that relies on a
simple literalist reading, the formula pits the enlightened and free
West against backward and enslaved Muslim societies.65 That
story turns on simple oppositions between choice and bondage,
force and consent.
It is important not to be seduced by the darkly appealing fictions of pulp nonfiction that underwrite the common sense that
links itself publicly to the language of human rights. These accounts themselves contain hints that things are not so simple.
One of the most poignant examples is found buried in the books
Zana and her mother have produced about their experiences in
Yemen, Sold and Without Mercy. The story of the younger sister,
Nadia, who refused her mothers attempts to spring her from her
enslavement in Yemen, gives us some clues about an alternative way to think about the key values of choice and consent.
Although I take up this issue in more detail in the conclusion, I
want to introduce here the observation that life is complicated
for all of us. It is never easy to cleanly distinguish freedom and
duty, consent and bondage, choice and compulsion. The determined older sister, Zana, leaves Yemen. She abandons her young
son because custody goes to the father, both by religious and
cultural tradition and by national law. She doesnt look back.
But Nadia refuses to take her mothers offer of a ticket to freedom. The girls mother, Miriam, cant seem to understand what
her younger daughter, Nadia, is telling her again and again. She
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assumes that her daughter must be under the thumb of her domineering husband. She must be weighed down by her life and her
stifling black robes.
Her mother cannot see that Nadia is deeply torn. She has five
young children whom she would have to leave behind, the legitimate children of a Yemeni father. One is reminded of the painful
stories that Das, Menon, Butalia, and other Indian scholars have
told about the Indian and Pakistani states decisions to repatriate the women abducted during Partition in 1948.66 These
women may or may not have come to love the husbands they had
been living with for years. But it was clear from their tears and
resistance that they were tortured by the forced separation from
their children in the name of national honor.
In what ways had this life on a barren mountaintop become
Nadias real life? She was only thirteen when she left Birmingham. Her childhood was unhappy and included a brush with
racism and the law. She lives in poverty in Yemen, it is true. But
one has to consider the possibility that the reason she keeps resisting her mothers entreaties and the British consulates intervention is that she would rather raise her children and be a married woman and part of her husbands community than move to
the freedom of an unknown life in England, haunted forever by
the loss of her children and the idea that they would grow up
without the love of their mother. How many stories do we know
of women, in any culture, choosing to stay in bad marriages or in
miserable circumstances for their children because they love them?
What does freedom or choice mean under such conditions?
The fiction that any of us can choose freely is maintained
by conjuring up those in distant lands who live in bondage with
no rights, agency, or ability to refuse or escape sex or violence.
The fact that, in liberal democracies, the most contentious debates
are about how choice should be balanced against the public
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goodin schooling, health care, welfare, or gun controlseems

also to get lost in this story line.67 That is why these popular memoirs have such a hold. That is why they seem to have come into
our public imagination at the same time the new common sense
emerged that we should save women globally.
Before taking a look at the framework of rights that gives
shape and purpose to the efforts of activist women and their admirers, I want to unpack one of the most iconic symbols of the
oppression of women in IslamLand: the honor crime. In the development of this culturalized category of abuse, we can see
perfectly the ways narratives of choice come together with sexuality in liberal discourse and get imbricated in local and international institutions of care and punishment. In tracking this particular type of violation of Muslim women and girls, we see how
people are led to suspend their critical faculties in the service of
a moral crusade, and how blaming culture justifies intervention.
CHAPTER
Seductions of
the Honor Crime
One of the most iconic of the

cultural-legal categories created to describe the deplorable state of
womens rights in the Muslim world is the honor crime. The
deployment of this category makes clear just how inseparable
the plight of Muslim women is from the politicized and polarized world in which we live. The 1990s marked the beginning of
a strong era for international womens rights. Violence against
women was successfully reconceptualized as a human rights issue and put on the agendas of various United Nations (UN) bodies. It now dominates the feminist agenda worldwide and is part
of the new common sense. Naming and publicizing the honor
crime, a category taken up eagerly by everyone from media makers to moral philosophers, marks humanitarian concern. Yet we
must be warythis category risks consolidating the stigmatization of the Muslim world and does not do justice to women.
Defined as the killing of a woman by her relatives for violation of a sexual code in the name of restoring family honor, the
honor crime poses more starkly than any other contemporary
category the dilemmas of rights activism in a transnational world.
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It is marked as a culturally specific form of violence, distinct

from other widespread forms of domestic or intimate partner violence, including the more familiar passion crime. Neither values
of honor nor their enforcement through violence are ever said to
be restricted to Muslim communities, nor are honor crimes condoned in Islamic law or by religious authorities. Yet somehow
their constant association with stories and reports from the
Middle East and South Asia, or immigrant communities originating in these regions, has given them a special association with Islam. Anyone concerned with representations of Muslim women,
with the lives of actual women in the Muslim world, and with
the global enterprise of saving Muslim women needs to look
hard at this category. Insofar as the honor crime is designated a
traditional or cultural practice and is introduced regularly into
arguments about international affairs or the risks of multiculturalism, even being condemned in UN General Assembly resolutions, it deserves special attention from anthropologists and
those trying to understand the new imperialism.1
Honor crimes are explained as the behavior of a specific ethnic
or cultural community. The culture itself, or tradition, is taken
to be the cause of the criminal violence. So the category stigmatizes not particular acts of violence but entire cultures or communities. But can one acknowledge the seriousness of violence
against women without contributing to the stigmatization of
particular communities and their representation as exceptional?
In the West today, Muslim communities are regularly portrayed
as backward and prone to violence. In the new common sense,
international conflicts are reduced to a clash of civilizations in
which entire regions of the world are represented as rejecting values such as freedom and nonviolence. Western interventions have
caused hundreds of thousands of deaths justified by the claim to
bring freedomand womens rightsto these other cultures.
SEDUCTIONS OF THE HONOR CRIME
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Ambivalence or hostility in Europe and the United States toward

immigrants from such regions is rationalized by the uncivilized practices they bring with them. Even within many Muslimmajority countries, elites look down on ordinary people from
the countryside, the slums, and certain regions, blaming violence
against women on the traditionalism and cultural backwardness
of their less enlightened or modern compatriots.
Naming and criminalizing forms of violence may have positive effects. They may encourage legal reform and the education
of judges. They might help governments and communities appreciate the seriousness of violence against women and justify the
creation of shelters, training programs for police, and relief efforts for women. But are there ways to achieve such goals without defining some acts of violence against women as peculiar?
The risk of this culturalization is that it will produce more animosity and violence. Women will be no safer.
Because moral horror about the honor crime was everywhere
I looked in the media, in pulp nonfiction, and in serious academic
work, I began to ask myself: What forces could be producing and
maintaining this category of spectacular cultural violence? What
elements of popular fantasy might be animating it? And what
might the category prevent us from seeing about the social and
political worlds in which violence against women is occurring?
In this chapter, I describe four problems with the way the category of the honor crime works. First, it simplifies morality and
distorts the kinds of relations between men and women that exist in societies where honor is a central value. Second, defining
honor crimes as a unique cultural form too neatly divides civilized from uncivilized societies, the West and the rest. Third, the
obsession with honor crimes erases completely the modern state
institutions and techniques of governance that are integral to
both the incidents of violence and the category by which they
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are understood. Finally, thinking about honor crimes seems to be

a sort of antipolitics machine that blinds us to the existence of
social transformations and political conflict.2
Moral Puzzles
Rights activists, popular writers, and scholars have all contributed to raising the visibility of the honor crime in the past two
decades. The sudden prominence of the honor crime in the late
1990s unsettled me. As an anthropologist who had lived and
worked in particular communities of Muslim women in the Arab
world, I had spent a long time trying to understand what people
meant by honor and what honor meant to them. The subtitle of
my first book is, after all, Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society. I
was shocked when I read documents like Amnesty Internationals
fact sheet on honor crimes. Called Culture of Discrimination, it
states: So-called honor killings are based on the belief, deeply
rooted in some cultures, of women as objects and commodities,
not as human beings endowed with dignity and rights equal to
those of men. Women are considered the property of male relatives and are seen to embody the honor of the men to whom they
belong. 3
Definitions such as this place honor crimes in types of societies where women are not just unequal to men but have no moral
agency. By describing women as property, objects, or body parts
controlled by men (as do some that reduce women to hymens),4
these accounts trivialize moral systems and do not begin to do
justice to the way women see themselves in such communities.
They did not make sense to me. I had lived for years in a community that prided itself on its commitment to honor. I had a
rich sense of womens and girls lives in a community in which
honor and sexual virtue were central to the social imagination.
Honor and modesty were the subject of constant discussion.
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These values were key to a shared and complexly lived moral

code that inspired and obligated individuals. Women and men
reflected on these values in an exquisite tradition of poetry and
storytelling.
Veiled Sentiments, my first book, focuses on how modesty, the
special entailment of honor that involved sexual propriety for
women, was part of a widely shared but complex moral code.
For my Awlad Ali Bedouin friends, honor helped define (and reproduce) social status. For the men and women I knew, honor
was based on upholding personal ideals from valor to generosity, from trustworthiness to refusal to accept slights. For women
and girls, as I describe in Veiled Sentiments, honor involved displaying most of these qualities of toughness and generosity expected of men and those from strong families (called free) but
in addition, forms of respect for others. Modesty, I show in my
book, was one of the forms this respectfulness took, defining
women as worthy of the respect of others. Modesty meant veiling for certain categories of men (and deliberately not others); it
meant being reserved with, and even avoiding, members of the
opposite sex who are not relatives. It had nothing to do with acting feminine, according to our standards. For men, avoiding
sexuality was equally important to honor; men were expected to
keep a respectful distance from unrelated women and to treat
them politely. They would never mention their wives or other
women from their family in front of other menout of respect.
Sex outside of marriage was dishonorable for both men and
women. And young men had little more choice in marriage partners than did young women. In a kin-based social order, marriages are far too important to be left to individuals.
Should this moral system that sets ideals for both men and
womenshaped as it is by the social structure of patrilineal kin
relations that organizes descent, inheritance, economy, and
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political and social relationsbe understood (and judged) as

simply a form of patriarchal oppression of women leading to violence? Must the restrictions on womens behavior be understood
as constraints on their autonomy imposed by men? To begin to
answer these questions, one would need to either ask how people involved in the system see it, or explore the complex ways
the moral system plays out in actual social situations. I did both
in two of my books, Veiled Sentiments and Writing Womens
Worlds.
Awlad Ali girls I knew in the 1980s often complained about
the unfair restrictions and suspicions to which they were subjected. Their aunts and grandmothers complained about increasing confinement, the result of leaving their nomadic life, along
with some newer factors that I discuss later when considering
how the Islamic revival that was transforming Egypt in the late
twentieth century affected them. But I noticed that the girls chafed
against new restrictions with a self-righteousness that came from
their sense that they were, unfairly, not being trusted. They defended themselves not by saying they had the right to do whatever they wanted, but by asserting their own modesty and moral
virtue, even if they did like bobby pins or lipstick. They spoke
about themselves not as objects controlled by family or by men,
but as persons who knew right from wrong.
To begin to understand that girls in this community see themselves as powerful agents of their moral standing, all we need to
do is listen to some Bedouin wedding songs. The adversarial gender imagery of a couple of the many proud songs women would
sing about brides in their families is striking: They lived like
falcons / The hunters of the wild couldnt touch them. A bird
in the hot winds glides / And no rifle scope can capture it.5 Here
are songs that, to return to a theme weve encountered before,
use birds metaphorically to comment on womens lives neither
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in terms of emancipation (from the cage) nor grief about loss,

but in terms of their pursuit of honor.
To appreciate how complex the system of morality is for individuals, one would have to talk about how everyday life proceeds. My ethnographies are full of stories about how girls dodge
accusations, mothers worry about their daughters, brothers stand
up for their sisters, and fathers support them against suspicion
or accusations. They also recount mens stories of thwarted love
or saving face after their sons or brothers have not acted honorably. At the heart of this community is the riveting and revealing
interplay of womens and mens public displays of pride and independence and the poems they share with their intimates, poems
of desire and pain that show their vulnerabilities and their attachments in their marriages and friendships. My Awlad Ali friends
would find familiar the social constraints and demands of honor
that produced the exquisite anguish of Romeo and Juliet; they
themselves tell similar love stories about tragic, or near-tragic, desert lovers.6
Can this moral system of a community that jealously guards
its independence from Egyptian state institutions be captured by
the idea that men constrain womens freedom or own their bodies? This is what the Amnesty fact sheet suggests. What should
we make of womens fierce commitments to the system? What
kind of understandings of power, of peoples social ties, and even
of individual psychic life would lead us to think in such blackand-white terms about something as complex as gendered human life?
Compulsions of Liberal Fantasy

Besides the reductive way it presents societies in which honor is
so central to morality, there is a second problem with the discourse on honor crimes. The tendency in the mutually reinforcing
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scholarship, popular culture, and legal campaigns is to treat the

honor crime as a distinctive and specific cultural complex. This
tradition continues in Kwameh Anthony Appiahs depiction of
honor killings in Pakistan in his book The Honor Code, in which
he calls for collective shaming or carefully calibrated ridicule
to spur Pakistani men and those who engage in honor killing
toward a moral revolution.7 Even anthropologists like Unni Wikan have fallen into this trap, as demonstrated in her book on a
spectacularly mediated honor crime that took place in Sweden in
2002, involving Kurdish immigrants. Her goal, she claims in the
book, is to try to understand the culture that produced such an
event. But the anthropological motive of understanding (without
stigmatizing) is belied by rhetorical moves such as melodramatic
chapter endings, consistent misreadings of evidence, and unremitting moral judgment.
Wikans book examines the case of a father who killed his
daughter, Fadime Sahindal, after years of estrangement; the trial,
police, and media records were extensive and contradictory. Let
me give one example of how Wikan misreads the evidence. One
of Fadimes sisters explains that for their father, everything
went to pieces when the media got in on the case. He felt robbed
of his dignity, his pride, his honor.8 After the father had developed a heart condition that forced him to quit his job, he is reported to have told Fadime, Dont show me up like this, to the
media and the police! At least fifteen people spat at me!9 In the
trial, he testified, All these Swedes came by and threw stones at
my window. They shouted things. Fucking blackhead, go back
where you came from! 10
Wikan, however, does not pick up on the lost dignity the sister
mentions, the racism the father experiences, or the critical role
the media and police played in the unfolding events. Symptomatically, she reverts to standard tropes about culture, seamlessly
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slipping among Kurdish, Middle Eastern, traditional, traditionbound, and non-Western culture. Fadimes father, she insists, had
a mental outlook . . . anchored elsewhere; his roots were deeply
sunk into a culture, or a set of traditions, with core values other
than freedom and equality.11 She says, Many immigrants in European countries remain deeply rooted in rural cultures established several hundred years ago.12 At her most sympathetic, she
says that we must understand fathers like him as victims of inhuman traditionsagainst which valiant and enlightened daughters and organizations should struggle.13 Her anthropological
discourse meshes surprisingly well with popular discourses on the
honor crime and the larger common sense about the problems of
Muslim women.14
To get the full flavor of the unsavory politics of this conception
of honor crimes, we need to turn to these more popular discourses. We have already seen how pulp nonfiction fixates on
choice and freedom to paint its pictures of Muslim womens oppressions. The honor crime category also works through fantasy to
attach people to a set of values they are made to associate strictly
with modernity and the West. We can see this in two highly successful memoirs by honor crime survivors that found enthusiastic, if tearful, audiences in the wake of 9/11, the U.S. invasion
of Afghanistan, and the impending military intervention in Iraq.
The first is Norma Khouris best-selling memoir from 2003 of
the alleged honor killing of her best friend, Dalia, in Jordan.
Called Forbidden Love in the United Kingdom and Honor Lost
in the United States, it is structured as a classic romance novel,
complete with a tall, dark, and handsome love object who is not
a sexist brute. It pulses with chaste but throbbing mutual attraction. But this romance ends differentlywith murder. And there
is an Orientalist difference; the gripping plot is interlaced, as
Harlequin romances and slasher films are not, with pedantic
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lectures on Islam. We are not allowed to forget that we are in

IslamLand.
The story is organized by the standard themes of a long history of Western representations of the Muslim woman. In contrast to the free Western woman, she is imprisoned: For most
women, Khouri writes, Jordan is a stifling prison tense with
the risk of death at the hands of loved ones. She is also voiceless: Women still pray that their silent cries will be heard,
echoing the late nineteenth-century missionary women discussed
in Chapter 1, who said, They will never cry for themselves, for
they are down under the yoke of centuries of oppression.15 And
then there is the stark contrast between patriarchal tradition and
feminist modernity that we have encountered before in Susan
Moller Okins essay, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? Of
her doomed friend Dalia, Khouri comments: And yet there are
a few rare women who risk their lives to try [to break the ancient code]. The whispers they hear are not from the desert, but
from the winds of change.16
The memoir aligns itself with popular feminism. To lend credibility, the book ends with a page similar to the ones we encounter in Half the Sky. Titled What Can You Do?, it urges readers
to write letters opposing the practice of honor crimes and to
donate money to the UN Commission on Human Rights.
The problem is that the book was a hoax. Norma Khouri,
whose real name turned out to be Norma Bagain Toliopoulos,
gained asylum in Australia on the basis of the events of the book.
Investigative journalists then discovered that she had not lived in
Jordan since she was three years old. Suspicious, the Jordanian
journalist Rana Husseini tracked dozens of serious errors and
anachronisms in the book, and the publisher withdrew it.17 Rather
than fleeing an honor crime, Khouri was a troubled woman (and
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compulsive liar) who had grown up in Chicago, had a police record, and was wanted for fraud.18
This piece of fiction masquerading as memoir reveals perfectly
the fantasy and seduction of the honor crime. Self-righteous horror about the barbarism of the other is married to voyeuristic
titillation, along the way facilitating the personalization of such
powerful symbols of liberalism as freedom and choice. The
freedom that honor crime books like this celebrate and that the
scandalizing of honor crimes affirms turns out to be the freedom
to have sex and to leave home. The choice that is cherished boils
down to the right to make personal decisions based on love. So
the books warm and uncritical reception can be accounted for
by the attractive way it affirms certain modern Western cultural
values through an association of sexuality with liberation, and
individual rights with public freedom.
Another memoir, mentioned briefly in Chapter 3, confirms
the erotic charge of the honor crime and its role in shoring up a
sharp distinction between the liberated West and the repressive
Muslim East. Burned Alive: A Survivor of an Honor Killing
Speaks Out, published first in France in 2003, is a different kind
of hoax, based on repressed memories (notorious for their
unreliability) and filled with inconsistencies and errors.19 It is the
story of Souad (who has only a first name and lives somewhere
in Europe). She is a Palestinian woman who was allegedly set
on fire for being pregnant out of wedlock. Writing her memoir
twenty-five years after the events were said to have taken place,
this woman, who has been regularly made to act as a witness at
conferences on honor crimes, testifies not just to the barbarism
of her own society but also to the goodness of the mission of
her European saviors. These include a woman named Jacqueline
and a shadowy Swiss organization, SURGIR, whose Christian
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salvationist language is striking and whose appeal for money appears, as we have now come to expect, at the end of the book.
Souad admits she cannot write or read books, but that Jacqueline had assured her she could just speak the book. We are
given no clues as to how the book was put together, except that
the title page (though not the cover) indicates it was written in
collaboration with Marie-Thrse Cuny. This French writer had
earlier helped Leila, the French Moroccan whose memoir of
forced marriage is analyzed in Chapter 3. As noted there, she
would also soon help Mukhtar Mai (the Pakistani village woman
whom Nicholas Kristof declares his heroine) write her memoir.
Burned Alive consists of Souads disjointed, fragmented, firstperson childhood memories, many of relentless cruelty at the
hands of her father. She gives us vivid fragments of what she
claims she had forgotten for twenty-five yearsincluding a
younger sister (whose name she cannot recall) being strangled by
her brother with a black telephone cord. Souads feelings toward
her brother are wildly ambivalentshe insists again and again
how much she loved him, and yet she depicts him as a murderer.
Although Jacqueline describes Souad in the West Bank hospital
where she found her as suffering intermittently from amnesia,
Souads writing becomes fluid and erotic when she describes
her trysts with the handsome neighbor she believed would marry
her, but who impregnated and then abandoned her. The breathless description of the first secret meeting with her would-be fianc says it all: I have never been so happy. It was so wonderful
to be with him, so close, even for a few minutes. I felt it in my
whole body. I couldnt think about it clearly, I was too naveI
was no more educated than a goatbut that wonderful feeling
was about the freedom in my heart, and my body. For the first
time in my life I was someone, because I had decided to do as I
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wanted. I was alive. I was not obeying my father or anyone

else . . . I was breaking the rules.20
These values of individual sexual transgression and personal
autonomy are precisely the ones that anthropologist Unni Wikan honors in Fadime, the Swedish Kurdish honor crime victim.
Fadime, she declares, is a symbol of the power of love. She
stands for an inclusive view of humankind, universal in its emphasis on the individuals irreducible value. She represented freedom and equality, regardless of gender, religion, and ethnicity,21
all because she defied her family by running off with a Swedish/
Iranian boyfriend and then condemned in front of Parliament
immigrant communities that would not assimilate.
In all these narratives of popular fiction and bad anthropology, Western society and well-integrated immigrants are granted
a monopoly on liberal and human values. The implication is that
the West does not include in itself any illiberal values, whether
chastity, religious moralism, intolerance, racism, incarceration,
sexism, economic exploitation, or inequality. So it is worth considering the ideological role that the honor crime might be playing in a period when critics of American imperial interventions
and of European anti-immigrant racism have questioned how
liberal existing Western democracies actually are, not to mention
thinking about how condemning the honor crime implies a sort
of uncomplicated celebration of autonomy when a strong tradition in feminist political theory has uncovered the masculine assumptions of the liberal ideal of the autonomous individual.
Many feminists argue that idealizing autonomy devalues not just
womens but also mens human experiences of dependency and
relationship. The most famous illustration of the bias in our evaluations of morality came from the social psychologist Carol Gilligan, whose pathbreaking book In a Different Voice suggested
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that an ethic of care, expressed more often by women, might be

just as important or healthy as the kind of moral reasoning based
on ideals of autonomy that is generally viewed as superior.
There are good reasons to be cautious about associating love
and sex so closely with freedom and individual rights, and both
with the modern West. Historians, political theorists, philosophers, and feminist scholars have questioned these dogmas. Michel Foucault, for one, has shown us how modern discourses of
sexual liberation came with new forms of discipline, medicalization, and a language of perversion. An older Marxist tradition
held that the subordination of women emerged with the development of private property and the nuclear family. Many feminists have documented the ways women are objectified and
turned into commodities in our late capitalist consumer society,
whether to sell cars or pornography.
But even if one ignores this kind of theorizing and research,
shouldnt one at least ask for a more nuanced understanding of
the place of love in the sorts of societies that Khouri and others
disparage? In the literature on honor crimes, there is a striking
absence of any mention of Arab literary culture, which is renowned for its artistic elaboration on the themes of love. Love
has been a special theme since pre-Islamic Arabic poetry and on
to the romantic storytelling that formed the basis for European
chivalric genres. Certainly for the Awlad Ali Bedouin I lived
with, love and desire were the stuff of the poetry, songs, and stories they cherished. These were their creative reflections on love
and life, which is why I wrote about them in Veiled Sentiments.
Things can go wrong for people everywhere. Some fathers are
violent, some brothers commit incest, there are men who kill
their wives and lovers on suspicion, and there are families and
marriages that are dysfunctional and abusive. Honor cultures
do not have a monopoly on violence against women. American
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and European newspapers, judges, lawyers, psychiatrists, and

prisons testify to this. And not all families in communities where
sexual modesty is a key element of young womens morality react the same way to suspicions or sexual infractions. The problem is that when violence occurs in some communities, culture is
blamed; in others, only the individuals involved are accused or
faulted. As Leti Volpp has shown in her classic article called
Blaming Culture, violent or abusive behavior gets attributed
to culture only when it occurs in minority or alien cultural, racial, or national groups.
The honor crime seems to function as a comforting phantasm
that empowers the West and those who identify with it. Not only
does it shift attention to an abjected stage where caricatured people are victims of their own violent culture but it also encourages
self-righteous commitment to change those backward or dysfunctional cultures. As Appiah prescribes, we should persuade Muslim men to shift their sense of honor so that killing their women
feels shameful; as others recommend, we should save the women
from their cultures. Rather than enabling us to understand social
lives that, like ours, are unfortunately too often marred by violence, the legal/cultural category of the honor crime produces
strong distinctions. It distracts our gaze from violence within,
and establishes the superiority of a dense concatenation of cultural values associated with liberalismautonomy, individualism, and sexual freedom. In some settings, it enables Westernized elites in Muslim communities to distinguish themselves
from their local backward compatriots and to gain new opportunities and alliances, mounting campaigns against honor crimes.
The political alignments of a bright, articulate young Jordanian
engineer who ran a web campaign against honor crimes are illustrative. Mohammad Al-Azraq had answered the call of a
Swiss-educated Bahraini friend to take on the issue. I contacted
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him shortly after the website called There is No Honor in Honor

Killing (nohonor.org) went live in 2007. He identified his motives: From the most obscure days of Arab tribalism till the 21st
century, many crimes have been committed against women in the
name of honour. People kill their own flesh and blood to satisfy
backward tribal values and traditions that are by no means related to religion. Wein No Honorare trying to raise awareness among young people from the region, and encourage young
males to respect their sisters/daughters/wives/cousins . . . etc.
choices in life.22 When I interviewed him on March 29, 2009, he
elaborated, The core thing I believe in is that men and women
are absolutely equal. My sister, my mother, my wife, my sonas
long as eighteen or over, have the right to make their own decisions. Thats the thing that were trying to preach. Attractive as
they are, these views must be put in the context of the wider liberal politics of dialogue and tolerance represented by cosmopolitan youth like him.
In short, the popular concern with the honor crime solidifies
certain violences as timeless cultural practices associated with
particular kinds of communities defined by their alien difference
from us, rather than treating them as the perverse and diverse
acts of individuals in different circumstances who sometimes
work with a complex of concepts linked to honor. In assuming
the uniformity of such practices, popular narratives affix values
of individualism, freedom, humanity, tolerance, and liberalism
neatly onto the West while denying them to others, despite the
actual distribution of acts of inhumanity, intolerance, and illiberalism across many societies.
Erasing Governance
The sober forms of knowledge production we find in human rights
or womens rights reports by and for grassroots and international
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organizations work differently and do a different kind of political work. Here we come to the third problem with the way the
category of the honor crime is used. Human rights reports on
honor crimes arise from and at the same time hide the ways in
which governments and transnational organizations now penetrate the lives of most people and communities. Unlike the sensationalist romance novel/memoir, such reports have all the neutral features of scientific objectivity. In such reports, one typically
finds a mix of telegraphic case studies and confusing statistics.
For example, Human Rights Watchs 2006 report on violence
against women in Palestine begins its section on Murder of
Women under the Guise of Honor in a predictable waywith
a clinical quote from an autopsy report: An 18-year-old female
died as a result of manual strangulation and smothering, which
were carried out by her family members.23 The lists and numbers
in these reports convince us that there is something out there. The
multiplication of cases lends credibility and objective weight to
the existence and specificity of the phenomenon. The accumulation makes it appear that all the cases are variations on each other.
These incidents are not to be considered as individual aberrations
or pathologies but as patterned forms.
Feminist activists contribute to these reports. Genuinely motivated by concern for the victims and committed to working on
behalf of women, these feminists work in grassroots organizations led by courageous individuals. Some offer good services;
most carry out research as part of advocacy. Yet when even the
most careful scholar-activists attempt to compile statistics, the
results are utterly confusing. These anecdotes and noncomparative or unreliable statistics reveal little about contexts, incidences,
and individual situations. They are unable, in the end, to draw
either distinctions among or commonalities across forms of violence against women.
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Even so, these are not the most important lessons I want to
draw from the genre of the human rights report. Instead, as the
late Turkish sociologist Dicle Kogacioglu alerted us, we need to
pay attention to the infrastructure that enables the manufacture of this statistical and case information. We need to pay
attention to the production and circulation of such reports.
Looking at the way honor crimes became such a hot topic in
Turkey in the wake of Turkeys bid for inclusion in the European Union, she showed how the honor crime was defined and
managed in party programs, legal arguments, and newspaper
articles. The crimes, she concluded, are produced in relationship to these institutions. Her most important argument was
that if we care about womens rights and well-being, we need
to reverse the invisibility that modern institutions, national and
international, manufacture about their own roles in perpetuating such practices.24
This infrastructure and these institutions are not traditional,
tribal, or rural; they are the infrastructure of modern government such as social service organizations that are alerted to
and follow up on complaints about abuses.25 They are often run
by middle-class, educated women committed to justice, versed in
contemporary feminist politics, and connected to wider networks
that are willing to work with state agencies and even international organizations. In Europe and the United States, they serve
immigrant women; in other countries, they focus on the poor
and the rural. In addition, there are the police who go to the
crime scenes, arrest killers, and investigate violent incidents.
Almost every report of an incident by the Jordanian journalist
Rana Husseini mentions that the brother or father either turned
himself in to the police immediately or waited for the police to
come and arrest him. The extensiveness of the Swedish police records actually allowed Wikan to write her book about Fadime.
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Then there are the medical institutions, from hospitals to

morgues. Rana Husseinis acknowledgments include special
mention of the pathologists at the Jordanian National Institute
of Forensic Medicine. Forensic medical teams determine cause of
death, conduct autopsies, and even routinely administer virginity
tests. Nearly every reported incident concludes with a finding
about the virginity of the victim, the result of an invasive medical
practice that even nineteenth-century court records in Egypt document as part of the institutionalization of modern medicine.26
There are the prisons that house remorseful or stoic killers.
Those in Jordan, Pakistan, and Afghanistan also house women
who are kept there for their protection, whether they are the
victims of rape, pregnant out of wedlock, or otherwise in danger.
It was such women who provided much of the interview material for the 2004 Human Rights Watch report on honor crimes
in Jordan. Associated with the prisons are the judicial and legal
systems with their laws, judges, trials, and records, and the political systems that ratify international conventions or entertain
debates about relevant articles from legal codes.
It turns out that honor crimes, whether over there or in
our midst, are almost always implicated in the social institutions of policing, surveillance, and intervention. As research by
Palestinian women activists and scholars has shown, for example, it is the failure of those very institutions to respond properly
to womens pleaswhether because of racism or sexismthat is
responsible for the victimization of so many women. Proposed
legislation that promises to punish men for killing women in the
name of honor does little to help the women victims, for whom
it comes too late. Shalhoub-Kevorkian and Daher-Nashif document how Palestinian women in danger regularly face hostile Israeli police who humiliate them, hand them back to elders who
are favored collaborators, and fail to follow up on threats or the
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willingness of family members to testify against murderers.27 A

discriminatory legal system compounds the problems for women
and girls.
Moreover, honor crimes are taken up in national and international political debates and activities, with the media usually
fanning the flames. Concrete examples of how honor crimes are
implicated in political institutions appear in human rights reports, even when these reports ignore it by introducing matters
in clichd ways. The Human Rights Watchs report on Palestine
that I discuss in Chapter 5 repeats Amnesty Internationals earlier diagnosis almost word for word: These murders are the
most tragic consequence and graphic illustration of deeply embedded, society-wide gender discrimination.28 Yet when the report comes to discuss the case of a sixteen-year-old Ramallah
girl, it notes: The Palestinian police were held by Israeli soldiers
for hours at an Israeli military checkpoint between the city of
Ramallah and the village of Abu Qash, where the family lived.
The staff of the Womens Center for Legal Aid and Counseling
said they were not able to reach her house in time to try to save
her life due to movement restrictions between Jerusalem and the
West Bank. Here, we see honor crimes caught within checkpoints, curfews, the Israeli occupation, and womens nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), at a minimum.
And finally there is the medianewspapers, magazines, television, film, and now websites through which honor crimes are
filtered, whether in exposs or cyber campaigns. Fadime turned
to the press for protection and then was hounded by it. Local,
national, and international mediahonor crimes are everywhere,
in the Jordan Times, Sydney Morning Herald, and Der Spiegel;
on CNN, the BBC, and The OReilly Factor on FOX News.
The role media play cannot be underestimated. An example
from Germany shows how this works. Katherine Ewing, an
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anthropologist who wrote a book called Stolen Honor, traces

how a key incident in Berlin gradually came to be classified as an
honor crime and how, in its wake, a set of previous murders of
women was reclassified, inducing a national panic about the crisis of the barbaric immigrants within the national fold, a panic
that she considers the eruption of a national fantasy.29 In early
February 2005, Hatun Src, a young woman of Turkish background, was murdered in Berlin, allegedly by her brother(s).
Journalists at first called the shooting a head scarf killing (since
she wasnt wearing one), playing on fears about Islamism. Two
weeks into the media frenzy, they had confidently come to call
this the sixth honor killing in Berlin in the previous five months.
Ewing argues that this spate of honor killings in Berlin was not
likely even a statistical anomaly, but an artifact of classification.
A range of murders under various circumstances retrospectively
came to be labeled honor killings.30 Most involved husbands
killing wives, which does not fit the definition.
A young, single mother estranged from her family, living a
more German life, complete with dancing at clubs, barhopping, and boyfriends, Srcs story could easily become about
honor. Confusing details like hints that she had a diverse sexual
life or that she might have been the victim of incest dropped
quickly out of the news. However, Ewing urges us to focus on the
institutional and historical context in which she was murdered
and became a symbol. In the neighboring Netherlands, the filmmaker Theo van Gogh had just been killed by a Moroccan immigrant for his role in producing Submission, Ayaan Hirsi Alis
anti-Muslim hard core Orientalist film that I discuss in Chapter 3. Although the Islamic Council condemned German-Turkish
youth for self-administered justice and deplored cultural traditions, the Right in Germany took advantage of this incident to
tar the Muslim communityand multiculturalism.
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The context was one, Ewing argues, in which immigrants could

serve as a focal point for the countrys ills and a threat to the
democratic principles that are the foundation of the German
state.31 In contrast, people who knew the social scene well attributed the murder to the gender politics of boys in gangs created in response to neo-Nazi racism and post-9/11 anti-Islamic
sentiment. Honor crimes by then had become a signifier for both
the machismo and the cultural authenticity of youths of Turkish
origin. They had also come to stand in for Germans fears of an
untamed parallel society in their midst. Turkish womens rights
activists, for their part, seized on Srcs murder to campaign
against honor crimes. In the end, this frenzy incited a good deal
of speculation on Srcs lifestyle, at the center of which again
were the erotics of sexual freedom and the fetish of personal
choice.
In Europe, honor crimes are also closely connected to border
control and what Miriam Ticktin, the anthropologist whose
work on illegal immigrants and humanitarianism in France I
quote in Chapter 3, calls the policing of immigration and immigrants. These are matters of national and international administration, not culture.32 Nacira Gunif-Souilamas, a French scholar
who has written about the stigmatization of North African immigrant men for their sexual deviance, links this phenomenon
to efforts to mask the new forms of social and economic domination experienced by working-class young people of non-European
origin and to the precarious lives into which they are being
forced, as sons of the formerly colonized.33 In the United Kingdom, the major study of honor crimes was conducted by the Centre for Social Cohesion, a conservative think tank devoted to the
study of religious (Islamic) extremism. Asylum cases, the extension of welfare benefits, and most interestingly, the issue of visas
(an issue we saw lurking in Leilas memoir of forced marriage;
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honor crimes are often said to be committed because girls refuse

marriages that are related to acquiring visas for their spouses)
also confirm how embedded honor crimes are in European immigration politics.
Jacqueline Rose provides more support for these arguments
with her eloquent decoding of the role of obsessive discussions
of the honor crime in the European politics of immigration, her
criticism of its branding as archaic or tribal when it is so thoroughly connected to modernity and nationalism, and her praise
for those who insist that we must refuse to generalize but instead
enter the complexity of lives.34 In a comprehensive comparative
study of the relationship between media and political debates
on honour-related violence in Britain, Germany, Canada, and
the Netherlands, Anna Korteweg and Gke Yurdakul too have
shown how unhelpful the common stigmatizing discourses are.
They insist that policy must be built on a recognition of the way
that such violence is actually shaped by immigration experiences.
They show that targeting this form of violence will be more effective if it is framed as a variant of domestic violence. They recommend that womens groups be made full partners and the emphasis be shifted toward empowering women as citizens rather
than calling for restrictions on immigration.35
In addition to nation-states worried about immigrants, honor
crimes involve international organizations, UN bodies, donor
communities, and local grassroots NGOs. If you look at them
closely, in fact, you see that honor crimes do not occur outside of
these modern state institutions or those of the international community. Honor crimes cannot be analyzed as if they were freefloating or rooted in ancient codes and tradition-bound cultures.
The honor crime gives legitimacy and resilience not just to all the
mechanisms of regulation, surveillance, and mass mediation intrinsic to modern state power but also to the specific forms and
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forums of contemporary transnational governance, whether

neoliberal economic institutions or humanitarian intervention of
the feminist or military sort.
The Winds of Change

This brings us to the fourth problem with the way the category
of the honor crime works. Blaming culture means not just flattening cultures, stripping moral systems of their complexity, and
hiding the most modern political and social interventions that
no community escapes; it means erasing history. In all the discussion of honor crimes, where is the recognition of the dynamic
historical transformations that are affecting women, families,
and everyday life in all communities, including those associated
with honor killings?
A constant refrain in the alarmist literature on the honor crime
is that it is on the increase, even if virtually every article or book
published in the past decade cites the inexplicably unchanging
figure attributed vaguely to the UN of 5,000 honor killings per
year, worldwide. Even Dalias mother, in the fictional Honor Lost,
seems to have known the figure. There is, of course, no proof of
this, since we have no reliable evidence of prevalence in the past
and there are, as everyone concerned has noted, formidable
problems of reporting and classification in the present. It would
not be surprising, however, to find that familial violence against
women might indeed be increasing in some social contexts. The
question is where one would look for explanations.
Studies from Europe, Turkey, and Palestine/Israel have noted
some relevant factors. They have described the retrenchment of
family under insecure conditions among Kurds; reactions to racism in Britain, Germany, and France; and deliberate policies of
strengthening traditional patriarchal authority among Palestinians in Israel. In many settings, we see contact with alternative
137
moral systems and competing forms of authority; differential

incorporation into the state and its institutions, including schools
and labor markets; and clashing forms of control, just to mention
a few of the circumstances that might affect family violence.
Even more crucial to observe is the way the past three decades
have brought not just changes in state institutions, migration patterns, ethnic politics, and the spread of global media, but piety
movements across the Muslim world. Alongside the Islamic revival come arguments for the Islamization of law and society
that are taking different forms. How is this trend of more selfconscious affiliation with what is presented as correct and complete Islamic practice playing out in the sphere of gender? What
effects is the Islamic revival having on womens rights or gender
violence? The answers, not surprisingly, are complicated. These effects vary tremendously across countries and communities. Surely,
such effects should be part of any discussion of honor crimes. But
they rarely are.
A look across the Muslim world shows that the winds of
change that are moving non-elite womenand many elite
womenin Egypt, Lebanon, Pakistan, Malaysia, and even Norma
Khouris Jordan are not the ones Khouri celebrated in her imaginary friend Dalia, which took her to restaurants in four-star hotels, dance clubs, or to liberated sexuality. Instead, these winds
are moving them toward what they perceive as a higher Muslim
morality. Sexual desires outside of marriage are no less problematic for Islamic piety and Islamic legal codes than for traditional
moral codes based on family honor. Some Bedouin women in
Egypt contrast new restrictions imposed on them by an Islamist
turn by young men to an older set of freedoms they felt their tribal
ways gave them, even while they are endorsing piety.
This channeling of sexuality through religious language and
law is leading to three trends in gender politics, at least in the
138
regions I know. First, young pious women and men want to live
up to the morality of the religious code and this guides them
away from a celebration of liberal freedom from sexual restrictions. Many women say they want to be close to God, with all
the moral entailments from shyness to sexual propriety and a
sort of formidable untouchability that this sometimes involves.36
Across the Muslim world now, women who mark their piety by
wearing the new Islamic dress, or the hijab, have gained autonomy from family and the domestic sphere. Their self-monitoring
is at least as powerful a form of conformity to moral standards
regarding sexual freedom as that of the kinds of girls I knew
among the Awlad Ali Bedouin in the 1980s, for whom it had been
a matter of family standing. Women and men must figure out
how to negotiate their relations given these terms. They are doing so in all sorts of creative ways. Not insulated from pop music, television, coeducational institutions, and leisure activities
and consumption, they have made use of institutions like temporary or urfi (secret) marriages. They also struggle with themselves
and society.37 Many attribute womens embrace of the hijab as a
public assertion of morality, not just religiosity, for those who
are massively present now in schools, the workforce, and public
space.38
Second, with the Islamization of states and legal systems in
the last quarter of the twentieth century in countries like Pakistan and Iran, radically new modes of regulation and enforcement of moral standards tied to sexuality, new vocabularies and
conceptions, and new forms of authority (and resistance) have
developed. Some incidents have even been described as statesponsored honor crimes. This means that morality is being given
religious grounding and is mediated through channels that
claim the authority of Islam. The voluntary embraces of morality described earlier are taking place alongside more official
139
interventions in moral discourses, including their manipulation.

A new language is coming into play: one of sin and zina (the crime
of sex outside marriage). This dominates state efforts at Islamization in places like Iran and Pakistan, as well as the lively internal
legal and social challenges to such efforts wherever they are being
imposed.
Third, a consequence of this situation is that tensions have
emerged between Islamic religious institutions and community
regulation. In recent years, major religious leaders in Syria, Lebanon, and elsewhere have issued legal opinions (fatwas) condemning honor crimes as unlawful. As Lynn Welchman, a legal
scholar based in London, has shown in her analysis of the sudden public intervention that the Islamic Chief Justice of the Palestinian Authority made in 2005 on the subject of murder in
defense of honor, Islam and Islamic law (the Sharia) are coming
to be invoked more and more against honor crimes. This has
new jurisprudential, legislative, and social consequences that have
yet to unfold.
At the same time, the honor crime (and women) have become
pawns in political battles. In Jordan, we have good documentation on how the honor crime was manipulated by politicians
from the Islamic Party in their resistance to the efforts of feminist campaigners backed by the Jordanian royal family to reform
penal law. These populist Islamist politicians stymied the efforts
by linking these reforms to a Western plot to undermine Jordanian society and morality. This is ironic given that the laws on
which the honor defense relies came into Jordanian law from the
Napoleonic Code, Ottoman law, and British common law.39
These changing responses to sexuality and honor signal important transformations not just in the discourses but also in the
institutions through which the honor crime now travels. Any diagnosis of gender violence that attributes it to culturebackward,
140
traditional, or barbaricdistracts us from these kinds of historical dynamics that are essential to an analysis of violence and to
responsible efforts to mobilize against it. It is time to stop talking about deep-seated cultural beliefs, ancient codes from the
desert, and efforts to understand how people in certain alien
cultures could want to kill their daughters. Even feminists from
the Muslim world need to be more careful. Although they tend
to be vigilant about racism and wary of the dangers of civilizational discourse, they sometimes let their fears of Islamic fundamentalism distort their understandings. The Women Living under Muslim Laws (WLUML) campaign called Stop Stoning and
Killing Women! that I discuss in Chapter 5 conflates a bewildering range of practices and puts into service the fascination
with horror and sex that attach to the timeless honor crime for
their antifundamentalist agenda.
Dilemmas for Concerned Activists

The seductive power of the honor crime, with its unique mix of
sexual titillation and moral horror and its capacity to subsume
and consume diverse acts, has allowed it to emerge as a robust
category that does significant political and cultural work. My
intention in challenging the usefulness and accuracy of the category is not to defend or excuse the violence it tries to name; nor
do I wish to undermine the value of much of the reparative work
carried out in its name. Instead, I have sought first to redirect our
attention to the historical conditions and precise political configurations that lead certain figurations of suffering to become
objects of earnest and widespread concern while so many others
go unremarked or unlabeled. Second, I wanted to trace the varied impacts of this structured concern, nowadays framed in the
hegemonic language of our times as violations of womens rights.
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I would not want to say, as some might, that familial violence

is not a serious problem, pointing out, for example, that more
women die in traffic accidents. I am not even saying that we
should look at how many (more) women fall victim to structural
and military violence, whether through the malnourishment of
poverty or the burning flesh of aerial bombardment. There is no
excuse for brushing under the rug the harms of interpersonal
violence and ignoring its gendered or sexed forms. It is the
achievement of feminism to have made violence against women
and sexual violence public moral and legal issues, not hidden or
taken-for-granted matters of private life.
However, it is a problem when we consistently fail to compare murder and assault rates by intimates between societies in
which women are allegedly victims of honor crimes and those in
which honor is not invoked as a motive, justification, or legal
excuse. The specifics are important, and as an anthropologist, I
am committed to going deeply into different systems of gender,
power, and morality. But as part of the attention to specifics, we
also need to look systematically at all the political and legal institutions through which everyday life, including violence, proceeds
in various places.
My main concern has been with the determinants of the cultural construction of the honor crime and the effects of its deployment.40 We have seen the articulating domains in which the
category works. We have examined the work of the honor crime
in distinct projects and scales of power and have begun to untangle its effects in different spheres and locales. These have included policing and exclusions of immigrants; the disciplinary
penetration of rural and urban subaltern communities by state
and social service organizations; particular attempts at domination by national, class, or ethnic groups; defenses of liberalism
142
that fuel a divisive separation of West and non-West; attraction

of funding for feminist projects and research; international militarism; and new forms of transnational governance carried out
in the name of rights or humanitarianism.
Looking ahead, there are signs that other cultural categories
might be moving into the limelight. We should watch out for
these, and be equally wary. Polygamy is a likely candidate for a
new campaign, following along the lines of forced marriage,
that theme of so much pulp nonfiction and political work by
governance feminists.41 Such categories will draw strength from
new political-cultural configurations that include religious debates about gay marriage, controversies about competing legal
systems and religious arbitration in Europe, the emergence of a
number of international Islamic feminist reform organizations,
the dynamics of Islamist identity politics, and the justification of
continuing military intervention in Muslim lands in the name
of introducing rule of law. These two figurations of womens
sufferingpolygamy and forced marriageare both redolent of
sex (harems and rape). They work slightly differently from the
honor crime and have different political and social effects. Dealing with real abuses and womens suffering in many cases, they
also will provide new opportunities for rights work, scholarship,
and intervention. They will present feminists and human rights
advocates with ethical and political conundrums, as has the honor
crime.
CHAPTER
The Social Life of

Muslim Womens Rights
Fayruz had some big news to

share. When I arrived in the village after a years absence, I went
to visit her. She had been in the midst of a cancer scare the last
time wed seen each other. They had removed a tumor that doctors assured her was benign. She told me about the pain she had
suffered and the long nights when she wept thinking about what
would happen to her children if she died. She was now back to
her bold, beautiful self, full of energy and determination.
Fayruz wanted to show me something. We set off on foot, her
long, flowing dress complemented by the black head covering all
women in the village wear. She had her daughter and her new
daughter-in-law in tow. Down some rutted dirt roads, we found
ourselves in the midst of the open agricultural land that surrounded
the village. She proudly pointed to a monstrous three-story house
under construction in the midst of the fields of wheat. Fayruz
showed me around, struggling up the great spiral staircase, stepping over the construction rubble. Then she took me to see the
side door, which someone had blocked up with mud. She explained that her younger brother had gone to war with her.
144
Her father had been the largest landowner in this village and
an intriguing figure of whom I had been fond. Since he had passed
away a couple of years earlier, she and her sisters had been fighting for their share of the inheritance. They had worked through
the local village head and had been to court. She paid fine after
fine because her brother reported her for illegally building on
agricultural land, for putting in electricity, and then for getting
piped water. He still refused to give her the few feet she needed
for an easement to this side entrance. It would have had to be
taken from a field he owned.
As we stood on the roof, surveying the lovely fields that abutted the house while she let her chickens out of their coop to get
some sunshine, she told me about the conflict. By Islamic inheritance law, she and her three sisters were entitled to half of the
land. The other half should be split between the two brothers. As
she put it, the four sisters are like two men. She was furious that
her brother didnt want to give them their share. He was making
life difficult for her. He had finally agreed to give her the few feet
she wantedbut only in exchange for an acre of the fields she
had inherited somewhere else.
I was sad to see this family feud. This brother of hers had
been a genial soccer player in his youth, content to let his father
manage the estate, reluctant to take on responsibility. He was the
baby of the family, and she had always been the loving older
sister. Now he wouldnt even talk to her, she said, except to curse
her. Her older brother would greet her politely if he bumped into
her on the road. He would call her daughter of my father,
but he no longer invited her to the family home. Yet Fayruz was
defiant. She accused her brothers of being greedy. Why shouldnt
I get it? In this place, the men always try to keep the land.
She confided that she wanted something of her own. She
pointed to her brother-in-law, whose wife had built a house on
THE SOCIAL LIFE OF MUSLIM WOMENS RIGHTS
145
some land she got from her parents. They had always been competitive. Fayruz explained, This house is for me. For my sons. She
explained that the main house (where she lives with her husband)
is her husbands family home. She doesnt have any rights in it.
Is this an example of the war on women for which popular
writers seek to enlist us? Fayruz actually accused her brother of
making war on her. But a moments reflection leads us to realize
that this is not a simple struggle against Muslim patriarchy. And
what about the problem of Muslim womens rights that so exercises those who are leading the moral crusade against Islam
and Muslim culture? The rights Fayruz is fighting for are hers
through Islamic inheritance law. The community elders and the
state courts both uphold them. Her brother, even though he has
become more religious than in his soccer-playing days, ignores
them. The violations that she is being fined for involve state law,
which forbids building on agricultural land; this law is not gendered. And the reason she is having some success is not just because of her persistence but because other men are supporting
her. Her husband is himself a wealthy merchant. From his complaints about the exorbitant cost of the construction, I got the
impression that he was bankrolling the building project. Fayruz
defends her fight for her inheritance rights on the basis that she
wants something for herself and her sons. But, of course, these
are her husbands sons too. Each has a floor of the house. Now
Fayruzs children will inherit from both sides of the family.
I tell this story about Fayruz to remind us that Muslim womens rights are pursued in particular places through a variety of
institutions and instruments, including state and religious law.
We need to recognize that Muslim womens rightssomething to
fight for, debate, consider historically, see cross-culturally, make
happen, organize around, fund, and examine in actionhave
very active social lives in our contemporary world.
146
The new common sense about global womens rights and saving Muslim women in particular is built on a variety of texts
that inform the Western imagination of womens plights in the
Muslim world. These range from United Nations (UN) documents and pulp nonfiction to political speeches about nail
polish in Afghanistan. But as the concept of Muslim womens
rights circulates across continentstraveling in and out of airport bookstores, classrooms, and government policy offices; UN
forums in New York and Geneva, and local womens organizations in Pakistan and Malaysia; television soap operas in Syria
and Egypt; model marriage contracts developed in Morocco and
Algeria; and mosque study groups in North Americawe are
confronted with the question of how to make sense of its travels
and its translations across these forms and forums. Muslim womens rights produce everything from websites and battered women
shelters to inheritance disputes in rural villages.
Given this proliferation of sites and forms, how should we
frame the question of rights? If we do not presume that there are
such things as rights to be found and measured on a scale of 1 to
10 using some kind of universal standard, and ask questions on
that basis about whether Muslim women do or dont have rights,
have enough rights or too few, we may better understand the international and national politics of rights. I would like to set
aside the standard questions of whether Muslim women do or
do not want rights, gain or lose more rights through secular versus Islamic law, or need advocates to deliver them their rights.
Instead, I want to track Muslim womens rights into the multiple
social worlds in which they operate. Who uses the concept and
how? How is this changing?
What can we learn by stepping back from the usual terms of
debate and the common sense that Muslim women are abused
and have no (or precious few) rights and instead follow Muslim
147
womens rights as they travel through various worlds and projects? We have seen how this concept circulates through debates
and documents in the United States and Europe, including in legislation against honor crimes and outcries about forced marriage. But we havent yet considered how the concept organizes
womens activism on the ground. We havent looked at how it
mediates the lives of women like Fayruz or Amal or Zaynab in
various places in the Muslim world. Turning to the many institutions organized around rights, we can ask: What work do the
practices organized in the name of Muslim womens rights do in
various places, and for various women?
It might sound odd to describe rights as having a social life.
I use this term to suggest that Muslim womens rights are to
befound only in their social play. By this, I mean not just that
rights circulate in social interactions or get transplanted and
appropriated in various local settings but also that the concept
takes different forms as it moves through social networks and
technical instruments. The kinds of instruments that are crucial
here might be anything from television soap operas to focus
groups to beadwork cooperatives to gender awareness training
sessions.1
I use the term Muslim womens rights not because there is
something that unites all Muslim women or makes their lives
and access to rights unique, but because, as I said from the outset, the notion that there is such a thing and the work and debates
framed in terms of this concept have become commonsensical. I
could have picked any number of locations where organizations
work for womens rights or where women are fighting for their
rights. I focus on Egypt and Palestine here because these are regions in which I have studied feminist activism.2
148
Egypt: In Shifting Fields

Egypt is a good place to examine the social life of womens
rights. Its rich history of womens activism has been well documented and it boasts a very significant number of educated
women involved in organizations that promote womens rights
and offer women services. Many of these organizations are part
of what might be thought of as the development industry, with
womens empowerment as a goal. Womens rights (not framed,
for the most part, as Muslim womens rights for good political
reasons, given the history of nationalism and the mixed Coptic
and Muslim population) have had an especially long and busy
social life there. The formation of the Egyptian Feminist Union
in the 1920s is one indication. The leaders of this organization
went to international conventions and interacted with suffragettes and other feminists, whether from France, the United States,
or India. Womens rights had been debated even earlier in Egypt,
in the context of the colonial feminism I describe in Chapter 1
when talking about Afghanistan. The most significant early moment was when the modernizing nationalist Qasim Amin published an influential book in 1899 called The Liberation of Women.
This book was read all over the Arab world and beyond.3
After the critical period of what scholars call state feminism
under Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1950s and 1960s, when independent womens organizations were shut down but sweeping
legislation was put in place guaranteeing women education, jobs,
labor rights, maternity leave, and various forms of state welfare,
a new phase began under President Sadat and continued under
Hosni Mubarak, who was deposed dramatically in 2011.4 Neoliberal economic reform and the opening to the United States
starting in the 1970s led to the retraction of important protective legislation. This paved the way for various civil society
149
organizationsfrom the Islamists to women activists, many

working through the paradigm and projects of developmentto
play a more active part in society while picking up some of the
pieces of social welfare now abandoned by the privatizing state
under structural adjustment.5
A wave of new womens nongovernmental organizations
(NGOs) were formed in the 1980s and 1990s, enhanced by the
full reentry of international foundations such as the Ford Foundation, the Population Council, and the United Nations International Childrens Emergency Fund (UNICEF), and massive aid
from European governments and the United States as part of the
dividend from Egypts peace with Israel. The traffic in womens
rights was intensified with Egypts participation in international
conferences in the mid-1990s, most notably hosting the International Conference on Population and Development and sending
delegates to the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing.6
Significant international funds ensured that womens rights
and service organizations became a growth industry. During the
Mubarak period, there were tens of thousands of NGOs operating in Egypt, despite dire restrictions on civil society organizations and periodic government crackdowns. Womens NGOs reflected perfectly the transformation of the political and economic
terrain in Egypt and confirmed how critical such factors as transnational political organizing, economic exchange, class relations,
and national historical shifts have been to the social life of womens rights.7
A study of women activists in the 1990s had already pointed
out the link between womens organizations and the wider context. Nadje Al-Ali, an anthropologist now based in Britain, suggested that the debates and conflicts among these womens organizations were a mirror of Egyptian political culture.8 Debates
about foreign funding were fierce as activists sought political
150
independence and worried about American influence. This was

true even though a later study based on a survey of sixty Egyptian NGOs showed that local organizations tried hard to get
foreign funding even while complaining about the ways this
funding constrained their choice of projects and forced local organizations to tailor their objectives to suit the priorities of
these agencies.9
The political-economic context affected womens rights most
forcefully by setting down the channels through which they operated and setting up the technologies that mediated them. The
three most significant shifts in the social life of rights in Egypt in
the decade before the revolution were (1) their takeover by the
government, (2) their entanglement with Islamic institutions and
religious discourse, and (3) their commercialization or corporatization. Beginning in the 1990s, not only did government organizations like the National Council for Women or foreign NGOs
come to mediate womens rights differently, but the politics, projects, and self-presentations of groups working for womens rights
shifted to reflect the transnational appeal of human rights and to
respond to the local situation in which religiosity has gained tremendous legitimacy.
The dramatic uprisings in Egypt in 2011 that toppled the regime reconfigured the political landscape, with womens rights
issues attracting media attention and mobilizing many groups in
relation to the elections and the new constitution. It is too early
to tell how the electoral victory of the Muslim Brotherhood in
2012 will affect the social life of womens rights in Egypt over the
next decade.10 What is certain is that the issues have electrified
the international sphere and media, and sparked local debate
from the first moments of the demonstration in Tahrir Square.11
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The Governmentalization of Rights

The way womens rights had been taken over by governmental
organizations in the decade before the uprisings can best be seen
in the establishment in 2000 of the National Council for Women
(NCW) by presidential decree. As one observer noted, under
the auspices of Suzanne Mubarak, wife of the [then] Egyptian
president, the Council was set up to advise the presidency and the
government on the effect of public policies on women.12 Some of
the leaders of the NCW were respected individualslike the leaders of its predecessor, the National Council for Childhood and
Motherhood (set up by Suzanne Mubarak in 1988)even though
they worked with this governmental organization, something
that often detracted from trust and respect, given the reputation
of the regime. Yet there was initial suspicion by many in the
NGO world just after the NCWs formation.
Rather than judging the NCW, let us ask what role it played
in the field of womens rights in Egypt. The NCW tried to be inclusive, inviting the participation of many women previously
active in womens issues in Egypt. They were invited as individuals, not as representatives of their organizations. This weakened
the NGOs.13 The NCW, run by the wife of the president, not
surprisingly received significant funding from the Egyptian government, the United Nations Development Program, and many
foreign sources including the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Many of the smaller, more radical
feminist NGOs would not accept this kind of funding. The significant number of projects conducted under its auspices suggests that
the NCW became the major institution through which womens
rights gained both visibility and practical existence in Egypt.
The NCW channeled funds along particular social and political lines. The funds for womens rights that the NCW could make
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use of were not negligible: the estimated cost to the UN system

for one project outlined in the 2006 United Nations Development
Assistance Framework was to have been $340 million over the five
years, which did not include the amount to be contributed by the
World Bank.14 In taking a lions share of development assistance
available for womens projects, the NCW could determine who
could be active in the business of promoting womens rights.15
State organizations involvement in defining and producing
womens rights was not the only change in the social field of
Muslim womens rights in Egypt in that period. There was a
decided shift in the kinds of projects and languages that defined
work on behalf of women in Egypt due to the internationalization of womens rights in the NGO world. In a sense, the NGOs
themselves are part of what Janet Halley and her colleagues have
called governance feminism, in which elites speak for women
and use their gender expertise in influential institutions.16 Human rights language came to dominate womens rights advocacy
in Egypt.
International support for womens rights organizations also
merged the interests of educated professional women in Egypt
with the international hyperconcern about Middle Eastern and
Muslim womens rights discussed in previous chapters. This led
to the proliferation of organizations and projects and the sort
of transnational governance structures found in many countries of
the global South. This is well illustrated by the Association for the
Development and Enhancement of Women (ADEW), an organization founded in 1987 to provide microcredit to women heads
of household.17 With a hugely impressive list of international
donors, ADEW eventually came to boast literacy programs,
health services, legal awareness seminars, and a shelter. It operated from fifteen offices in five different areas of Egypt with a
staff of 200.18
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Accommodating Islamic Institutions and

Religious Discourse
A second characteristic of the social life of womens rights in
Egypt in the past decade was the new accommodation with religious institutions and ideology. Although most of those involved
in the official world of womens rights work in Egypt, like elsewhere, believed that womens rights are under threat by rising
conservative Islamist elements (and are now wondering how to
respond to leadership by the Muslim Brotherhood), there had
been various ways to respond, especially in a world of close social and personal ties.
The more explicit engagement with Islam could be seen clearly
in the NGO world, as well as in governmental organizations.
The Center for Egyptian Womens Legal Assistance (CEWLA)
offers a good case for analysis. It was founded in 1995, and is
located in a poor and crowded informal neighborhood in Cairo.
It had been set up there to help just this sort of population; even
after it was better funded, it refused to leave the area because of
its commitment to serving the community. CEWLA had started
small, with just a couple of rooms and file boxes for furniture.19
Headed by a female attorney, Azza Sleiman, many of the staff
are also women lawyers. They are graduates of the Egyptian universities where women constitute more than half the students, as
they do in higher-education institutions in most countries of the
Arab world. Given financial support initially by such organizations as the Canadian International Development Agency and
Dutch Oxfam, and later by many others including the Now or
Never Fund of the Global Fund for Women, the Ford Foundation, and the Sawiris Foundation,20 CEWLA expanded its mission from legal aid to raising awareness about violence and childrens rights, lobbying at the national level, conducting studies
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and publishing research, and providing direct services including

adult literacy education, democracy training for children, and
sexual and reproductive health education for teenagers.
CEWLAs initiative in 2008 took the organization in a relatively new direction that represented a shift in the social life and
institutional mediations of Muslim womens rights. The particular dynamics were Egyptian but, as I argue in Chapter 6, what
CEWLA was funded to do reflected a global trend. The trend has
been toward highlighting the religious identities of women, even
though the NGOs are not faith-based or linked to a particular
religious organization.21
CEWLA was dedicated to demonstrating the compatibility of
the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and Sharia, or, more correctly,
Islamic family law. CEWLA took up this project in response to
both the larger cultural-political contextin which religiosity has
been increasingly respectedand the concerns brought to them
by the ordinary poor women, men, and youths they serve. Seham
Ali, the lawyer who spoke to me about CEWLA, explained that
people in Egypt tend to be suspicious of anything that comes from
the West. Some have accused CEDAW of seeking to destroy the
family and undermine religion. This new project was intended to
counter that ignorance. For this, CEWLA was going to route itself through new institutional networks, enlisting experts in Islamic law, and particularly a respected and noncontroversial
professor of Islamic philosophy at Al-Azhar University, the great
religious establishment in Egypt.22
CEWLA was not the only NGO to be dealing with Al-Azhar.
In the UN Development Assistance Framework for Egypt 2007
2011, Al-Azhar is listed as a partner of the National Council for
Women and several ministries, including that of Religious
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Endowments, in the pursuit of two goals: changing perceptions

of womens rights and combating gender violence.23
Commercializing Rights
In one of the more dramatic shifts since around 2000 and symptomatic of a tilt toward a neoliberal model for civil society, Dr.
Iman Bibars, the feminist cofounder of ADEW, became the coordinator of the Middle East North Africa fellows program of
Ashoka. Ashoka describes itself as the global association of the
worlds leading social entrepreneurs. In a television interview,
Bibars explained, We are the venture capitalists of the social
sector. Ashoka accepts no government funding, but instead
looks for partnerships between corporations and foundations.24
The business language of Ashokas creed is on its website: We
believe that the growth of a global citizen sector begins with
the work of individual social entrepreneurs. These entrepreneurs drive the sector forward, responding to new challenges
and changing needs. They are rooted in local communities but
think and act globally. They are the ultimate role models and
the pillars of Ashokas [trademarked] vision of Everyone a
Changemaker.25
This is the third path that was being taken in the evolving social life of Muslim womens rights in Egypt, at least before the
revolution. Womens rights talk began to operate in a commercial
world. The dramatic change could be seen most clearly in the work
of the Egyptian Center for Womens Rights (ECWR), founded in
1996, only a year after CEWLA. The ECWRs website announces
its liberal ideology: CWRs work is based on the belief that womens rights are an integral part of human rights and are key to any
substantive progress towards building a democratic culture and
development in Egypt and the Middle East region.26 But the
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ECWR makes a novel appealto socially responsible corporate

sponsorship.
One of the ECWRs high-profile campaigns was against sexual harassment on the streets.27 Without denying that harassment of women occurs on the streets of Cairo and other cities, I
want to draw attention to one aspect of their campaign that is
crucial for thinking about the social life of rights. The ECWR
mobilized innovative technologies for this depoliticizing issue
that has no structural analysis of gender inequality and no target
other than men with bad cultural attitudes. One attempt to raise
money consisted in a proposal to develop a system for mapping
harassment through Short Message Service (SMS) text messages.
The proposal was submitted for the 2008 USAID Development
2.0 Challenge through NetSquared; the winner was to be determined by a jury after a popular vote narrowed the contestants
down to fifteen finalists ( la Star Academy and American Idol,
which are both popular TV genres in the Arab world now).28
The ECWR thanked its corporate volunteersNile and Nugoom FM, Masrawy.com, Filbalad.com, Egyptsoft.org, Goethe
Institute, and Netsmart Egyptfor having given a life and professionalism to the campaign that was unmatched in NGO work
in Egypt. The bid for mobile phone technology development,
corporate cooperation, and popular voting fit perfectly in contemporary Cairo, where shopping malls, satellite television, ads
for vying cell phone companies, and consumerism had come to
dominate the landscape.29
This campaign also marked the transplantation or implantation
in Egypt of the transnational trend to focus on violence against
women, supported through various UN organizations, particularly
the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM)
and the CEDAW Commission.30 It is interesting to observe how
much fund-raising and career building takes place around this
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issue that circulates well beyond the halls of the UN and CEDAW
hearings. The One in Three Women Global Campaign to raise
awareness about violence against women, for example, encourages you to buy their cards, charms, and dog tags;31 Peacekeeper
Cause-metics asks you to support womens causes by purchasing
their lipstick and nail polish.32 Peacekeeper Cause-metics gives a
fraction of its proceeds to fight honor crimes and other forms
of cultural violence against women associated with the Muslim
world. Ayaan Hirsi Alis foundation is only the most recent to
pick up this commercialization of womens rights, inviting us to
get our own high-quality Honour tote bag, for a donation.
Palestine: Inescapable Politics

Thinking about violence against women takes us to another case
and space of rights work. The Global Campaign to Stop Killing
and Stoning Women is a global project orchestrated in the name
of Muslim womens rights. Launched in 2007, it is coordinated
by the network Women Living under Muslim Laws (WLUML),
founded on a shoestring in 1984 by the antifundamentalist French
Algerian feminist Marieme Hlie-Lucas.33 The WLUML has grown
to be a major international player in defending Muslim womens
rights, producing alerts, research, and conferences cast in terms of
endangered or abused Muslim women.34
The campaign isolates, targets, and publicizes culturally specific
forms of violence against women: violations of Muslim womens
rights by Muslim regimes, Muslim fundamentalists, and local
(Muslim) families. In its press announcement, the new campaign
justified itself by the need to address the intensifying trend of
cultural and religious legitimization of lethal violence against
women.35 Individual cases of stoning or threatened stoning, whipping, and honor crimes merge together on the campaign website as
if they were instances of the same phenomenon, despite radical
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differences among individual cases, countries of origin, reliability

of information, and legitimacy in the eyes of Muslim thinkers, state
legal systems, and ordinary people.
Violence against women is a serious problem worldwide. But
to begin to see what is peculiar about its deployment in the service
of work on Muslim womens rights, I have to draw attention to
the context in which this campaign is being mounted. First, we
cant ignore the fact that this campaign emerged in the midst of
a dense terrain of similar sensationalizing projects to save Muslim women from their cultures, whether imagined as backward
rural cultures by educated youths, as I show in Chapter 4 for
honor crimes, or as the result of an oppressive Islamic law or
religion, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, right-wing Americans and Europeans, and even other feminists, argue as part of the new common sense.36
The second aspect of the context is that the campaign was
launched in a period of great violence against (Muslim) women
inflicted in war. Military conflict still gripped Afghanistan and
Iraq. Soon after the campaign was launched, just before Christmas, the Israeli Defense Forces attacked Gaza. In twenty-three
days, more than 1,300 Palestinians were killedburied alive in
houses bombed by F16s, shot at close range in their beds, machinegunned from the sea, shelled by tanks using flechettes, and burned
by white phosphorus, which acts like napalm.37 How many were
women? I asked myself then: Where was the global feminist
campaign against killing or hurting such significant numbers of
Muslim women? Women and civilians in conflict zones suffer and
die in great numbers because of the violence.38
Palestinian women activists have had to negotiate this situation for years, balancing their commitment to womens rights, as
well as contact with feminists from other countries and regions,
with an awareness of the specific political context within which
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they and the women for whom they advocate live and work.
Despite widespread self-criticism about the depoliticizing effects of
the NGOization of the Palestinian womens movement that has
brought on professionalization, hierarchies based on expertise, diversion of energies to funders desires for gender training and
research reports, and deflection of women from political mobilization to grant writing, Palestinian womens rights advocates have
remained consistent in their national commitments and constant
awareness of the larger political situation.39 Palestinian NGOs
and projects, whether in the Occupied Territories or within the
1948 borders, may be funded by the Scandinavians, the Germans, the Ford Foundation, the Open Society, the World Health
Organization (WHO), and UNIFEM, just like Egyptian NGOs,
but at the core of their efforts are the inescapable realities of occupation and militarization, and in the case of the Palestinian
citizens of Israel, marginalization and discrimination.40
One of the most moving studies from this region is the report
on some action-research on women and loss that was conducted during the second intifada, which began in 2000. The
report illustrates several features of womens rights work in Palestine that make it different, perhaps, from the social life of
rights in Egypt. The study was designed to help produce effective
psychological and social therapies for women while at the same
time giving voice to womens experiences of political conflict. As
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, the initiator of the study, argues in
her chapter in Women, Armed Conflict and Loss: The Mental
Health of Palestinian Women in the Occupied Territories, the
project was to stand at the crossroads between human rights
violations, mental health and research.41 The study produced
stories of individual womenwrenching accounts of trauma and
coping in response to political violence (like watching your sons
brain spill on the ground as Israeli soldiers trample his body),
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house raids and demolition (seeing your house blown up when

youve hidden your sons in the well at the center of the house),
terror and sexual harassment (soldiers molesting your daughters), gender-related violence (surveillance of martyrs wives, births
at checkpoints, unemployed and frustrated husbands at home),
and continuous fear and insecurity.42
Many committed feminists in Palestine cooperate with international and governmental organizations to work for womens
rights or empowerment. Human rights claims, in particular, are
recognized as a powerful tool for Palestinians, claims they cannot forfeit even though they know and understand the academic
and political critiques of human rights.43 Palestinian womens
NGOs point to the larger structural features that affect Palestinian womens lives, even as they participate in womens rights institutions and networks that are transnational and that are often
silent on such political features of everyday life. This was not
often the case in Egypt, where the regime could barely be criticized, and where the devastating consequences of neoliberal reform policies for womens and mens lives seemed to lie outside
the frame, at least until the revolution.
The problem Palestinian rights workers face, according to
Penny Johnson, a researcher at Birzeit University, is that those
scholar-activists like Shalhoub-Kevorkian who assist international organizations such as Human Rights Watch (HRW) are
sometimes dismayed to find that none of their analysis of violence of the occupation and siege and its effects on women and
families is included in the final reports.44 Johnson complains
that A Question of Security, one such HRW report, isolates
domestic violence and implicitly gender relations and Palestinian
families from all the contexts in which they function. She charges
that such reports ignore the effects of occupation and siege on
the Palestinian Authoritys ability to enforce law and do not take
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into consideration the effects of pervasive violence and economic

strangulation on Palestinian family relations.45
If Halleys governance feminism nicely characterizes much
of Egyptian womens rights work, Islah Jad and others have
similarly shown how the establishment of the Palestine National
Authority in the West Bank and Gaza, and particularly its patronage of femocrats alongside the proliferation since the 1990s
of foreign-funded NGOs, led to what they call the demobilization of the Palestinian womens movement, which used to be
political.46 Paying careful attention to the types of work, forms
of organization, hierarchies, and social networks the new means
of pursuing womens rights have entailedthe social life of
rightsreveals that there has been a gradual disempowerment of
women activists. Jad is most concerned about how this has left
the field of grassroots women wide open for Islamist mobilization (about which she has been uniquely open-minded),47 but I
think she underestimates the distinctive way that even the depoliticized NGO technologies of gender training courses might still,
in the highly charged Palestinian national context, intersect with
and enhance other sorts of womens rights work carried out in
more activist veins.
A hint of this can be gleaned from the story another researcher, Sama Aweidah, tells about her first encounter on a trip
to the Jenin refugee camp that also formed the subject of the
study of womens loss by Shalhoub-Kevorkian.48 The multinational delegation she accompanied in order to get into the devastated refugee camp was organized by the Union of Palestinian
Medical Relief Committees. When they arrived, they were greeted
by some young men doing medical relief. When these young men
found out there were two Palestinians who had managed to
come with the international delegation, they were excited to
hear that they came from womens centers because, it turned out,
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these young men had previously had some gender training by the
Jerusalem Womens Studies Centre. They even recognized her
name from their training course materials. Such crossovers from
gender training to therapeutic and political work characterize
the field of womens rights work in Palestine because of the peculiarities of this national context.
Hybrid Circuits in Everyday Life

If we now understand more about the shifting fields of womens
rights work in Egypt and the tight nexus of womens rights and
national politics in Palestine, we still need to think about how
Muslim womens rights are mediated outside of the direct reach
of these local advocates and defenders of womens rights. For all
of these professionals, sometimes held up as brave heroines for
fighting for womens rights in their own societies, there are women
(other than themselves) who are imagined as the targets of their
protective efforts. How do Muslim womens rights circulate in the
lives of these grassroots beneficiaries?
I want to return to the village I know in Upper Egypt to look
at how the social instruments of rights mediate womens lives
there. We need to understand how the circuits of rights within
such villages intersect withand diverge fromthose we have
been following in elite urban and international sites. What happens when we turn to communities of women who seem to lie
outside the catchment areas and social networks of Egyptian
womens rights groups? I turn to these women not to discredit or
disparage the professionals and activists who plow the social
fields of Muslim womens rights, but to give a sense of both the
reach and the shapes of discourses of Muslim womens and girls
rights far away from the metropolitan centers where they are so
vivid, variegated, and well funded.49
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I have traced some nodes in the international circulation of

rightsgoing in and out of the various womens organizations
that promote them, the donor foundations that fund these organizations, and the states that entangle with a rights agenda in two
particular countries, Egypt and Palestine. As an anthropologist
who works in rural communities, I also want to ask how Muslim
womens rights run, if they do, through ordinary womens lives.
When I was doing research in Egypt on womens rights organizations in 2008, I took a break and went back to some of my
friends in the village to talk about this new project. Many had
something to say ( just as Zaynab would three years later, when
she criticized the government). A couple of young women Id
known since they were girls immediately launched into an animated discussion of a popular television serial that they had just
finished watching during Ramadan. It featured Egypts biggest
film star, Yusra. They told me the plot: A group of youths kidnap
a female doctor and some nurses on their way home late at night
and rape one of them. The show, they said, was about bringing
these rapists to justice. They wanted me to know that rape is
punishable by death.
That they had paid attention to the message of the television
serial and were part of a national conversation is significant, but
nothing new. Egyptian television dramas often take up important social issues, as I explored in my book, Dramas of Nationhood. This serial, A Matter of Public Opinion, had launched
public debates on violence against women. After it was broadcast,
the serial was discussed and the main actor praised at a celebration in Amman of UNIFEMs global campaign, Sixteen Days of
Activism to End Violence against Women.
Another young woman showed that national television had
mediated womens understandings of womens rights in this
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Upper Egyptian village. When I asked her what she knew about
womens rights, she said, Its something Suzanne Mubarak is
working on. Its about female circumcision. Indeed, one of the
key projects of the National Council for Childhood and Motherhood that addressed violence against girl children was the push
for circumcision-free model villages.
Village women were tied into national discourses of rights.
When I asked another woman and her teenage daughter if they
knew of any local organizations for womens rights, they had no
idea. They agreed that perhaps such organizations existed in
Cairo, but they didnt know of any in their region. But then we
got onto the subject of what happened if a woman was having
troubles with her husband. The mother explained that their families would come together to try to sort things out and make
peace. When I asked about inheritance (the subject that would
several years later be at the heart of Fayruzs struggles), at first she
said that a woman could go to court. But, she added, it was more
likely that people would come to talk to her brother if he was
resisting. They would try to persuade him to give the sister her
fair share.
When I explained to her that the reason I was working on the
topic of womens rights was that some Westerners consider
Egyptian women oppressed, she laughed. No, no. They used to
be, she said. That was in the past. Now theres progress. All
the girls are getting educated now. Her generation had been required to help their mothers in the household, she explained.
Now, they all wanted their kids educated. She and her husband
were working very hard so that their kids could do well in
school. He was encouraging his daughter to study French, in the
hope that it would help her get into college. So though the word
rights did not come up in this womans response, she certainly
shared the developmentalist discourse of girls education as the
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quintessential sign of progress, even a right. She knew full well

that she had to work harder in the house and with the animals
because her husband wanted more for his daughters.50 This equation had been established and publicized by the state in schools
and media since the dreams of national development in the
1950s became the stuff of mass consumption.
Discussions with other women revealed the multiple mediations and registers of womens rights in this village. Aysha, a
woman in her forties whom I had met in a literacy class in the mid1990s, gave me the best evidence of the hybridity of the concept of
Muslim womens rights in this rural village and a sense of the
multiple institutional circuits through which rights are produced
and pursued. The literacy classes where I met her were themselves
part of the national machinery of womens rights: sponsored by
Suzanne Mubarak for a couple of years with local women graduates hired to teach, then discontinued for no reason.
When I told Aysha that my new project was on womens
rights in Egypt, she exclaimed, Let me tell you, the woman in
Egypt enjoys the highest level of rights. Truly . . . Do you know,
Lila, that we have women ministers in the cabinet? Ministers!
The minister of social affairs. The head of the Finance Ministry.
All of them are women. Here in Egypt, the government has given
women their rights, 100 percent.
But then she went on to qualify this: But people, a womans
family, they are the ones who undermine her rights. Say it happens that my father leaves me three acres of land. Her brother
comes along and says, No, she shouldnt take it. The girl shouldnt
take the land. Here, the government gives her her rights. Picking up on the shifting pronounsmy father, her brotherI
asked if this happened to her. She laughed. This is just a for
instance. Praise be to God, she added (so as not to be complaining about her fate), my family doesnt have any land!
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Then she continued, So the brother takes his sisters land. It

happens. In some families. Not all, because some families give to
the daughters . . . He says, I want the land. Im a man, I should
take the land.
Her response to this imagined brother was, But God, Glory
be to Him, gives women an inheritance.51 She then quoted the
Quranic passage that mandates that women inherit. She concluded, So if God sent down in the Quran word that a woman
is entitled, that the woman should get her inheritance, how dare
you fight this?
When I asked what a woman would do in these circumstances,
she responded, She goes to the government. Only a few seconds later, she modified this. Well, first she goes to complain to
the family. To the elders. Immediately after that, however, she
gave a different example that related to their specific village.
She reminded me that they had an important religious figure in
the next village, a respected man whose father and grandfather
had also been religious leaders. She said, We go to him with
any problem like this. Women do. Just then, her older brother
walked into the room and she confirmed with him, Isnt it true
that a girl goes to the shaykh if she has a problem with her uncle
or her brother? Yes, she complains to him. Its normal. And he
listens to her. Her brother nodded and then went on to tell a
story of a major problem that the shaykh had resolved, interestingly, not between a girl and her family, but between a
Christian and some Muslim families in a dispute over land.
This showed the shaykhs enormous grace, generosity, and
wisdom, and suggested why he had the respect of all in mediating arguments.52
During this one conversation, Aysha talked about rights in
multiple registers: she invoked national legal rights for women;
she assessed womens rights in terms of political representation;
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she talked about local conflicts within and among families; and
then, finally, she described the God-given rights granted to
women in the Quran. In another conversation we had a year
later, she defended Islam in general. She insisted that Islam says
women are free to work and free to go to school. She then gave
examples of important women in the Prophet Muhammads time:
Nafisa, who was a teacher, and Aysha who transmitted hadiths,
the sayings of the Prophet. But, she added, some women had
decided that freedom meant wearing short dresses with short
sleeves and walking around the streets naked. There is too much
freedom now, she concluded. Mixing yet again several registers
of rights, she explained that this kind of freedom was not what
Qasim Amin had meant. Here she invoked Amin, that classic
turn-of-the-twentieth-century Egyptian modernist reformer and
author of the tract The Liberation of Women, who supported
womens limited education and unveiling.
In her discussion, Aysha also referenced the multiple institutions that mediate rights in Egypt. These are the forums through
which individual women might seek justice: the courts with their
lawyers, legalities, and papers; local family arbitration with its
pull of emotions, hierarchies, and cross-cutting ties; and the institution of the local religious figure who would intervene in the
name of Islamic rights and morality if a woman was wronged
by her family. She did not mention NGOs, even though in a
nearby region an extremely well-funded transnational humanitarian project was under way, dedicated to uplifting and educating village girls about their natural claims to rights, including
the right to learn, play, and be physically mobile.53 Like the
other women and girls whose conversations about womens
rights I have quoted, Aysha has learned these multiple ways of
framing lives and asserting rights from television, from school,
from religious study, and from the everyday lives of those
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around her. Community members tend to have few secrets, so

their knowledge of the possible is rich and intimate.
When I returned to visit Aysha in 2012, a year after the uprisings and in the immediate aftermath of the parliamentary elections, I was struck even more that everywhere I went, women
and girls wanted to talk.54 They were talking politics. At the
national level, they were stunned by the unfolding revelations
about just how corrupt the regime had been from top to bottom,
and just how vast the scale of wealth appropriation and theft by
the elites had been. They were especially scandalized by the discovery (or rumor) that Suzanne Mubarak had taken for her
personal property the jewels of Queen Nazli, the mother of the
former monarch, King Farouk. These belonged to the nation,
they insisted. They were furious that the former presidents yearlong trial was probably not going to deliver justice. They expressed a special empathy for the families of the young people
killed in the streets by security forces during the first weeks of
the uprisingsthe martyrs. They deserved justice.
At the local level, they were excited about the parliamentary
elections that had just taken place. They were eager to talk about
the campaign platformstheir concerns about the Muslim Brotherhood had been eased by the reassurances that they would not
ban tourism, but only ask that tourists respect local morality.
They liked that idea. But some also joked about aspects of the
process. The Muslim Brotherhood had arranged for transportation to take girls and women to vote, but the young women
shrewdly noted that the expectation was that they would support the partys candidates for parliament. As one girl said mischievously, But how would they know who we voted for?
Everyone commented on how before, people had not been
able to talk. Now there was a strong sense that they could. They
would not go back to silence and despair. Too much had been
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revealed about just how much and exactly how the system had
wronged themas citizens, not as women.
In an ethnographic study of the interaction between a Scandinavian feminist NGO and the village womens organization it
supported on an island off the coast of Tanzania, Christine Walley has argued that a universalizing term like rights accumulates meanings from multiple sources.55 She shows that for the
Muslim women in the community in which she worked, the
Kiswahili term translated as rights (haki) could refer to prerogatives and obligations found in Islamic law, as well as suggest
customary justice. But she also found that in the independence
and socialist periods, haki had accumulated other meanings that
were tied to ideas of citizenship. More recently, the term had come
to be used in the context of international human and womens
rights frameworks that the leaders of this organization encountered when they were sent to conferences by their Scandinavian
funders. As a consequence, when a woman asserted or claimed
her rights, one simply could not know what register she was
using, which meaning(s) of rights she was referencing, or
whether in fact these all inflected each other, producing a dense
sense of rights.
Walleys challenging presentation of the way conceptions of
rights are layered in one grassroots situation is intriguing, and
seems to describe womens mobilizations of rights in Egyptian
villages well, too. Walley did not pursue what I attempt to showcase here: the need to do a more sociological tracking of the
networks, institutions, and technologies that mediate such rights.
In the Egyptian village from which I have been drawing my examples, it is clear that even though there are no womens rights
organizations, comments like Ayshas reveal the ways national
and international enterprises of womens rights have shaped local conceptualizations of rights and made certain institutions,
170
from schools to state courts, central to their pursuit. At the same

time, her comments also reveal something worth noting: how
many social institutions and imaginative frameworks outside of
the dominant work of NGOs and government are part of local
womens active pursuit of justice and their imagination of rights.
The religious idiom of Islamic lawonly now becoming a track
for rights in urban centers, as we see in the case of the legal
rights organization, CEWLAand the local moral force of popular religious authorities, alongside the extended family that remains the most significant social form, exceed the frames and
social institutions of more official womens rights work in Egypt.
We need to find new ways of thinking about Muslim womens
rightsthat sensationalized international issue that is so entangled with military intervention and transnational feminism, progressive foundations and right-wing think tanks, elite careers and
welfare administration, literary commerce and marginal lives. An
ethnographic approach that tracks the social lives in which the
concept partakes may be more useful for understanding this subject and the moment we are living than moral posturing that
judges womens rights to be either collusion with imperialism (to
be denounced) or a hopeful sign of universal emancipation and
progress (to be celebrated).
I have offered an alternative: approaching Muslim womens
rights as something that makes and remakes the world. How,
when, and where is the concept deployed? What transformations of social and individual lives are produced in its name?
Who enables that work and is in turn enabled by it? What new
paths of power and channels of capitalfinancial and cultural
does it open up?
Anthropologists have urged us to study the social practice of
rights and to closely observe rights talk and implementation.56
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I argue here for something more: to trace carefully, across multiple terrains, the way both practices and talk of rights organize
social and political fields, producing organizations, projects, and
forms of governing as much as being produced by them. If we
take this approach, there is no alternative but to go into the details of Muslim womens rights as they move in and out of particular locations and communities. In Cairo, the womens rights
industry creates careers, channels funds, inspires commitments,
gives credibility to new actors, creates and disrupts social networks, and legitimizes intellectual and political frameworks and
ideals. Womens rights provide a conduit for foreign intervention
and government involvement in ordering the daily lives of both
the middle classes and those at the margins. Womens rights are
subjects of corporate sponsorship and adopted as a symbol of
modernity, but they are also, and increasingly so now, the objects
of struggle among religious institutions and organizations, especially Islamic parties and movements, and have been taken up by
new forms of feminism that some call Islamic feminism, as I explore in Chapter 6.
Juxtaposing the Egyptian case to the Palestinian reveals how
dependent the operation of Muslim womens rights is on the
larger political situation. We need to look at the organization
and resources of countries and the configuration of international interest. Palestine may have womens NGOs that are just
as well funded as Egypt, but the nature of the work they do, the
social networks they forge, their links to international and national institutions, and even the class relations and solidarities
among the women and their beneficiaries differ dramatically
from the Egyptian case.57
Anyone seriously interested in Muslim womens rights must
follow them as they move. The village in which Ive been fortunate to work over so many years houses the kinds of marginal
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women often imagined to be the beneficiaries of rights work:

traditional women in need of rights and empowerment. The
women and girls in this village are not members of any womens
rights organizations or recipients of their funds. They have not
been the objects of rights, except through a short-lived government literacy program for women in the 1990s (in which Fayruz
learned to write her name), and a few equally fleeting initiatives
by individual Europeans for handicraft production.
The fragments of conversation on the subject of womens
rights I have reported from this village demonstrate that no one
is unaffected by the circulation of discourses on Muslim womens
rights and the practical ways their pursuit is being negotiated. At
the same time, these fragments indicate that the framework and
the projects of Muslim womens rights do not begin to exhaust
womens conceptions of rights or their experiences of trying to
assert them.
CHAPTER
An Anthropologist in the Territory

of Rights
All of us who are concerned

about womens suffering and well-being find ourselves in a world
saturated with talk about rights and the institutionssmall and
large, local and transnationalthat have arisen to defend them.
I entered the territory of rights because of my consternation
about the ways Muslim womens rights were being put to political use for intervention in Afghanistan. Then, during the past
decade, I began exploring other regions and tributaries of this
rights system. The advances of feminists into the international
and local organizations for womens rights led me to understand
that rights activists, as discussed in Chapter 5, were not outside
of power, even if their sense of solidarity with other women and
feeling of common subordination might distinguish womens
rights work from some other forms of international rights work
or humanitarian sentiment.
Perhaps because I was such a latecomer to this territory
someone whose anthropological research over thirty years had not
been organized around rights, human or otherwiseI continue to
struggle with the framework.1 I experience some uncomfortable
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problems of fit when I think about rights because of the ethnographic research I have done, some thick and some thin.2 The
thick ethnography is of everyday life in the village in rural Egypt.
The thin is some modest research on organizations that promote
womens rights and empowerment in and across the Muslim
world. Muslim womens rights work is taking new creative forms.
Rather than talk about the more secular nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that have dominated the scene since the 1970s
and that I discuss in Chapter 5, I focus here on the newer initiatives of Islamic feminists.
Taking both conceptual and practical rights as objects of study,
other anthropologists have shown that rights can be performative
they make things happen and they mobilize peopleand that
the rights framework can be transplanted and translated into
other languages, what Sally Merry has called vernaculars.3 They
have traced how rights instruments and language are produced
through a social machinery that operates in many sites, from
United Nations (UN) and government offices to NGOs around
the world.4
Some anthropologists have stood by indigenous people and
other disadvantaged groups to defend their rights; others have
been more wary of engagement.5 Even when they have supported marginal groups, they have been conscious of the double
binds and paradoxes. In Australia, for example, the demands of
liberal multiculturalism have placed aboriginal Australians trying to make land claims in the odd position of having to prove
cultural authenticity and continuity when the very same settlers
who took their land had devastated their culture too.6 Anthropologists working in Africa have shown how human rights work
has ended up promoting new social distinctions, opening career
paths for some, and depoliticizing neoliberal reform and transnational governance.7 Many anthropologists have realized that
AN ANTHROPOLOGIST IN THE TERRITORY OF RIGHTS
175
human rights claims depend on treating human suffering at the

natural level of bodies, displacing other sorts of more political
claims, such as those based on peoples citizenship.8
When they challenge the innocent morality of the rights regime, anthropologists join a number of political and legal theorists who have asked whether humanitarianism is the new face
of colonialism. Some have pointed out the paradoxes of rightsbased arguments: that they allow people to make claims, but
lock them into fixed identities defined by their injuries rather
than freeing them from these identities into a world of equals;
or they absolve the perpetrators of past violence by making
them the defenders of rights.9 Transnational feminist theorists
have worried about the implications of linking womens rights to
human rights. Ratna Kapurs influential analysis of the way rights
discourses construct third world women as victim-subjects
and Inderpal Grewals charge that human rights is a regime of
truth linked both to welfare and forms of power are both
exemplary.10
My own discomfort with the framework and practices of
rights for those who want to address suffering and promote social justice stems from something additional that I clarify by
looking not at conventional secular human or womens rights,
but at some new initiatives that seek to establish womens rights
through Islam. They do so by seeking to reform Islamic law, particularly family law, or by offering nonpatriarchal interpretations
of the Quran. My ambivalence about these activist projects
diverse, innovative, and potentially transformative as they may
bearises from thinking about them in light of what I know
about womens lives in rural communities in Egypt. Women like
Zaynab, Aysha, Amal, and others I introduce in this book are the
imagined beneficiaries of these Muslim feminists efforts to guarantee womens rights through a more indigenous framework.11
176
These are the same oppressed Muslim women that, as we have

seen, other moral crusaders seek to save.
My argument is in two parts. In a sociological sense, I ask
whether initiatives like these can be understood outside the frames
of global governance that are tied to class privilege and education, even though the participants work with a shared sense of
religious community and admirable religious knowledge. Second, I ask whether any legalistic framework of rights or gender
equality can do justice to the complexity of womens lives and
suffering. An intimate look into the troubles women face in one
Egyptian village leads me to conclude that there is always a certain incommensurability between everyday lives and the social
imagination of rights, whether by outsiders, by veterans of
womens activism in the region, or by these new cosmopolitan
Islamic feminists.
I use the situation of one young woman, Khadija, to articulate
my discomfort with a rights frame. She is a victim of domestic
violence. Violence is considered a classic violation of womens
rights and has been the focus of transnational feminism for years.
It is also the focus of at least one of these new Muslim feminist
initiatives.12 My concern here is that the selective rendering of
womens lives in the Muslim world in terms of rights risks reinforcing existing (and sometimes malicious) simplifications of their
complicated lives and experiences. This is the case even though
most of those working to improve womens rights in these communities do not share these negative or simplistic views, and even
though women across the world noweven in villages such as
this one in rural Egypt, as we see with Aysha in Chapter 5use
various hybrid and sometimes contradictory languages of rights
to assert claims.
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Womens Rights and Islamic Reform

A couple of recent initiatives suggest that a new social configuration and playing field for advocacy of Muslim womens rights is
emerging. Building on many local initiatives in Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey, Indonesia, Lebanon, and Egypt, and responding in
complex ways to the Islamic revival and the growing appeal of
Muslim politics, many educated cosmopolitan Muslim women
are no longer defensive about exploring what Americans would
call faith-based feminism.13 These serious and thoughtful projects are quite distinct from the highly publicized efforts of some
individual Muslim women in the West who claim to be criticizing Islam from within but are playing a different game.14 They
are also distinct from the political engagements of many women
across the Muslim world who have joined Islamist political parties and movementswomen who, without appealing to a rights
language, have challenged gender norms in their communities
through their political activism and public service.15 I would like
to look closely at two initiatives before asking how they might
relate to the everyday lives of some women in one village.
The first group to consider is Musawah (which means equality). Launched in Kuala Lumpur in February 2009, it calls itself
a global movement for equality and justice in the Muslim family. It was spearheaded by a leading organization of what many
call Islamic feminism, a Malaysian-based feminist organization
called Sisters in Islam.16 Registered as an NGO in 1993, Sisters
in Islam has been active since the late 1980s in advocacy around
Muslim womens rights and discriminatory family law.17
Three features of the way Musawahs mission statement begins are significant: We, as Muslims and as citizens, declare that
equality and justice in the family are both necessary and possible.
The time for realising these values in our laws and practices is
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now.18 First, note the we as an entitlement to speak from

within. Second, note the mixed religious and political identities
that define the rights claims: We, as Muslims and as citizens.
Third, consider the hybrid sources of rights they invoke in what
follows: Musawah declares that equality in the family is possible through a framework that is consistent with Islamic teachings, universal human rights principles, fundamental rights guarantees, and the lived realities of women and men. Musawahs
reasoning follows two principles: they prioritize the objectives of
Sharia rather than the legal schools (as they have developed
historically); and they insist that there must be a fit with the contemporary world. Here is the way they put it: Muslim laws and
practices must reflect justice, which is the indisputable objective
of the Shariah. They must also uphold equality, which is an essential part of todays understanding of justice.19
The generic models for Musawah are drawn as much from
the ideational world of liberal international organizations as Islamic legal or moral discourse. Musawahs Framework for Action is deliberately structured along the lines of documents such
as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: It has a preamble
that declares principles and states the conditions, followed by a
delineation of principles using the form of numbered articles.
What distinguishes it from its models and marks it as a hybrid
form is its religious opening line: We hold the principles of Islam to be a source of justice, equality, fairness and dignity for all
human beings.20
The reformist projects of these Muslim feminists who have
established organizations like Musawah share qualities of
thought and argumentation with earlier reformist projects in the
Muslim world that emerged from the colonial encounter. The
explicit focus of Musawah is Muslim family law. It does not engage in debates about how best to interpret the Quran; instead,
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it begins with the more modest and sound observation that family laws are man-made, the result of interpretations shaped by
the social conditions of the periods in which Islams sacred texts
were turned into law by jurists.21 However, it also follows the
standard modernist reformist arguments of the last century that
one must seek an ethical Islam, true to its spirit and guided by
the objectives of Sharia, and thus to make Islam appropriate for
contemporary realities. The targets of Musawahs critiques are
the Muslim jurists and the claims to expertise and authority of
those conservatives who follow them. To support its stance, Musawah reminds people of the importance of diversity of opinion
in the Islamic tradition, points to specific verses of the Quran
that promote equality, exposes the way human interpretation
has corrupted understanding, and highlights concepts within the
tradition that could support human rights.22
The vocabulary of democratic liberalism saturates Musawahs
arguments. Holism is a key concept in Zainah Anwars introduction to their resource book, Wanted: Equality and Justice in the
Muslim Family.23 She points out that womens groups in various
Muslim countries have begun to explore a broader, more holistic
framework that argues for reform from multiple perspectives
religious, international human rights, constitutional and fundamental rights guarantees, and womens lived realities.24 One
aspect of holism for Anwar is therefore to limit the role of religion: she advocates treating religion as only one source for policy and legal reform.25 The first major research project Musawah
undertook was a study of the common ground between the UN
Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination
against Women (CEDAW) and Muslim family laws.26
Some have celebrated Sisters in Islam, Women Living under
Muslim Laws (WLUML), and now Musawah as heralding a new
enlightenment in the Muslim world. This suggests that at least
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some people associate these reform initiatives with the tradition

of secular liberalism. The clever title of one legal scholars blog
about the Musawah launch even played on, and therefore reinforced in a ghostly way, one key text in the oppressed Muslim
women literary genre that has been promoted so hard by neoconservative hawks in the United States. Mahdavi Sunders Reading the Quran in Kuala Lumpur inflects Azar Nafisis best-selling
Reading Lolita in Tehran.27 Sunders representation of Muslim
womens rights groups like Musawah in this way reproduces the
standard liberal views, both within and outside the Muslim
world, that contrast religious backwardness and conservatism to
enlightened modernism.28
Some of those involved would dispute this framing. Ziba MirHosseini, one of the founders of Musawah, considers Islamic
feminism (a term she finds confusing) to be the unwanted child
of political Islam.29 Yet she defends the new efforts of Muslim
feminists this way:
Faced by an apparent choice between the devil of those who want to
impose patriarchal interpretations of Islams sacred texts, and the
deep blue sea of those who pursue a neo-colonialist hegemonic
global project in the name of enlightenment and feminism, those of
us committed to achieving justice for women and a just world have
no other option than to bring Islamic and feminist perspectives together. Otherwise, Muslim womens quest for equality will remain
hostage to different political forces and tendencies, as it was in the
twentieth century and continues to be in the new century that began
with the politics of the war on terror.30
Not as far along in its institutionalization is another initiative

that dovetails with Musawah. It treads some of the same pathways and has some overlapping membership. With a very different kind of institutional base, a more cosmopolitan and
181
deterritorialized outlook, and a more explicitly religiospiritual

cast, the Womens Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equality
(WISE) had its first public event in 2006 in New York.31 Out of
this conference came the decision to form a Global Muslim
Womens Shura Council (consultative body) to address the perceived lack of womens participation in the discourses on Islamic
law. WISE is directed by Daisy Khan as part of the American
Society of Muslim Advancement (ASMA; formerly the American
Sufi Muslim Association, though nowhere in their current materials is this acknowledged). Founded in 1997 in New York by
her husband, Imam Feisal Abdel Raouf, ASMA is closely connected to an initiative he directs: the Cordoba Initiative dedicated to Muslim-West understanding and bringing back the atmosphere of interfaith tolerance and respect that we have longed
for since Muslims, Christians and Jews lived together in harmony and prosperity eight hundred years ago.32 Moderation,
pluralism, tolerationthese are the key liberal terms that he believes are crucial in a polarized world.33
In 2008, I was invited to participate in and observe one of
WISEs preparatory meetings. This is the kind of fieldwork that
anthropologists of human rights do when they work with lawyers and commissions, or observe the social processes of the bureaucracies that establish and negotiate human rights issues. What
struck me most about the daylong deliberations was the creativity
and unpredictability of the process by which they made collective decisions. No sweeping critiques about rights regimes or
humanitarianism as the new colonialism can capture this quality.
The women who gathered for this meeting brought to the table
a cultural imagination formed by modernist and liberal Sufi ideals, United Nations (UN) and human and womens rights documents, models of transnational feminist organizing and activism,
and academic conferencing. They brought tools of knowledge
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drawn from everything from Quranic exegesis to feminist historiography and quantitative social science.34
In a survey sent out to members just before this meeting, the
steering committee had proposed five potential issues to research
and then use as the testing ground for its first fatwa, or statement as they began to call it, to draw away from the negative
cast of fatwa in the West and perhaps not to antagonize official
sources of fatwas in different countries. The statement was to
constitute the focus of the official launch of the Womens Shura
Council in July 2009 in Kuala Lumpur, the same place where Musawah had just had its launch. The membership overwhelmingly
voted for two issues: domestic violence and womens religious
authority. Yet in the give-and-take of the meeting, a consensus
emerged around a slightly different focus for the Shura Councils
first pronouncement. A few strong personalities led them to an
ambitious project: they would deal with domestic violence in
tandem with violent extremism. Over the course of the day and
with thoughtful objections being raised by different participants
to aspects of what was being proposed (How was extremist
violence a gendered issue? Werent there formidable analytical
challenges in linking domestic and military violence? Werent
the religious textual sources that would have to be brought into
conversation quite diverse? Wasnt it dangerous to invoke the
term jihad?), a general enthusiasm developed for Jihad against
Violence as the Shura Councils first campaign.35 Although the
staff communicated their criteria for choosing an issue (its importance to women, its likely support by women, its feasibility in
terms of research, its ability to draw media attention, and the
level of resistance it might provoke from traditional institutions),
the outspoken women at this meetingmostly academics, journalists, and lawyerswent their own way.
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My ethnography, thin as it was, revealed that the outcome

emerged from a lively social process, not a conspiracy or any sort
of engineering. Those with strong convictions, good analyses,
and experience shaped the result. Diverse in outlook and background (with family origins in South Asia, the Arab Middle East,
Turkey, Iran, and the United States), some of the participants
were experts on Islamic law and practice, while some were experts on the Quran and the history of Islam. Some seemed to be
using the vocabulary and tools of Islam strategically because of
their imagined persuasive power for others; others were secure
in and vocal about their convictions that they were doing this to
be good Muslims. Some were devout followers of Sufi shaykhs,
learned and philosophical students of the faith and veterans of
interfaith dialogue. Some covered their hair, some didnt. Notably, some were sharply critical of Western imperialism, while
others were more supportive of the U.S. governments War on
Terror.36 The discussion was heated at times, but the women remained civil and respectful. The democratic, inclusive, and positive tone set by the director helped the women work hard toward the common goal of determining what the Shura Council
might best do.
WISE had already achieved a good deal in its two years of
existence. It had a structure, a talented staff, a strategic plan and
vision, and a major conference and several planning meetings
under its belt. It had hammered out a compact that like Musawahs drew on Sharia by grounding its commitment to womens rights in the six objectives of Shariathe protection and
preservation of religion, life, the intellect, the family, property,
and dignity. These, the accompanying letter sent to the membership explained, had a long history in the Muslim tradition and
are rooted in the Quran.37
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WISE had also been successful in fund-raising. It had just won

a 1 million euro grant from the Dutch Foreign Ministrys MG3
Fund, an initiative related to the third Millennium Development
Goal of Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women.38 As
Daisy Khan stressed at the meeting, WISE planned to facilitate
and enhance the work of others, not to compete. And indeed,
several years later, in June 2011, they launched the inclusive
Muslim Womens Web Portal and have supported numerous
initiatives.
The meeting I attended was followed four months later by a
two-day retreat at which certain principles were agreed upon.
Again, there was an unanticipated outcome in terms of content
and rhetorical strategy. The major breakthrough of the brainstorming meeting was finding a way to link domestic and extremist violence. Drawing on the Islamic tradition, the two were
linked by the question of good and bad leadership.39 The Queen
of Sheba story was used as the organizing parable.
At this retreat, the worldly participants brought into play multiple models and genres of representation and argumentation.
The women shared deep Islamic knowledge and the skills and
vision of the cosmopolitan professional women who get heard in
transnational womens rights initiatives: they are fluent in the
languages of English, rights, and bureaucratic UN-speak.40 The
document they produced, like that of Musawah, had a preamble. WISE also used the social sciencebased instruments of
democracysurveys and polls. Even more prominently than in
the case of Musawah, WISEs commitment to religious exegesis
and Quranic quotation blends with the conventions of culturally secular international rights work.
Initiatives like Musawah and WISEs Global Womens Shura
Council seem to be the wave of the future. Although they build
on a decades-long tradition of Muslim womens activism, some
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of which has been explicitly grounded in religious identity and

conviction, they are finding surprisingly strong support now
from Western foundations and governments.41 Their efforts are
commendable, particularly in light of the recent forms of Western
hysteria around Sharia and head scarves represented in controversies discussed in previous chapters, such as the British and
Canadian outcries about religious family arbitration councils
and the European bans on burqas (not to mention absurd proposals such as the Jihad Prevention Act introduced by a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2008; the
bill would require aliens to attest that they will not advocate installing a Sharia law system in the United States as a condition
for entry visas and even naturalization!).42
As with the crude criticisms of NGOs in places like Egypt,
where facts of outside funding could beand often have been
blown out of proportion and used to discredit rights initiatives
in the service of either the religious Right or a government anxious to limit independent political activity, one must be cautious
about making too much of foreign funding of Muslim feminist
projects of internal reform.43 Yet as time goes by, the causes that
the Global Womens Shura Council has adopted have aligned
surprisingly well with the clichd causes familiar to us through
our study of sensational media and pulp nonfiction. Prominent
are the usual cultural violations such as female genital cutting,
stoning, honor killings, and forced marriage.44
It is worth examining the new consensus in the international
rights community and among many Muslim feminist activists
and scholars that Islam and womens human rights must be reconciled and that internal reform is necessary. A human rights
lawyer and scholar published an important article in 2006 about
the crisis facing international NGOs like Human Rights Watch
(HRW) and Amnesty International that have been working in
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the Middle East and Muslim world. Uncomfortable about how

the human rights movements rhetoric echoed that of the Bush
administration, she noted that the dilemma facing the practitioners was how the human rights movement should deal with Islamic law.45 Current practice, Naz Modirzadeh argued, was to
evade the issue by beginning every report with a caveat that the
organization would take no position on Islamic law (to appear
neutral and nonimperialist) but then proceeding in the body of
the report to list violations linked to rules of Islamic law without admitting it explicitly.46 She offered three ways out of the
dilemma. Two years later, she was surprised at the outcome of
her assessment of the way international NGOs dealt with Sharia.
HRW decided to create a position for an in-house Sharia expert,
a position that still has not been filled.47
Twenty years ago, no one would have predicted that Muslim
womens rights would be traveling so regularly in and out of Islamic law, Islamist parties, and now the discourses and practices
of moderation and Islamic reform among an educated and cosmopolitan professional elite.48 This is not to question the authenticity or integrity of such projects. As an ethnographer, I
want only to note the circuits in which they are participating
social, political, and economic. And I want to point out the multiple cultural resources they draw on to formulate their Islamic
rights projects.
Incommensurate Lives
One of the most important questions an anthropologist like me
with experience in rural areas and among non-elite women feels
compelled to ask, though, is how organizations conceived and
run by educated urban elites who spend a good deal of energy
studying, thinking, drafting position statements, applying for
funds, and presenting Islam to the West (and the East) as
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something not incompatible with gender equality, might relate to

those in whose name and on whose behalf they work. These new
feminist groups operating within the framework of Islam hope
to ameliorate the lives of grassroots Muslim women by finding
locally and personally meaningful resources. They also hope to
avoid accusations that they are importing foreign ideologies or
devaluing womens commitments to being good Muslims, even
while most of them insist that religion, on the liberal model, is a
matter of private faith. How do these new reformist projects,
with their constructions of womens rights in terms of Islamic
law and tradition and the Muslim spirityet arising from these
womens own social locations in global fields of feminist governance in which elites from the South have a very visible and
prominent placefit with the everyday lives of some ordinary
Muslim women in particular communities?
No one can represent or speak for ordinary women, but I
think it is fair to use the life stories of women in one Upper Egyptian village that I know to clarify the conundrums we all face
when we try to think about the complex terrain of womens
rights in the Muslim world today. These womens experiences
can help us reflect on the existing frameworks for addressing
Muslim womens problems, whether those that organize initiatives like WISE or Musawah, or those of any other international
and local projects of empowerment and rights advocacy. There is
a profound incommensurability between the lives of these particular grassroots women I know and the terms in which they
are being imagined in the field of rights, including Islamic feminist versions.
One way to see this incommensurability is to consider dimensions of what religiosity or piety means to women these days in
this village. The varieties and tensions among everyday forms of
the religious life are obvious, as is the way Islamic thought and
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practice have changed in this village over the past fifty years.
This makes clear the particular cast and the class politics of
some of these projects of Islamic reform that go under the name
Islamic feminism. When we juxtapose village lives and international projects, we are forced to ask how far visions of a modern
enlightened interpretation of the Quran or legal reforms guided
by the objectives of Sharia take into account the variety of meanings of Muslim religious experience for women like the ones I
know. A more urgent question that presents itself is: What authority and channels might such projects find in order to compete with existing authorities and institutions on the ground? In
this particular Egyptian village, these range from teachers in the
Azhar school system or the local Quranic afterschool programs
to popular televangelists; from Sufi brotherhoods to new Islamic
studies institutes for girls.
Islam in village life is variegated and constantly evolving.
There are generational differences related to the political, social,
economic, and cultural transformations in Egypt over the past
decades. Older women think of themselves as good Muslims and
wear modest, loose clothing and cover their hair. The oldest generation also still wears the traditional black wool cloak over
their clothes for formal occasions, but this has been replaced
by the more fashionable abaya, or tailored overcoat, for women
in their forties. Although the national trend to become more
strictly observant had already reached the village when I arrived
in 1993, older womens regular prayers were nothing new.
For the younger generation, the key factors have been the simultaneous spread of the influence of education and television
and the Islamic revival. Young women and men increasingly express their faith in other ways and dress differently. Some young
women wear jeans with various forms of long-sleeved fashion
tops or tunics. Some wear sweaters and long skirts. These are
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urban forms of dress that link them to Luxor, across the river,
and Cairo, the distant capital. No one would think of leaving the
house without a hijab or head scarf; the more fashionable
wear colorful hijabs that change with the current styles. But not
all the young women are like this; those who attend the Azhar
schools, a parallel system that follows the national curriculum
but includes more rigorous Islamic studies, pull their hijabs
more fully over their hair and wear long shapeless dresses (which
can be of pretty fabric, however). These are the girls whose families prefer schooling that is not coeducational, where the fees
are lower and the opportunities to pursue a higher education
more plentiful.
Multiple religious activities engage girls in the village. Most
girls and boys are sent from a young age to the traditional kuttab to learn Quran as an after-school and summer holiday activity. More recently, a modern Islamic institute for girls has opened
in the next village. Young women are eagerly taking up training
in religious studies both for its own sake and because it is meant
to prepare them to teach in the Azhar schools where there is a
shortage of women teachers.
For one young woman I knew, working toward the certificate
was her salvation from boredom. Having finished her vocational
business degree, she found herself stuck at home. It was hard
togo from dressing up and heading off to Luxor every dayto
study, take exams, mix with other girls, and endure the pleasant
annoyance of the boys who hung around the schoolto sitting
at home. An avid soccer fan, she came alive cheering her teams
on TV. But most of her time was taken up with lonely housework
that she did to relieve her mother, who was busy herself with the
cows and sheep that helped supplement her husbands income
from farming and a low-paying but skilled job. Only a marriage
proposal would give her a different life because there is precious
190
little employment in the area, especially for a girl from a poor

family with no connections.
While she waited for someone to ask for her handand perhaps mindful of the increasing number of young women in the
village who never got askedthe religious institute gave her an
intellectual challenge, an unimpeachable moral claim to be out
and about (after four years in the house), and possibly, later, a
respectable way to make some kind of living. She could go for
up to eight years; she would get a certificate after two years, then
another after two more. She said she liked knowing more about
her religion and she absolutely loved studying, though she was
finding the different interpretations of the four schools of Islamic law terribly confusing.
All those in the Azhar schools, the kuttabs, the university
courses in religious studies, and this new kind of institute are becoming knowledgeable about Islam in ways their mothers, and
even fathers, are not. They are literate and they study Islamic
history, Quranic exegesis, and law. They are being empowered
by this knowledge, and otherseven their familiesrespect
them for it. They have confidence and know more about their
rights. They are also empowered in practice, as they have good
reasons to be out and about, independent. But the kind of religious education they are receiving is, I think, conservative. So,
although the students might be equipped to understand the
grounds on which Musawah or the WISE Shura Council are
making their arguments (insofar as they draw on Islamic concepts and sources), it is unlikely that they will ever hear such arguments as the compatibility of CEDAW and Sharia. And the
interpretations of womens roles in Islamic society they are hearing in such institutes are probably far from revolutionary or
egalitarian. This is the case even though some key principles, such
as the importance of consent to a marriage, have now become
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widely established among this group of young women, as I describe in the conclusion.
This new generation is participating in forms of religious life
that are in tension with the more popular local traditions of
religious experience and practice, some associated with the Sufi
brotherhoods that are still quite strong in Upper Egypt. It is
women and girls like these in one village in Egypt that the cosmopolitan professional women of Musawah and the Shura Council
project as the beneficiaries of their efforts to reinterpret Islam and
introduce reforms in the laws governing family and marriage.
These are the sorts of marginalized women and girls the grant
proposals promise to train in knowing their rights. Yet the distance is vast between the reformers and these girls and women
embedded in the particular socioreligious institutions of one village in Egypt and similar ones elsewhere. What social or political
mechanisms will bridge this?
Violence in the Domestic Sphere

A different gap exists between the framework used by reform
organizations and these village womens imaginations of social
responsibility and individual desire. To explore this, I want to
unpack one case of domestic violence in the village. Domestic
violence is a cornerstone of womens rights work around the world
and in international forums; in recent years, it is the most publicized issue the United Nations Development Fund for Women
(UNIFEM), succeeded by the United Nations Entity for Gender
Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women), is promoting. It is also a central element in the WISE Shura Councils
first campaign, Jihad against Violence. Musawah would treat
domestic violence as a key dysfunction in marriage and family.
Reforms in Islamic family law and educating people about more
just interpretations of Islam should address this problem. For
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this part of the world, as with honor crimes, such violencenow

labeled a violation of womens human rightsis generally represented as the result of tradition or patriarchal culture. If many
outsiders blame Islam for this culture of violence, the Muslim
feminists of Musawah or WISE are quick to argue that the fault
lies in cultures that, contrary to such arguments or those of Muslim conservatives, are actually based on insufficient knowledge
of or incomplete adherence to Islam. Islam, they insist, enshrines
justice, equality, human dignity, and love and compassion among
humans and in the family. They can find plenty of textual evidence for this.
Village womens lives confound for me this key subject of advocacy for womens rights. With these women in mind, I stumble
when trying to apply the standard feminist framing of and solutions to domestic violence. The standard idea is that patriarchy
is the problem. The solutions are shelters, police training, anger
management training, media campaigns to increase awareness,
the development of womens rights consciousness, holding governments accountable for not protecting women, and becoming
modern. Nowadays, the tactic of Islamic feminists is to look for
bases in Islam for care, love, and peace within families.49
The situation of one young woman whose traumas have troubled me ever since I met her suggests the inadequacy of these
frameworks and solutions. I sketch the contours of Khadijas situation to show why I am reluctant to mediate such an unhappy
story through the language of womens rights, either Islamic or
human.50 Resisting the womens rights frame and exposing the
poverty of the categories set by the Violence against Women
(VAW) discourses, including on domestic violence, her personal life
needs to be understood in terms of both global forces that deform
her life and local bonds of attachment and dependency that go
without saying.51 In the conclusion, I will also introduce a difficult
193
personal circumstance that complicates her marriage, a special

remainder. I insist throughout this book that there are always
particulars that confound our easy attempts to generalize or to
find quick fixes. Khadijas life need not be typical to teach us
something general about the relationship between everyday life
and rights frames.
When I saw her mother in the spring of 2009, I learned that
Khadija had just returned to her husband after a month or so of
living back home. This had become a pattern in her six-year
marriage. Khadija was unhappy and her husband was sometimes violent. I knew Khadija complained that her husband did
not like her to leave the house or go to visit her mother, even
though she lived nearby. Khadija had said that he stayed at home
most of the time. He would start drinking early in the morning;
first hed drink coffee (most villagers drink tea), then beer, then
whiskey. During this latest escape to her mothers home, Khadija
was taken by her brother to Cairo (which neither had ever visited) to consult a psychiatrist recommended to them by a European expatriate neighbor. According to Khadijas mother, the
psychiatrist had talked with her daughter at length and told her
there was nothing wrong with her except that she was unhappy.
He told her to come and talk to him every three daysand to
leave her husband.
As Khadijas mother explained, neither was possible. There
was no way her family could afford to stay in Cairo for long or
pay the psychiatrists fees. Even the medicine he had prescribed
was expensive and they could not afford to refill the prescription. But why couldnt Khadija leave her husband? Her mother
put it starkly: She has two children already and one on the way.
Who would support them? How could she bring them with her
to stay in their crowded house? Khadijas mother and father
were long divorced. He had little work and a new family to
194
support anyway. Khadijas mother lived with and was supported

by her brother, along with her son, her parents, and her widowed sister-in-law with her three children. This maternal uncle
of Khadijas was the only one in the family with a job, and since
he was a schoolteacher, it paid a pittance.
The vectors of oppression that consign Khadija to remaining
in this conflictual and violent marriage can be traced here not so
much to culture or traditional forms of gender inequality as to
poverty. Their poverty is a result of local family history, on the
one hand, and broad political economic transformations on the
other, which for at least a century have concentrated wealth in
the capital and the north of Egypt, and that now, thanks to neoliberal reform, organize the distribution of property and welfare
in even more unequal ways. Even beyond that, global inequalities
that have their own colonial and contemporary histories have
positioned places like Egypt in certain ways toocondemned, it
seems, to endemic poverty.
These global, national, and local dynamics of inequality that
have placed the poor under such pressure also have had a peculiar impact on Khadijas marriage because of how they have
shaped her husbands life. Why does he drink in a community
where most people do not and where their religion specifically
proscribes it? In a region of Egypt where Pharaonic sites have
long attracted Western tourists and archaeologists, he and his
brothers were among the first men in the village to get involved
in tourism in the period after feminism, womens employment,
and other transformations in Europe and the United States made
independent women active participants in the global tourist industry.52 As a youth, he mixed with tourists, drank with the foreigners, and took up with European women. Like many of the
young men in the area who have done this in the last twentyfive years or so, he became involved with an older European
195
divorce.53 These men have found a new way to make a living

without having to migrate to Cairo or the Gulf. The European
women build them houses, buy them taxis, partner with them to
run hotels and music festivals, and occasionally take them home
with them.
Everyone knows that Khadijas husband has had a European
friend for twenty years. But like most men, he also wanted to
start a family. When he had saved up enough, he married this
local girl. It was not surprising that Khadijas husband had chosen her, much younger, to start his own family. His mother seems
to have been involved in arranging the match because she is always the one who intervenes to persuade Khadija to return. He
built a house for Khadija in 2001, but didnt tell his European
friend. These kinds of situations can be difficult for all concerned.
The tricky time for everyone seems to be when the European
woman comes to visit. Some people say that at first she didnt
know the truth. Now that she knows, others say she is jealous.
Six years into the marriage, though, Khadijas mother insists
that his European wife adores his children and walks proudly
around the village hand in hand with his little boy. I could understand why when I met this bright boy. Dressed neatly in a
pink button-down shirt and chatting merrily and showing off
the French he was learning in his private school, he was irresistible. Everyone in the village notes with a certain respect that this
woman, unlike many of those duped, had made sure that the
house she built to rent out to tourists was legally in only her own
name. Her relative wealth and European status confound norms
of gendered power. Khadijas husband, everyone comments, is
docile around this woman. Did he feel he was compromising his
masculine standing in the village? I wondered if he might be
compensating in his marriage to the much younger and more
vulnerable Khadija by being so harsh. One can only speculate.
196
What is apparent and significant, though, is that domestic violence in this case is anything but traditional. It is produced at
the nexus of the global field of European tourism in the Third
World and the inequalities between rich foreigners and local villagers that fuel it. The alcohol that is so taken for granted in the
European circles in which men like Khadijas husband travel
also surely plays a part.
Having known Khadija for many years, I understand that she
cannot leave the marriage for other reasons beyond these compulsions of poverty and the fallout of global inequalities. There
is also kinship: Khadija and her husband are distant cousins;
he is thus a precariously well-off relative whose marriage to a
troubled cousin from a broken home may also have been a way
to help out these poor relations. Khadija is attractive, but this
marriage may have been something of a protection and a gift to
her and her desperate family.
In this aspect of her life, there seems to be something of a repetition of Khadijas family history (with a more unfortunate
outcome). Khadijas grandparents, who were cousins, had married
for the same reasonas a way to make sure her grandmother was
cared for. People told me that she had been possessed by spirits at
the age of twelve or thirteen. She was a volatile young woman
who ran off to saints tombs and caused her parents tremendous
worries. Although many young men had wanted to marry this
beautiful girl, their mothers and families would forbid them. She
was not considered normal, always running off to religious sanctuaries and chanting Gods name. So finally it was arranged that
her cousin marry her, taking on the lifelong responsibility to care
for her out of family concern. He got her treated and she was
much better for a while. Her daughter told me that she was stable
for about ten years, but then reverted to her religious practices,
periodically running off and leaving her family, including her
197
three children. Khadijas father was her son. He too has had a
troubled history of abusive behavior that was much worse when
he was married to Khadijas mother, hence the divorce. The difference in the two stories is that Khadijas grandfather was kind
to his wife and his daughters. Khadija is not so fortunate in her
husband. Still, her relationship with him cannot be disentangled
from the family bonds of attachment and dependency that help
keep her in the marriage.
This last piece of the story suggests that we must see Khadijas
difficult marriage as something that the language of violations of
womens rights in traditional patriarchal culture cannot begin to
describe because it cannot be isolated from the dynamics of globalization or the intimacies of family ties. Given the layers of
this story, we need to ask ourselves whether the framework of
rightseven if expressed in the new, more indigenous initiatives
to reform Muslim family law or to promote and publicize gender egalitarian interpretations of the Qurancan capture the
complexity of Khadijas life situation. Would any approach that
talks in terms of freeing her from patriarchal culture or saving
her from Muslim men enable us to see the tangled strands of her
suffering?
Women in the village used other frameworks for judging and
analyzing Khadijas unhappy situation. They had a variety of
opinions about and degrees of empathy with Khadija. When I
would ask them why she didnt leave her husband when he was
violent with her, some would explain that she didnt want to end
up like her mother, divorced and raising two kids on her own, or
that she didnt want her children to grow up, as she had, without
the love of a father. Others mentioned that she had wanted to
marry this particular man, knowing full well his situation and
his drinking problem. It was her choice and therefore she had
some responsibility to make the marriage work. Some women
198
blamed her for being too touchy and hypersensitive. They contrasted Khadijas flighty mother, who had provoked her exhusbands violence, to Khadijas fathers calm second wife who
had managed just fine for eighteen years to get along with her
husband. And, indeed, he was good to her and his three children
from this new family.
The frameworks they used were drawn from local ways of understanding the many sorts of difficult situations in which women
find themselves. Some frameworks were religious, based on the
ideals of patience (sabr) or accepting ones fate and Gods will.
Others were based on intimate knowledge of what women value
most and a fuller recognition of how messy life can be. They
were quick to point out to me that Khadija had actively sought a
third pregnancy, giving up contraception. Did this suggest to
them a (perfectly understandable) desire, even a will, to stay in
the marriage so that she could have a full family life? This is a
value that remains largely unquestioned in their social world,
even if its realization is so often fraught. I dont think any of us
would scoff at this wish.
Six months after Khadijas crisis and her trip to Cairo, she
safely delivered a lovely baby girl. Khadijas mother confided
happily to me on my next visit that from the moment of the
birth of this child, Khadijas husband had stopped drinking completely. He had become pious, observing Ramadan for the first
time in decades. Others told me that actually he had been very ill
and the doctor had warned him that if he did not quit drinking,
he would have complete liver failure. Either way, there was marital harmony for the moment. Everyone, including Khadija, was
hoping it would last.
199
Selective Intervention
I have set side by side one set of social and moral relations in one
Egyptian village to another set of relations that constitute new
and interesting forms of rights activism by Muslim women
working explicitly within an Islamic framework. Through this, I
have shown why, from my experience, it seems that none of the
kinds of global rights discourses at work in the world now are
adequate for assessing or judging the lives to be redeemed. The
single case of domestic violence I began to unravel was meant to
shake our confidence that frameworks of womens rights or
campaigns for gender equality capture or solve the kinds of vexing problems that women face.
Activists working in the name of rights tend to come from
certain social locations, work within political situations, and use
particular cultural resources. It is not my intention to denigrate
individual efforts on behalf of women or to dismiss any of the
forms of activism organized in the name of improving womens
(human or Islamic) rights. I see these new projects of Islamic
feminism, for example, like the more secular womens rights projects that came before them as having mobilized concerned, hardworking, creative, committed, and, in this case, impressively
learned individuals.
I do not deny that those who speak out for rights and gender
equality may contribute to improving lives by making certain
critiques of social inequality and social injustice possible. Some
have provided legal and moral remedies for intractable problems. The political or strategic uses of dialects of rights have enabled political and moral gains and may offer future benefits for
disenfranchised groups and individuals, including women, who
learn to use this powerful language or who come to translate
their grievances into its terms. In Chapter 5, I describe the ways
200
some Egyptian village women now deploy multiple vocabularies

of rights to make claims when they feel wronged, drawing from
national political and legal spheres, local familial norms, and
from knowledge of Islamic law and texts.
However, we need to recognize the limits of this language. We
need to see what it excludes and to recognize its links with institutions and political configurations. We also want to be aware of
the violence that translating into this language might entail for
people, even those for whom it feels like a mother tongue. In
short, we have to be more realistic about the limits and locations
of the vocabularies and imagination of rights. We need to be attentive to the intersection of rights work with a range of global
and class inequalities. We must look closely at what various
forms of rights work and womens advocacy actually produce in
the world by way of careers, social distinctions, public discourse,
new social and financial circuits, documents, legal debates, travel
opportunities, intellectual excitement, and even hope. Some of
these effects are unintended. Some may even harm the women
they intend to help, especially when caught up in international
politics. The intellectual tools of the rights frames that are common sense now turn out to be inextricable from the socially located political projects of the people and groups who put them
to use. They are also not adequate for appreciating the complexities of womens experiences.
Conclusion
Registers of Humanity
This book is a long answer to

the question of whether Muslim women have rights or need saving. I have examined the work and the frameworks of the many
who want to do something about violations of womens rights
globally, especially Muslim womens rights. There are the moral
crusaders who view Muslim women as distant and different and
want to save them. There are writers who have capitalized on the
international political situation and individual womens traumas
by selling sordid memoirs of sensational abuse and escape. There
are hardworking activists leading organizations dedicated to
fighting forms of gender inequality, including violence. Most
speak a dialect of universal rights; others use dialects specific to
the Muslim discursive tradition. Some work at the international
level, some work locally. Sometimes it is hard to disentangle the
two. The vibrancy of this entanglement is clearest in the case of
a new type of feminist who has emerged on the scene. She quotes
fluently from the Quran, is familiar with Islamic law, invokes
precedents from early Muslim history, writes sophisticated articles
on the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of
202
Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), arranges conferences

on Google Calendar, conducts online surveys, and draws from a
wide range of experiences of organizing for change.
In concluding, I want to return to rural Egypt one last time to
consider the experiences of some women who are not part of
these efforts, though they would qualify as suitable objects of
intervention in the world that all these activists imagine. Just as
Zaynab was shocked to hear that anyone would blame Islam for
what she and other women in Egypt were suffering, so would
these women be puzzled, even offended, by some of the ways
they are being viewed and judged. I want to use their lives to
open up a way we might think differently about Muslim women
and their rightsand about our responsibilities.
In this book, I argue that rather than clicking on a website to
donate $10 or flying to distant lands to bring school supplies to
girls, and certainly before calling in military troops, we should
take time to listen. I have shown how hard it is to hear through
the noise of the familiar stories. These stories have been made
authoritative through their association with the purity of the
language of universal rights. Popular (porno)graphic memoirs
and media have made them believable. Gendered Orientalism
has taken on a new life and new forms in our feminist twentyfirst century.
If we were to listen more closely, I believe we would discover
that matters are not so simple. If we were to listen and look, we
might be forced to take account of contexts that are not as disconnected from our worlds and our own lives as we think. These
contexts are shaped by global politics, international capital, and
modern state institutions, with their changing impacts on family
and community. Above all, these examples of womens situations
might shake our moral certainty about some cherished values of
liberalism that have diffused so widely in this era when human
CONCLUSION
203
rights ideals have become hegemonic. Along with Talal Asad, I

would argue that we should not dismiss these values as mere instruments of new imperial interventions. We have to take this
language of justice seriously. It frames the new common sense
about saving Muslim women because it has, as Asad put it, produced political subjects around the world who share these values
and speak this language.1
Choice, consent, and freedom are the grammar. So let us look
at what this grammar allows and what it does not.
Taking into Account . . .

Shortly after saying good-bye to Zaynab in Upper Egypt, I made
a quick trip to another part of the country. I went back to the
northwest coast to visit the Bedouin families I had lived with in
the late 1970s and 1980s. It was two years since I had been there
to mourn the passing of the extraordinary man who had been
my host, and who had become like a father to me.
A lot had happened. The family had been adjusting to the loss
of this charismatic figure who had held together not just his family but also the wider community. I noticed two new houses that
had been built nearby. I knew these houses had been in the
works for years; they were part of the familys attempt to stake
their claims to land that the government was trying to seize from
them to build public housing. Each time they built a wall around
the plots of barren land, bulldozers would come and knock them
down. For as long as anyone could remember, these Bedouin
families had lived on this open land surrounded by no one but
relatives and friends. They did not want this taken, but government policy was to move people out of the crowded Nile Valley
into the desert.
I was pleased to find Gateefa still in the house in which I had
lived with her and the family. Serious and intelligent, she was the
204
woman I most looked up to and appreciated. I was grateful for

the warm generosity with which she had taken me into their
household and was indebted to her for the wealth of knowledge,stories, poetry, and wise insights into her community she
had shared. It was sad to see her living alone in the section of the
house she had shared with her husband and children for the
thirty-some years that I had known her. We sat close, catching up
on the news. Our shared memories and people gave us a lot to
talk about, even if time had made my return awkward and my
long research in another part of Egypt had compromised my
dialect.
As we reminisced about her husband, she suddenly said, You
need a man who knows how to rule. I was jolted by the comment. She said it with some force. I knew that she and her husband had been close. She had married him when she was only
thirteen and shed had nine children with him. It had not always
been easy. He had imposed co-wives on her. But she had understood why and had always been at his side. In his final illness,
she had organized his care. She knew the most intimate details of
his illnesses, and then his death.2 She had been philosophical and
strong after he died, her faith enabling her to reassure all those
who burst into tears around her that we should accept what God
wanted. We all pass on. She cherished her husbands last gift to
her: arranging for her to go with her son on the pilgrimage to
Mecca.
So what had provoked this outburst? Did she unthinkingly
accept male domination? Was she getting her ideas from the
Quran? As we talked, I came to realize that this was an angry
comment directedindirectlyat her eldest son. He had recently
moved out of the large family home, taking his wife and children
to live in one of these new houses. I remembered her critical remarks on previous visits about her daughters-in-law. She was
CONCLUSION
205
annoyed when one daughter-in-law left her infant with an aunt

while she went off to get her eyebrows plucked. She considered
it frivolous. The baby was crying for its mother. She disapproved
of the other daughter-in-law for going shopping with her mother
to buy special clothes just for her own children. The new generation was selfish.
In this comment, Gateefa was expressing her disapproval of the
way her son had, as she interpreted it, succumbed to the power
and desires of his wife. She blamed her daughter-in-law for maneuvering the breakup of the family that she and her husband had
built together. Each woman now gets her husband to go off and
buy special things for his own children, she complained. Each
woman wants her own household, not all the work of the joint
household. She then appealed to my knowledge of the way
things had been in the past, when her husband was alive. No one
would have dared to buy special things for their own children. In
the old days, she reminded me, her husband was in charge. He
made sure that everyone in the household got whatever they
needed. But they all got the same things. If he bought food, it
was for everyone. If he bought new clothes, everyone got the
equivalent itembolts of cloth for dresses, gallabiyas (the robes
that boys and men wore), shawls, and even socks. The family finances were still jointher husband had wanted it that way and
it was the respected norm for prominent families.
Gateefa thought that the man should rule because her first
commitment was to keeping the family together. This is what her
husband had done. She could not let herself think that her son
might want his own household too. He should be committed
above all to the integrity of the family and the honor of the kin
group. She presumed that her sons wife was selfishly trying to
break this up. She could not see that this was a normal generational transition, much like ones she had seen so often in her
206
lifetime (and that anthropologists have written so much about

under the name the domestic cycle). It was perhaps hard for
her to accept that she was entering a new phase in the life of the
family, set in motion by the passing of her husband. She responded to her own sense of personal loss through this moralistic formulation. As perhaps everywhere, there was an unresolvable tension between her desires as a mother and those of her
daughter-in-law as a wife. Their choices clashed. This had nothing to do with the Quran or anything Islam might have to say
about mens rights over women. I had often seen her fiercely defend her Islamic rights to equal treatment in her marriage.
That specific personal situations like this give meaning to
what appear to be such clear signs of the cultural oppression of
Muslim women can also be seen in the developments in Khadijas marital life. In Chapter 6, we see how she was subjected to
violence by her alcoholic husband. I describe how regional poverty, international tourism, and feminist gains in Europe (as well
as high divorce rates) affected her marriage. But there is a further complication I do not mention therea kind of remainder
that introduces some doubt about whether her husbands violence and the circumstances that prevent her from walking away
from the marriage are the only or even the main sources of her
wretchedness.
Long before she was married, Khadija had been subject to
crises. Her relatives regularly covered them up in the face of village gossip. I will never forget the day many years ago that I
stopped in to see her family. It was just a week before the first of
what would become a succession of postponed wedding dates. I
found a terrible situation. Khadija was lying on the couch, dazed
and in pain. Her tongue was swollen and she couldnt speak.
Her mother, worried sick about her again, had this time taken
her to a specialist, an expensive neurosurgeon who flew in from
CONCLUSION
207
Alexandria once a week to see patients. He had barely spoken

with Khadija before prescribing some medications. He administered an injection that knocked her out. Enmeshed, as all Egyptians are now, in a flawed medical system driven by the politics
of expertise, profit, and the pharmaceutical industry, this was
not the first or last time medical intervention failed to help
Khadija. The forms of religious healing her mother had pursued
earlier had not helped either. The Cairo psychiatrist had been
just the most recent, and perhaps the most harmless, of these attempts to make her feel better.
A careful look at Khadijas situation forces us to see that we
dont quite know what to make of her problem of domestic violence. The complex bonds of protection and constraint that kinship introduced to her marriage, her husbands oddly international circumstances, the various aspects of globally regulated
poverty that foreclosed her options, the uneven reach of an inadequate medical system, and the demons she lives withwhether
they are the result of childhood trauma (her father was violent),
inherited mental illness (her grandmother was possessed by spirits), or parasites and anemia (as the various interpretations circulating in and out of the family suggest)make us realize that
there is no simple story here. Would getting out of the marriage
help? It is hard to say. All her life, she has struggled with headaches, felt she was being strangled, and periodically withdrawn
into herself.
Khadijas saga continues. Her future remains unclear. Despite
the fervent hopes for a happy ending that her husbands sudden
decision to stop drinking and fast Ramadan seemed to presage,
she was back at home with her mother when I last visited the
village. Her aunt quietly took my hand and walked me across
the road to see the house they were building for her on a field
that had salted up and where nothing would grow. Did I know
208
of any charity that could help them build this house for Khadija
and her children? This time, she told me soberly, Khadija has
sworn she will never go back.
Consent and the Right to Freely Choose

As an anthropologist whose business it is to understand how
individuals are formed within the contours of their cultures and
social worlds, I have always been wary of concepts like choice.
The legal category of consent that goes with it poses similar problems for anyone who stops to think about how we go through life
and what intimate relationships mean for us. Especially in societies that value relationality and mutual concern above individualism, and where gender is closely tied to familial power, liberal
dreams like those found in CEDAWs Article 16 about the equality that men and women should enjoy in marriage and family
relations strike me as aspirational but troubling fictions. Musawahs Framework for Action to reform Muslim family law reiterates this goal; it proposes that women and men should have
the same right freely to choose a spouse and to enter into marriage only with their free and full consent.3
The complexity of human lives formed in social worlds challenges such fictions. What does it mean to freely choose, or to
consent? These are difficult questions for marriage. A look at
what has been happening in rural Egypt in the past twenty years
or so shows one aspect of the difficulty. An intriguing phenomenon has emerged: girls in different rural communities have been
developing knowledge of their rights under Islamic law. They
have been using this knowledge to challenge the customary arrangement of marriages by families by pointing to the requirement of consent.
Parallel efforts have been under way across the Muslim world
by feminist reformers of various sorts, from secular to Islamic, to
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209
make choice, consent, and contract the instruments for guaranteeing womens rights in marriage. In North Africa, for example,
feminist reformers developed a model marriage contract that
would build in requirements of consent for a husbands decision
to take a second wife. In India and Egypt, there have been campaigns for legal reform of Islamic family law that would establish womens rights to initiate divorce.4
But one of the most striking changes I noted in the late 1980s
in the Bedouin community in Egypts Western Desert where I
had first done fieldwork a decade earlier was the impact of the
Islamic revival on young men and women. In an essay a young
woman wrote for me on the theme of what she believed deserved
to be preserved and what traditions should change in her community, she returned again and again to marriage.5 She was the
first girl in her family to graduate from high school. Her commentary bore the traces of the mixture of modernization and Islamization ideologies that were the stuff of Egyptian state education.6 Of the Bedouin girl in the past, she wrote: She had no
right to an opinion in any matter, however much the matter
might concern her personally. She had no say even in the choice
of a husband . . . what she had to do was carry out her familys
orders even if she didnt want him. It was not right for her to
refuse. She commented to me, And to this day, no matter how
educated shes become, very seldom does she have a say . . . Even
if he was older than she was, for example, or very different from
her, she had to agree to what the family wanted. For example, if
they said I had to marry someone and I didnt want himI
hated himif my kinsmen had agreed to the match and told
me I had to marry him, what I would have to do, despite my
wishes, was marry him. I found this statement surprising. Why
did she depict girls as powerless in decisions about marriage?
She had heard all the same stories I hadvivid accounts, like her
210
grandmothers, of ways they had resisted marriages arranged for

them by their families.7 She also knew plenty of young women
like the one who, in love with someone else, had married her
cousin. She understood her strategy perfectly. She kept storming
off to her fathers household at the slightest provocation. Eventually, her husband divorced her, which was what she wanted.
This depiction of a simple story of past powerlessness allowed
her to foreground the new standards that were coming into play.
Her religious training at school had given her moral ammunition
against arranged marriage. The Prophet, she reported authoritatively, says that it is wrong to marry someone you have never
seen. A girl must be asked her opinion and she must give her
consent.8
In this period of her life, marriage was on her mind. As her
mother teased, Now that she has her diploma, were going to
get her the other diploma! She was frank about her feelings
about someone rumored to have been selected for her. She told
her aunts and her mother how she felt. She insisted to her grandmother and anyone who would listen that she wanted to marry
someone educated, an Egyptian, not a Bedouin. She wanted someone with his own house. She wanted someone who wanted a
small family. She wanted someone who would not take a second
wife. When her grandmother retorted, Your father wont agree
to it! she had hugged her grandmother affectionately, reassuring her, Were just talking with you to see what youll say. Is
there anything in our hands? Or in my fathers? Only God knows
what will happen.9
More and more girls are invoking Islam to argue against customary ideas about the propriety of arranged marriages. Twenty
years later and hundreds of kilometers south, I heard the same
confident insistence on the Islamic principle of the necessity of a
girls consent to marriage, thanks to the power of education and
CONCLUSION
211
of the growing legitimacy of the Islamic revival. Womens rights

activists, whether working on state law or the reform of Muslim
family law, have drawn on the existence of guarantees intrinsic
to the Islamic tradition such as the requirement of consent to
marriage. Musawah, the most significant reform initiative to have
emerged in the past few years, lays out the principle in its Framework for Action. Arguing that in the twenty-first century, the
provisions of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of
Discrimination against Women (CEDAW)which stands for justice and equality for women in the family and societyare more
in line with the Shariah than family law provisions in many
Muslim countries and communities, it proposes that such laws
must change to ensure such rights.
Having the principle of consent in place, though, does not
resolve the quandaries of young women as they try to decide
whether to marry a particular person. In the village in Upper
Egypt from which so many of my examples have come, families
were still closely involved in marriage arrangements. There was
no institution of dating, even though young men and women
might get to know each other if their families were related or if
they had been at school together. When a man or his parents
went to a girls parents to ask for her hand, the girl was always
asked her opinion. But how do these girls form an opinion? Marriage everywhere is no small matter and it is hard to know what
the future holds.
I was intrigued to hear the way people talked about how
someone might decide whether to refuse or consent to a marriage. The broken engagement of Zaynabs oldest daughter provided the occasion for many such discussions. She had refused
several suitors during the past decade. Then one day, she agreed
and got engaged. A close friend of her mothers made sense of
her consent this time as a matter of fate (nasib). As she explained
212
to me, Thats when it works. You can say no, and I dont like
this one or that one. But when it is meant to be (theres nasib),
you say okay.
Another young woman affirmed that nowadays they always
ask a girl if she accepts. In the old days, they didnt; if her family
agreed to the match, she agreed. But again, on what basis? Girls
now expect to sit and talk with the prospective groom and to get
to know him a little, if they didnt before. But this can hardly tell
either of them much about the person with whom they plan to
spend their lives. Something else has developed to help girls decide. As this young woman who was studying at a new Islamic
studies institute for girls explained, when a girl doesnt know
whether to consent or not, she should perform a certain prayer.
During the prayer, it will become clear whether you should or
should not accept the man. That is when youre so close to God,
she confided, that He reveals it to you. If you feel during this
prayer that hes not right for you, you say no.
Both invoked a higher force, not inner feeling; fate is, after all,
Gods will, and the special prayer to ask God for guidance in
making ones individual choice is even more direct. Given how
hard it is for anyone to decide whether a future intimacy will be
fulfilling or miserable or whether something as long-term as a
marriage might work, this reference to some guiding force to
replace the formerly trusted parents makes sense. This is not the
free choice idealized in CEDAW or Islamic feminist documents,
but it is very much about consent and choice.
In this case, though, the factors that shaped Zaynabs daughters decision about the marriage were more mundane. Her fianc was the son of a friend of her mothers. Like many young
men from this region, he was working in Europe. Lack of opportunity means that when young men can get out to find work,
they do. He was fairly young and not unattractive. I recalled her
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213
positive words about him. She said she had asked him a lot of
questions and found him easy to talk to.
I was happy for her when I learned she was engaged. She had
always been open with me and I enjoyed her company. She deserved to have a family of her own. A teenager when I first met
her, she had worked hard in high school and done well. She was
smart, sensible, and warm. She had always been a great support
to her mother, who was raising a big family on her own. Keenly
feeling her mothers hardships, she gradually took over all the
household work and even the care of her younger sisters. She
took her responsibilities seriously, but she was less needed now
that they had the business and her brother had the caf. So finally it seemed that she would be getting a life of her own.
Yet eight months later, she suddenly decided to break off the
engagement. She returned the gold jewelry that had made her
feel special. She created bad feeling between her mother and this
friend. When I asked her what had gone wrong, she said hed
had very old-fashioned demands. He told her that he would be
away a year at a time, working in Europe, and that during that
time, she wouldnt be allowed to leave their apartment in his
familys building, which was the next hamlet over. He told her
that she could not go to stay with her own family while he was
away. He said she shouldnt even go downstairs to hang out with
his extended family. When I asked how she had discovered all
this, she explained that theyd been talking a lot on the phone.
When I expressed surprise that he was being so rigid, having
lived in Europe for years, she agreed: I thought he would be
more open-minded after living in Europe. In fact, no one here
would ever impose those kinds of conditions on a woman.
From her mother, I discovered something else. He planned to
stick with his European wife/girlfriend, the one who had obtained the work permit for him. He wanted to keep this new
214
marriage to her daughter secret for a while. This was too much.
Perhaps Zaynab said this to save face. But her daughter seemed
to be refusing this insult to her dignity. This was not the kind of
marriage she wanted. These were not conditions she would accept, even though it would have meant finally having a husband
and starting a family. This is what most people want in this community, as in many.10
As she gets older, though, it becomes increasingly less likely
that she will ever marry. She had already refused marriage proposals from men she said were too old or not as educated as she
was, or from men who seemed boorish. Her parents respected
her decisions, though they were sad that this engagement hadnt
worked out. Secretly they worried, as I did, that no more marriage offers would be forthcoming. No one said this. She was
now well over thirty in a community where girls marry as early
as seventeen and most brides are in their early twenties. This was
also a community that had its share of women who never married, passed by and left taking responsibility for the care of aging
parents. As in so many places, there are a lot of women in the
village who remain single. In the Arab Middle East, they are part
of what alarmists call the marriage crisis.11
Two years later, Zaynabs daughter confided her regret that
she had not married. She said she had misjudged life. She felt so
needed, so responsible for helping her mother with the heavy
household load, especially after her mother broke her ankle and
was no longer able to farm or even keep a water buffalo to milk.
She said she couldnt imagine abandoning her mother and the
household that needed her so much. She added that she had been
so attached to her little sisters (including the one with diabetes)
that I felt like I was their mother.
The trouble was that circumstances had changed. Her father
had retired from his job in Cairo and returned home to live with
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215
his family. Her sisters were growing up fasttoo fast, she

thought. The twenty-two-year-old, who had graduated from college in religious studies, was engaged. The seventeen-year-old had
just accepted a marriage proposal. One of her brothers had married and his wife now shared the household work. She confessed
that she probably should have looked out for herself more. Her
sacrifice had not even been appreciated; her parents had thought
she was just being picky when she refused those marriage offers.
It wasnt that she hadnt wanted to marry; it was that she had felt
a sense of responsibility, but did not want them to feel this as a
burden.
The unexpressed fear now was that it might now be permanent. How else to explain her anxiety attacks and fits of uncontrollable crying? She now was going from doctor to doctor.
Among the pills she had been prescribed, piled into a plastic bag
she opened for me to inspect, I noticed an antidepressant.
Consumed by Love: An Alternative Bondage

This description of the way one young woman weighed responsibilities and desires, wanted to be part of what she knew and
loved and at the same time wanted to choose something new not
knowing if it was right for her or not, whether it would bring her
happiness or misery, should remind us of what we all know:
choices are not easy and what we want is not always clear. The
guarantee of consent, whether backed by CEDAW, Sharia, respect and family love, or rational calculation, could do little to
help Zaynabs daughter make this important decision. Wherever
we turn in the world, we find people caught in similar binds.
These binds have to be factored into any discussion of what it
means to freely choose, or to consent.
So let us return briefly to the pulp nonfiction discussed in previous chapters to amplify these reservations about consent: that
216
it is not easy in peoples lives to distinguish freedom and duty,

consent and bondage. Embedded in these tales of force, as I have
shown for Ayaan Hirsi Alis autobiography, Infidel, we can detect traces of alternative understandings and of contradictions
that are never given prominence because they do not fit the popular narrative. These throw light on the complexities of womens
situations and feelings.
Without wanting to minimize the hardship, betrayal, and
abuse suffered by the two Yemeni-British teenagers Zana and
Nadia, one would, for example, still want to ask in the cases of
these girls whose stories are told in Sold and Without Mercy if
their reactions would have been different had the marriages been
arranged to wealthy or middle-class, educated young men living
in comfort in Taiz, the city to which they are eventually taken by
the Yemeni authorities as a refuge. Leaving the rough Birmingham neighborhood in which they lived, the council housing, the
long hours working at a sandwich shop, an abusive and alcoholic father, limited futures, and run-ins with the racist law (all
described in these books), would these girls or their mother have
complained of force?
Zanas outrage seems to be directed mostly at the harshness
and desolation of their mountaintop hovel, the excruciatingly
hard work of simple farming, the torture of milling corn by hand,
and carrying water buckets up cliffs while pregnant. Her complaints are about insufficient food and a sickly husband. These
merge imperceptibly into a condemnation of forced marriage
and violent patriarchy. Yet if one reads her account carefully, one
sees that the men who support these girls are up against the
same harsh conditions. They too missed out on the normal joy
of being the centers of attention at weddings celebrated by the
community. There was no wedding, no marriage gifta requirement of Muslim family law. In short, this was a pathological
CONCLUSION
217
situation for all involved, though for people used to living in this
harsh region, the tough conditions of livelihood are normal.
But I noted something more poignant and complicated in my
reflections on the younger sister Nadias ambivalent refusal to
take her mothers ticket to freedom and home. Her mother
does not seem to be able to hear her daughters confusion as she
reconciles her anger at having been tricked into this situation to
which she did not consent, and her sense that she has now built a
meaningful life in Yemen. She is bound by love for her children,
and even perhaps her husband. She cannot choose freedom.
Nadias all-too-human dilemma, like the dilemmas faced by
so many of us at the other end of the life cycle who find their
freedom compromised by caring for elderly parents or ill loved
ones, opens up new ways of thinking about Muslim women and
their rights and wrongs. In a profound essay on sexual consent,
Judith Butler goes beyond the usual critiques of legal consent by
noting how consent might not be simply a core liberal value, but
part of a strong fantasy of autonomy; hence, our intense attachment to the idea. She reminds us that, as Antonio Gramsci put it,
consent is always manufactured, at both the personal and the
political levels. We need to recognize the importance of power in
determining choices. But most originally, Butler asks us to reflect on how, in matters of personal desire or intimacy, consent
might not have much meaning. In the end, we can never know
what we are consenting to when we say yes. How will it go?
What will it mean to consent to a relationship? A deep unknowability characterizes all human desires, acts, and futures.
A century of anthropological thought about humanity has
established that our everyday understandings of the individual
are culturally and historically specific and that the dominant
modern Western understanding of the self contrasts with many
other conceptions of self that have valued autonomy differently
218
and have worked with more grounded perceptions of the interrelationship between self and other.12 Anthropologists also agree
with Clifford Geertz that the best way to understand human
nature is to recognize it as thoroughly cultural. To be viable as
humans, we need a drastically long period of socialization within
families and communities.13
Yet, anthropologists have rarely gone the next step to see
how, in certain circumstances, the values of consent and choice
might be fetishized and defended in order to uphold for individuals the fantasy of being autonomous subjects. This is a dynamic
I found at work in pulp nonfiction about forced marriage and
honor crimes. Nor have they articulated so well how foundational for our humanity it is to be related to each other, even if so
many of us who have written about people in other places have
commented on the deep meaning that family ties hold for men
and women. I certainly have done this in my studies of the Arab
Muslim communities in which I have had a chance to live and
do research.14
In the final paragraph of her essay on sexual consent in law
and psychoanalysis, Butler offers a poignant truth about the limits we all face as individuals and as people in our time and place
who assert the value of freely choosing. The most basic fact of
our existence, she reminds us, is that we are born into and depend on families we did not choose. There are form of proximity, of living with, of adjacency and co-habitation that are radically unchosen, she writes. And these constitute a basic form
of sociality that no one enters contractually, that constitute the
social conditions of life to which we never consented, and which
are finally indifferent to our consent. These are conditions we
are nevertheless obligated to protect and defend, even though we
never agreed to them, and they do not emerge from our will.
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219
As a philosopher, she can then make a general statement

about how this situation shapes all of us: Those lives which exceed me and are not a matter of my choosing are a condition of
who I am, and so there is no life that is exclusively my own . . . We
are finally creatures of life, including creatures of passion, who
need what we cannot fully understand or choose, and whose sexual and emotional lives are marked from the start from this being
bound up with one another with unknowing and necessity.15
These words give us a different way to think about Muslim
womens rights. Here are some universals that are not normative
and do not pretend to be abstract, carefully hiding their parochialism and politics.16 Here are some universals that begin from
the premise that we all share something as humans. These universals join us together instead of dividing us artificially into
those who freely choose and those who dont, those who champion rights and those who do not have any, or dont have enough
or the right kinds. This position has implications for how we
think about rights, what we should do about womens rights,
and whether or how we should we go to war for distant women.
Invoking this kind of common humanity is not the same as
fantasizing about the universalism of human rights. One might
be reminded here of the famous photography exhibit The Family
of Man, which was imagined as part of the wishful declaration
of a common humanity in the postwar period.17 That it was
called a family of man is only one index of its historical specificity, of course. And that the preamble of the UNs Universal
Declaration of Human Rights should define members of the
human family by their equal and inalienable rights is very
peculiar, given our experiences of actual families we know. Families are by nature contingent and ever-changing, their dynamics
volatile, and their membership flexible. Anthropologists used to
220
study kinship. They studied the bewildering array of ways that

humans have imagined their social and emotional relations, as
well as the logics by which they have organized themselves. They
taught us about the different meaning people have given to their
differences and affinities and they have studied the various inclusions and exclusions of kinship, configured by the workings of
memory and amnesia. Like novelists, they have marveled at the
intense emotions and sharp interactions that shape individual
experience and personhood within diverse families. In recent
years, feminist anthropologists have become fascinated with the
forms of kinship that new reproductive technologies and organ
transplantation have spawned, just as earlier they critiqued the
heteronormative constructions that made us imagine families
only one way, or as biologically given.18 On the ground, every
family is different, even the happy ones, contrary to Leo Tolstoys famous pronouncement in the opening of Anna Karenina.
Families harbor distance and closeness, violence and love, indifference and passion. Does this make them a better model of
the relatedness of people in the world than an abstract humanity
marked by uniformity, or the agonistic oppositions of backward
versus modern cultures or civilizations? Family is about living
together, across individual differences, in ever-changing relations
not just of affiliation or affection but of dependency, struggles
over authority, and ambivalence.19 As Roland Barthes said, commenting on the pietistic presentation of the magical natural unity
of the family of man, what get lost are the differences, whose
other names are history and injustice.20
Justice, Not a Click Away

I have shown that we can best understand rights as projects
imagined and pursued by people in particular social settings,
whether in their families or in court, in international organizations
CONCLUSION
221
created to realize them or grassroots ones that use them as tools.

Rather than asking, therefore, if Muslim women have rights, I
suggest that we ask instead what the concepts of Muslim womens rights or the oppressed Muslim woman are doing in the
world and who is making use of these concepts. I have uncovered some ways that a commitment to going to war for womens
rights in distant lands participates in divisive and sometimes
devastating political projects. But I have also called into question
the capacity of any rights framework to capture the complexity
of actual peoples lives. I recognize that this language of justice has
become a part of many womens and mens lives around the world.
We do not have a monopoly on it, even if the sources and outlines
of rights vary. We see this in Ayshas appeal to a mixture of rights
drawn from state law, customary practice, and the Quran.
By offering some glimpses into womens lives and dilemmas
in some communities that lie on the other divide of the imaginative geography that fuels the clash of civilizations, I make four
arguments in this book. First, like other women, the kinds of
suffering that Muslim women undergo are of many sorts and
have various causes, only some of which might be traced to religious traditions or cultural formations. These formations need
to be understood in their fullness, not caricatured.
Second, the violations of what might be widely agreed upon
as rights to equality, safety, dignity, or even choice may indeed be
patterned along gender lines in ways that are crucial to analyze.
Yet we must realize that these patterns are configured differently
in relation to opportunities and possibilities available to people
in different communities and historical eras. So we want to be
attentive to the ways gender structures violence as well as status,
well-being, and options in each particular context.
Third, none of us is immune to suffering or difficulties, or to the
potential of violations of the most horrible sort. Our newspapers
222
give daily evidence of terrible inhumanity in our own world. Yet

we distract ourselves by focusing our gaze on spectacular wrongs
elsewhere, led by those who are often well-meaning and sometimes self-righteous, and fed by sensational accounts, including
mass-mediated memoirs. I often think of the short stories of Alice Munro, the Canadian writer, when I am confronted with
sanctimonious talk about womens suffering elsewhere in the
world. These stories about the everyday lives of women model the
opposite of what a rights discourse does when it glosses the lives
of women. Munro exquisitely captures their desperate searches
for meaning or happiness in and out of marriage. She writes
hauntingly about the compromises they make in life, the ambivalences they cant escape, the desires and dreams that die. She
quietly draws out the sudden strength of character or the impulsive transgression, the misunderstandings between those who
love, the ties that strangle, the lies that poison, and the judgments and solaces of social convention and religion. We usually
fail to balance the universalizing discourse of rights, like the
distancing forms of social scientific description, with this more
human perspective when it comes to those we dont know well
or those who seem culturally distant.21
The failure to look for similarities is dangerous. Through
such failures, we disavow not just our common humanity but
also our complicity in the forms of suffering that people, including women, experience elsewhere in the world. As we see from
Kandiyotis analysis of the impact of insecurity and war-imposed
poverty on families in Afghanistan who now find themselves
pressed to sell young daughters, or Hirschkind and Mahmoods
analysis of the long-term impact of CIA Cold War funding of
Afghani mujahideen, warlords with disturbing views and practices toward women, poverty produces debilitating limits on
womens choices and cultures of militarism make respect for
CONCLUSION
223
women elusive. Khadija, with her alcoholic husband and his

European friend, strangled by her poverty in a region deliberately disadvantaged not just by transnational capitalism
butalso by state policy, is as much part of the modern global
economy and social system as we are, sitting in the United
States or France or Britain. When a coalition decides to go to
war for women, it brings in its train unforeseen consequences
for all.
Fourth, we need to always to think about power. This is not to
place blame, but to ask some basic questions about who has the
power to reduce other women, and particularly Muslim women,
to subjects known only by deficits in their rights, with the
remediesin development, empowerment, Christianity, womens
rights, human rights, or Islamic reformknown in advance by
others. What social capital enables projects of bringing rights to
Muslim women? This is not a matter for moral judgment but
careful analysis. To insist on our innocence and our separation
from those whose lives cause us so much concern is to deceive
ourselves and make it hard to know what to do. For me, as an
anthropologist, reducing the poignant and complex lives of Muslim women to a question of rights or equalitywhether womens
or humanis not satisfying. This is partly because their lives and
the sources of their suffering are so complicated.22 But it is also
because the lives of the unschooled, the poor, or the rural seem to
be more regularly rendered legible through talk about their rights
and the violations of their rights than the lives of the rest of us.
Dont Khadija and Amal and others in their village have complex
feelings, tangled relations, and dreams? Dont they do their best
to maneuver within their circumstances and constraints? Dont
they explore the creative possibilities open to them in this hamlet
in Upper Egypt, just as we all do in the settings in which we find
ourselves?
224
I dont have four steps you can take in the next ten minutes,
as offered by other comforting books on global womens suffering. The stories Ive told and the analyses Ive developed here
suggest that there are no quick fixes or easy answers. If pressed
for an alternative formula, I would probably give the following
advice: look and listen carefully, think hard about the big picture, and take responsibility.
What can looking and listening teach us? This book has introduced you to some women in particular places who are trying to
lead good lives. They are making choices that are sometimes
hard, limited by the constraints of the present and the uncertainties of the future. I have known all of them for many years as
people living in families, in communities, and in nation-states that
are part of this world. How do they see the problems they are facing? What do they say they want? How do they invite us to think
differently about that mythical place where Muslim women, undifferentiated by locality or personal circumstance, live lives that
are totally separate and distinct from our own? Looking carefully
at these womens circumstances can teach us much about loaded
values like choice and freedom and how they actually work in the
context of human lives.
To think about the big picture means remembering that no
person is an island. People are involved with otherswith their
families, their friends, their villages or neighborhoods, and their
countrieswhether these are hopeful with political uprisings,
succumbing to drone attacks, or fielding elections in which politicians run on racist anti-immigrant platforms. All of us are shaped
by forces that engage wide groups and that go well beyond us. We
all live in real time, our worlds marked by change, argument,
and social contestation. What occurs in places that (are made to)
appear timeless or backward is always a product of a long history. Ignoring the past or the dynamic contexts of the present
CONCLUSION
225
may lull us into believing that we can transcend the messiness of

actual lives with their fractured and contradictory practices, but
there is no escape from politics or history. We should be suspicious of anyone who asks us to gaze on the sufferings of other
kinds of women, as if they are not connected to us and what we
do, including our governments and our financial institutions, and
as if these women do not share our humanity.
Finally, honest self-reflection about how the privileges of
elites or middle-class people might be connected to the persistence of devastating inequalitieswhether on distant shores or
in our backyardsis essential to any ethical stance toward womens human rights. Can we trace the lineaments of the particular
formations of power and inequality that bind us together? The
consistently disappointing results of well-intended interventions
whether military, humanitarian, or developmentalistare sufficient evidence that we have failed to grasp the character of the
connections.
What responsibilities should flow from awareness of womens
suffering or of the persistence of gender inequality in other parts
of the world? It is not enough to click on a woman-to-woman
website to donate a few dollars to support African women learning beadwork or Afghani women sewing bags (with the hope
that the sponsoring organization can arrange to sell these wares
in New York department stores, meanwhile earning nice salaries
for their efforts). Websites of international organizations that urge
technology-savvy teenage girls to reach out to impoverished
girls in the developing world by feeling compassion for their
plight and by donating five U.S. dollars to the organization on
their behalf, only reinforce, as Rana Sweis explains, the schism
between donors and their objects of compassion.23 Clucking
about ancient tribal honor codes will not get us to the heart of
problems in Karachi or Bradford, or be met with sympathy even
226
by women there. Asking women like Zaynab or Aysha in Egypt,

or my Palestinian aunt in Jordan to renounce their faith, their
identities as Muslims, or their deep sense of belonging to their
families or communities shows a lack of respect. Advising Muslim girls to run away from home is simply irresponsible.
This book is about what lies behind such deceptively simple
responses to problems we think we already understand or believe that we should act on even before we understand.24 I have
uncovered some of the ways that representations of Muslim
womens suffering and arguments about their lack of rights work
today, both politically and practically. I have followed Muslim
womens rights as they travel through debates and documents;
organize feminist organizations and womens activism; ignite
public passions; structure sexually violent memoirs; and mediate
lives in villages, refugee camps, slums, and the halls of the United
Nations. I have outlined what this frameworkwhich seeks to
capture distant womens lives only in terms of rights, present or
absenthides from us about everyday violence and forms of
love. We need to ask what this framework, which evaluates lives
in terms of rights versus culture (or religion), does for (and against)
different kinds of women. I have shown how the key symbols of
an alien Muslim culturefrom the veil to the honor crime
have been deployed in current political projects of destructive
warfare, chilling xenophobia, and lucrative humanitarianism.
I am all too aware of the ironies of a privileged scholar in
North America invoking the lives of poor rural women in distant lands to comment on the gap between such lives and the
visions put forth by other privileged cosmopolitans. My excuse
is that a devotion to observation rather than intervention in village lives has made me sensitive to the complexity of these lives,
and even to their amazing richness. A commitment to studying
the long histories of projects to remake women across the
CONCLUSION
227
Muslim world has humbled me.25 I cannot put out of my mind

the global inequalities that make women such as those I have
written about so much more vulnerable than we are to interventions, imagined or actual, by outsiders.
The world in which I feel a moral pull to intervene is the
world of the privileged in which I participate as an equal, not the
world of village women elsewhere. In light of the global reach of
rights work and rights talk, and their implication in forceful projects to remold human lives, I would rather use my knowledge
and experience to intervene into the worlds of power that authorize and naturalize rights work and the sometimes dangerous
understandings of human social life to which they are made to
give rise. I would rather recognize that societies everywhere debate justice, struggle over power and right, and seek change. Others may choose differently. But I hope that it will be on the basis
of careful analysis, critical self-reflection, and constant recognition of our common humanity, a humanity subjected to different
forces and expressed in different registers.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION: RIGHTS AND LIVES
1. Zaynab is a pseudonym, as are all the names of the women in

Egypt whose lives I describe.
2. She was even hauled off to the police station once for arguing with
her envious neighbor. This was shocking for a middle-aged, respected
woman from the community who had lived in this house for most of
her life.
3. Zaynab depended on her mother for help in the years when her
children were young. She shared her knowledge generously with folklorists and anthropologists. For more on Zaynab, see Elizabeth Wickett, For
the Living and the Dead: The Funerary Laments of Upper Egypt, Ancient
and Modern (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010); and Lila Abu-Lughod, Dramas
of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt, Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures 2001 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
4. Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
5. Paul Riesman, Freedom in Fulani Social Life: An Introspective
Ethnography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).
6. For more on this subject, see the preface to Lila Abu-Lughod,
Writing Womens Worlds: Bedouin Stories, 15th anniv. ed. (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2008).
7. Scholars have called this gendered Orientalism. Taking off from
Edward Saids book, Orientalism, many have analyzed the representation of women and the role of gender in Orientalist discourse. For a few
230
N O T E S T O PA G E S 7 1 0
examples, see Dohra Ahmad, Not Yet beyond the Veil: Muslim Women
in American Popular Literature, Social Text 27, no. 99 (2009): 105;
Rana Kabbani, Europes Myths of Orient (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); and Meyda Yegenoglu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
8. Suad Joseph, Elite Strategies for State Building, in Women, Islam, and the State, ed. Deniz Kandiyoti (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991); Nadje Sadig Al-Ali, Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from
1948 to the Present (London: Zed Books, 2007); Nadje Al-Ali and
Nicola Pratt, What Kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of
Iraq (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).
9. Christina Hoff Sommers, The Subjection of Islamic Women and the
Fecklessness of American Feminism, Weekly Standard, May 21, 2007,
weeklystandard .com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/013/641szkys
.asp. She cites Phyllis Chesler, notorious for her support of a tawdry
campaign against Islamofascism that targeted womens studies programs, initiated by the right-wing Zionist David Horowitz. Chesler has
coauthored a pamphlet on women and Islamic law that collates Quranic
quotes out of context to argue that Islam is to blame for violence and all
the other wrongs suffered by Muslim women everywhere.
10. Amy Farrell and Patrice McDermott, Claiming Afghan Women:
The Challenge of Human Rights Discourse for Transnational Feminism, in Just Advocacy? Womens Human Rights, Transnational Feminisms, and the Politics of Representation, ed. Wendy S. Hesford and
Wendy Kozol (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005).
11. Clifford Geertz once quoted a line from William Blake to capture
how it is that anthropologists go about knowing, and why they spend
years in small or obscure places attending to the minutia of daily life in
order to grasp the human condition. Anthropologists, like poets, he suggested, see a world in a grain of sand.
12. Fatemeh Fakhraie, Just . . . Ugh, Muslimah Media Watch,
April 13, 2011, muslimahmediawatch.org/2011/04/just-ugh/.
13. Maya Dusenbery, Agency Is Easily Overlooked if You Actively
Erase It, Feministing, April 14, 2011, feministing.com/2011/04/14/
agency-is-easily-overlooked-if-you-actively-erase-it/. I am grateful to
Laura Ciolkowski for bringing this article to my attention.
14. Nussbaum corrects the term, noting that what is being legislated
against is not the burqa but the niqab, or face veil. Martha Nussbaum,
Veiled Threats?, New York Times: Opinionator, July 11, 2010, opin
ionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/veiled-threats/. As I describe in
N O T E S T O PA G E S 1 1 1 2
231
Chapter 1, there are many forms of covering that Muslim women wear.
The words for these different types, from Arabic or Persian, are used in
English with some fuzziness about the reference. The hijab or head scarf
simply covers the hair. The niqab and some forms called the burqa
cover the face except for the eyes. The chador, in Iran, is enveloping, but
only covers the head and body, not the face. Interestingly, I discovered
that the leather mask used by Qatari Bedouins to cover their hunting
falcons eyes is also called a burqa. Hans Christian Korsholm Nielsen,
The Danish Expedition to Qatar, 1959: Photos by Jette Bang and Klaus
Ferdinand, English-Arabic version (Moesgrd Museum, 2009).
15. Martha Nussbaum, Beyond the Veil: A Response, New York
Times: Opinionator, July 15, 2010, opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010
/07/15/beyond-the-veil-a-response/.
16. Martha Nussbaum, Veiled Threats?, New York Times: Opinionator, July 11, 2010, opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/veiled
-threats/; and Martha C. Nussbaum, The New Religious Intolerance:
Overcoming the Politics of Fear in an Anxious Age (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2012).
17. For a clear summary of this position, see Martha Nussbaums
latest iteration for a general audience: Martha C. Nussbaum, Creating
Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2011).
18. For the best analysis of the workings of the UN Convention on the
Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW),
see Sally Engle Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating
International Law into Local Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2006).The timing of CEDAW was important for what was about
to happen to the relationship between Islamic and human rights law,
and the centrality of the Muslim woman to this relationship. Ziba
Mir-Hosseini, a feminist legal anthropologist originally from Iran, has
pointed out that the Iranian Revolution took place in the same year that
CEDAW was passed at the UN. It was a shock to find that people chose
an Islamic government. It was ironic that after years of secularization in
Iran, Islamic law became valued. Women became the flash point. Forced
to cover themselves in public, women also gave birth to a new kind of
feminism. Islamic feminism has taken many forms since 1979, but the
women involved must be taken seriously as examples of what happens
when you see feminism transnationally. Ziba Mir-Hosseni, Beyond Islam vs. Feminism, IDS Bulletin 42, no. 1 (2011): 6777.
19. These debates are taken up later, focusing on such key figures as
Nussbaum, Susan Moller Okin, and Catherine MacKinnon, and using
232
the work of Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of

Identity and Empire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006);
Inderpal Grewal, On the New Global Feminism and the Family of Nations: Dilemmas of Transnational Feminist Practice, in Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age, ed. Ella Shohat,
Documentary Sources in Contemporary Art (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1998); Inderpal Grewal, Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms (Next Wave: New Directions in Womens Studies) (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005); Chandra Talpade
Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing
Solidarity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003); Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?, in Marxism and the
Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988); Rajeswari Sunder Rajan,
Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture, and Postcolonialism
(London: Routledge, 1993); Leti Volpp, Blaming Culture for Bad Behavior, Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities 12 (2000): 89116; and
Leti Volpp, Feminism versus Multiculturalism, Columbia Law Review 101, no. 5 (2001): 11811218, among others.
20. Zakia Pathak and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Shahbano, Signs
14, no. 3 (1989): 558582; For a good analysis, see Flavia Agnes, Interrogating Consent and Agency across the Complex Terrain of Family Laws in India, Social Difference Online 1 (2011): 116, socialdif
ference.columbia.edu/files/socialdiff/publications/SocDifOnline -Vol
12012.pdf.
21. Elora Halim Chowdhury, Transnationalism Reversed: Women
Organizing against Gendered Violence in Bangladesh, SUNY Series,
Praxis: Theory in Action (Albany: State University of New York Press,
2011), 4.
22. Makau W. Mutua, Savages, Victims and Saviors: The Metaphor
of Human Rights, Harvard International Law Journal 42, no. 1 (2001):
201245.
23. Dina M. Siddiqi, Crime and Punishment: Laws of Seduction,
Consent, and Rape in Bangladesh, Social Difference Online 1 (2011):
4653, socialdifference.columbia.edu/files/socialdiff/publications/SocDif
Online-Vol12012.pdf.
24. The most famous international case was that of Amina Lewal in
Nigeria.
25. Jacqueline Aquino Siapno, Sharia Moral Policing and the Politics of Consent in Aceh, Social Difference Online 1 (2011): 1729,
233
socialdifference.columbia.edu/files/socialdiff/publications/SocDifOnline
-Vol12012.pdf.
26. I discuss Musawahs work in Chapter 6.
27. Elora Shehabuddin, Gender and the Figure of the Moderate
Muslim: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, in The Question of
Gender: Joan W. Scotts Critical Feminism, ed. Judith Butler and Elizabeth Weed (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 107.
28. Leila Ahmed, A Quiet Revolution: The Veils Resurgence, from the
Middle East to America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2011).
29. Virginia Woolf, A Room of Ones Own (London: Hogarth Press,
1929).
30. Wendy Brown, Civilizational Delusions: Secularism, Tolerance,
Equality, Theory and Event 15, no. 2 (2012). For a good critique of
French secularism and its treatment of the veil, see Joan W. Scott, The
Politics of the Veil (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007).
31. Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006).
32. Ayaan Hirsi Ali has resisted the closing of the Muslim mind by
reading Voltaire. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation
Proclamation for Women and Islam (New York: Free Press, 2006):
129140.
33. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ten Tips for Muslim Women Who Want to
Leave, in ibid., 111122.
34. Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (New York:
Bantam Books, 1993). The full poem can be found in Maya Angelou,
The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou (New York: Random
House, 1994), 194195.
35. For a powerful analysis of the postCold War triumph of a new
ethical human rights discourse that justifies intervention of any sort
by the world community to rescue others from atrocities committed
by their neighbors, see Robert Meister, After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). The summary of the principles of this discourse on p.6 shows just how much
the concern for Muslim womens rights fits within the new humanitarian human rights. In a more sarcastic vein, Laura A. Agostn refers to
the Rescue Industry in which journalist heroes like Nicholas Kristof
(see Chapter 2) get a free pass to act out fun imperialist interventions
masked as humanitarianism. Agostn, The Soft Side of Imperialism,
Counterpunch, January 25, 2012, counterpunch.org/2012/01/25/the
-soft-side-of-imperialism/.
234
1.
1. Derrick Crowe, Times Epic Distortion of the Plight of Women in

Afghanistan, myFDL (FireDogLake), August 2, 2010, my.firedoglake
.com/derrickcrowe/2010/08/02/times-epic-distortion-of- the-plight
-of-women-in-afghanistan/.
2. See Jodi Bieber Speaking about Her Bibi Aisha Photograph, audio clip, n.d., audioboo.fm/boos/350494-jodi-bieber-speaking-about-her
-bibi-aisha-photograph.
3. Richard Stengel, The Plight of Afghan Women: A Disturbing Picture, Time, July 29, 2010, time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,
2007415,00.html.
4. Esther Hyneman, Staying Honest about Afghanistan, HuffPostWorld, September 20, 2010, huffingtonpost.com/esther-hyneman/staying
-honest-about-afgh_b_732185.html; Ann Jones, Afghan Women Have
Already Been Abandoned, Nation, August 12, 2010, thenation.com/
article/154020/afghan-women-have-already-been-abandoned. For an informed and empirically grounded study of the current work of womens
organizations in Afghanistan, see Torunn Wimpelmann, The Price of
Protection: Gender, Violence and Power in Afghanistan (Ph.D. diss.,
Department of Development Studies, School of Oriental and African
Studies, University of London, 2013).
5. This chapter draws heavily on Lila Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim
Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural
Relativism and Its Others, American Anthropologist 104, no. 3 (2002):
783790. For an excellent early analysis of the politics of this move
against the Taliban in the name of women, see Charles Hirschkind and
Saba Mahmood, Feminism, the Taliban, and the Politics of CounterInsurgency, Anthropological Quarterly 75, no. 2 (2002): 339354.
Wendy Hesford shows the visual potency of the Afghan woman for
humanitarian publicity in her analysis of an Amnesty International
campaign, Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions,
Feminisms (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011).
6. Jasbir K. Puar and Amit Rai, Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on
Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots, Social Text 20, no. 3
(2002): 117148.
7. Laura Bush, Radio Address by Mrs. Bush, The American Presidency Project, November 17, 2001, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index
.php?pid=24992#axzz1Zh0bpVSX.
8. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence
235
Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271313. Antoinette Burton, The White Womans Burden, in Western Women and
Imperialism, ed. Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1992), 145; Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India, Cultural Critique 7, The
Nature and Context of Minority Discourse II (1987): 119156.
9. Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a
Modern Debate (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). Elora
Shehabuddin has laid out the problems of colonial and missionary feminism in fine detail in Gender and the Figure of the Moderate Muslim, in The Question of Gender: Joan W. Scotts Critical Feminism, ed.
Judith Butler and Elizabeth Weed (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2011), 102142.
10. Marnia Lazreg, The Eloquence of Silence: Algerian Women in
Question (New York: Routledge, 1994), 135.
11. Ibid., 6869.
12. Saba Mahmood, Feminism, Democracy, and Empire: Islam and
the War of Terror, in Womens Studies on the Edge, ed. Joan Wallach
Scott (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008), 8182. This normative secularism has implications for the kinds of Muslim women
who get celebrated in the West now. Hirsi Ali declares herself an atheist.
For an excellent discussion of missionary views and the role of Christianity even today, see Shehabuddin, Gender and the Figure of the Moderate Muslim.
13. Hannah Papanek, Purdah in Pakistan: Seclusion and Modern
Occupations for Women, in Separate Worlds: Studies of Purdah in
South Asia, ed. Hannah Papanek and Gail Minault (Delhi: Chanakya
Publications, 1982), 190216.
14. Ruth Fremson, Allure Must Be Covered: Individuality Peeks
Through, New York Times, November 4, 2001, 12.
15. Ibid.
16. Suzanne Goldenberg, The Woman Who Stood up to the Taliban, Guardian, January 23, 2002, guardian.co.uk/world/2002/jan/24/
gender.uk1.
17. I am grateful to Tonunn Wimpelmann for this update on the
shifting meaning and use of the burqa in Afghanistan.
18. Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
19. For examples, see Lila Abu-Lughod, ed., Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, Princeton Studies in Culture/
Power/History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998); Lila
236
Abu-Lughod, Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in

Egypt, The Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures 2001 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2005); Suzanne April Brenner, Reconstructing Self and
Society: Javanese Muslim Women and the Veil, American Ethnologist
23, no. 4 (1996): 673697; Arlene Elowe Macleod, Accommodating
Protest: Working Women, the New Veiling, and Change in Cairo (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1991); Aihwa Ong, State versus Islam: Malay Families, Womens Bodies and the Body Politic in Malaysia, American Ethnologist 17, no. 2 (1990): 258276.
20. Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the
Feminist Subject (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005).
21. Lara Deeb, An Enchanted Modern (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 2006).
22. In Iran, the name for pushing the boundaries of obligatory covering
is bad hijab, alternately tolerated and cracked down on by the regime.
23. For a glimpse into some of the controversies about veiling in Europe, see Annelies Moors, The Affective Power of the Face Veil: Between
Disgust and Fascination, in Things: Material Religion and the Topography of Divine Spaces, ed. Birgit Meyer and Dick Houtman (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2012), 282295; Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007).
24. The special problems of feminist anthropologists in that awkward relationship were articulated by Marilyn Strathern, An Awkward
Relationship: The Case of Feminism and Anthropology, Signs 12, no. 2
(1987): 276292.
25. See Charles Hirschkind and Saba Mahmood, Feminism, the
Taliban, and the Politics of Counter-Insurgency, Anthropological Quarterly 75, no. 2 (2002): 339354.
26. See Aihwa Ong, Colonialism and Modernity: Feminist Representations of Women in Non-Western Societies, Inscriptions 3, no.
4 (1988): 7993.
27. Steven Erlanger, At Bonn Talks, 3 Women Push Womens Cause,
New York Times, November 30, 2001.
28. Haleh Afshar, Islam and Feminisms: An Iranian Case-Study
(New York: St. Martins Press, 1998); Pardis Mahdavi, Passionate Uprisings: Irans Sexual Revolution (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University
Press, 2009); Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Islam and Gender: The Religious Debate in Contemporary Iran, Princeton Studies in Muslim Politics
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999); Haideh Moghissi,
Feminism and Islamic Fundamentalism: The Limits of Postmodern
Analysis (London: Zed Books, 1999); Afsaneh Najmabadi, Feminisms
237
in an Islamic Republic, in Islam, Gender, and Social Change, ed. Yvonne

Yazbeck Haddad and John Esposito (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1998); Arzoo Osanloo, The Politics of Womens Rights in Iran (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009).
29. Lila Abu-Lughod, Orientalism and Middle East Feminist Studies, Feminist Studies 27, no. 1 (2001): 101113.
30. Lila Abu-Lughod, Dialects of Womens Empowerment: The International Circuitry of the Arab Human Development Report, International Journal of Middle East Studies 41, no. 1 (2009): 83103.
31. Saba Mahmood, Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile
Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival, Cultural
Anthropology 16, no. 2 (2001): 223.
32. Annie Van Sommer and Samuel Zwemer, Our Moslem Sisters: A
Cry of Need from Lands of Darkness Interpreted by Those Who Heard
It (New York: F. H. Revell, 1907). For a historical study, see Ellen Fleischmann, Our Moslem Sisters: Women of Greater Syria in the Eyes of
American Protestant Missionary Women, Islam and Christian-Muslim
Relations 9, no. 3 (1998): 307323.
33. Annie Van Sommer, Hagar and Her Sisters, in Van Sommer
and Zwemer, Our Moslem Sisters, 16.
34. Samuel Zwemer, introduction to Van Sommer and Zwemer, Our
Moslem Sisters, 5.
35. See the excellent film by Liz Mermin, Beauty Academy of Kabul
(Sma Distribution, 2006); for a good analysis of the film and the project,
see Mimi Thi Nguyen, The Biopower of Beauty: Humanitarian Imperialisms and Global Feminisms in an Age of Terror, Signs 36, no. 2 (2011):
359; and for an account by one of the American participants, see Deborah Rodriguez and Kristin Ohlson, Kabul Beauty School: An American
Woman Goes behind the Veil (New York: Random House, 2007).
36. Christine J. Walley, Searching for Voices: Feminism, Anthropology, and the Global Debate over Female Genital Operations, Cultural Anthropology 12, no. 3 (1997): 405438.
37. Deniz Kandiyoti, Old Dilemmas or New Challenges? The Politics of Gender and Reconstruction in Afghanistan, Development and
Change 38, no. 2 (2007): 176.
38. Kandiyoti, Old Dilemmas or New Challenges?
39. Ibid., 180.
40. Deniz Kandiyoti, The Lures and Perils of Gender Activism in
Afghanistan (Anthony Hyman Memorial Lecture, School of Oriental
and African Studies, University of London, 2009), mrzine.monthlyre
view.org/2009/kandiyoti041109p.html.
238
41. Aryn Baker, Afghan Women and the Return of the Taliban, Time,
August 9, 2010, www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2007238-4,00
.html.
42. Cynthia Enloe has examined these closely, including for Afghanistan; see Enloe, The Curious Feminist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) and Globalization and Militarism (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007).
2.
1. Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, Half the Sky: How to

Change the World (London: Virago, 2010), back cover.
2. Ibid., vii.
3. Ibid., back cover.
4. Anthony Appiah, The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions
Happen (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010). Found in places like Pakistan, though previously in places like Sicily, the form of violence against
women that Appiah targets in particular is the so-called honor crime.
This violence is explained as arising from the desire for men to control
women. It happens that these men are Muslims. I discuss and dissect the
honor crime in Chapter 4.
5. I was recently invited to contribute to a book, following a conference in Australia. To be called In the Name of Honour, it was being
edited by Aisha Gill, Karl Roberts, and Carolyn Strange. For the Shop
Honour campaign and tote bag offer, see theahafoundation.org/getinvolved/honour/shop-honour/, accessed June 30, 2012.
6. Ayaan Hirsi Alis three books are The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam (New York: Free Press, 2006);
Infidel (New York: Free Press, 2007); and Nomad: From Islam to America; A Personal Journey through the Clash of Civilizations (New York:
Free Press, 2010).
7. In response to those whom Hirsi Ali describes as performing the
emotional equivalent of patting my hand because they believe that her
battle is hopeless, she writes, I choose not to adopt this defeatist approach. Hirsi Ali, Nomad, 232.
8. Kristof and WuDunn, Half the Sky, xviii.
9. Hirsi Ali, Caged Virgin.
10. Kristof and WuDunn, Half the Sky, xxiv.
11. Ibid., 261.
12. Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British
Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006),
452455.
239
13. Ibid., 453.

14. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (New York: New Press,
2010). But even a decade ago, young black men were six to eight times
more likely to serve time in prison than young white men. Since a staggering 30 percent of black men who have finished only high school and
60 percent of high school dropouts have been to prison, researchers
conclude that imprisonment has become a common life event for recent
cohorts of black men who never went to college. This has dire consequences for their future opportunities. Becky Pettit and Bruce Western,
Mass Imprisonment and the Life Course: Race and Class Inequality
in U.S. Incarceration, American Sociological Review 69, no. 2 (2004):
151.
15. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, Mole editions (New York:
Urizen Books, 1978).
16. Interestingly, the new Islamic feminists who are seeking gender
equality through reform of Islamic family law also lay their hope for
gender equality in the prior acceptance of slavery and its current rejection. For the activists in Musawah, however, gender equality must be
achieved through internal reform, not external intervention. Their Framework for Action states: The principles and ideals within the Quran lay
out a path toward equality and justice in family laws and practices, as
they did in ending the institution of slavery. As the injustices of slavery
became increasingly recognised and the conditions emerged for its abolishment, laws and practices related to slavery were reconsidered and the
classical fiqh rulings became obsolete. Similarly, our family lawsas
well as practices that have not been codified into lawmust evolve to
reflect the Islamic values of equality and justice, reinforce universal human rights standards and address the lived realities of families in the
twenty-first century. Musawah: For Equality in the Family, The Musawah Framework for Action, 2009, musawah.org/sites/default/files/
Musawah-Framework-EN_1.pdf.
17. Kristof and WuDunn, Half the Sky, xxiii.
18. Patricia Tjaden and Nancy Thoennes, Extent, Nature, and Consequences of Rape Victimization: Findings from the National Violence
against Women Survey, Special Report (Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Justice and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, January 2006). The rates are the same for minority and nonminority women.
19. Peggy Reeves Sanday, Fraternity Gang Rape: Sex, Brotherhood,
and Privilege on Campus (New York: New York University Press, 1990);
never mind the scientific literature that pokes holes in pop attempts to
explain social facts by sex hormones. For a cutting-edge critique of sex
240
in science, see Rebecca M. Jordan-Young, Brain Storm: The Flaws in the

Science of Sex Differences (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 2010).
20. Kristof and WuDunn, Half the Sky, xvi.
21. Cynthia H. Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist
Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1990); Cynthia H. Enloe, The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End
of the Cold War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
22. Kristof and WuDunn, Half the Sky, 181. This is an intriguing image and I am curious to know whether Kristof here is deliberately calling
up the suitcase carriers (les porteurs de valises) of the Algerian War
in the late 1950s and early 1960s.This was the name given in France to
a group of people of different originssome priests, some Marxists, and
some otherswho supported the Algerian struggle for independence
and carried money collected by Algerians in France for the National
Liberation Front, but who also assisted with forging false identity papers
and finding safe houses for the National Liberation Front militants
(Alain Gresh, personal communication, April 17, 2011).
23. Appiah, Honor Code, 99.
24. Dorothy Ko, Footbinding and Anti-Footbinding in China: The
Subject of Pain in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, in
Discipline and the Other Body: Correction, Corporeality, Colonialism,
ed. Steven Pierce and Anupama Rao (Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, 2006), 215217.
25. Dorothy Ko, Cinderellas Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding, Philip E. Lilienthal Asian Studies Imprint (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2005).
26. Carma Hinton and Richard Gordon, Small Happiness (Ronin
Films, 1984); Gail Hershatter, The Gender of Memory: Rural Women
and Chinas Collective Past (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2011). For a pathbreaking book on Chinese feminism that disrupts
such narratives of tradition, modernity, and western influence, see Lydia
H. Liu, Rebecca E. Karl, and Dorothy Ko, eds., The Birth of Chinese
Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).
27. A few of the key works to consult are Margery Wolf, Revolution
Postponed: Women in Contemporary China (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 1985); Margery Wolf, Women and Suicide in China,
in Women in Chinese Society, ed. Margery Wolf and Roxane Witke
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1975); Ko, Cinderellas Sisters; Ko, Footbinding and Anti-Footbinding in China; Lisa Rofel,
241
Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Hershatter, Gender of Memory; Emily Honig and Gail Hershatter, Personal Voices: Chinese Women
in the 1980s (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988); Delia
Davin, Women in the Countryside of China, in Wolf and Witke, Women
in Chinese Society.
28. Ko, Cinderellas Sisters.
29. Ko, Footbinding and Anti-Footbinding in China, 235.
30. Kristof and WuDunn, Half the Sky, xxii.
31. It has often been noted that Americans do not accept that human
rights law should apply to the United States. It is also often said but
forgotten that the United States is one of the few countries that has not
ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). There are many reasons for this
guarding national sovereignty and political and economic concerns might
be among them; Republicans dont help.
32. Catherine Lutz, Homefront: A Military City and the American
Twentieth Century (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001).
33. Kristof and WuDunn, Half the Sky, 211. Studies of microcredit
have actually shown that interest rates are far higher and that there are
serious problems with microcredit schemes for women. Lamia Karim,
Microfinance and Its Discontents: Women in Debt in Bangladesh (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Ananya Roy, Poverty
Capital (New York: Routledge, 2010).
34. Kristof and WuDunn, Half the Sky, 24.
35. Ibid., 23.
36. Ibid., 20.
37. She subtitles one of her books A Womans Cry for Reason and
another A Personal Journey through the Clash of Civilizations. For
more on Hirsi Ali from her days in the Netherlands, see Erik Snel and
Femke Stock, Debating Cultural Differences: Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Islam
and Women, in Immigrant Families in Multicultural Europe: Debating
Cultural Difference, ed. Ralph Grillo (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008); Halleh Ghorashi, Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Daring or Dogmatic? Debates on Multiculturalism and Emancipation in the Netherlands, in Multiple Identifications and the Self, ed. Henk Driessen and
Toon van Meijl (Utrecht, Netherlands: Stichting Focaal, 2003).
38. The extent of this political patronage for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, like Irshad Manji and Azar Nafisi is well documented in Saba Mahmood, Feminism, Democracy, and Empire: Islam and the War of Terror, in Womens Studies on the Edge, ed. Joan Wallach Scott (Durham, N.C.: Duke
242
University Press, 2008). For an analysis of the key role of women in the
construction of the moderate Muslim who denounces Islam, see Elora
Shehabuddins Gender and the Figure of the Moderate Muslim, in The
Question of Gender: Joan W. Scotts Critical Feminism, ed. Judith Butler
and Elizabeth Weed (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011).
39. Hirsi Ali invents the country of Islamistan as the setting of her
film script for Submission, directed by Theo Van Gogh (2004).
40. Hirsi Ali, Caged Virgin, 2.
42. Appiah, Honor Code, 153.
43. Kristof and WuDunn, Half the Sky, xii.
44. He used the same techniques in his earlier cause, the Save Darfur
campaign. See Rosemary R. Hicks and Jodi Eichler-Levine, As Americans against Genocide: The Crisis in Darfur and Interreligious Political
Activism, American Quarterly 59, no. 3 (2007): 711735.
46. Elaine H. Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random
House, 1979).
47. Kathryn Joyce, Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009); QuiverFull, n.d., quiverfull.com/.
48. Appiah quotes from Leviticus and Deuteronomy.
49. Nadia Abu El-Haj, The Genealogical Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
50. See Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Gloria Steinem, in Jewish Women:
A Comprehensive Historical EncyclopediaJewish Womens Archive,
March 20, 2009, jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/steinem-gloria.
51. Hirsi Ali, Nomad, 247. She writes this without a footnote to the
Crusades, whose castles attract busloads of tourists across the Middle
East, not to mention a hundred years of nineteenth- and twentieth-century
colonial missionary work in the Arab world that produced some good
schools but only managed to convert some Eastern Orthodox Christians
to Protestantism.
52. miriam cooke, The Muslimwoman, Contemporary Islam 1,
no. 2 (2007): 139154.
53. Hirsi Ali, Nomad, 129.
54. As is standard practice, I use pseudonyms to protect the anonymity of people about whom I write.
55. One of the best analyses of the link between social visiting and
family honor is in Anne Meneley, Tournaments of Value: Sociability and
Hierarchy in a Yemeni Town (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1996).
243
56. Appiah writes about a Pakistan he does not know, relying on

websites and journalism for his analysis. I try to imagine what a philosopher from Iran would say about what Americans should do if he based
his knowledge of the United States on American newspapers, studies of
women in shelters and jails, legal briefs on child welfare, or on advertisements in magazines. Would we trust his analysis of gender relations
based on tabloid coverage of kidnappings or serial killers?
57. Hirsi Ali, Nomad, 2526. I borrow the term contingent to describe the specifics from Shehabuddin, Gender and the Figure of the
Moderate Muslim, 126.
58. Janet Halley et al., From the International to the Local in Feminist Legal Responses to Rape, Prostitution/Sex Work, and Sex Trafficking: Four Studies in Contemporary Governance Feminism, Harvard
Journal of Law & Gender 29 (2006): 335509.
59. Karen Halttunen, Humanitarianism and the Pornography of
Pain in Anglo-American Culture, American Historical Review 100, no.
2 (1995): 303334.
60. The term pulp nonfiction comes from Dohra Ahmad, Not Yet
beyond the Veil: Muslim Women in American Popular Literature, Social Text 27, no. 99 (2009): 105.
3.
1. Ratna Kapur, The Tragedy of Victimization Rhetoric: Resurrecting the Native Subject in International/Postcolonial Feminist Legal Politics, Harvard Human Rights Law Journal 15 (2002): 1.
2. Kristof and WuDunn humbly announce that they feel honored to
have sat at the feet of some amazing women. Nicholas D. Kristof and
Sheryl WuDunn, Half the Sky: How to Change the World (London: Virago, 2010), acknowledgments, 287.
3. Catharine A. MacKinnon, Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006),
4143; Charlotte Bunch, Womens Rights as Human Rights: Toward a
Re-Vision of Human Rights, Human Rights Quarterly 12, no. 4 (1990):
486498; Susan Moller Okin, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?, ed.
Joshua Cohen, Matthew Howard, and Martha Craven Nussbaum (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999); Martha Craven Nussbaum,
Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach, John
Robert Seeley Lectures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
4. MacKinnon, Are Women Human?, 43.
5. Bunch, Womens Rights as Human Rights, 491.
6. Okin, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?, 10.
244
7. Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 190.
8. Both the rights and the capabilities approaches use cultural arguments to explain sex-subordinating practices in other places, and religion usually comes in for special opprobrium. In blaming culture or religion, as Leti Volpp has noted, liberals obscure the degree to which
many womens problems around the world are rooted in forces beyond
their individual cultures or communitiesfor example, in international
structures of inequality, novel forms of patriarchy related to politicized
religious movements, and flows of transnational capital. They direct attention away from issues affecting women that are separate from what
are considered sexist cultural or religious practicesproblems that they
might share with others, including men. Meanwhile, as I argue in Chapter 4, they divert our gaze from the sexism indigenous to the contemporary United States or Europe, or to the middle classes. Leti Volpp,
Feminism versus Multiculturalism, Columbia Law Review 101, no. 5
(2001): 1204.
9. Okin, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?, 23; As one of her critics objects, why assume the public sphere is neutral? Brown asks, What
if male superordination is inscribed in liberalisms core values of liberty
rooted in autonomy and centered on self-interestand equalitydefined
as sameness and confined to the public sphere? Brown, Regulating Aversion, 194.
10. Okin, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?, 16. See Dipesh
Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 27.
11. Martha Nussbaum, Non-Relative Virtues: An Aristotelian Approach, in The Quality of Life, ed. Martha Nussbaum and Amartya
Sen, Studies in Development Economics (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1993), 265.
12. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 97.
13. Nussbaum may be correct that the capabilities approach has not
been tainted by its association with the West in the same way that human
rights has, despite multiple attempts to also locate such rights within particular and non-Western traditions (as evidenced in the International
Islamic Declaration of Human Rights, the Cairo Declaration of Human
Rights in Islam, and the Islamic Human Rights Commission in Iran).
For a discussion of these, see, for example, Ridwan al-Sayyid, The
Question of Human Rights in Contemporary Islamic Thought, in
N O T E S T O PA G E 8 6
245
Human Rights in Arab Thought: A Reader, ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi

(London: I. B. Tauris, 2009), 257273; For Iran, see Arzoo Osanloo,
The Politics of Womens Rights in Iran (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009); and Arzoo Osanloo, The Measure of Mercy: Islamic Justice, Sovereign Power, and Human Rights in Iran, Cultural
Anthropology 21, no. 4 (2006): 570602.
14. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 99100. To convey the contrast between the universalistic rhetoric she deploys and the
extreme cultural particularity of the elements she presents as universal,
we need to look at how she describes these human capabilities. Talal
Asad argues that hers is a thick account of what being human is, quoting the most blatantly value-laden of these. Talal Asad, Redeeming the
Human through Human Rights, in Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, Cultural Memory in the Present Series (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2003), 127158. I seized on the same capability and unpacked the values in Lila Abu-Lughod, Against Universals:
The Dialects of (Womens) Human Rights and Human Capabilities, in
Rethinking the Human, ed. J. Michelle Molina, Don Swearer, and Susan
Lloyd McGarry (Cambridge, Mass.: Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University Press, 2010), 6993.
15. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, General Assembly Resolution 217 A (III) (Geneva: UN Official Records, December 10, 1948),
7179. The text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is available in 360 different languages on the website of the UN Office of the
High Commissioner for Human Rights, ohchr.org/EN/Pages/Welcome
Page.aspx. An English version of the resolution is available from that
website at ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/Pages/Language.aspx?LangID=eng.
16. Postcolonial scholars urge us to ask what historical processes
made certain notions of universal human progress seem self-evident,
well beyond the places where they originated; Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 43. And how might they have been developed not just in
Europe but also in the non-West, which was some kind of laboratory for
centuries? See Timothy Mitchell, The Stage of Modernity, in Questions of Modernity, ed. Timothy Mitchell (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2000), 134. Historians of colonialism have taught us
that a focus on race, culture, and, most importantly, religion as impediments to modernization deflected attention away from many illiberal
forms of governance that characterized imperial rule. Steven Pierce and
Anupama Rao, eds., Discipline and the Other Body: Correction, Corporeality, Colonialism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006).
246
17. See Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 27. For elaboration of

these arguments about the particularity of universality, see Abu-Lughod,
Against Universals, 6993.
18. As Talal Asad has put it, human rights builds on a thick description of the human that is culturally and historically specific and thus
parochial; it also seeks to impose this version of the human by force.
Asad, Redeeming the Human through Human Rights; Lila AbuLughod, Against Universals.
19. Dohra Ahmad, Not Yet beyond the Veil: Muslim Women in
American Popular Literature, Social Text 27, no. 99 (2009): 105.
20. Meyda Yegenoglu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998);
Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Annie Van Sommer and Samuel Zwemer, Our Moslem
Sisters: A Cry of Need from Lands of Darkness Interpreted by Those
Who Heard It (New York: F. H. Revell, 1907); Linda Nochlin, The
Imaginary Orient, Art in America, May 1983; Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979); Rana Kabbani, Europes Myths
of Orient (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).
Scott (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008).
22. Leti Volpp, Blaming Culture for Bad Behavior, Yale Journal of
Law and the Humanities 12 (2000): 89116.
23. Young Hee Kwon, Searching to Death for Home: A Filipina Immigrant Brides Subaltern Rewriting, NWSA Journal 17, no. 2 (2005):
6985.
24. This association has been reinforced twenty years later in the
spare best-selling memoir titled I am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced.
Like other books in the genre, this is an as told to story. It is written
by Delphine Minoui, a prizewinning French journalist. Like other victim/heroines, this girl has been lionized in the West and the association
of barbarity with IslamLand reinforced in an era in which Yemen has
become intimately associated with terrorism and Al-Qaeda. Nujood Ali
and Delphine Minoui, I am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced (New York:
Crown Publishing Group, 2010).
25. Miriam Ali with Jana Wain, Without Mercy: A Mothers Struggle
against Modern Slavery (London: Little, Brown, 1995): 8889.
26. Islamic feminists have taken up the issue as well. In late 2012, I
received an e-mail questionnaire about forced marriage from the
247
Womens Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equality (WISE) of the

American Society for Muslim Advancement that I discuss in Chapter 6.
27. Leila, with the collaboration of Marie-Thrse Cuny, Married by
Force, trans. Sue Rose, 2nd ed. (London: Portrait, 2006), 215.
28. Leila, Married by Force, 216. She presses charges and gets a restraining order, but still he wont leave. She then locks him in the apartment for an apocalyptic battle, which ends in an orgy of violence that
sends her into a guilty psychotic episode and attempted suicide. Yet between the lines, we can see that for her husband, this marriage has been
terrible. He began to strike himself, screaming, Im sick to death of this
girl, Im sick to death of this girl! I want to make a success of my life. I
dont want my son to grow up all alone and my mother isnt here! He
punched himself so badly that his face and eyes were swollen . . . he was
banging his head against the walls, rolling around on the floor . . . I had
to call the neighbours for help, and then an ambulance. Leila, Married
by Force, 222223.
29. Jean Sasson, Desert Royal (London: Bantam Books, 2004), 124.
30. Ibid., 130.
31. Ibid., 29.
32. Ibid., 292293.
33. Ibid., 297. Sultana obviously hadnt read Kristof.
34. To cite just a sample, I would mention Anne Meneley, Tournaments of Value: Sociability and Hierarchy in a Yemeni Town (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, Inc., 1996); Soraya Altorki, Women in
Saudi Arabia: Ideology and Behavior among the Elite (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1986); Christine Eickelman, Women and
Community in Oman (New York: New York University Press, 1984);
Elizabeth Warnock Fernea, Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an
Iraqi Village, 3rd ed. (New York: Anchor Books, 1995); Deborah Kapchan, Gender on the Market (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1996); Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival
and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
2005); and Lara Deeb, An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public
Piety in Shii Lebanon (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
2008).
35. Hannah Shah, The Imams Daughter (London: Rider, 2009), 270.
36. For good analyses of this controversy, see Talal Asad, Wendy
Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood, Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2009).
248
37. Jean P. Sasson, Desert Royal (London: Bantam, 1999), 16.

38. Ali and Wain, Without Mercy, 274, 285; Zana Muhsen with Andrew Crofts, Sold: A Story of Modern-Day Slavery (London: Little,
Brown Book Group: 1991).
39. See Nacira Gunif-Souilamas, The Other French Exception:
Virtuous Racism and the War of the Sexes in Postcolonial France, French
Politics, Culture & Society 24, no. 3 (2006): 2341; Miriam Ticktin,
Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in
France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Mayanthi Fernando, Reconfiguring Freedom: Muslim Piety and the Limits of Secular Law and Public Discourse in France, American Ethnologist 37, no.
1 (2010): 19.
40. Leila, Married by Force, 193. It is worth noting that recent statistical studies conducted by the French National Institute for Demographic Studies and the National Institute for Statistics and Economic
Studies show the complexity of questions of consent and the number of
fewer forced marriages among immigrant women and their daughters.
Christelle Hamel, Fewer Forced Marriages among Immigrant Women
and Daughters of Immigrants. Population and Societies 479 (2011): 1
4. I thank Nisrin Abu Amara, who has done the research for this study,
for bringing the findings to my attention, including her own analysis
both of the rarity of forced marriages and their lack of connection to
obtaining immigration documents.
41. Miriam Ticktin, Sexual Violence as the Language of Border
Control: Where French Feminist and Anti-immigrant Rhetoric Meet,
Signs 33, no. 41 (2008): 863889. She expands on the case of Zina in
Ticktin, Casualties of Care. The quote from Sarkozy is on p.128.
42. Mukhtar Mai, In the Name of Honor: A Memoir, trans. Linda
Coverdale (New York: Washington Square Press, 2006).
43. See Carole S. Vance, Thinking Trafficking, Thinking Sex, GLQ:
A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 17, no. 1 (2011): 135143, for
nineteenth-century melodrama themes in trafficking debates; see also
Elizabeth Bernstein, Militarized Humanitarianism Meets Carceral
Feminism: The Politics of Sex, Rights, and Freedom in Contemporary
Antitrafficking Campaigns, Signs 36, no. 1 (2010): 45.
44. Amazon.co.uk, Disgraced: Forced to Marry a Stranger, Betrayed by My Own Family, Sold My Body to Survive, This Is My Story:
Amazon.co.uk: Saira Ahmed and Andrew Crofts: Books, 2011, amazon
.co.uk/Disgraced-Forced-Stranger-Betrayed-Survive/dp/0755318188/ref
=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1322254584&sr=81.
N O T E S T O PA G E S 1 0 0 1 0 2
249
45. Amazon.co.uk, Belonging: Amazon.co.uk: Sameem Ali: Books,

2011, amazon.co.uk/Belonging-Sameem-Ali/dp/071956462X/ref=sr_
1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1322254797&sr=1-1.
46. Shah, The Imams Daughter, viii.
47. Ibid., 8081.
48. This freedom is not always secular. I was surprised to find Shah,
The Imams Daughter advertised on a website called ChristianBooks
(christianbook.com/the-imams-daughter-hannah-shah/9780310325758/
pd/325758?event=1036SPF|527742|1036), where it was described as a
true story of a courageous woman who broke free of cultural oppression
and embraced a new life in Christ . . . She married who she wanted. An
amazing account of Gods saving grace.
49. She wrote the script for this film and made it with Theo Van
Gogh, a Dutch filmmaker known for his sharp tongue and relish for
controversy (including, but not limited to, racist remarks he made about
Muslim immigrants). For excellent discussions, see the work by Dutch
anthropologists: Annelies Moors, Submission, ISIM Review 15
(2005); and Marc de Leeuw and Sonja van Wichelen, Please, Go Wake
Up!, Feminist Media Studies 5, no. 3 (2005), 329.
50. As Annelies Moors pointed out about Ayaan Hirsi Ali in response to her film Submission, Hirsi Ali has been seen as a lone voice
willing to take great personal risks to reveal the cruelty Islam inflicts on
women that others had tried to cover up. It is certainly true that she has
taken great risks, but the presentation of her position in Dutch society
as a lone voice is remarkable. Whereas she does not have much support
amongst Muslims, men or women, she finds herself in the company of
very powerful players. Moors, Submission, 9. Halleh Ghorashi, another scholar based in the Netherlands, describes her as a welcome
mouthpiece for the dominant discourse on Islam in the Netherlands
that pictures Islamic migrants as problems and enemies of the nation.
Ghorashi, Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Daring or Dogmatic? Focaal: European
Journal of Anthropology 42 (2003): 163173. Iveta Jusov, a scholar
who was in the Netherlands at the time the film came out, noted how
unconcerned Hirsi Ali seemed about making alliances with Dutch Muslim women or checking the appropriation of her film for Islamophobes.
To the contrary, Jusov writes, By depicting Muslim women in the film
as victims with no agency, by quoting from the Quran selectively and
only those verses that represent its autocratic voice, and by ignoring
the tradition of Muslim womens efforts to forge new readings of the
Quran appropriate for the 21st century, in fact by the whole way the
250
N O T E S T O PA G E S 1 0 3 1 1 1
films argument is expressed, Submission lends itself easily to appropriation by the Islamophobic discourse. Iveta Jusov, Hirsi Ali and van
Goghs Submission: Reinforcing the Islam vs. Women Binary, Womens
Studies International Forum 31, no. 2 (2008): 154.
51. De Leeuw and van Wichelen, Please, Go Wake Up!, 329.
52. Moors, Submission, 8.
53. Hirsi Ali, Caged Virgin, 141150.
54. Marcus Wood, Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002), 87.
55. Ibid., 96.
56. See also Carolyn J. Dean, Empathy, Pornography, and Suffering, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 14, no. 1
(2003): 88124.
57. Jay M. Bernstein, Bare Life, Bearing Witness: Auschwitz and the
Pornography of Horror, Parallax 10, no. 1 (2004): 12.
58. Wood, Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography, 102103.
59. For other discussions, see Ahmad, Not Yet beyond the Veil;
Laila Lalami, The Missionary Position, Nation, June 19, 2006, thenation.com/article/missionary-position; and Roksana Bahramitash, The
War on Terror, Feminist Orientalism and Orientalist Feminism: Case
Studies of Two North American Bestsellers, Critique: Critical Middle
Eastern Studies 14, no. 2 (2005): 221235.
Scott (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008), 9293. She notes
that like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, this native who takes us inside a country in
the axis of evil has been celebrated by Western feminists as well as the
neoconservative men and women who people the American Enterprise
Institute.
61. Sherene H. Razack, Stealing the Pain of Others: Reflections on
Canadian Humanitarian Responses, Review of Education, Pedagogy,
and Cultural Studies 29, no. 4 (2007): 375394.
62. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel (New York: Free Press), 85.
63. Ibid., 207208.
64. Ibid., 209.
65. See Abu-Lughod, Against Universals.
66. Veena Das, National Honor and Practical Kinship: Unwanted
Women and Children, in Conceiving the New World Order: The
Global Politics of Reproduction, ed. Faye D. Ginsburg and Rayna R.
Rapp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Ritu Menon and
Kamla Bhasin, Borders & Boundaries: Women in Indias Partition (New
N O T E S T O PA G E S 1 1 2 1 2 1
251
Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Urvashi Butalia, The

Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000).
67. I am grateful to Partha Chatterjee for this insight.
4.
1. For details, see a longer and earlier version of this chapter published as Lila Abu-Lughod, Seductions of the Honor Crime, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 22, no. 1 (2011):1763.
2. I take this term from James Fergusons now classic study of the work
of the development industry in the Third World. James Ferguson, The
Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic
Power in Lesotho (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).
3. Amnesty International, Culture of Discrimination: A Fact Sheet
on Honor Killings (New York: Amnesty International, July 20, 2005).
4. As Kristof informs us, the hymenfragile, rarely seen, and pretty
pointlessremains an object of worship among many religions and societies around the world. Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn,
Half the Sky: How to Change the World (London: Virago, 2010), 90.
5. Lila Abu-Lughod, Writing Womens Worlds: Bedouin Stories
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 192, 184.
6. For a particularly compelling story in which love poems were even
credited for causing a death, see Lila Abu-Lughod, Shifting Politics in
Bedouin Love Poetry, in Language and the Politics of Emotion, ed.
Catherine Lutz and Lila Abu-Lughod (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 2445. For a beautiful Romeo and Juliet type traditional romance, in which the fronds of trees growing from the graves of
a pair of tragic lovers cross high in the sky, see Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled
Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 249250.
7. Anthony Appiah, The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 172.
8. Unni Wikan, In Honor of Fadime: Murder and Shame (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2008), 62.
9. Ibid., 117.
10. Ibid., 110.
11. Ibid., 236.
12. Ibid., 167.
13. Ibid., 275.
14. Riemerss analysis of the Swedish media coverage of the event has
revealed the patterns. As she notes, The newspapers represented Fadime
252
N O T E S T O PA G E S 1 2 2 1 2 8
Sahindal as a martyr for the Swedish way of living, which is signified by

equality, modernity, freedom, and enlightenment. This representation was
founded on, and thereby reiterated, cultural racism, sexism, and class
prejudice. These representations exaggerated differences among Swedish
and immigrant cases of violence against women. Eva Riemers, Representations of an Honor Killing: Intersections of Discourses on Culture,
Gender, Equality, Social Class, and Nationality, Feminist Media Studies
7, no. 3 (2007): 239255, quote on 252. Rema Hammami kindly brought
this article to my attention after I had completed my analysis. For a sharp
critique of the way this incident was represented in Canada by Wikan, see
Sherene Razack, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western
Law and Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008).
15. Annie Van Sommer and Samuel Zwemer, Our Moslem Sisters: A
Cry of Need from Lands of Darkness Interpreted by Those Who Heard
It (New York: F. H. Revell, 1907), 16.
16. Norma Khouri, Forbidden Love, 2nd ed. (New York: Bantam
Books, 2004), 8, 1011.
17. Rana Husseini, Murder in the Name of Honour: The True Story
of One Womans Heroic Fight against an Unbelievable Crime (Oxford:
Oneworld, 2009).
18. In 2007, a fascinating documentary film called Forbidden Lie$,
by Anna Broinowski, was released about Norma Khouri. It features interviews with the Australian journalist who broke the story, Malcolm
Knox, and many others who reveal, among other things, the support for
Khouris asylum case at the highest levels of the Bush administration.
For further discussions of the case and the newspaper coverage, see Saba
Mahmood Feminism, Democracy, and Empire: Islam and the War of
Terror, in Womens Studies on the Edge, ed. Joan Wallach Scott (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008); Husseini, Murder in the Name
of Honour; Joseph R. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel,
Narrative Form, and International Law (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2007).
19. It is certainly to be read cautiously, as an Australian historian
and specialist on memoirs has argued. Thrse Taylor, Truth, History,
and Honor Killing: A Review of Burned Alive, AntiWar.com, May 2,
2005, antiwar.com/orig/ttaylor.php?articleid=5801.
20. Souad and Marie-Thrse Cuny, Burned Alive (London: Bantam,
2004), 68.
21. Wikan, In Honor of Fadime, 24.
22. E-mail communication, September 8, 2007. The parent site, Mideast Youth, was set up in 2005 as a platform for dialogue between
N O T E S T O PA G E S 1 2 9 1 3 4
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Iranian and Arab youth. It has since expanded to cover minority rights
and many other issues, garnering international awards for cyberactivism. Al-Azraq had to give up his volunteer work with the No Honor
site because he got busy organizing dialogues between Jordanians and
Danes, trying to convince the U.S. Embassy to sponsor a similar
Jordanian-American youth dialogue project, and helping teach a virtual
course for American college students interested in international relations and the Middle East. The website, accessed November 3, 2010, is
no longer live.
23. Human Rights Watch, A Question of Security: Violence against
Palestinian Women and Girls, November 11, 2006, unhcr.org/refworld
/docid/4565dd724.html. I discuss this report in Chapter 5.
24. Dicle Kogacioglu, The Tradition Effect: Framing Honor Crimes
in Turkey, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 15, no. 2
(2004): 119, 141.
25. For a critique of the association of tradition with honor, see Ayse
Parla, The Honor of the State, Feminist Studies 27, no. 1 (2001):
6588.
26. Khaled Fahmy, Women, Medicine, and Power in Nineteenth
Century Egypt, in Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the
Middle East, ed. Lila Abu-Lughod, Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/
History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998); Liat Kozma,
Negotiating Virginity: Narratives of Defloration from Late NineteenthCentury Egypt, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 24, no. 1 (2004): 5769; Mario M. Ruiz, Virginity Violated:
Sexual Assault and Respectability in Mid- to Late-Nineteenth-Century
Egypt, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
25, no. 1 (2005): 214226.
27. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian and Suhad Daher-Nashif, The
Politics of Killing Women in Colonized Contexts, Jadaliyya, December
17, 2012, jadaliyya.com/pages/contributors/110635.
28. Human Rights Watch, A Question of Security, 49.
29. Katherine Pratt Ewing, Stolen Honor: Stigmatizing Muslim Men
in Berlin (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008), chap. 5.
30. Ibid., 153.
31. Ibid., 154.
32. As Miriam Ticktin argues in her analysis of the hyperconcern in
France about rapes in the slums and sexual soliciting on the street, Put
in the larger context of debates in France about immigration, national
security, and a growing Europe-wide form of Islamophobia, the focus
on sexualityand sexual violence, more specificallycan be explained
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by the fact that it has become the discourse of border control and the way
borders are policed. Miriam Ticktin, Sexual Violence as the Language
of Border Control: Where French Feminist and Anti-immigrant Rhetoric Meet, Signs 33, no. 4 (2008): 864.
33. Nacira Gunif-Souilamas, The Other French Exception: Virtuous Racism and the War of the Sexes in Postcolonial France, French
Politics, Culture & Society 24, no. 3 (2006): 27.
34. Jacqueline Rose, A Piece of White Silk, London Review of
Books 31, no. 21 (2009): 58.
35. Anna C. Korteweg and Gke Yurdakul, Religion, Culture and
the Politicization of Honour-Related Violence, Paper No. 12, Gender
and Development Programme, UN Research Institute for Social Development, October 2010.
36. Fadwa El Guindi, Veil: Modesty, Privacy, and Resistance, Dress,
Body, Culture (Oxford: Berg, 1999); Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety:
The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
37. Lara Deeb and Mona Harb, Leisurely Islam (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 2013); Lara Deeb and Mona Harb, Sanctioned Pleasures: Youth, Piety and Leisure in Beirut, Middle East Report 245 (2007): 1219; Frances Susan Hasso, Consuming Desires:
Family Crisis and the State in the Middle East (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2011).
38. Homa Hoodfar, Between Marriage and the Market: Intimate
Politics and Survival in Cairo (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1997); Arlene Elowe Macleod, Accommodating Protest: Working
Women, the New Veiling, and Change in Cairo (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1991); Mahmood, Politics of Piety.
39. Lama Abu-Odeh, Crimes of Honour and the Construction of
Gender in Arab Societies, in Feminism and Islam: Legal and Literary
Perspectives, ed. Mai Yamani and Andrew Allen (New York: New York
40. As Saba Mahmood writes, No discursive object occupies a
simple relation to the reality it purportedly denotes. Rather, representations of facts, objects, and events are profoundly mediated by the fields
of power in which they circulate and through which they acquire their
precise shape and form. Saba Mahmood, Feminism, Democracy, and
Empire: Islam and the War of Terror, in Womens Studies on the Edge,
ed. Joan W. Scott (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008), 97.
41. Janet Halley, Prabha Kotiswaran, Hila Shamir, and Chantal
Thomas, From the International to the Local in Feminist Legal
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Responses to Rape, Prostitution/Sex Work, and Sex Trafficking: Four

Studies in Contemporary Governance Feminism, Harvard Journal of
Law and Gender 29 (2006): 335423.
5.
1. Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in

Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988),
has alerted us to the circulation of objects through his notion of the
social life of things; Sally Engle Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice, Chicago Series
in Law and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), has
introduced the idea of vernacularization for womens human rights;
and Bruno Latour, Circulating Reference: Sampling the Soil in the
Amazon Forest, in Pandoras Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science
Studies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999) and other
ethnographers of science have taught us to look at the instruments
through which concepts are mediated. For another ethnographic approach to rights that focuses on the arts, see Susan Slyomovics, The
Performance of Human Rights in Morocco (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2005).
2. Though my examples are drawn from the Arab world because
that is where I have done my research, I am keenly aware of how this
skewing perpetuates the association of Islam with the Arab world when,
in fact, Muslims are found around the world. For a good critical analysis of the Muslimwoman, see miriam cooke, The Muslimwoman,
Contemporary Islam 1, no. 2 (2007): 139154; for counterweights to
the focus on the Arab world, see Elora Halim Chowdhury, Leila Farsakh, and Rajini Srikanth, Introduction-Engaging Islam, International Feminist Journal of Politics 10, no. 4 (2008): 439454.
3. For more on early Egyptian and Middle Eastern feminism, see Lila
Abu-Lughod, ed., Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the
Middle East, Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998); Margot Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995); Beth Baron, Egypt as a Woman:
Nationalism, Gender, and Politics (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2005); Marilyn Booth, May Her Likes Be Multiplied: Biography
and Gender Politics in Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2001); Afsaneh Najmabadi, Crafting an Educated Housewife in Iran,
in Abu-Lughod, Remaking Women; Hoda El Sadda, Imad Abu Ghazi,
and Jabir Usfur, Significant Moments in the History of Egyptian
256
N O T E S T O PA G E S 1 4 8 1 5 0
Women (Cairo, Egypt: National Council for Women, Committee for

Culture and Media, 2001).
4. For state feminism, see Laura Bier, Revolutionary Womanhood:
Feminisms, Modernity, and the State in Nassers Egypt (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 2011); Mervat F. Hatem, Economic and Political Liberation in Egypt and the Demise of State Feminism, International Journal of Middle East Studies 24, no. 2 (1992): 231251; Mervat F. Hatem, In the Eye of the Storm: Islamic Societies and Muslim
Women in Globalization Discourses, Comparative Studies of South
Asia, Africa and the Middle East 26, no. 1 (2006): 2235; Cynthia Nelson, Doria Shafik, Egyptian Feminist: A Woman Apart (Gainesville:
University Press of Florida, 1996); El Sadda, Abu Ghazi, and Usfur,
Significant Moments.
5. Maha M. Abdelrahman, Civil Society Exposed: The Politics of
NGOs in Egypt, Library of Modern Middle East Studies (London: Tauris Academic, 2004), 54; Maha M. Abdelrahman, The Nationalisation
of the Human Rights Debate in Egypt, Nations and Nationalism 13,
no. 2 (2007): 285300.
6. Nadje Sadig Al-Ali, Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to
the Present (London: Zed Books, 2007); Siham Abd al-Salam, Almunazzamat al-ahliyya al-saghira al-amila fi majal al-mara [Small
civil society organizations working on womens issues] (Cairo, Egypt:
Dar al-ayn li al-nashr, 2005).
7. For a sharp analysis of the structure of and impediments to womens
activism in Egypt, see Rabab El Mahdi, Does Political Islam Impede
Gender-Based Mobilization? The Case of Egypt, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 11, no. 3 (2010):379396.
8. Nadje Sadig Al-Ali, Secularism, Gender, and the State in the Middle
East: The Egyptian Womens Movement, Cambridge Middle East Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 20.
9. Abdelrahman, Civil Society Exposed, 182183.
10. The literature is fast growing and the debates continue to rage
about the implications of the Arab Spring for women. For an early assessment that was critical of media representations, see Lila Abu-Lughod
and Rabab El Mahdi, Beyond the Woman Question in the Egyptian
Revolution, Feminist Studies 37, no. 3 (2012): 683691. Mona El
Tahawys Why Do They Hate Us? The Real War on Women is in the
Middle East, in Foreign Policy, Sex Issue, May/June 2013, ignited controversy; foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/04/23/why_do_they_hate_us.
11. For an ethnographic consideration of the way the revolution
was experienced in Fayruz and Ayshas village, see Lila Abu-Lughod,
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257
In Every Village a Tahrir: Rural Youth in Moral Revolution, in Public

Space and Revolt: Tahrir Square 2011, ed. Elena Tzelepis and Sherene
Seikaly (Cairo, Egypt: American University in Cairo Press, forthcoming); and Lila Abu-Lughod, Living the Revolution in an Egyptian
Village: Moral Action in a National Space, American Ethnologist 39,
no. 1 (2012): 1620.
12. Naomi Sakr, Friend or Foe? Dependency Theory and Womens
Media Activism in the Arab Middle East, Critique: Critical Middle
13. Nationalist campaigns to discredit the smaller nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs) for their foreign links must be seen, as Sakr argues, as a diversionary tactic. Given that Egypt is the second-largest
recipient of U.S. aid, Sakr concludes that it seems perverse to suggest
that NGOs were more to blame than the government for prolonging dependency on foreign powers, ibid., 172; for more on the complicated
scene of such organizations, see Sheila Carapico, NGOs, INGOs, GONGOs and DO-NGOs: Making Sense of Non-Governmental Organizations, Middle East Report 214 (2000): 1215.
14. United Nations Egypt, United Nations Development Assistance
Framework 20072011 Egypt: Moving in the Spirit of the Millennium
Declaration: The DNA of Progress (Egypt: United Nations, 2006), 22.
Similarly, the annual report on the European Neighbourhood Policy by
the Commission of the European Communities notes that 17 million
euros were earmarked in 2008 for human rights, womens rights, and
childrens rights projects in Egypt. Commission of the European Communities (CEC), Implementation of the European Neighbourhood Policy in 2008: Progress Report Egypt (Cairo, Egypt: CEC, 2009), 22,
ec.europa.eu/world/enp/pdf/progress2009/sec09_523_en.pdf.
15. This strategy of setting up a government body to advance rights
that were formerly the bailiwick of more critical NGOs while trying to
discredit them by presenting them as part of a foreign plot, was copied,
it seems, in the case of human rights. Three years after the creation of
the National Council for Women (NCW), a National Council for Human Rights was established. As Maha Abdelrahman has argued, with
serious restrictions on NGOs and a campaign to misrepresent human
rights and the organisations that attempt to promote these rights as
mouthpieces of Western imperialist powers, the regime tarred human
rights organizations as a threat to Egypts national security and reputation. Meanwhile, the regime has gained a degree of legitimacy in the
eyes of the public by representing itself as the protector of national interests. More recently . . . since the debate on and the foundation of the
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National Council for Human Rights in 2003, the state has refined its
discourse on the role of civil society and human rights organisations by
promoting an image of itself as the true patron of civil society organisations and the official agent of a more nationalistically defined human
rights movement. Abdelrahman, Nationalisation of the Human Rights
Debate in Egypt, 287.
16. Janet Halley et al., From the International to the Local in Feminist Legal Responses to Rape, Prostitution/Sex Work, and Sex Trafficking: Four Studies in Contemporary Governance Feminism, Harvard
Journal of Law & Gender 29 (2006): 335509. Similar trends of governmental control over substantial funds for womens empowerment
and rights have been observed in Jordan and Syria. See Mayssoun Sukarieh, The First Lady Phenomenon: Womens Empowerment and the
Colonial Present in the Contemporary Arab World, paper presented at
the Boas Seminar, Columbia University, March 27, 2013.
17. Association for the Development and Enhancement of Women,
History of ADEW, 2008, adew.org/en/?action=10000&sub=1.
18. Funders include one Egyptian (Sawiris Foundation for Development) and one Arab (Arab Gulf Program for United Nations Development Organization, or AG Fund), and the rest is a whos who of foreign
or UN foundations or agencies: the Delegation of the European Commission to Egypt, Swiss Development Fund, Ford Foundation, Embassy
of Japan, Royal Netherlands Embassy, Dutch Organization for International Development Cooperation (NOVIB), German Technical Cooperation (GTZ), Italian Debt Swap Program, United Nations Development
Program (UNDP), Australian Embassy, and Embassy of Finland.
19. Naela Rifaat, personal communication, Cairo, March 2008.
20. The Center for Egyptian Womens Legal Assistance (CEWLA) is
sought after as a partner by many, including the School of Oriental and
African Studies at the University of London when it was conducting a
multiyear project on honor crimes. See Lynn Welchman and Sara Hossein, Honour: Crimes, Paradigms and Violence against Women (London:
Zed Press, 2005). CEWLA also commissioned its own study.
21. Both Coptic and Muslim NGOs have long provided services to
women in Egypt, though Iman Bibars, an Egyptian scholar and activist,
has criticized them for their rigid expectations about gender roles and,
in the case of Muslim welfare groups, their bias toward women who are
heavily veiled and who present themselves as lonely, sick and poor.
Iman Bibars, Victims and Heroines: Women, Welfare and the Egyptian
State (London: Zed, 2001); and Abdelrahman, Civil Society Exposed,
116.
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259
22. Seham Ali interview, 2008. The director of CEWLA, Azza Sleiman, is also part of a transnational network of Muslim feminists who
launched an organization called Musawah in Kuala Lumpur in February 2009, dedicated to seeking justice and equality within Islamic family law. For more on this organization, see Chapter 6.
23. United Nations Egypt, United Nations Development Assistance
Framework 20072011 Egypt; for more on the alliance of the state and
Al-Azhar in Egypt, see Malika Zeghal, Religion and Politics in Egypt:
The Ulema of Al-Azhar, Radical Islam, and the State (195294), International Journal of Middle East Studies 31, no. 3 (1999): 371399; and
Tamir Moustafa, Conflict and Cooperation between the State and Religious Institutions in Contemporary Egypt, International Journal of
Middle East Studies 32, no. 1 (2000): 322.
24. Bibars was interviewed on Al-Jazeera by Riz Khan. Ashoka,
Iman Bibars and Sakeena Yacoobi on Al Jazeera, Ashoka: Innovators
for the Public, September 22, 2008, ashoka.org/video/5007.
25. Ashoka, Support Social Entrepreneurs, Ashoka: Innovators for
the Public, n.d., ashoka.org/support. The Ashoka Middle East and North
Africa fellows program, like ADEW (perhaps because both are directed
by Bibars), has also taken advantage of the opportunity to partner with
Columbia Universitys School of International and Public Affairs. Students in the development program in 20082009 were commissioned to
evaluate a girls sports program in Upper Egypt sponsored by Nike and
run by an Ashoka fellow. For a critical analysis of the role of sports in
imagining the liberation of village girls in Egypt, see Rania Kassab Sweis,
Saving Egypts Village Girls: Humanity, Rights, and Gendered Vulnerability in a Global Youth Initiative, Journal of Middle East Womens
Studies 8, no. 2 (2012): 2650.
26. A report on the Egyptian Center for Womens Rightss campaigns
against sexual harassment, which have taken new forms to respond to
the harassment of women protesters that have been orchestrated since
the events in Tahrir Square in 2011, can be found on their website. See
ecwronline .org/blog/2012/12/16/publications-of-sexual-harassment
-campaign/.
27. The Egyptian Center for Womens Rights (ECWR) appropriated
the slogan The Street Is Ours from a more radical coalition formed in
the summer of 2005 after the scandalous attack on women protesters
by thugs with police approval/instigation at a peaceful prodemocracy
demonstration by the political movement Kefaya (Enough) (Rabab El
Mahdi, personal communication, 2008). See El Mahdi, Does Political
Islam Impede Gender-Based Mobilization? The Case of Egypt. Such
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attacks were seen again across our television screens in the initial days
of the revolt in Tahrir Square on January 28, 2011, but this time without succeeding in stopping the demonstrators. The ECWRs campaign
against anonymous sexual harassment delinks the problems from the
ugly politics of government repression and violence by the security
forces and their successors.
28. For the results of this initiative, see harassmap.org.
29. Mona Abaza, Changing Consumer Cultures of Modern Egypt:
Cairos Urban Reshaping, Social, Economic, and Political Studies of the
Middle East and Asia (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2006); Diane Singerman and Paul Ammar, eds., Cairo Cosmopolitan: Politics, Culture, and
Urban Space in the Globalized Middle East (Cairo, Egypt: American
University in Cairo Press, 2006); Anouk De Koning, Global Dreams:
Class, Gender, and Public Space in Cosmopolitan Cairo (Cairo, Egypt:
American University in Cairo Press, 2009). For a major study of contemporary Cairo that focuses instead on informal development across
the social classes, see David Sims, Understanding Cairo: The Logic of
a City Out of Control (Cairo, Egypt: American University in Cairo,
2011).
30. Sally Engle Merry has shown that since the 1990s, violence has
been the main issue on the agenda of the transnational feminist community, a focus not without its suspicious critics. Merry, Human Rights
and Gender Violence.
31. One in Three Women: A Global Campaign to Raise Awareness
about Violence against Women, Domestic Violence, Sexual Assault, Human Trafficking, n.d., oneinthreewomen.com/. The website indicates an
interesting mix of commerce and good works: It states, One in Three
Women is a program of Moxie Company, Seattle, WA, founded by
Cheyla McCornack and Evelyn Brom. Moxie Company is a social enterprise supporting programs and organizations working to end violence
against women; oneinthreewomen.com/index.cfm?action=about.
32. PeaceKeeper Cause-metics, Womens Health Advocacy and Urgent Human Rights, 2013, iamapeacekeeper.com/peacekeeperadvoca
cyissuesnew.htm?
33. Women Living under Muslim Laws (WLUML), Violence Is Not
Our Culture: The Global Campaign to Stop Violence against Women in
the Name of Culture, 2009, stop-stoning.org/.
34. See Valentine M. Moghadam, Globalizing Women: Transnational
Feminist Networks, Themes in Global Social Change (Baltimore, Md.:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 142172, for an excellent description of WLUMLs positions and history.
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261
35. Women Living under Muslim Laws (WLUML), The Global

Campaign Stop Stoning and Killing Women! Concept Paper, 2007, 2,
wluml.org/english/news/stop_stoning _and _killing _ women%20_con
cept_paper.pdf.
36. For example, see Robert Spencer and Phyllis Chesler, The Violent
Oppression of Women in Islam (Los Angeles: David Horowitz Freedom
Center, 2007).
37. Amnesty International, Israeli Army Used Flechettes against Civilians (New York: Amnesty International, January 27, 2009), amnesty
.org/en/news-and-updates/news/israeli-used-flechettes-against-gazacivilians-20090127; James Hider, Names of Commanders to Be Kept
Secret as Gaza Weapons Inquiry Begins, Times of London: TimesOnline, January 22, 2009, timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east
/article5563082.ece.
38. New evidence of this has emerged in the report of the United Nation Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, submitted in September
2009. For the Goldstone Report, see United Nations Human Rights
Council (UN/HRC), Human Rights in Palestine and Other Occupied
Arab Territories: Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission
onthe Gaza Conflict, September 15, 2009. www2.ohchr.org/english/
bodies/hrcouncil/specialsession/9/FactFindingMission.htm. Although
Goldstone disavowed the report under pressure, other members of the
commission did not.
39. Carapico, NGOs, INGOs, GO-NGOs and DO-NGOs; Sari
Hanafi and Linda Tabar, The Emergence of a Palestinian Globalized
Elite: Donors, International Organizations and Local NGOs (Ramallah, Palestine: Institute of Jerusalem Studies; Muwatin, Palestinian Institute for the Study of Democracy, 2005); Islah Jad, Between Religion
and Secularism: Islamist Women of Hamas, in On Shifting Ground:
Muslim Women in the Global Era, ed. Fereshteh Nouraie-Simone (New
York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2005); Islah
Jad, The Demobilization of the Palestinian Womens Movement in
Palestine: From Empowered Active Militants to Powerless and Stateless
Citizens, MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies 8 (Spring
2008): 94111; Penny Johnson, Violence All Around Us: Dilemmas of
Global and Local Agendas Addressing Violence against Palestinian
Women, an Initial Intervention, Cultural Dynamics 20, no. 2 (2008):
119131.
40. For good analyses, see Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Militarization and Violence against Women in Conflict Zones in the Middle East:
A Palestinian Case-Study, Cambridge Studies in Law and Society (Cam-
262
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bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Nahla Abdo, Women in Israel: Race, Gender and Citizenship (London: Zed Books, 2011).
41. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Conceptualizing Voices of the
Oppressed in Conflict Areas, in Women, Armed Conflict and Loss: The
Mental Health of Palestinian Women in the Occupied Territories, ed.
Khawla Abu Baker (Jerusalem: Womens Studies Centre, 2004), published with Swedish funding: Kvinna Till Kvinna (Woman to Woman)
and Sida (Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency).
42. Ibid., 1731.
43. For a subtle analysis of the impact of human rights on Palestinian politics, representations, and subjectivity, see Lori Allen, Martyr
Bodies in the Media: Human Rights, Aesthetics, and the Politics of Immediation in the Palestinian Intifada, American Ethnologist 36, no. 1
(2009): 161. Didier Fassin also comments on the depoliticizing focus
on trauma during the second intifada; see his Humanitarian Reason
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). Islah Jad, based at
Birzeit University in Palestine, chose to coauthor the UNDPs Arab Human Development Report 2005: Towards the Rise of Women in the
Arab World. Scholar-activists, including Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian,
assisted Human Rights Watch (HRW) in preparing A Question of Security, its 2006 report on violence against Palestinian women and girls.
44. Johnson, Violence All Around Us, 125.
45. These kinds of critiques are different from ones that focus on the
way the Human Rights Report played in the American media. The reception of the report returns us to the dense terrain surrounding the
focus of the campaign to stop killing and stoning womenthe transnational terrain Muslim womens rights traverses. According to some
analysts, the U.S. reportage on violence in Palestine is skewed: of eighty
reports documenting human rights abuses in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict since 2000, only two of the seventy-six that were primarily critical
of Israel were featured in the New York Times, while two of the four
that were primarily critical of Palestinians received coverage, including
the 2006 Human Rights Watch report on Domestic Security. Moreover,
HRW 2006 was represented selectively to reinforce the impression that
Muslim women need saving because they are passive victims of patriarchy and family violence. Also, as these commentators note, by failing to
quote a single Palestinian womens rights activist of the twenty-one
mentioned in the report, the New York Times coverage also made it
seem as if only foreigners could identify womens problems and help
resolve them. This was not HRWs position. Patrick OConnor and Rachel Roberts, The New York Times Marginalizes Palestinian Women
N O T E S T O PA G E S 1 6 1 1 6 6
263
and Palestinian Rights, Electronic Intifada, November 17, 2006, elec

tronicintifada.net/content/new-york-times-marginalizes-palestinian-wo
men-and-palestinian-rights/6544#.TsHn0HERpq4.
46. Jad, Demobilization of the Palestinian Womens Movement in
Palestine.
47. Islah Jad, Between Religion and Secularism: Islamist Women of
Hamas; Islah Jad, The Politics of Group Weddings in Palestine: Political and Gender Tensions, Journal of Middle East Womens Studies 5,
no. 3 (2009): 3653.
48. Sama Aweidah, A Glimpse into the Womens Stories, in Abu
Baker, Women, Armed Conflict and Loss, 102.
49. I acknowledge the dangers of picking out individual cases; I do
so here neither to present such women as victims in order to solicit aid
or justify good works, nor to cast them as unsung heroines resisting
patriarchy in far-flung places, as critics charge is commonly the case in
NGO work or feminist ethnography; see Marnia Lazreg, Development: Feminist Theorys Cul-de-Sac, in Feminist Post-Development
Thought: Rethinking Modernity, Post-Colonialism and Representation,
ed. Kriemild Saunders, Zed Books on Women and Development (London: Zed, 2002); Sangtin Writers and Richa Nagar, Playing with Fire:
Feminist Thought and Activism through Seven Lives In India, 1st ed.
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). I use their voices
here to speak to those concerned with Muslim womens rights and
therefore to insert these village women into the discourses and practices
that constitute them as subjects of womens rights.
50. For more on Arab women and education, see Fida Adely, Gendered Paradoxes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Adely,
Educating Women for Development: The Arab Human Development
Report 2005 and the Problem with Womens Choices, International
Journal of Middle East Studies 41 (2009): 105122; for more on education in the village, see Lila Abu-Lughod, Dramas of Nationhood: The
Politics of Television in Egypt, Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures 2001
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
51. She explained to me this element of Islamic law: the man takes
two portions of the inheritance and the woman takes one.
52. This is confirmed by Rachida Chihs study of this and other Sufis
of the Khalwatiyya Brotherhood in Upper Egypt. Based on research in
the 1990s, she argues, Women, like men, want to meet the Shaykh for
his baraka, for spiritual counseling but also for his mediation and protection against a ruthless husband or to escape a forced marriage . . .
The Shaykhs mediation is so popular that the population of the village
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has called it hukm hasani meaning for them a fair and quick justice that
compensates the victims and prevents vendettas. Rachida Chih, The
Khalwatiyya Brotherhood in Rural Upper Egypt and in Cairo, in Upper Egypt: Identity and Change, ed. Nicholas Hopkins and Reem Saad
(Cairo, Egypt: American University in Cairo Press, 2004), 162.
53. Rania Kassab Sweis, Saving Egypts Village Girls. As Sweis argues, in this project of saving village girls, crafting the adolescent girl
body as mobile, healthy, and rights bearing in these ways is viewed as
imperative to the overall construction of a healthy national population
in line with developmentalist models, 37.
54. For more on the response of the villagers to the uprisings, see
Lila Abu-Lughod, In Every Village a Tahrir: Rural Youth in Moral
Revolution.
55. Christine Walley, What We Women Want: An Ethnography of
Transnational Feminism (Unpublished book manuscript).
56. Mark Goodale, Introduction to Anthropology and Human Rights
in a New Key, American Anthropologist 108, no. 1 (2006): 3; Richard
Ashby Wilson, Afterword to Anthropology and Human Rights in a
New Key: The Social Life of Human Rights, American Anthropologist
108, no. 1 (2006): 81.
57. Smadar Lavie, Mizrahi Feminism and the Question of Palestine, Journal of Middle East Womens Studies 7, no. 2 (2011): 56.
6.
A N A N T H R O P O L O G I S T I N T H E T E R R I T O RY O F R I G H T S
1. I draw some implications of feminist ethnography for debates

about rights in the preface to the 15th anniversary edition of my ethnography, Lila Abu-Lughod, Writing Womens Worlds: Bedouin Stories
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).
2. I am referencing Clifford Geertz, of course. Clifford Geertz, The
Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books,
1973). George E. Marcus picked this up in the title of his book, Ethnography through Thick and Thin (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1998).
3. Sally Engle Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice, Chicago Series in Law and
Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
4. Feminist anthropologists have tended instead to observe the workings of womens rights in particular contexts, whether the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women
(CEDAW) Commission hearings or local womens organizations. The
development of such organizations is often accompanied by tensions
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265
between what elite nationals, transnational feminists, and donor organizations want, and the womens priorities in their communities. See
Dorothy L. Hodgson, These Are Not Our Priorities: Maasai Women,
Human Rights and the Problem of Culture, in Gender and Culture at
the Limit of Rights, ed. Dorothy Hodgson (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Christine J. Walley, What We Women Want:
An Ethnography of Transnational Feminism, unpublished manuscript.
5. Taking both conceptual and practical rights as their objects,
anthropologists have considered everything from rights as cultural
and performative to the ways that rights talk is mobilized (Dorothy L.
Hodgson, Womens Rights as Human Rights: Women in Law and Development in Africa [WiLDAF], Africa Today 49, no. 2 [2002]: 326;
Dorothy L. Hodgson, Introduction: Comparative Perspectives on the
Indigenous Rights Movement in Africa and the Americas, American
Anthropologist 104, no. 4 [2002]: 10371049; and Hodgson, These
Are Not Our Priorities. ) They have studied the dynamics of transplantation and vernacularization of rights frames and the social machinery of the production and reproduction of rights: see especially
Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence; Peggy Levitt and Sally Engle Merry, Making Womens Human Rights in the Vernacular: Navigating the Culture/Rights Divide, in Gender and Culture at the Limit
of Rights, ed. Dorothy Hodgson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). Others have invoked human rights to find ways to assist indigenous communities: Elsa Stamatopoulou and Bruce Robbins,
Reflections on Culture and Cultural Rights, South Atlantic Quarterly
103, nos. 23 (2004): 419434. In an important contribution aptly
titled Rights Inside Out, Riles has shown the peculiar way womens
groups in Fiji adopted womens rights as human rights as a framework, despite their own doubts, convinced of the efficacy of a discourse
that they imagined others out there found persuasive. See Annelise
Riles, Rights Inside Out: The Case of the Womens Human Rights
Campaign, Leiden Journal of International Law 15, no. 2 (2002):
285305.
6. Elizabeth Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 2002).
7. See Harri Englund, Prisoners of Freedom: Human Rights and the
African Poor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), writing
on Malawi; and Michael Jackson, Existential Anthropology: Events,
Exigencies and Effects (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), writing on
Sierra Leone. See also James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta, Spatializing
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States: Toward an Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality, American Ethnologist 29, no. 4 (2002): 98110.
8. Lori Allen, Martyr Bodies in the Media: Human Rights, Aesthetics, and the Politics of Immediation in the Palestinian Intifada, American Ethnologist 36, no. 1 (2009): 161. See also Didier Fassin, Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2011); Peter Redfield, Doctors, Borders, and Life in
Crisis, Cultural Anthropology 20, no. 3 (2005): 328361; Miriam Ticktin, Casualties of Care (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011);
Ticktin, Where Ethics and Politics Meet: The Violence of Humanitarianism in France, American Ethnologist 33, no. 1 (2006): 3349.
9. Wendy Brown, The Most We Can Hope For . . .: Human Rights
and the Politics of Fatalism, South Atlantic Quarterly 103, nos. 23
(2004): 451463. Robert Meister, After Evil: A Politics of Human
Rights (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
10. Ratna Kapur, The Tragedy of Victimization Rhetoric: Resurrecting the Native Subject in International/Post-Colonial Feminist Legal Politics, Harvard Human Rights Journal 15 (2002): 138; Inderpal
Grewal, Womens Rights as Human Rights: The Transnational Production of Global Feminist Subjects, in Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms, ed. Inderpal Grewal, Next Wave
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), 125.
11. As Norani Othman, one of the founders of Sisters in Islam explains, The experience of many womens groups operating in Muslim
countries these past two decades demonstrates that in their daily battles
a great deal more progress is achieved by working with their religious
and cultural paradigm. Norani Othman, Grounding Human Rights
Arguments in Non-Western Culture: Sharia and the Citizenship Rights
of Women in a Modern Islamic State, in The East Asian Challenge for
Human Rights, ed. Joanne R. Bauer and Daniel A. Bell (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999).
12. The focus will be on one of the key violations of womens human rights that has mobilized the transnational community in recent
years: domestic violence. See Grewal, Womens Rights as Human
Rights ; for a questioning of the capacity of legal language to capture
the experience of violence, see Kirsten Hastrup, Violence, Suffering and
Human Rights: Anthropological Reflections, Anthropological Theory
3, no. 3 (2003): 309323.
13. Those concerned with womens rights realized that for the
grassrootstheir objects of concern and intended beneficiariesthe
moral appeal of fidelity to Islam had never wavered and in fact has been
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enhanced in the past few decades with the spread of education, media,
and the growing funding of Islamic education and proselytizing.
14. Irshad Manji is a good example, discussed by Saba Mahmood,
Feminism, Democracy, and Empire: Islam and the War of Terror, in
Womens Studies on the Edge, ed. Joan Wallach Scott (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 2008). Ayaan Hirsi Ali is another.
15. An interesting new mix is represented by Nazreen Nawaz, media
spokesperson for Hizb ut-Tahrirs 2012 launch of an international campaign called The Khilafah: A Shining Model for Womens Rights and
Political Role, which fuses womens rights language with a radical vision of a ruling system based purely upon Islamic laws and principles,
hizb-ut-tahrir.info/info/english.php/contents_en/entry_16414.
16. According to some accounts, Sisters in Islam (SIS) catalyzed when
theologian Dr. Amina Wadud, having since become famous through her
books like Inside the Gender Jihad (Oxford: Oneworld, 2008) and
through leading a mixed congregation prayer, came to teach in Malaysia; Madhavi Sunder, Reading the Quran in Kuala Lumpur, University
of Chicago Law School Faculty Blog, February 16, 2009, uchicagolaw
.typepad.com/faculty/2009/02/reading-the-quran-in-kuala-lumpur.html.
For other important arguments about achieving womens rights through
feminist interpretations of the Quran, see Zainah Anwar, Sisters in Islam and the Struggle for Womens Rights, in On Shifting Ground: Muslim Women in the Global Era, ed. Fereshteh Nouraie-Simone (New York:
Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2005); Asma Barlas,
Globalizing Equality: Muslim Women, Theology, and Feminism, in
On Shifting Ground: Muslim Women in the Global Era, ed. Fereshteh
Nouraie-Simone (New York: Feminist Press at the City University of
New York, 2005); Azizah al-Hibri, Deconstructing Patriarchal Jurisprudence in Islamic Law: A Faithful Approach, in Global Critical Race
Feminism: An International Reader, ed. Adrien Katherine Wing (New
York: New York University Press, 2000); and Azizah al-Hibri, Muslim
Womens Rights in the Global Village: Challenges and Opportunities,
Journal of Law and Religion 15, nos. 12 (2000): 3766. For an overview of issues, see Margot Badran, Feminism in Islam: Secular and Religious Convergences (Oxford: Oneworld, 2009).
17. But Basarudin, writing her dissertation about SIS, describes the
organization more neutrally as those working from within their religious and cultural frameworks. Azza Basarudin, Musawah Movement:
Seeking Equality and Justice in Muslim Family Law, CSW Update
Newsletter, UCLA, March 1, 2009, repositories.cdlib.org/csw/newsletter
/Mar09_Basarudin.
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18. Musawah: For Equality in the Family, Musawah Framework

for Action, 2009, musawah.org/sites/default/files/Musawah-Framework
-EN_1.pdf.
19. The statement continued, Todays Muslim family laws are human interpretations of the Shariah, based on juristic theories and assumptions. Therefore, they can change in accordance with the changing
realities of time and place and contemporary notions of justice.
20. Musawah: For Equality in the Family, Musawah Framework
for Action.
21. Ziba Mir-Hosseinis contribution to Musawahs resource book is
Towards Gender Equality: Muslim Family Laws and the Shariah, in
Wanted: Equality and Justice in the Muslim Family, ed. Zainah Anwar
(Selangor, Malaysia: Musawah, 2009), musawah.org/background_papers.asp, but she has published widely on such issues, starting with her
excellent piece Stretching the Limits: A Feminist Reading of the Sharia
in post-Khomeini Iran, in Feminism and Islam: Legal and Literary
Perspectives, ed. Mai Yamani and Andrew Allen (New York: New York
University Press, 1996), and extending to her essay: Ziba Mir-Hosseini,
Muslim Womens Quest for Equality: Between Islamic Law and Feminism, Critical Inquiry 32, no. 4 (2006): 629645.
22. The latter article is by Khaled Abou Fadl, named in Mahmoods
article as one of the good Muslims, the moderate Muslim thinkers
with whom the U.S. government wishes to partner, even if they are more
or less critical of U.S. policy in the Middle East.
23. Saba Mahmood, Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire: The
Politics of Islamic Reformation, Public Culture 18, no. 2 (2006):
323347.
24. Zainah Anwar, Introduction: Why Equality and Justice Now?
in Anwar, Wanted: Equality and Justice in the Muslim Family, 3.
25. Basarudin has described the launch and the issues; she notes in
the piece that a part of her dissertation will discuss Musawah and Sisters in Islam. Basarudin, Musawah Movement.
26. Musawah, CEDAW and Muslim Family Laws, December 12,
2011, musawah.org/cedaw-and-muslim-family-laws-search-common
-ground.
27. Madhavi Sunder, Reading the Quran in Kuala Lumpur; for
more on Nafisi, see Chapter 3 and Laila Lalami, The Missionary Position, Nation, June 19, 2006, thenation.com/article/missionary-position;
Roksana Bahramitash, The War on Terror, Feminist Orientalism and
Orientalist Feminism: Case Studies of Two North American Bestsellers,
Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies 14, no. 2 (2005): 221235;
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Hamid Dabashi, Native Informers and the Making of the American

Empire, Al-Ahram Weekly Online, June 1, 2006, weekly.ahram.org
.eg/2006/797/special.htm; Mahmood, Feminism, Democracy, and
Empire.
28. A third issue to consider in Musawahs construction of its reform
project is its family resemblance to some political efforts from which it
would distance itself unequivocally. In Saba Mahmoods provocative
article Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire: The Politics of Islamic
Reformation, she has drawn attention to the awkward relationship between liberalism and U.S. imperial projects directed at the Muslim world.
As she notes, somewhat surprisingly for a secular state, the United
States has embarked upon an ambitious theological campaign aimed at
shaping the sensibilities of ordinary Muslims whom the State Department deems to be too dangerously inclined toward fundamentalist interpretations of Islam (Mahmood, Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire, 329). She argues that secular normativity is not, as it avers, about
separating church and state or promoting tolerance of differences, but
about remaking religious subjectivities, ibid., 328. This can be seen in
the targets of U.S. fears (the traditionalist Muslim), the goal of their
reform efforts (encouraging moderate Islam), and their methods,
which are, as Mahmood describes them, theological. She notes, for example, that a portion of the $1.3 billion allocated to the Muslim World
Outreach initiative has gone into training Islamic preachers, establishing
Islamic schools that could counter the madrasas (a word that means
school, but that Western media now use to designate conservative religious schools that produce, it is believed, extremists), and shaping the
content of religious debate in the media. This is perfectly in line with the
media efforts of states like Egypt to drive a wedge between a good moderate enlightened Islam and bad and wrongheaded extremism; Lila AbuLughod, Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt,
Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures 2001 (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2005). What Mahmood argues, however, is that the partners these
U.S. initiatives have sought to encourage are those who consider themselves moderate Muslim reformers who are distinguished by the fact that
they agree with the diagnosis that the central problem haunting Muslim societies lies in their inability to achieve critical distance between the
divine text and the world. So it is not just ideology or practice but
hermeneutics that distinguishes the reformers to be encouraged and the
rest of society that is dangerously literalist, ritual-bound, and therefore
in danger of being attracted by the messages of extremists; Mahmood,
Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire, 330331.
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29. Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Beyond Islam vs. Feminism, IDS Bulletin 42, no. 1 (2011): 6777, esp.71.
30. Ibid., 75.
31. Their sophisticated new website is Womens Islamic Initiative in
Spirituality and Equality (WISE), WISE Muslim Women, wisemuslimwomen.org/.
32. See The Cordoba Initiative, cordobainitiative.org/; see also
Rosemary R. Hicks, Translating Culture, Transcending Difference?
Cosmopolitan Consciousness and Sufi Sensibilities in New York City
after 2001, Journal of Islamic Law and Culture 10, no. 3 (2008): 281
306. For more on the cosmopolitan ideology of Sufis in New York and
the work of Imam Feisal, see Rosemary R. Hicks, Creating an Abrahamic America and Moderating Islam: Cold War Political Economy and
Cosmopolitan Sufis in New York After 2001 (Ph.D. diss., New York:
Columbia University, 2010).
33. Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of
Identity and Empire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006)
shows that contemporary liberal tolerance discourse masks some unsavory politics. Despite Abdel Raoufs insistent liberalism, his bid to set
up a cultural center near Ground Zero in New York set off vitriolic
protests by Islamophobes.
34. Even the visions of femininity were multiple. Some capitalized on
the fact that the acronym WISE had a meaning: some of the women
present spoke about womens wisdom as a source of authority. Others
were uncomfortable with the essentialization of femininity sometimes
invoked.
35. See poster on website: Womens Islamic Initiative in Spirituality
and Equality (WISE), Jihad against Violence: Muslim Womens Struggle
for Peace, July 2009, wisemuslimwomen.org/pdfs/jihad-report.pdf.
36. The ideological positioning of one of the most forceful women in
the group placed her squarely in the camp that Mahmood calls reformist. Her biographical sketch notes that she has spent the past decade
assisting moderate Muslim communities around the world to resist the
ideological onslaught of Islamic extremism. She advises both government and civic leaders on the threat posed by the extremists, as well as
on policies to transform stifled Muslim societies into progressive participants of a free society.
37. What follows in the compact is a series of declarations about
exactly what, in these six domains, WISE women are dedicated to: in
the sphere of protecting religion, for example, the compact states, We
are dedicated to advancing Muslim womens positions as religious and
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271
spiritual authorities. In the sphere of the intellect, We are dedicated to

defending Muslim womens freedom to interpret, think, and express,
especially concerning Islams primary texts. Under property, they support Muslim womens financial independence. And under dignity,
We are dedicated to empowering Muslim women to make dignified
personal, familial, and career choices. Womens Islamic Initiative in
Spirituality and Equality (WISE), Resources, n.d., wisemuslimwomen
.org/resources/.
38. Ironically, at the same time, one of the more extraordinary recent
scholarly ventures dedicated to research on Islam and the Muslim
world, the Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM),
lost its funding from the Dutch government.
39. Interestingly, the American Society of Muslim Advancements
(ASMAs) other big initiative is to train young leaders.
40. Sally Engle Merrys ethnography, Human Rights and Gender
Violence, describes the transnational feminists who attend the meetings
in New York, Geneva, and Beijing where the Commission on the Status
of Women holds its hearings on CEDAW and where documents and
platforms are tortuously composed to produce consent by delegates
from many nations.
41. In addition to the major competitive grant from the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, WISE lists an impressive group of supporters:
the United Nations Population Fund, the William and Mary Greve
Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Sister Fund, Ford Foundation, Global Fund for Women, Danny Kaye and Sylvia Fine Kaye
Foundation, Graham Charitable Foundation, Deak Family Foundation,
Henry Luce Foundation, the Elizabeth Foundation, and the Ms. Foundation. The Malaysian-based organization Sisters in Islam has also been
successful in fund-raising, although again, a good deal of hard volunteer work has gone into it for years. Since 2005, for example, it has been
a grantee of the Sigrid Rausing Trust, which claims to fund international human rights work; the current 100,000 pound sterling grant
they have seems to be for establishing Musawah.
An intriguing initiative out of North Africa that has received extensive European government funding has produced something more concrete and defined: a way to try to guarantee womens rights through a
legitimate instrument within the Islamic tradition, the prenuptial contract. The Model Marriage Contract, published in 2008, was developed
out of coordinated efforts in Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria through
partnering with Global Rights, self-described as a thirty-year-old international human rights advocacy organization (globalrights.org). The
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North African feminists who developed the Model Marriage Contract

consulted with a wide range of ordinary women about their experiences
and desires in marriage and the published contract is intended to guide
future spouses as they draft their marriage contract by providing suggestions for topics to discuss as well as examples of clauses to stipulate.
The booklet recognizes that contracts must be tailored to individual
situations, but insists that they should be rights protective for women
and should promote equality within marriage. Like so many of the
feminist projects of the past decade and a half that work for reform
within an Islamic framework, the project found enthusiastic funding
from outsiders: the United Kingdom Foreign Commonwealth Office
Global Opportunities Fund, the British Embassy in Rabat, the Norwegian Royal Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Norwegian Embassy in
Rabat are thanked. In turn, the drafters expertise was sought by Musawah. Global Rights, Conditions, Not Conflict: Promoting Womens
Human Rights in the Maghreb through Strategic Use of the Marriage
Contract (Rabat, Morocco: Global Rights, September 2008).
42. This bill presented to the Judiciary Committee would amend
the Immigration and Nationality Act. It was proposed by Congressman Tom Tancredo. I thank Mahmood Mamdani for bringing this to
my attention. This was followed by an equally silly motion in Oklahoma to ban Sharia law, as if there were any threat that it could be
installed.
43. Naomi Sakr, Friend or Foe? Dependency Theory and Womens
Media Activism in the Arab Middle East, Critique: Critical Middle
Eastern Studies 13, no. 2 (2004): 153174; Maha M. Abdelrahman,
Civil Society Exposed: The Politics of NGOs in Egypt, Library of Modern Middle East Studies (London: Tauris Academic, 2004); Maha M.
Abdelrahman, The Nationalisation of the Human Rights Debate in
Egypt, Nations and Nationalism 13, no. 2 (2007): 285300.
44. Their range of issues is admirable and much broader, however.
See WISE, wisemuslimwomen.org/currentissues/.
45. Naz K. Modirzadeh, Taking Islamic Law Seriously: INGOs and
the Battle for Muslim Hearts and Minds, Harvard Human Rights Journal 19 (2006): 192.
46. Ibid., 207.
47. Modirzadehs presentation was at the workshop, Whos Afraid
of Sharia? held at the Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference (cosponsored by the Institute for the Study of Religion, Culture,
and Public Life) at Columbia University, October 3, 2008. I am grateful
to Katherine Franke for bringing this job advertisement to our attention.
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273
Posted in 2007, it was for an Advisor on Sharia in the Womens Rights

Division. This person was to provide Human Rights Watch (HRW)
with advice on the application of sharia as a legal system, the variations
in its employment by states and other agents in different regions of the
world, and how it is used to advance or restrict womens human rights,
in areas including civil and political rights, family law, and sexuality.
The qualifications included deep expertise in Islamic jurisprudence and
history and a history of involvement with womens organizations and
human rights organizations in Muslim communities. Also required was
an advanced degree, work experience, and fluency in English and advanced Arabic. Described as beneficial were other linguistic talents:
knowledge of one or more of the languages of countries in Asia, Africa,
or the Middle East with substantial Muslim populations and knowledge of international human rights law and experience with field research, report writing, advocacy, and media work, in other words, the
transnational language of rightsa tall order. A couple of feminist anthropologists who work on Islamic law or Muslim societies were rejected for the position; they believed that HRW had a very specific kind
of candidate in mind: a more authentic Muslim woman trained in Islamic legal studies, perhaps wearing a hijab. This just might be the kind
of woman that the Womens Shura Council has envisioned training and
that, as the president of Union Theological Seminary, Reverend Serene
Jones, announced at their conference in Kuala Lumpur in 2009, her institution was prepared to help train. Rasha Elass, Conference Told of
Plan for Female Muftis, National, July 20, 2009, thenational.ae/news
/uae-news/conference-told-of-plan-for-female-muftis.
48. For various treatments of women in/and Islamist parties, see
Lara Deeb, An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shii
Lebanon, Princeton Studies in Muslim Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006); Sherine Hafez, An Islam of Her Own: Reconsidering Religion and Secularism in Womens Islamic Movements
(New York: New York University Press, 2011); Islah Jad, Between Religion and Secularism: Islamist Women of Hamas, in On Shifting
Ground: Muslim Women in the Global Era, ed. Fereshteh NouraieSimone (New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York,
2005); Zakia Salime, Between Feminism and Islam: Human Rights and
Sharia Law in Morocco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2011); and Elora Shehabuddin, Reshaping the Holy: Democracy, Development, and Muslim Women in Bangladesh (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). For more on nongovernmental organizations
(NGOs) and the introduction of debate about Sharia in Egypt, see the
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longer version of Chapter 5, published as Lila Abu-Lughod, The Active Social Life of Muslim Womens Rights: A Plea for Ethnography,
Not Polemic, with Cases from Egypt and Palestine, Journal of Middle
East Womens Studies 6, no. 1 (2010): 145.
49. As Merry notes of successful social work projects against domestic violence in Hawaii, anger management for men and police training
are among the practices that have been transplanted to that locale that
may help women develop rights consciousness. Merry, Human Rights
and Gender Violence.
50. For more examples of such projects in Egypt and Palestine, see
Abu-Lughod, The Active Social Life of Muslim Womens Rights.
51. I am not arguing with the Egyptian feminist, scholar, and wouldbe parliamentarian Iman Bibars, who anticipates criticisms of her focus
on battering in her study of the urban poor by saying, I could be accused of applying my Westernized middle-class biases in assessing, interpreting, and analyzing the stories of the women interviewed in this
study, but the issues came from them. Wife-battering is a violent and
humiliating experience, as stated by the women themselves in their
own words. Then she quotes one informant, who said, I felt like dying. I hate him and hated my life. Iman Bibars, Victims and Heroines:
Women, Welfare and the Egyptian State (London: Zed, 2001). The
question I ask, instead, is how the things these women say about their
husbands or brothers or fathers are translated into the language of
womens rights through the medium of reports and projects by rights
advocates, and how the re-embedding transforms their own readings. I
am aware that my own rendering of Khadijas situation as an ethnographic case study may make her stories part of the rights discourse
too. For a critique of this problem, see Marnia Lazreg, Development:
Feminist Theorys Cul-de-Sac, in Feminist Post-Development Thought:
Rethinking Modernity, Post-Colonialism and Representation, ed. Kriemild Saunders, Zed Books on Women and Development (London: Zed,
2002).
52. Enloe has drawn our attention to the shifting gender dynamics
produced from mass tourism by European and North American women.
Cynthia H. Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2000).
53. Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Technopolitics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Timothy Mitchell, Worlds Apart: An Egyptian Village and the International Tourism
Industry, Middle East Report 196 (SeptemberOctober 1995): 823;
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275
Kees Van Der Spek, The Modern Neighbors of Tutankhamun: History,

Life, and Work in the Villages of the Theban West Bank (Cairo, Egypt:
American University in Cairo Press, 2011).
CONCLUSION: REGISTERS OF HUMANITY
1. Talal Asad, Redeeming the Human through Human Rights, in

Formations of the Secular (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,
2003), 140.
2. For a reflection on my relationship with Gateefa and her husband,
see Lila Abu-Lughod, A Kind of Kinship, in Being There: Learning to
Live Cross-Culturally, ed. Sarah H. Davis and Melvin Konner (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), 821.
3. Division for the Advancement of Women, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of
Discrimination against Women, General Recommendations Made
by the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against
Women,June 12, 2009, un.org/womenwatch/daw/cedaw/recommenda
tions/recomm.htm.
4. This is discussed in Chapter 6. In many countries, age of consent
or age of marriage has been the focus of campaigns by conservative
Muslim clerics as well as feminists. The long genealogy of the debate
over age begins with British colonial rule. Flavia Agnes, Interrogating
Consent and Agency across the Complex Terrain of Family Laws in
India, Social Difference Online 1 (2011): 116, socialdifference.co
lumbia.edu/publications/social-differences-vol-1.
5. I quote from the young womans essay and commentary in my
ethnography, Lila Abu-Lughod, Writing Womens Worlds: Bedouin Stories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 211213.
6. Gregory Starrett, Putting Islam to Work: Education, Politics, and
Religious Transformation in Egypt (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1998).
7. Lila Abu-Lughod, The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power through Bedouin Women, American Ethnologist 17,
no. 1 (1990): 4155.
8. Brinkley Messick, Interpreting Tears: A Marriage Case from
Imamic Yemen, in The Islamic Marriage Contract: Case Studies in Islamic Family Law, ed. Asifa Quraishi and Frank E. Vogel (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard Law School, Islamic Legal Studies Program, 2008);
Lynn Welchman, Consent: Does the Law Mean What It Says? Social
Difference Online (2011), socialdifference.org/publications.
276
N O T E S T O PA G E S 2 1 0 2 1 9
9. As I describe in Abu-Lughod, Writing Womens Worlds, her father

eventually arranged a marriage for her to someone who fit all her criteria, except that he was of Bedouin origin.
10. This is still the ideal in her community, where women do not
work or live independently. For more on women and work, see Lila
Abu-Lughod, Dialects of Womens Empowerment: The International
Circuitry of the Arab Human Development Report. International Journal of Middle East Studies 41, no. 1 (2009): 83103.
11. Frances Susan Hasso, Consuming Desires: Family Crisis and the
State in the Middle East (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,
2011).
12. The idea of the individual we work with today was developed, as
mile Durkheim so nicely suggested, as part of the cult of the individual
personality that grew up with the modern division of labor or, as Marcel Mauss put it in 1979, as a product of social evolution. Anthropologists have pursued this idea of different senses of the individual in many
societies. For India, McKim Marriott called this the dividual rather
than the individual. Dorothy Lee was an early thinker on this subject,
but Shelley Rosaldo also contributed. Marcel Mauss, Sociology and
Psychology: Essays (London: Routledge, 1979); Marriott, referenced
in E. Valentine Daniel, Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Dorothy Lee, Freedom
and Culture (Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press, 1987); Michelle
Zimbalist Rosaldo, Knowledge and Passion: Ilongot Notions of Self
and Social Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
13. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays
(New York: Basic Books, 1973).
14. See Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a
Bedouin Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986);
Abu-Lughod, Writing Womens Worlds; Lila Abu-Lughod, Against
Universals: The Dialects of (Womens) Human Rights and Human
Capabilities, in Rethinking the Human, ed. J. Michelle Molina, Donald K. Swearer, and Susan Lloyd McGarry (Cambridge, Mass.: Center
for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School, Harvard
15. Judith Butler, Sexual Consent: Some Thoughts on Psychoanalysis
and Law, Columbia Journal of Gender and the Law 21, no. 2 (2011):
405429.
16. Human rights and human capabilities talk is part of this universal reason that needs to be parochialized, not in order to dismiss it as
Western or to make peace with it by asserting that other religious or
N O T E S T O PA G E S 2 1 9 2 2 2
277
cultural traditions share the same values, but to ask what historical processes and what institutional arrangements from nation-states to the
flourishing forms of transnational governance, advocacy, and humanitarianism have installed this dialect of universality in so many places.
And to follow Talal Asad, to ask who has the political power to redeem
humanity (including women) from traditional cultures or to reclaim
for them their inalienable rights, which he says, comes down in the end
to the same thing. Asad, Redeeming the Human through Human
Rights, 154.
17. I am referring here to the famous photography exhibit that traveled the world, first shown at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in
1952. The curator had been, as OBrian notes, a member of a UNESCO
[United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization]
committee established to study the problem of how the Visual Arts can
contribute to the dissemination of information on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Meant to stress the universal elements and
aspects of human relations and experiences common to all mankind,
the exhibit censored photographs of lynching and the effects of the
atom bomb in Japan and was used as part of American propaganda in
the Cold War setting. See John OBrian, The Nuclear Family of Man,
Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus (July 11, 2008). japanfocus.org/_John
_O_Brian-The_Nuclear_Family_of_Man. I am arguing that family must
be understood differently.
18. For an example of the range of this rethinking, see Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon, eds., Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship
Study (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001).
19. After I had written this section, I was pleased to find that Marshall Sahlins noted on p. 44 of his pamphlet The Western Illusion of
Human Nature (Chicago: Prickly Paradigms Press, 2008) that the
Western tradition has long harbored an alternative conception of order
and being, of the kind anthropologists have often studied: kinship community. True that in the West this is the unmarked human condition, despite that (or perhaps because) family and kindred relations are sources
of our deepest sentiments and attachments. He does not, however, consider the family as a complex mixture of power and attachment.
20. Roland Barthes, The Great Family of Man, in Mythologies, trans.
Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972 [1957]), 100102.
21. For example, see Alice Ann Munro, Runaway (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Limited, 2004). For an elaboration of the argument
about the importance of ethnography of the particular, see the introduction to Abu-Lughod, Writing Womens Worlds.
278
N O T E S T O PA G E S 2 2 3 2 2 7
22. I am not the first to suggest the inadequacy of womens rights

as a gloss or solution even in Egypt. In her study of poor urban women
in Cairo, Heba El-Kholy also refuses this concept because of the subtle, elusive, overlapping, and diffuse nature of the constraints on women,
the intermeshing of exploitation and reciprocity, the fluctuations of
their power due to life cycle changes, and the lack of a clear person,
group, or class to confront. Heba Aziz El-Kholy, Defiance and Compliance: Negotiating Gender in Low-Income Cairo, New Directions in
Anthropology (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002), 2526.
23. Rania Kassab Sweis, Saving Egypts Village Girls: Humanity,
Rights, and Gendered Vulnerability in a Global Youth Initiative, Journal
of Middle East Womens Studies 8, no. 2 (2012): 29.
24. This was the slogan of the Save Darfur campaign, which Mahmood Mamdani has called the humanitarian face of the War on Terror.
He contrasts his argument to the motto of the Save Darfur campaign,
which is to act even before you know. Rather than a call to act in the
face of moral certainty, it is an argument against those who substitute
moral certainty for knowledge, and who feel virtuous even when acting
on the basis of total ignorance. Indeed, the lesson of Darfur is a warning
to those who would act first and understand later. Only those possessed
of disproportionate power can afford to assume that knowing is irrelevant, thereby caring little about the consequences of their actions.
Mahmood Mamdani, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the
War on Terror (New York: Pantheon, 2009), 6.
25. For some Middle Eastern cases, see Lila Abu-Lughod, ed., Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998).
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AC KNOW LEDG MENTS
How can one ever acknowledge all those who have contributed to ones
thinking about a complex world? This book bears the traces of all those
with whom I have thought and talked about womens rights during the
past decade, including those I only know through their writings. I am
grateful to them in ways I can never properly credit.
My debts to the women and men I have known in Egypt whose stories fill the pages of this book are immense. I would not have been so
certain that we had to be so critical of the common discourses on
womens rights and Muslim women if I had not been so warmly brought
into their lives. They helped me to see the world through their eyes. I
hope their experiences and perspectives and my analysis of their complex situations will shift the terms of the debates. I am sorry that I cannot name them here, but they will recognize what I have learned from
them.
Colleagues and friends across the world, including at Columbia,
which has been my intellectual home since 2000, commented on drafts,
sent me clippings and citations, shared unpublished work, encouraged,
and even inspired me. I want thank them all. Wendy Brown, Catherine
Lutz, and Anupama Rao have been close interlocutors over many years;
I cannot imagine my formation, or this book, without them. I owe them
more than I can say, not just for their brilliance, political commitments,
enthusiasm, and humor, but for giving me confidence. For their unique
individual contributions, I also want to thank Nahla Abdo, Lori Allen,
Soraya Altorki, Partha Chatterjee, Jane Cowan, Susan Crane, Lara
306
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Deeb, Rabab El Mahdi, Hoda El Sadda, Katherine Ewing, Khaled

Fahmy, Katherine Franke, Michael Gilsenan, Victoria de Grazia, Havva
Guney-Ruebenacker, Janet Halley, Rema Hammami, Saidiya Hartman,
Marianne Hirsch, Dorothy Hodgson, Jean Howard, Martha Howell,
Rana Husseini, Islah Jad, Penny Johnson, Deniz Kandiyoti, Alice
Kessler-Harris, Rashid Khalidi, Dorothy Ko, Nancy Kricorian, Saba
Mahmood, Mahmood Mamdani, Sharon Marcus, Sally Engle Merry,
Brinkley Messick, Ziba Mir-Hosseni, Mira Nair, Afsaneh Najmabadi,
Elizabeth Povinelli, Naela Rifat, Susan Rogers, Reem Saad, Carol
Sanger, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Dina Mahnaz Siddiqi, Susan Slyomovics, Pamela Smith, Mayssoun Sukarieh, Neferti Tadiar, Miriam
Ticktin, Leti Volpp, Boutros Wadieh, and Elizabeth Weed.
I have been deeply fortunate in students too. How can I capture what
they have taught me? My graduate courses during the past few years
through Columbias Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality have been invaluable intellectuallythanks to all the committed
students who participated. The graduate students with whom I have
worked most closely in the past fifteen years are especially precious interlocutors. Those who contributed in particularly helpful ways to the
making of this book include Fida Adely, Amahl Bishara, Nadia Guessous, Sherine Hamdy, Rosemary Hicks, Maya Mikdashi, Ayse Parla,
Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins, Shahla Talebi, Amina Tawasil, Christine Walley, Jessica Winegar, and Berna Yazici.
At every university where I have been invited to present my work-inprogress, I have encountered audiences who contributed to a better understanding of the issues I was addressing. I wish I could have done
more with what they offered. Particularly memorable for me were conferences at Brown Universitys Pembroke Center (where the late Dicle
Kogacoglu inspired us all), Duke University, the Harvard Center for
World Religions, Harvard Law School, the Makerere Institute for Social
Research, Rutgers, the University of Massachusetts-Boston, and the
University of Wisconsin. Invitations to speak at the American University in Beirut, the British Academy, Cambridge University, CUNY, Mada
al-Carmel, Simon Fraser University, the University of British Columbia,
the University of California at Berkeley, the University of California at
Santa Barbara, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Washington, and Yale also allowed for productive exchanges. Thanks to
those who invited me and those who engaged so constructively with my
work.
Crucial to this project was the generous financial support I have
received. Scholars depend on such support to do careful, long-term
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
307
research; to carve out time to read, think, and write in the midst of
teaching and administration; and to meet with colleagues to share ideas
and learn from each other. I am grateful for fellowships from the American Council for Learned Societies and the Carnegie Foundation from
2007 to 2009. Columbia too was generous with research leaves. I will
remain grateful to Nicholas Dirks for his support always.
Support from many quarters at Columbia for collaborative intellectual work was crucial for the development of my ideas. The Institute
for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality was my perfect base,
and out of it the Center for the Study of Social Difference. I have the
best colleagues I could wish for there and have depended on them as
well as the talented staff who make up our team, especially Laura
Ciolkowski and Vina Tran. Enthusiastic support from the Institute for
Social and Economic Research and Policy; from the Luce Foundation
funded initiative on religion and international affairs through the
Center for Democracy, Toleration, and Religion; from the Institute for
Religion, Culture, and Public Life; and most significantly from the
Center for the Study of Social Difference, an advanced study center
that nurtures intellectual work at Columbia, made it possible to set up
faculty working groups and international workshops that advanced
my thinking and connected me to wonderful scholars. I want to thank
Toby Volkman at the Luce Foundation for her firm support and for being there both in Amman and in Paris for some of those workshops.
None of these institutions or individuals is responsible for the views
presented here.
Putting a book into production takes the good efforts of many. I am
grateful to Elora Shehabuddin for making the connection with Sharmila
Sen, my dynamic dream editor who understood in a flash what I was
trying to do and gave me wise counsel (as well as pressuring me to finish). Heather Hughes shepherded the project in the most professional
way. I am grateful to Brian Ostrander for meticulously overseeing the
production and Fran Lyon for deftly clarifying my prose. Everyone I
worked with at Harvard University Press contributed to making the
process of bringing out this book so positive.
The labor of an embarrassing number of talented research assistants
went into making this book a reality. I want to thank Ali Atif, Amina
Ayad, Elisabeth Jacquette, Menna Khalil, Ana Maria Lebada, Sara Layton, Sarah Polefka, Leah Riviere, Mona Soleiman, Nikolas Sparks, and
John Warner. My debt to Ana Maria Lebada for the index cannot be underestimated; it makes such a difference to have an intelligent and
knowledgeable person constructing an index.
308
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Earlier versions of sections of this book have been published. They

are revised and used here with permission. Chapter 1 updates and expands Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others, American Anthropologist 104, no. 3 (2002): 783790. Chapter 4 is a revision and condensation
of Seductions of the Honor Crime, Differences: A Journal of Feminist
Cultural Studies 22, no. 1 (2011): 1763. Chapter 5 has been streamlined
and updated from The Active Social Life of Muslim Womens Rights: A
Plea for Ethnography, not Polemic, with Cases from Egypt and Palestine,
Journal of Middle East Womens Studies 6, no. 1 (Winter 2010): 145.
Chapter 6 and parts of the conclusion are drawn from my 2009 RadcliffeBrown Lecture in Social Anthropology, published as Anthropology in
the Territory of Rights, Human, Islamic, and Otherwise, Proceedings of
the British Academy 167 (2010): 225262.
Finally, I want to thank my family. Tim, Adie, and JJ have shared the
life and times of this book. They have shaped both my everyday life and
my thinking, not only by making the experiences and friendships we
have had in Egypt and elsewhere a part of who we all are, but in having
their own projects and visions that have expanded mine. I admire their
talents, commitments, and integrity. I have been grateful for their various contributions to this book too, whether in reading chapters and
helping me conceptualize issues, posing challenges, offering insights, or
leading me to different parts of the world. I am grateful that they have
lived with me in so many places, while giving me the space for this project to absorb and sometimes consume me. My wider family on both
sides and of all generations has enriched my life, with a special thanks
to Shahla and Raja.
I dedicate this book to my mother, Janet Abu-Lughod, who has
watched keenly as I struggled to find the right place to stand, politically
and intellectually. Her disagreements have sharpened my arguments,
and her acumen about my relationship to this book, while sometimes
taking me by surprise, has been a gift of the heart.
INDEX
Abaza, Mona, 260n29

Abd al-Salam, Siham, 256n6
Abdelrahman, Maha M., 256n5,
257n15, 258n21, 272n43
Abdel Raouf, Imam Feisal, 181
Abdo, Nahla, 261n40
Abolition. See Slavery
Abou Fadl, Khaled, 268n22
Abu El-Haj, Nadia, 49
Abu-Odeh, Lama, 254n39
Academia, 46, 56, 115
Aceh, 15
Activism, 96, 173, 199200; and
Afghan women, 4041, 43;
cyber, 252n22; dilemmas of,
113, 142; and domestic
violence, 192; and Egypt, 148,
152155; and forced marriage,
96; global/transnational, 67,
82, 181; grassroots, 83, 142,
199; and history, 16; and
honor crimes, 122, 129; Islamic
feminist, 175180, 181187;
Palestinian, 158161. See also
Feminism; Human rights
Adely, Fida, 263n50

ADEW (Association for the
Development and Enhancement of Women), 155. See also
Bibars, Iman
Afghanistan, 46, 131, 146, 177;
and Bibi Aysha, 2731, 52;
and burqa, 35, 4044, 48; and
humanitarianism, 48; and
military intervention, 4, 13, 17,
5455, 66, 99, 107, 121, 158,
173; and poverty, 5153, 222;
and RAWA, 41, 50. See also
Taliban
Africa, 41, 59, 62, 209
African Americans, 61. See also
Slavery
Afshar, Haleh, 236n28
Agnes, Flavia, 232n20,
275n4
Agostn, Laura A., 233n35
Ahmad, Dohra, 8788, 230n7,
243n60, 246n19
Ahmed, Leila, 18, 33
Aisha (Prophets wife), 71
310
Al-Ali, Nadje Sadiq, 230n8,

256nn6,8
Al-Azhar University, 154
Al-Azraq, Mohammad, 127
Alexander, Michelle, 61
Alexandria, 207
Algeria, 3334, 49, 146
Al-Hibri, Azizah, 267n16
Ali, Nujood, 246n24
Ali, Sameem, 100
Ali, Seham, 154. See also CEWLA
(Center for Egyptian Womens
Legal Assistance)
Allen, Lori, 262n43, 266n8
Alloula, Malek, 49
Al-Sayyid, Ridwan, 244n13
Altorki, Soraya, 247n34
American Revolution, 60
Amin, Qasim, 149, 167
Amman, 74, 163. See also
Jordan
Ammar, Paul, 260n29
Amnesty International, 14, 42,
116, 119, 132, 234n5
Amsterdam, 72. See also
Netherlands
Angelou, Maya, 2021
Anthropology, 4, 8, 16, 26, 30,
125, 170, 217218
Anwar, Zainah, 179. See also
Musawah
Appadurai, Arjun, 255n1
Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 56,
5859, 6164, 66, 69, 70, 83,
120, 127
Arab Gulf, 195
Arab Spring, 256n10. See also
Revolution
Asad, Talal, 203, 245n14,
246n18, 247n36, 277n16
Ashoka, 155, 259n25
INDEX
ASMA (American Society of

Muslim Advancement), 181.
See also Cordoba Initiative;
WISE (Womens Islamic
Initiative in Spirituality and
Equality)
Atheism, 101
Australia, 122, 174
Autonomy, 125128, 138,
217218. See also Liberalism
Aweidah, Sama, 161
Awlad Ali Bedouin, 46, 73,
117119, 126, 138, 203205,
209210
Backwardness, 9798, 110,
114, 115, 120, 123, 127,
128,133, 139, 180, 192. See
also Modernity; Progress;
Tradition
Badran, Margot, 255n3, 267n16
Bahramitash, Roksana, 250n59,
268n27
Bangladesh, 14, 16, 73
Barlas, Asma, 267n16
Baron, Beth, 255n3
Barthes, Roland, 220
Basarudin, Azza, 267n17
Beauty Academy of Kabul,
237n35
Bedouin. See Awlad Ali Bedouin
Beneficiaries, 175, 187, 191.
See also Feminism; NGOs
Bergdorf Goodman, 93
Bernstein, Elizabeth, 248n43
Bernstein, Jay M., 104
Bhasin, Kamla, 250n66
Bibars, Iman, 155, 258n21,
259nn24,25, 274n51. See also
Ashoka
Bibi Aysha, 2729, 5152
INDEX
Bieber, Jodi, 27
Bier, Laura, 256n4
Bin Laden, Osama, 31
Birmingham, 91, 111, 216
Birzeit University, 160
Blair, Cherie, 31
Bookseller of Kabul, The, 87
Booth, Marilyn, 255n3
Bonn peace conference, 4344
Brenner, Suzanne April, 236n19
Broinowski, Anna, 252n18
Brown, Christopher Leslie,
5960
Brown, Wendy, 19, 231n19,
233n30, 244nn7,9, 247n36,
266n9, 270n33
Bunch, Charlotte, 83
Burned Alive, 97, 123124
Burqa, 9, 10, 3536, 38, 230n14.
See also Clothing; Veiling
Burton, Antoinette, 235n8
Bush, George W., 29, 31
Bush, Laura, 3032, 34, 46, 53
Butalia, Urvashi, 111
Butler, Judith, 217218
Caged Virgin, The, 87, 109
Cairo, 22, 4547, 156, 164, 171,
189, 193, 195, 198, 260n29
Cambodia, 16, 57, 62, 67, 70
Canada, 109, 135
Canadian International Development Agency, 153
Capabilities, human, 8586,
244nn8,13, 245n14, 277n16
Capitalism, 48, 65, 126, 150,
155156, 223, 244n8
Carapico, Sheila, 257n13, 261n39
CEDAW (UN Convention for
the Elimination of All Forms
of Discrimination against
311
Women), 12, 154, 157, 179,

190, 202, 208, 211212, 215,
231n18, 241n31, 264n4
Centre for Social Cohesion, 134
CEWLA (Center for Egyptian
Womens Legal Assistance),
153154, 170
Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 86,
254n16
Chesler, Phyllis, 230n9, 261n36
Chih, Rachida, 263n52
China, 57, 6465. See also Foot
binding
Christianity, 14, 34, 4647,
60, 7173, 101. See also
Missionaries
Choice, 25, 111, 208, 218219,
221; in fashion, 18, 221; as
fiction, 110, 111, 208; and
marriage, 197, 210, 212, 215;
and power, 19, 217; and pulp
nonfiction, 82, 91, 123; sexual,
101. See also Consent;
Freedom; Liberalism
Chowdhury, Elora Halim, 14,
255n2
CIA (Central Intelligence
Agency), 31, 222
Clarkson, Thomas, 59
Clothing, 21, 73, 188189;
as marker of equality and
freedom, 19; as marker of
oppression, 9, 10, 17, 33, 35;
as marker of social status, 3;
and symbolism, 18, 3738, 40,
48. See also Burqa; Veiling
Cold War, 222
Colonialism, 3334, 46, 49, 60,
64, 103, 175, 178, 245n16
Congo, 57, 70
Consent, 92, 95, 208218
312
cooke, miriam, 73
Cordoba Initiative, 181
Crofts, Andrew, 9697, 99
Cromer, Lord, 3334
Crowe, Derrick, 234n1
Crusades, 7273, 78, 82; moral,
85, 112. See also Salvation
Culture, 12, 25, 3132, 43, 49,
8990, 128, 140, 226, 244n8;
and oppression, 14; and
politics, 6. See also Tradition
Cuny, Marie-Thrse, 9798, 124
Dabashi, Hamid, 106, 269n27
Daher-Nashif, Suhad, 131
Daniel, E. Valentine, 276n12
Darfur, 242n44, 270n32, 278n24
Das, Veena, 111, 250n66
Daughters of Shame, 96, 99
Davin, Delia, 241n27
Dean, Carolyn J., 104
Deeb, Lara, 39, 247n34
De Koning, Anouk, 260n29
De Leeuw, Marc, 249n49
Democracy, 34, 86, 111, 125,
134, 154155, 179, 184. See
also Freedom
Dependency, 125, 218219
Desert Royal, 9395, 9697
Development, 83, 87, 148, 152,
155, 164165, 223, 259n25,
264n53
Divorce, 93, 109
Doctors of the World (Mdecins
du Monde), 48. See also
Humanitarianism
Durkheim, Emile, 276n12
Dusenbery, Maya, 230n13
Dutch Foreign Ministrys MG3
Fund, 184
Dutch Oxfam, 153
INDEX
Economy, 6465, 67. See also

Women: and economy
ECWR (Egyptian Center for
Womens Rights), 155156,
259nn26,27
Education. See Women: and
education
Egypt: and domestic violence,
193195; and ethnography,
45, 174; and history, 3334,
148149; and Islamization,
137; and medicine, 74, 76, 193,
206207; and neoliberalism,
160, 162; and piety movement,
4546, 137; and religiosity,
188191, 264n53; rural, 14,
7477, 162170, 172, 174,
176, 187188, 202, 223,
225226, 259; and soap
operas, 163; and tourism, 3,
194195, 206; and uprisings,
24, 150, 160, 168169,
264n54; and veiling, 39,
188189; and womens rights
organizations, 149157, 167,
169171, 257n15. See also
Awlad Ali Bedouin
Egyptian Feminist Union, 148
Eichler-Levine, Jodi, 242n44
Eickelman, Christine, 247n34
El Guindi, Fadwa, 254n36
Elias, Norbert, 61
El-Kholy, Heba, 278n22
El Mahdi, Rabab, 256nn7,10,
259n27
El Sadda, Hoda, 255n3, 256n4
El Tahawy, Mona, 256n10
Empathy, 104107
Engels, Frederich, 65
England, 59, 89, 9697. See also
Great Britain
INDEX
Englund, Harri, 265n7

Enloe, Cynthia, 63, 238n42,
274n52
Entrepreneurship, 155
Ethnography, 8, 88, 120, 170, 174
Europe, 39, 44, 50, 90, 115,
134136, 147, 194, 212
European Parliament, 48
European Union, 130
Ewing, Katherine Pratt, 132134,
253n29
Extremism, 269n28, 270n36
Fahmy, Khaled, 253n26
Fakhraie, Fatemeh, 230n12
Family. See Women: and family
Family of man, 220, 272n17
Farouk (king), 168
Farrell, Amy, 7
Farsakh, Leila, 255n2
Fassin, Didier, 262n43, 266n8
Fate (nasib), 211212
Feminism, 9, 45, 50, 55, 63, 88,
105, 129, 142, 160, 185186,
201202; colonial, 3334, 42,
53, 101, 148; and fundamentalism, 140; and governance
(GF), 79, 142, 152, 161; and
honor crimes, 113, 122; Islamic,
44, 171, 174, 176177, 180,
187188, 192, 199, 201202,
208, 231n18, 239n16; local,
71; state, 148; transnational,
1112, 29, 41, 44, 49, 51, 58,
170, 173, 181; U.S., 7, 20,
4243, 8384; and violence,
141, 158, 176; Western, 30,
105. See also Activism;
Musawah; NGOs; WISE
(Womens Islamic Initiative in
Spirituality and Equality)
313
Feminist Majority Campaign,

41
Ferguson, James, 251n2, 265n7
Fleischmann, Ellen, 237n32
Foot binding, 57, 6162, 6465,
70, 75, 7778, 82
Ford Foundation, 153, 159
Fourth World Conference on
Women, 11
France, 3334, 4849, 92, 9798,
123, 136, 148, 223, 253n32
Freedom: and choice, 18, 19, 82,
119, 219; and duty, 110, 217;
and escape, 20, 25, 93, 100,
108, 249n48; and Islam, 45,
167; in pulp nonfiction, 88, 91,
93, 124, 100, 108, 111, 124;
sexual, 40, 126127, 138; as a
value, 18, 45, 58, 81, 121,
123, 125; and the West, 20,
114, 128
Fremson, Ruth, 235n14
French Civil Code, 98
Funding, 150157, 184185,
225, 257nn13,14,
258nn16,18,21, 271n41
Gaza, 158, 161
Geertz, Clifford, 217
Gender, 119, 137, 141, 195; and
discrimination, 3, 84, 116,
132, 156; and equality, 58, 81,
8485, 87, 125, 128, 178, 180,
199, 208, 223, 225, 239n16;
issues as distant, 63, 66, 106,
225, 244n8; issues as localized,
6263, 66; and Orientalism,
88, 202, 229n7; and religion,
72, 74, 95, 145, 182, 184, 187,
189; and training, 162. See
also Feminism; Women
314
Germany, 134136
Grme, Jean-Lon, 106
Ghorashi, Halleh, 241n37,
249n50
Gill, Aysha, 238n5
Gilligan, Carol, 125
Ginsburg, Faye D., 250n66
Girls, 118, 264n53; and pedophilia, 100101
Global Fund for Women, 153
Global Muslim Womens Shura
Council, 181183, 185,
190191
Goodale, Mark, 264n56
Gordon, Richard, 240n26
Governance: feminist, 79, 152,
161; transnational, 136, 142,
152, 174, 176
Government, 51, 85, 115, 130,
150, 166; as oppressor, 1, 3
Gramsci, Antonio, 217
Great Britain, 6061, 99100,
134, 135, 136, 223
Grewal, Inderpal, 175, 232n19
Gunif-Souilamas, Nacira, 134,
248n39
Gupta, Akhil, 265n7
Hafez, Sherine, 273n48
Half the Sky, 7072, 79, 8384,
122
Halley, Janet, 152, 161, 243n58
Halttunen, Karen, 80
Harassment, 156, 259n27
Harb, Mona, 245n37
Hassidic women, 36
Hasso, Frances Susan, 254n37,
276n11
Hastrup, Kirsten, 266n12
Hatem, Mervat F., 256n4
Hlie-Lucas, Marieme, 157
INDEX
Hershatter, Gail, 240nn26,27

Hesford, Wendy, 234n5
Hicks, Rosemary R., 242n44,
270n32
Hirsi Ali, Ayaan, 241n37, 84;
and AHA Foundation, 57,
157; and freedom from cage,
19, 74, 87, 101; and global
womens rights, 54; and Islam,
69,72, 78, 88, 108; and
personal story, 78, 107108,
109110, 216; and the Right,
68, 241n38, 249n50; and
slavery, 59; and Submission,
102103, 133, 242n39; and
Western intervention, 66
Hirschkind, Charles, 222, 234n5
Hizbollah, 39
Hodgson, Dorothy L., 265nn4,5
Honig, Emily, 241n27
Honor, 5354, 5657, 70, 99,
109, 113114, 116117,
119120, 126, 128, 135
Honor Code, The, 56, 83, 120,
225
Honor crime: and Amnesty
International, 116; and elites,
127128; and fantasy, 121,
127, 140; and governance,
129, 131132, 135136, 141;
and history, 136, 139; as
iconic, 112, 226; and immigration, 134141; and Islamization, 136, 138139; and
legislation, 99, 147; and
media, 132133; in Pakistan,
56; and pulp nonfiction,
122125, 218; in Sweden,
119121, 125
Honor Lost (Forbidden Love),
89, 121122, 126, 136137
INDEX
Horowitz, David, 130n9

Hossein, Sara, 258n20
Houris, 71, 94
HRW (Human Rights Watch), 42,
129, 131132, 160, 185186,
262n45, 272n47
Humanitarianism, 8, 4849, 62,
80, 98, 100, 104, 107, 136, 142,
175, 181, 225226, 233n35
Humanity, 218219, 222, 227
Human rights. See Rights; UDHR
(Universal Declaration of
Human Rights)
Huntington Samuel, 68
Husseini, Rana, 122, 130131
Hyneman, Esther, 29, 51
Imams Daughter, The, 96, 101
Immigration, 97, 121, 125,
133135, 253n32
Imperialism, 20, 60, 105, 114,
125, 170, 203, 245n16
India, 37, 41, 57, 70, 95, 111,
148, 209. See also South
Asia
Individualism, 208. See also
Autonomy; Choice; Liberalism
Indonesia, 177
Inequality, 61, 6667; global,
196, 200, 227
Infidel, 68, 108109, 216
Institutions: Iran, 7, 39, 40, 44,
106107, 138139, 177, 183,
231n18, 236nn22,28; legal,
132, 139, 145,147, 167;
medical, 130131; of policing,
130132, 141; religious, 139,
150, 153, 167, 171, 189190;
and the state, 135, 141, 145,
167
Iraq, 7, 63, 99, 107, 121, 158
315
Islam: and education, 189190,

210; and family law, 13, 16,
154, 175, 178, 191, 209, 211,
239n16; and Islamization,
137138, 209; and law, 74,
114, 139, 144, 158, 170, 179,
200, 231n18; as oppressive, 1,
45, 72, 74, 88, 100, 102, 158;
as positive, 109, 169, 184,
192, 239n16; and Quran, 74,
102, 109, 179, 183, 206,
239n16; and revival, 39, 101,
137, 177; and rights, 15, 19,
145, 206, 210; and Sharia, 15,
139, 178179, 183, 211, 215,
268n19, 272n47. See also
Feminism: Islamic
Islamic Chief of the Palestinian
Authority, 139
Islamic Council, 133
Islamic Party, 139, 273n45
Islamism, 108, 133, 142, 161, 171
Islamland, 68, 6970, 73, 78, 88,
112, 122, 246n24
Israel, 22, 24, 41, 136, 158159,
262n45
Jackson, Michael, 265n7
Jad, Islah, 161, 261n39, 262n43,
263nn46,47
Jaffa, 22
Jerusalem, 132
Jerusalem Women Studies Centre,
the, 162
Jihad, 182, 191
Jihad Prevention Act, 185
Jim Crow, 61
Johnson, Penny, 160
Jones, Ann, 29
Jordan, 71, 73, 121122, 127, 131,
137, 139, 226. See also Amman
316
Jordanian National Institute of

Forensic Medicine, 131
Jordan-Young, Rebecca,
240n19
Judaism, 72
Jusov, Iveta, 249n50
Justice, 4950, 57, 85, 180, 221,
227
Kabbani, Rana, 230n7,
246n20
Kabul, 16, 28, 48, 51, 237n35
Kandiyoti, Deniz, 5052, 222
Kapchan, Deborah, 247n34
Kapur, Ratna, 175, 243n1
Karim, Lamia, 241n33
Kefaya, 259n27
Kenya, 69, 108109
Khadija, 176, 192, 195198,
206208, 223
Khalwatiyya Brotherhood,
263n52
Khan, Daisy, 181,184. See also
WISE (Womens Islamic
Initiative in Spirituality and
Equality)
Khouri, Norma, 89, 121122,
126, 137
Knox, Malcom, 252n18
Ko, Dorothy, 6465, 70
Kogacioglu, Dicle, 130
Korea, 90
Korteweg, Anna, 135
Kotiswaran, Prabha, 254n41
Kozma, Liat, 253n26
Kristof, Nicholas, 54, 58, 63, 66,
67, 6971, 83, 98, 124
Kuala Lumpur, 72, 177, 182.
See also Malaysia
Kurds, 120, 136
Kwon, Young Hee, 246n23
INDEX
Labor, 3, 60, 75
Latour, Bruno, 255n1
Lavie, Smadar, 264n56
Lazreg, Marnia, 3334, 263n49,
274n51
Lebanon, 39, 71, 73, 137, 139,
177
Lee, Dorothy, 276n12
Levitt, Peggy, 265n5
Lewal, Amina, 232n24
Lewis, Bernard, 68
Liberalism: and attachments,
104; and democracy, 34, 47,
84, 86, 111, 125, 179; and
multiculturalism, 68, 174; and
organizations, 155, 178, 208;
and religion, 180181, 187,
244n8; and sexual freedom,
112, 119, 127, 138, 141; as
symbol of autonomy and
freedom, 123, 125, 127, 202,
217, 244n9; and toleration,
128, 181, 270n33; and the
West, 85, 125, 128, 269n28.
See also Autonomy; Choice;
Freedom
Literature, 55, 68, 82, 8789,
91
Liu, Lydia H., 240n26
Louboutin, Christian, 73
Love, 126, 215, 217, 226
Lutz, Catherine, 241n32
Luxor, 189
Lydda Airport (now Ben Gurion),
22
MacKinnon, Catherine, 83,
231n19
Macleod, Arlene Elowe, 236n19,
254n38
Mahdavi, Pardis, 236n28
INDEX
Mahmood, Saba, 34, 39, 4546,

89, 106, 222, 247n36, 250n60,
254n40, 269n28
Mai, Mukhtar, 98, 124
Malaysia, 15, 38, 70, 137, 146.
See also Kuala Lumpur
Mamdani, Mahmood, 278n24
Mani, Lata, 235n8
Manji, Irshad, 88, 267n14
Marcus, George, 264n2
Marriage, 3, 2224, 111, 119,
189, 191, 193, 211212, 222;
arranged, 210211, 216; in
China, 6465; and choice, 117,
208209; and consent, 91, 190,
210; and contract, 146, 209,
271n41; and diversity, 5, 126;
forced, 9091, 93, 96, 9899,
108, 124, 134, 142, 147, 185,
216, 218, 248n40; gay, 142;
and rape, 15, 92; and sex, 117,
137, 139. See also Women
Married by Force, 9293, 9798,
124, 134, 247n28
Marriott, McKim, 276n12
Marx, Karl, 65
Mauss, Marcel, 276n12
McDermott, Patrice, 7
McKinnon, Susan, 277n18
Mecca, 204
Media, 38, 243n56; and abuse
ofwomen, 1314, 32, 115,
222; and immigration, 97,
120;and religion, 73, 150,
269n28; and rights, 132133,
156, 163, 262n45; and war,
28,32, 107
Meister, Robert, 233n35, 266n9
Memoirs, 7, 89, 9596, 107, 112,
121, 123124. See also Pulp
nonfiction
317
Men, 52, 70, 75, 9394, 106,

117, 119, 127; and labor, 90,
194196; mobility of, 3; as
oppressors, 92, 95, 97, 105; as
political subjects, 1
Meneley, Anne, 242n55, 247n34
Menon, Ritu, 111
Mermin, Liz, 237n35
Merry, Sally Engle, 174, 231n18,
255n1, 265n5
Messick, Brinkley, 275n8
Microcredit, 58, 67, 241n33
Middle East, 29, 33, 114, 121,
155, 183
Millennium Development Goals,
184
Minoui, Delphine, 246n24
Mir-Hosseini, Ziba, 180, 231n18,
268n21
Missionaries, 14, 47, 34, 53,
6465, 88, 122, 164165,
237nn3234
Mitchell, Timothy, 245n16,
274n53
Modernity, 39, 6465, 115, 122,
135, 209, 245n16
Modernism, 180
Modirzadeh, Naz, 186
Moghadam, Valentine M.,
260n34
Moghissi, Haideh, 236n28
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade,
232n19
Moors, Annelies, 103, 236n23
Morality, 58, 61, 117119,
137,141; and discourse of,
138139
Morocco, 71, 89, 93, 146
Mubarak, Hosni, 149
Mubarak, Suzanne, 149, 164165,
168
318
Muhammad, Prophet, 71, 97

Muhsen, Zana, 9697. See also
Sold
Multiculturalism, 68, 84, 114,
133, 174
Munro, Alice, 22
Musawah, 177180, 182184,
190192, 211, 239n16
Muslim Brotherhood, 109, 150,
153, 168
Muslims, 97, 99, 148; and
diversity, 13; and identity, 13,
15; as threats, 11
Muslim Women: as alien, 6, 26,
74; caged, 19, 88; and diversity,
1213, 16, 26, 30, 71, 73, 109,
165, 169, 187221, 224; and
dress, 9, 17, 19, 40, 57; as
Muslimwoman, 73, 78;
oppressed, 1, 3, 67, 910, 14,
1618, 2427, 4043, 70,
175176, 180, 206, 221; and
popular memoir, 7, 19, 82, 95,
102105, 121, 130; and
representations, 6, 9, 11,
1617, 49, 88, 106, 114, 122,
226; and rights, 4, 8, 13, 17,
19, 2526, 145147, 152158,
162, 170171, 177, 186, 219,
220221, 226; and saving, 26,
3435, 46, 114, 146, 107, 158.
See also Women
Muslim Women Web Portal, 184
Mutua, Makau W., 232n22
Nafisa, 167
Nafisi, Azar, 87, 106, 180
Nagar, Richa, 263n49
Nairobi, 72, 108109
Najmabadi, Afsaneh, 45, 236n3,
255n3
INDEX
Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 149

National Council for Childhood
and Motherhood (Egypt), 151,
164
National Council for Human
Rights, Egypt, 257n15
National Council for Women,
Egypt, 150, 151, 154, 257n15
Nation-states, 85, 135
Nawaz, Nazreen, 267n15
Nazli (queen), 168
Nelson, Cynthia, 256n4
Neocolonialism, 180
Neoconservatism, 180
Neoliberalism, 136, 149, 155, 160
Netherlands, 57, 69, 102, 108,
109, 133, 135
New York, 28, 146, 181
NGOs, 28, 132, 169, 178, 186;
and feminism, 12, 152, 160,
167, 170, 171, 174, 177, 181,
185; and funding, 150151,
152156, 184, 257n13,
271n41. See also Organizations
Nguyen, Mimi Thi, 237n35
Nielsen, Hans Christian Korsholm, 231n14
9/11, 6, 25, 30, 87, 90, 121
Nochlin, Linda, 246n20
Nomad, 69
North Africans, 98
North America, 59, 90, 146
Now or Never Fund, 153
Nussbaum, Martha, 911, 8586,
244n13, 245n14
Obama, Barack, 27
OConnor, Patrick, 262n45
Okin, Susan Moller, 84, 86, 122,
231n19
Ong, Aihwa, 236nn19,26
319
INDEX
Open Society, 159

Organizations, 7, 148, 151,
153,163, 258n21; feminist,
130; international, 29, 129,
135, 160; local/grassroots,
2829, 129, 135, 149, 150,
161, 164, 169, 177, 187. See
also NGOs
Orientalism, 49, 88, 103, 121,
133, 202, 230n7, 246n20,
250n59
Osanloo, Arzoo, 237n28, 245n13
Othman, Norani, 266n11
Pagels, Elaine, 71
Pakistan, 37, 5657, 66, 73, 95,
98100, 107, 111, 120, 131,
137139, 146
Palestine, 2226, 41, 89, 124,
131132, 136, 147, 159163,
171, 262n45. See also Gaza;
West Bank
Palestinian National Authority,
160161
Papanek, Hannah, 235n13
Paradise, 94
Parla, Ayse, 253n25
Partition, 111
Pashtun, 35
Pathak, Zakia, 20
Patriarchy, 8485, 94, 105, 118,
122, 136, 145, 192, 216,
244n8
Pedophilia, 100101
Pentagon, 31
Philippines, 95
Pipes, Daniel, 97
Polygamy, 7576, 78, 142
Popular publishing, 79, 103,
106107, 121, 124125. See
also Memoirs; Pulp nonfiction
Pornography, 100104, 107, 124,

126
Postcolonialism, 97
Poverty, 1, 3, 5153, 193194,
196, 216, 222223. See also
Inequality
Povinelli, Elizabeth, 265n6
Power, 141, 225, 254n40; and
discourse of, 142
Pratt, Nicola, 230n8
Progress, 164165, 245n16
Promise to Nadia, A, 96
Psychoanalysis, 218
Puar, Jasbir K., 234n6
Public sphere, 57, 244n9
Pulp nonfiction, 87, 92, 97, 99,
102, 104, 106107, 110, 115,
121, 146, 216, 218
Qatar, 73
Racism, 60, 103, 125, 134,
245n16, 252n14
Rai, Amit, 234n6
Ramallah, 132
Rape, 92, 95, 9899, 101102
Rapp, Rayna R., 250n66
RAWA (Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan),
41, 43, 50, 53
Razack, Sherene, 107
Reading Lolita in Tehran, 87,
106
Redfield, Peter, 266n8
Religion, 7273, 138, 150,
153154, 157, 166167,
170171, 176183, 185,
188189, 192, 226, 269n28;
and identity, 4
Revolution, 60, 61; and American,
60; and Egyptian, 150151,
320
Revolution (continued)
155, 160, 168, 224; Iranian,
231n18; moral, 56, 58, 61, 70,
78, 120. See also Arab Spring;
Tahrir Square
Riemers, Eva, 252n14
Riesman, Paul, 229n5
Rifaat, Naela, 258n19
Right, the, 68, 97
Rights, 164, 166, 172, 174175,
197, 197, 200203, 231n18,
244n8, 265n5, 274n51, 277n16;
circulation of, 146147,
162163; and commercialization, 155157; frameworks of,
176, 198199, 221, 226;
human, 10, 54, 5859, 7985,
110, 113, 128130, 142, 152,
159160, 219; and identity,
178; and Islamic feminists,
178181, 184186; registers
of, 166, 169; sexual, 123, 126;
social life of, 145, 147, 150,
153, 161162, 164, 167,
170171, 176, 193, 200. See
also Muslim women; Women
Riles, Annelise, 265n5
Riley, Ferzanna, 99
Robbins, Bruce, 265n5
Robinet, Philippe, 98
Rodrigues, Deborah, 237n35
Rofel, Lisa, 240n27
Rosaldo, Michelle Zimbalist,
276n12
Rose, Jacqueline, 135
Roy, Ananya, 241n33
Ruiz, Mario M., 252n26
Sadat, Anwar, 148
Sahindal, Fadime, 120, 125, 130,
132, 251n14
INDEX
Sahlins, Marshall, 277n19

Said, Edward, 229n7, 246n20
Sakr, Naomi, 257nn12,13,
272n43
Salime, Zakia, 273n48
Salvation, 14, 43, 4547, 4950,
6263, 66, 82, 107, 112,
123124, 127, 146, 158, 201,
203, 223. See also Crusades
Sanday, Peggy Reeves, 63, 239n19
Sanghera, Jasvinder, 96, 99
Sangtin Writers, 263n49
Sarkozy, Nicolas, 98
Sasson, Jean, 94, 96
Saudi Arabia, 7, 69, 89, 94, 97
Sawiris Foundation, 153
Scott, Joan W., 233n30, 236n23
Secularism, 19, 44, 46, 47, 184,
249n48, 253n12, 269n28
Seierstad, Asne, 87
Shah, Hannah, 96, 101
Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Nadera,
131, 159161, 262nn40,41,43
Shame, 96, 99
Sharia. See Islam: and law
Shehabuddin, Elora, 16, 242n38,
273n48
Siapno, Jacqueline Aquino,
232n25
Siddiqi, Dina Mahnaz, 15
Sisters in Islam, 15, 177, 179.
See also Musawah
Slavery, 5861, 80, 82, 104106,
239n16
Sleiman, Azza, 153, 259n22.
See also CEWLA (Center for
Egyptian Womens Legal
Assistance); Musawah
Slyomovics, Susan, 255n1
Sold, 9091, 93, 95, 97, 110,
216
INDEX
Somalia, 57, 69, 108109

Sommers, Christina Hoff, 230n9
South Asia, 33, 114, 183. See also
Bangladesh; India; Pakistan
Soviets, 50
Spencer, Robert, 261n36
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 33,
101, 232n19, 234n8
Stamatopoulou, Elsa, 265n5
Starrett, Gregory, 275n6
Statistics, 129130, 133, 136
Stedman, John Gabriel,
103104
Stengel, Richard, 234n3
Stolen Honor, 133
Strange, Carolyn, 238n5
Strathern, Marilyn, 236n24
Suad, Joseph, 230n8
Submission, 102, 109, 133,
249n50
Sunder, Mahdavi, 180
Sunder Rajan, Rajeswari,
232nn19,20
SURGIR, 123
Src, Hatun, 133134
Sweden, 72, 120, 125130
Sweis, Rana, 225, 259n25,
264n53
Syria, 16, 139, 146
Tahrir Square, 150, 260n27.
See also Revolution
Taliban, 27, 29, 3132, 34,
3738, 4042, 48, 50
Tanzania, 169
Taylor, Thrse, 252n19
Tel Aviv, 16, 22
Terrorism, 33
Thailand, 70, 95
Thibault, Jacqueline, 97
Thomas, Chantal, 254n41
321
Thonnes, Nancy, 239n18

Ticktin, Miriam, 98, 134,
248nn39,41, 266n8
Time (magazine), 2729, 5152,
57, 234n3
Tourism, 3, 194196, 206
Tradition: and Awlad Ali
Bedouin, 117, 209; and culture,
81, 88, 106, 109, 277n16; and
foot binding, 6465; Islamic,
15, 18, 71, 179, 187, 211; and
modernity, 122, 253nn24,25;
secular humanist, 96, 180; and
violence, 52, 114115, 121,
130137, 140, 192, 196. See
also Backwardness; Culture;
Modernity
Turkey, 40, 130, 136, 177, 183
UDHR (Universal Declaration of
Human Rights), 83, 86, 219
Unbroken Spirit: A True Story of
a Girls Struggle to Escape
from Abuse, 99
Union of Palestinian Medical
Relief Committees, 161
United Kingdom, 134
United Nations, 22, 113,
135136, 146, 174, 181, 184,
226; and the United Nations
Commission on Human Rights,
Convention on the Elimination
of All Forms of Discrimination
against Women (CEDAW), 12,
154, 157, 231n18; and the
United Nations Development
Assistance Framework, 152,
257n14, 259n23; and the
Fund for Women (UNIFEM),
322
United Nations (continued)

156, 159, 163, 191; and the
Programme (UNDP), 151,
258n18, 262n43; and the
United Nations Education,
Scientific, and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO),
23, 277n17; and the United
Nations General Assembly,
International Childrens
Emergency Fund (UNICEF),
149; and the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights
of the United Nations (UNDHR), 86
United States, 41, 4448, 50, 53,
54, 57, 60, 63, 69, 115, 121,
147148, 183, 194, 223,
269n28
Universality, 79, 8183, 86, 87,
202, 219, 245n14, 277n16
USAID (United States Agency for
International Development),
151, 156
U.S. Justice Department, 63
Vance, Carole S., 248n43
Van Gogh, Theo, 103, 133
Van Sommer, Annie, 237nn32,33
Van Wichelen, Sonja, 249n49
VAW (Violence against Women),
47, 56, 62, 8485, 113, 115,
129, 141, 153, 155157, 164,
191192
Veiling, 9, 10, 11, 17, 19, 33,
3540, 4849, 108, 117,
230n14; and symbolism,
3536, 39. See also Burqa;
Clothing
INDEX
Violence, 25, 127, 220221, 226;

and Afghanistan, 29, 37, 50;
and circumstances, 136137;
and culture, 61, 114115, 124,
126, 127128, 139, 157, 192;
domestic, 11, 63, 93, 114,
135136, 141, 160, 176, 182,
191192, 196199, 206207;
fraternity, 10; and immigrants,
135, 251n14; and Islam, 72,
137; and Jihad against
Violence, 182184, 191; and
North America, 90, 98, 100,
127; and Palestinians, 129,
141, 157161, 262n45; and
politics, 9, 105, 115, 140141,
158160, 176, 182, 184,
259n27; sexual, 89, 9596,
103104, 111, 141, 163,
253n32; structural, 42, 47; of
translation, 200; and the West,
46, 107. See also VAW
(Violence against Women)
Volpp, Leti, 90, 127
Wain, Jana, 91, 96, 110,
216
Walley, Christine, 169, 237n36,
265n4
War, 17, 2728, 31, 42, 46, 50,
5255, 63, 81, 106107, 114,
121, 158159, 221, 226; on
terror, 29, 32, 53, 66, 180,
183; on women, 58, 75, 78.
See also Women: and
militarization
WAW (Women for Afghan
Women), 28, 51
Welchman, Lynn, 139, 258n20,
275n8
Weldon, Fay, 97
INDEX
West, the: and feminism, 30, 42,

45, 102, 105, 107, 122; and
intervention, 46, 53, 6364, 66,
97, 114, 184; versus Islam, 15,
45, 73, 84, 96, 110, 142, 181,
186; and modernity, 121; and
representations of Muslim
women, 18, 52, 88, 114, 122,
146; and values of secularism,
freedom, 1920, 44, 52, 8586,
123, 128. See also Liberalism;
Orientalism
West Bank, 124, 132, 161. See
also Palestine
WHO (World Health Organization), 159
Wickett, Elizabeth, 229n3
Wikan, Unni, 120, 125, 130
Wilson, Richard Ashby, 264n56
Wimpelmann, Torunn, 234n4,
235n17
WISE (Womens Islamic Initiative
in Spirituality and Equality),
181, 183184, 190192,
270nn34,36,37
Without Mercy: A Mothers
Struggle against Modern
Slavery, 91, 96, 110, 216
WLUML (Women Living under
Muslim Laws), 140, 157, 179
Wolf, Margery, 240n27
Women, 56; and abuse, 13, 20,
41, 52, 54, 78, 87, 8083, 89,
96, 99100, 102104, 106
107, 109, 112, 145, 157, 201;
and agency, 9, 15, 1719, 26,
33, 37, 3940, 6566, 108
109, 111, 116118, 122, 125,
138, 144; and artistic expressions, 2023; as caged virgins,
19; and community, 77, 111,
323
116120, 139, 224, 226; and

diversity, 12, 18, 24, 45, 71,
73; and economy, 1, 3, 42, 52,
7375, 90, 223; and education,
1, 3, 6768, 71, 153, 164167,
172, 189190, 210, 223,
263n50; and emancipation,
1920, 89; and empowerment,
12, 172, 184, 258n16; and
family, 77, 93, 144, 197198,
219220; and global rights, 26,
5356, 58, 62, 69, 84, 113,
146, 173, 176, 191, 201; and
hierarchy, 3739; and human
rights, 9, 12, 14, 79, 81, 175,
181, 192, 265n5; as icons,
2830, 32, 7980, 94, 99, 107;
and identity, 13, 36, 217218,
226; as literary/artistic subjects,
7, 48, 82, 8791, 9394, 97,
99, 101102, 104; and media,
4, 7, 2728, 3031; and
militarization, 5155, 64,
79, 107, 141142, 158160,
170; and motherhood, 111;
oppressed, 3, 3233, 35,
4748, 6566, 84, 88, 9495,
100, 102, 116, 118119,
121122, 126, 158, 164; as
political subjects, 1, 3, 2226,
165, 168; as products of
complex circumstances, 2226,
40, 43, 49, 51, 65, 78, 87,
108109, 160, 192198,
206207, 214217, 222224;
and property, 144145, 164,
166; and religion, 1, 14, 19, 21,
25, 30, 34, 37, 39, 44, 6972,
75, 101103, 108109, 128,
137, 187188, 190191, 204,
210, 212, 226; and rights in
324
Women (continued)
Afghanistan, 29, 41, 51; and
rights in Egypt, 148157,
163167, 169, 171; and rights
as hybrid, 163167, 169; and
rights in Palestine, 158162;
and sex(uality), 7, 70, 88, 91,
9396, 103, 116117, 123124,
126, 137139, 142, 239n19;
and social status, 117, 187,
221,223, 227; and suffering,
16, 2225, 32, 5253, 55, 62,
66, 7475, 77, 80, 82, 101,
105, 141142, 160, 176, 196,
221, 223226; and war, 14, 61,
68, 78, 81, 83, 219, 221, 223.
See also Gender; Marriage;
Muslim women
INDEX
Women in Black, 41
Womens Center for Legal Aid
and Counseling (Palestine), 132
Wood, Marcus, 103, 105
Woolf, Virginia, 18
World Bank, 152
World Trade Center, 31
WuDunn, Sheryl, 58, 63, 6667,
6970, 83
Yegenoglu, Meyda, 230n7
Yemen, 8991, 95, 97, 110111,
217
Yurdakul, Gke, 135
Yusra, 163
Zionism, 22, 24, 97
Zwemer, Samuel, 237nn32,34

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What is the book about?

What is the book about?

What point does Zaynab make to the author?

What point does Zaynab make to the author?

Do Muslim Women Need Saving?

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright 2013 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

Introduction: Rights and Lives

1. Do Muslim Women (Still) Need Saving?

2. The New Common Sense

3. Authorizing Moral Crusades

4. Seductions of the Honor Crime

5. The Social Life of Muslim Womens Rights

6. An Anthropologist in the Territory of Rights

Conclusion: Registers of Humanity

Bibliography 279 Acknowledgments 305 Index 309

Do Muslim Women Need Saving?

On a bright December day in

wondered why she seemed to understand more about the world

Thinking like an Anthropologist

Western Desert. I was then a graduate student in anthropology

escape what they perceived as their communitys flaws, even if

rescue them from their cultures. As I explore in this book, these

mobilize around: female genital cutting, enforced veiling, or the

the University of Chicago she had to cover everything but her

Beijing in 1995 and the successful campaign to claim womens

experiences living in these other contexts can teach us different

than war injuries or other consequences of militarization or the

on what they value as pious Islamic dress. Womens decisions to

The Wounded Bird

after they, like many Palestinians, were driven out of Kuwait in

Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Egypt. We loved to play

to be philosophical about life. You have to accept what life

God. Zaynab has been consumed by the struggles and failings of

Politics of the Everyday

aliennessfrom the veil to the honor crimeare deployed in

popular television hosts, and women in shelters and burn

Discomfort with this sudden attention led me to reflect on why,

Cultural Explanations and the

geography of West versus East, us versus Muslims, cultures in

These words have haunting resonances for anyone who has

added to the event a symbolic dimension that dramatized the one

Lazreg gives memorable examples of the way in which the

Politics of the Veil

Hanna Papanek, an anthropologist who worked in Pakistan

blue burqa with embroidered eyeholes, which a Pashtun woman

decade, the demographics and meaning of wearing (and not

So we need to work against the reductive interpretation of

Taliban. I was not sympathetic to the dogmatism of the Taliban;

Taliban and the U.S. multinational corporation Unocal that was

directions we can imagine. It is unlikely that such changes would

by conservatives of various sorts, whether Islamist or nationalist,

American University in Cairowho has expressed envy of

Beyond the Rhetoric of Salvation

Looking closely at the political history of the country and at the

and drug traffickers. Kandiyoti heard stories of young girls being

worse, subjects her to a so-called honor killingmurder under

The New Common Sense

THE NEW COMMON SENSE