Do Muslim Women Need Saving?  By Lila Abu-Lughod

I have compiled below some bits on the book. There are so many recent events tied closely or broadly to the subject of the book. I have kept the focus fairly tightly on the book in the links here, except for the last one, which makes some connections, and we can make more of these in our discussion. I hope the pieces are helpful, and I look forward to the session!

Summary of the book (adapted from the jacket blurb):  Frequent reports of honor killings, disfigurement, and sensational abuse have given rise to a consensus in the West, a message propagated by human rights groups and the media: Muslim women need to be rescued. Lila Abu-Lughod boldly challenges this conclusion. In recent years Abu-Lughod has struggled to reconcile the popular image of women victimized by Islam with the complex women she has known through her research in various communities in the Muslim world. She renders that divide vivid by presenting detailed vignettes of the lives of ordinary Muslim women, and showing that the problem of gender inequality cannot be laid at the feet of religion alone. Poverty and authoritarianism—conditions not unique to the Islamic world, and produced out of global interconnections that implicate the West—are often more decisive. The standard Western vocabulary of oppression, choice, and freedom is too blunt to describe these women’s lives. Do Muslim Women Need Saving? is an indictment of a mindset that has justified all manner of foreign interference, including military invasion, in the name of rescuing women from Islam—as well as a moving portrait of women’s actual experiences, and of the contingencies with which they live.

Abu-Lughod videos and article:  Two very short but informative videos of Abu-Lughod talking about the book, from the Harvard University Press and New York Times sites, and a brief article by Abu-Lughod in Time online.

Review of the book:  An excellent and easy to read review of Abu-Lughod's book by Elif Shafak, a prominent Turkish woman author who is published widely in English.

Blog post with two key images discussed in the book:  A post on a blog called Sociological Images that briefly covers the two images that Abu-Lughod discusses in depth in the book: the image used by a German human rights group, purporting to be in support of women's rights, that equates women in burqas with garbage bags; and the controversial image from a 2010 Time magazine cover of Afghan woman Bibi Aysha.

Interview with a Muslim-American civil rights activist:  In this excellent interview, Linda Sarsour, executive director of the Arab American Association of NYC, talks about the increase in Islamophobia and linkages between the movement against this and the current racial justice movement that grew out of Ferguson.