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Assignment #12

In this article Lila Abu-Lughod discusses the way the image of the oppressed Afghan women and her victimized femininity were mobilized in efforts to justify the U.S post 9/11 wars in the middle east. She analyzes two major moments in media where this can be clearly seen: One was her interview with a PBS reporter and the other was Laura Bush’s radio address.  In her interview with the PBS reporter she discusses the way culture, women’s roles and Islam were evoked as a way to explain terrorism. Instead of analyzing the way U.S involvement created much of the instability in the region prior to the events on 9/11, the media chose to focus on Muslims and middle eastern culture to try to make sense of the attacks. The veil was evoked as a symbol of female oppression and a clear example of the “backwardness” and “barbarism” of Islam and middle eastern culture. In turn, the war was presented as necessary to “free” oppressed and victimized Afghani women. In Laura Bush’s radio address her manner of speech conflates the Taliban and the terrorists while framing the western world as the benevolent entity that would save the “women of cover.” This approach to Muslim women’s identities, their perceived oppression and victimization under the veil is problematic in different ways. Not only does It help mobilize the west to see themselves as more “civilized” and therefore superior, it also ignores Muslim women’s agency within their own cultural and religious tradition. While women face oppression and disenfranchisement in Afghanistan they fight their hardships by drawing on philosophy that makes sense in their context and through reinterpreting religious doctrine. Ignoring the way Muslim women carve out their own unique brand of feminism is an instrument that maintains the “war on terror” running by gaining support for western countries in the name of freeing middle eastern women from middle eastern men.