Do Muslim Women Need Saving Summary

Advocating and safeguarding human rights is a venerable moral responsibility that transcends gender, culture, race, and religion. However, as Lila Abu-Lughod contends in her book Do Muslim Women Need Saving?, those championing the cause of Muslim women’s rights need to thoughtfully consider the social, cultural, historical, and religious backgrounds of the diverse array of women they are trying to represent. Abu-Lughod, is an anthropologist who has been researching and recording women’s lives for over twenty years, with much of her research occurring in the Middle East (Abu-Lughod, 2015). After witnessing Muslim women being used as a political platform for the United States to justify military action in the Middle East, Abu-Lughod began examining her ethnographic research to evaluate Western and Eastern perceptions of the oppression of Muslim women (Abu-Lughod, 2015).

Furthermore, Abu-Lughod asserts that colonialism and feminism are strong factors in the frantic effort to rescue Muslim women (Abu-Lughod, 2015). Colonialism exploits skewed Western views of Muslim culture to justify political intervention and military occupation in Eastern nations, touting these efforts as protective (Abu-Lughod, 2015). Subsequently, in working to save helpless marginalized Muslim women, feminists ignorantly impose their Western views of liberties, freedoms, and rights on their Middle Eastern contemporaries without considering that their views may not be shared ubiquitously (Abu-Lughod, 2015). The author conclusively raises the question as to whether humanitarian efforts directed toward Muslim women could, perhaps, be a disguise for colonialism (Abu-Lughod,