"The Invisible Labor of Women's Studies": Paige West and Lila Abu-Lughod Featured in the Atlantic Magazine
Paige West, Professor of Anthropology at Barnard and Columbia and director of CSSD's project on Pacific Climate Circuits and Lila Abu-Lughod, Professor of Anthropology and Women’s and Gender Studies at Columbia and director of CSSD's project on Gender, Religion, and Law in Muslim Societies, were featured in the recent Atlantic article "The Invisible Labor of Women's Studies."
The article, on the problem of poorly resourced Women's Studies departments, investigates how many elite universities continue to assign women's studies and gender studies departments second-class status. Many times these interdisciplinary departments receive much less funding than traditional departments and have no salaried positions. Often the programs are not covered by contracts or grants so run the risk of termination.
Read the article here.
Katherine Pratt Ewing Awarded Grant by American Council of Learned Societies for Sufi/Salafi Research
Katherine Pratt Ewing, Professor of Religion, Columbia University, and co-director of CSSD's project "Gender, Religion and Law in Muslim Societies," was awarded a grant by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) for her project on "Sufis, Salafis, and the Public Square."
The grant is funded by the Luce Foundation and is part of ACLS' inaugural Program in Religion, Journalism & International Affairs, aimed at pursuing programming that connects scholarship on religion to journalism training and practice.
Ewing's project, which examines the relationships between authoritarian regimes and Salafist movements in countries where Sufism is being crowded out, will produce a database of oral histories of Sunni Muslims and government representatives.
Lila Abu-Lughod Publishes Forum on "The Politics of Feminist Politics"
Lila Abu-Lughod, project director of CSSD's Gender, Religion and Law in Muslim Societies working group and Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University, recently edited a special forum called "The Politics of Feminist Politics" for the journal Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
The special section brings together the work of feminist scholars of the Middle East and South Asia to highlight the silences and exclusions that mark the transregional imaginative geographies of both “feminism” and “Islam.” The essays use careful analysis of the languages of justice, forms of social and political life, and embodied realities of particular places and times to call into question some of the generalized claims of liberal feminist discourse.
These works track the everyday languages and institutions of governance, policing, and morality by investigating diverse fields such as legal cases, histories of education, dynamics of marriage, arts of linguistic transformation, politics of religious argument, legitimations of state power, and political economies of labor and housing.
Read the issue here.
Lila Abu-Lughod Delivers Edward Said Memorial Lecture at the American University in Cairo
Lila Abu-Lughod, Professor of Social Science at Columbia University and Project Director of CSSD’s working group on Gender, Religion and Law in Muslim Societies, delivered the Edward Said Memorial Lecture at American University in December. In a followup interview with the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram Weekly, Abu-Lughod discussed the critical reception of her book, Do Muslim Women Need Saving? as well as gender politics and the "Malala Effect," the Arab Spring, and BDS.
Read the full interview here.
CSSD Member Amina Tawasil Publishes on the Emancipatory Effects of Marriage and Motherhood on Shi'i Women in Iran
Amina Tawasil, Visiting Lecturer at the International Studies Institute, University of New Mexico and member of the CSSD working group on Gender, Religion and Law in Muslim Societies, recently published research in the Journal of Women of the Middle East and Islamic World entitled "Towards the Ideal Revolutionary Shi'i Woman: The Howzevi (Seminarian), the Requisites of Marriage and Islamic Education in Iran."
Tawasil’s ethnographic fieldwork in Iran reveals how some religious conservative howzevi (seminarian) women understand marriage and motherhood as constitutive of idealized womanhood. Tawasil argues that the howzevi’s observances of certain constraints impose both regulatory and emancipatory effects as they facilitate educational, social and political mobility.
Read the full article here.
Lila Abu-Lughod's "Do Muslim Women Need Saving" Reviewed in "Ethnicities" Journal
The journal Ethnicities recently ran a review symposium of Do Muslim Women Need Saving?—the book by Lila Abu-Lughod, Professor of Social Science at Columbia University and Project Director of CSSD’s working group on Gender, Religion and Law in Muslim Societies.
Deniz Kandiyoti, SOAS, University of London, found the book a “refreshingly accessible, jargon free text” and said “(I)t presents a comprehensive indictment of global Western actors’ commonly held normative assumptions about the role of Islam in oppressing women in Muslim majority countries.” Kandiyoti found that Abu-Lughod successfully uses interviews with women from Egyptian villages whose complex realities are influenced by a multitude of factors beyond religion. According to Kandiyoti, the book “does a thorough and masterful job of taking on centres of power and privilege that propagate simplistic and disabling representations of Muslim women’s lives.”
Maleiha Malik, Kings College, University of London, wrote that “Abu-Lughod’s analysis is important because she relates her analysis to the wider institutional framework of international feminism, human rights and NGOs that produce institutions for ‘saving Muslim women’.” In doing so, the book also “moves academic and public debates beyond de-construction towards a normative constructive analysis of the category ‘Muslim women,’” according to Malik.
Schirin Amir-Moazami, Free University, Berlin called Abu-Lughod’s book a timely critique of Western attempts at “saving Muslim women” as it “dismantles, on various levels, the discursive production and structures of these (current) rescue narratives in a thought provoking and accessible way.” She also called it an “extremely inspiring exercise in starting to ask different kinds of questions than those at hand.”
Working Group Member Publishes on Lack of Support for Disabled in Indonesian Education
Dina Afrianty, member of the Gender, Religion, and Law in Muslim Societies working group, published an article on the limited degrees of support services for people with disabilities in Indonesian higher education institutions.
"People with disability: locked out of learning?"—Afrianty's blog post for the University of Melbourne site Indonesia at Melbourne—claims that increasing enrollment in higher education is still limited by a lack of infrastructure and supportive government policies and academic services.
While some universities have made accommodations and government has voiced verbal support, the existing segregated special school system allows many institutions to turn away disabled students, who rely heavily on family support if they do gain entrance to mainstream schools, writes Afrianty.
Afrianty suggests using Islamic texts that emphasize social justice to change discriminatory attitudes, along with better staff training and increased funding. Read the full article here.
Lila Abu-Lughod's "Do Muslim Women Need Saving?" Reviewed in Public Books
Lila Abu-Lughod's Do Muslim Women Need Saving? received a favorable review from Leti Volpp in Public Books.
Volpp remarked that Abu-Lughod's book is "a great service to those of us who have long wanted for a resource we can recommend to explain why Muslim women do not need saving" and that it "works hard not to alienate the skeptical reader."
The book provides a multi-faceted examination of the Western obsession with constraint and choice that is borne out of the misplaced imposition of the Enlightenment ideals of freedom and autonomy on Muslim women, according to Volpp.
"The presumption of those who would save Muslim women from their unfreedom is that identification with Islam can only be a negative experience and that they are being saved to a more ideal alternative," writes Volpp. That Western alternative is usually identified with "human rights, liberal democracy, and modern beauty regimes" even though not all women seek this identical life, according to Volpp's reading of Abu-Lughod.
Abu-Lughod asserts that the subjugated Muslim woman motif can be politically useful to Western states. She also feels that defining women's rights as human rights assumes the presence of a liberal democracy and in fact acts as a "strategic diversion" for troubled social movements in the global North. Both of these applications leave out the geopolitical and historical realities that forcefully shape Muslim women's lives, writes Volpp.
Read the full review here.
Lila Abu-Lughod's new book named "Best Book of 2014 on the Middle East"
Lila Abu-Lughod's Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Harvard University Press) was named a "Best Book of 2014 on the Middle East" by Foreign Affairs.
Abu-Lughod is Co-director of the CSSD project Gender, Religion and Law in Muslim Societies.
Read John Waterbury's review here. Listen to Abu-Lughod discuss her work here.