Week 4 Reading

This week’s discussion is about cultural relativism and how currently, the media would like to plaster Muslim women at the frontline of the War on Terror. While they certainly may need saving in the most literal sense, reducing their very human need for help to some kind of enlightened saving that will liberate them from the restrictions of their culture is an obvious cause of feminism. As Lila Abu-Lughod states in her article, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?” placing Muslim women at the center of what this war is about weakens the social, historical, and political perpetrators that are actually behind the start of the wars and problems in the Middle East. Chandra Mohanty, in her article on Western feminism and colonial discourse, argues that it is a problem for feminism when only white women from the West are writing and talking about feminist issues pertaining to women in the East and more specifically, with a “third world difference” (Mohanty, 63). Overlaying the issues that affect women in the West onto women from other cultures, without hearing their voices on the matter, creates an appropriation over the problems of women.

A recent article by a Western, feminist, Phyllis Chesler, demonstrated what Abu-Lughod and Mohanty speak about in their articles. Chesler states that she lived in a harem in Afghanistan in her twenties, thereby claiming at least some cultural knowledge of Muslim women. In Chesler’s article, “What Kind of Feminist Future Does ISIS Have in Mind?” she states four problems that she thinks Muslim and Western women face together. The issues are: 1) the right to abortion and birth control, 2) women losing custody of their children, 3) rape, and 4) tribal misogyny. These all seem like legitimate concerns, however, without a female Muslim voice to confirm or deny them, these are just as Mohanty states, the concerns of a white, Western feminist. Mohanty identifies this as “the crucial presupposition that all of us of the same gender, across classes and cultures, are somehow socially constituted as a homogeneous group identifiable prior to the process of analysis” (Mohanty, 65). Abu-Lughod states that we need to look closer at the things we claim to support because human universal rights entail more than liberating women from a burqa (Abu-Lughod, 787).

Essentially, cultural relativism prohibits one to truly understand the needs and desires of those from other cultures because we are so caught up in our own needs and desires, and doing this can create cultural imperialism. It is difficult, but when trying to understand a situation it is necessary to shed any pre-conceived notions and honestly try to understand where the other party is coming from. Even more beneficial is to hear what that person needs, directly, rather than overlay our own wants from our very different cultures onto things that we may know absolutely nothing about.