This is one of those books that not only immediately captures one’s attention, but becomes something of an academic page turner. Lila Abu-Lughod’s book may be dismissed by many as an apologia for the abject condition of women in the Islamic world. Her response would be that those who make the most about the issue of the degraded condition of Muslim women are under the sway of what she calls ‘IslamLand’. This is an unchanging notion of the lands of Islam and Muslims that does not take into account the multifarious and diverse ways in which women lead their lives in these many regions, territories and nations of the world. Abu-Lughod’s training as an anthropologist equips her with precisely this imperative to look into the complex matrix of diversity, hopes, miseries, desires, ambitions, dreams and uncertainties with which women lead their lives. Her focus is on the Middle East and in particular a remote village of Egypt in which she has followed the lives of her many female interlocutors about whom she has written, quite often with great empathy.
Abu-Lughod’s book, suffused with warmth and concern for the women she depicts in her study, simultaneously suggests that it is far better to spare these women from the bleeding heart liberalism of western intervention. Abu-Lughod’s point is that such interventions are premised on the starkness of rights-based understandings of the world which are doomed in their failure to understand the complexity, diversity and nuances of Muslim women’s lives. What is worse is the fact that such liberal interventions have more often than not been associated with colonial expansionism. Among one of the many, rather spurious justifications that were proffered for western intervention in Afghanistan in 2001 was the stated need to protect Muslim women and their pathetic condition. More pertinently, in the light of France and its rather rigid legislation banning the veil, is an instance Abu-Lughod cites of how on May 16 1958, four years prior to Algerian independence, a demonstration was organized by French generals in Algiers that was meant to show their determination to stay on in Algeria. Their method of putting the point across was to gather native Algerian women who were then solemnly unveiled by French women (p. 33).