Generalizations on Islam, women and human nature

Generalizations

I was particularly intrigued this week by the common thread through all the readings that it is a mistake to assume that all people (women in particular) have an innate desire for “freedom” in some context, whether positive or negative. Mohanty  criticizes author Perdita Huston for assuming “that all third-world women have similar problems and needs. Thus, they must have similar interests and goals.” (140) Huston’s assumption is that said “third-world women” place “family, dignity and service to others” above all else, deprioritizing personal freedoms. However, those same values are commonly shared by Western women as well, Mohanty points out. Mohanty argues that social class and ethnic identity should also play a role in this discourse, ideas that are often neglected by the “cultural reductionism” of many scholarly authors and analysts.

                The idea that Muslim women have the same desires and needs as Western women because all women are inherently the same is perpetuated by Laura Bush’s speech, which is discussed in Lila Abu-Lughod’s “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others”.  After the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush made a speech that Abu-Lughod asserts “reinforced chasmic divides, primarily between the ‘civilized people throughout the world’ whose hearts break for the women and children of Afghanistan and the Taliban-and-the-terrorists, the cultural monsters who want to, as she put it, ‘impose their world on the rest of us.’” (158)

 Who decides that Westerners or those who agree with Western ideals are the “civilized”? Am I, as a Christian Western woman, so different from a Muslim woman that I must save her from her own culture? Are we so similar that we both want to be free from oppression, dominance or subordination as society defines them?

Saba Mahmood sums up my feelings on the generalizations many scholars make about human nature as often used to explain the “plight of the Muslim woman”.

“If we recognize that the desire for freedom from, or subversion of, norms is not an innate desire that motivates all beings at all times, but is also profoundly mediated by cultural and historical conditions…”

Not everyone prioritizes “freedom” above all else, just like not every person wants to settle down, not every person wants to stay at home taking care of children, not every person wants to go to college, etc. What we’re told is right to want isn’t always what we want.

On Western ideas being discussed in Iranian culture:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/01/25/iran_faces_backlash_over_morality_police_spying_on_coffee_shops.html