Jihad Watch Advisory Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald writes for Campus Watch in FrontPage about Columbia University’s new chair of Israel studies, Lila Abu-Lughod:
Judging by the press coverage of Lila Abu-Lughod, a professor of sociology, her family background is of keen interest. Or possibly that background has proved to be quite useful. In the view of Antony T. Sullivan (reviewing her book, Veiled Sentiments, in The World and I, January 1991), her father Ibrahim was a “distinguished Palestinian-American political scientist” and his “Jewish wife, Janet” is “herself a world-class sociologist.” Their daughter, raised a Muslim, spent childhood summers in Jordan and she seldom fails to mention her “heritage.”This background makes her serving on the committee searching for a scholar to occupy Columbia’s new chair of Israel studies especially inapt.
Lila Abu-Lughod specializes on “topics of gender, class, and modernity.” She lived for 2 years with the Baladi tribe of Egyptian Bedouins, and wrote two books about them: Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society, and Writing Women’s Worlds: Bedouin Stories. Still, she has reservations in this kind of writing, for as she told an interviewer for the Cairo Times (March 4-17, 1999) she “worries about privileging her own voice over her subjects.”
Abu-Lughod is the editor of a book of essays, Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity, which has been hailed as “an important contribution to comparative postcolonial and feminist studies.” The book, she explains, “seeks to tackle comfortable and accepted linear notions of progress, modernity, and emancipation in modern academic works on gender in the postcolonial world.”
Why, Abu-Lughod asks, should the West’s ideas about “progress” and “modernity” be unquestionably accepted? Perhaps Western “progress” is not progress, and “modernity” is not modernity. And Western feminists should not be so hasty in denouncing the veil and the burka, because they act as a “portable seclusion,” your very own zenana or haramlik, which you can bring with you anywhere.
Her essay “The Marriage of Feminism and Islamism in Egypt: Selective Repudiation as a Dynamic of Postcolonial Cultural Politics,” in Remaking Women, offers a critique of what Abu-Lughod calls “companionate marriage” – i.e. monogamy, which the highly judgmental Western world apparently thinks is the only way to go about things, and fails to appreciate the many benefits to women from polygamy.
Read it all. Good links in the original.
Well, I can see Abu-Lughod's point to some extent. Alasdair MacIntyre wrote a book _Which Justice? Whose Rationality_ which pointed out that enlightenment liberalism is one tradition among many. It may be easy to speak of "progress" when we're dealing with material objects and finding more uses for them (when I was a boy, silicon was just sand, and now using it has belped me earn a living); but in issues of human relationships, MacIntyre's title is a question that needs to be asked.
It's not "progress" when the Western civilization that pioneered workable and long-lived systems of limited government and thought it would be a good idea for its minorities to be full citizens rather than perpetually humiliated is sterlizing and aborting itself out of existence.
Professor Lughod is neither a feminist nor is she an anthropologist. She is an anti-Israel propagnadist whose raison d'etre is to make u0p excuses for Islam and vilify Israel at every opportunity, even (shades of Ann Coulter) while in a eulogy for someone she loved dearly. (For Coulter it was bashing Hilary for Barb Olsen; for Lughod it is bashing Israel for Ed-weird Said.)
I read about this last month at Campus Watch. Her ridiculous letter starts thusly:
"I sit here on the earthen terrace with the sunset warming the pharaonic temple across the field, wondering how to carry on your work. The first step, I know, is to keep talking about Palestine."
I.e., “keep lying about Israel.” You can read the entire pathetic screed at
http://www.geocities.com/martinkramerorg/Documents/AbuLughod.pdf
(caution: make sure that you have a water-proof bag or trash can near at hand.)
Alasdair MacIntyre wrote a book "Which Justice? Whose Rationality?" which pointed out that enlightenment liberalism is one tradition among many. It may be easy to speak of "progress" when we're dealing with material objects and finding more uses for them ... but in issues of human relationships, MacIntyre's title is a question that needs to be asked.
MacIntyre was a focus in a class I took "Contemporary Philosophy". He does have some good points. However, I think that "The Justice" and "The Rationality" that should be chosen is the one that allows the most people to seek the most amount of personal freedom and attain the most happiness. "We" liberal enlightenment thinkers aren't trying to STOP women from wearing Burkas, and we aren't trying to STOP men from practicing polygamy. But by God, the women involved should do these things only if they want. Some people get off by being beaten up. Some people really do like the smell and taste of human excrement.
We let people ride motorcycles without helmets, why shouldn't we let them get beaten up if they think that they deserve it (even if they think it because a "holy" book written by a madman says so)?
No I am not calling for a "free for all" society. We should not allow sex with animals or children, because neither are consenting adults. We should not seek to outlaw Islam, but we should make it plain that one does not HAVE to be a Muslim fanatic, or a Muslim at all, should he or she choose.
THIS is the beauty of "Enlightenment Liberalism": a woman MAY wear a head-to-toe burqua with full-sleeve gloves, hijab, and veil. Or she MAY were an ultra-tight miniskirt and tank top. Or anything in between. Women are ALLOWED to stay home to bear young and keep the house, but if they choose they can work in any field they desire, no matter what their husbands or fathers say, and in fact they may even eschew marriage altogether.
WE "Liberal Englightenment Thinkers" aren't going to Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, etc. and telling THEM that THEY have to do things OUR way. It is just the opposite.
It should be easy to speak of progress when dealing with human relationships. No one should have to endure the hopeless life of misery foisted upon Muslim women for the sole reason that they were born without a penis.
What I have pointed out here is only in regards to womens rights, but the same could be said for Animal Rights, Ethics, and the treatment of minorities. EVERY culture in the word has made great progress in the realm of human rights... every culture except one, that is.
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It's not "progress" when the Western civilization ... is sterlizing and aborting itself out of existence.
No, Kepha. It's called "Limiting your family size in order to devote more to the children you have."
Just because the "other side" is irrationally fixated on "outbreeding" us on the order of a 7-century "holy" book, doesn't mean that we should struggle to keep up.
The answer to the problem of Muslims outbreeding us is to stop subsidising this overbreeding through aid and benefits, not to turn Western women back into breeding machines.
Another representative of this trend (one of many, what ms. Abu-Lughod represents is really mainstream now among academic "feminists") is Saba Mahmood, who has come to the United states from Pakistan, taken a university education first as an architect, then as antropologist; then, as a self-proclaimed American feminist, done her field research among the women of a "piety movement" in Egypt, and come back and written a romantic book about the Islamic Revival, in which she uses a lot of post-modern slang to come to the self-congratulatory conclusion that the "prejudices" of Western feminists (among whom she still counts herself, while rising herself above them, as more tolerant, more enlightened and more insightful about the REAL political meaning of the "fundamentalist" mosque movements) about the burqa, and gender segregation, and Islamic "fundamentalists" (her quotation marks, not mine), and the Sharia; are stupid, imperialist and out-of-date. She denounces American "liberal" freedoms as irrelevant, individualist, and not really desirable: never mind that she herself chose the liberty to get out of the Islamic Paradise of Pakistan, take several Western university degrees and live the academic life thinking (or pretending to do so), writing and travelling, instead of staying inside and raising ten kids for a man chosen by her father.
Here are some links about her achievements:
http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/titles/7888.html
http://www.fathom.com/feature/190136/
http://www.bostonreview.net/BR28.2/mahmood.html
Surprise, surprise: the "piety" book of Mahmood is praised at the PUpress site by none else than Lila Abu-Lughod:
"This brilliant study of women in the contemporary mosque movement in Egypt is a provocative challenge to secular feminists and a testament to what anthropology can still offer--through its insistence on serious listening to other worlds--to critical social theory. No feminist theorist or anthropologist of modernity will be able to think the same way about liberalism, agency, or religion after reading this book. I hope that Mahmood's incisive analysis of the Islamic movement will also finally put an end to the banalities that currently masquerade as knowledge about this meaningful social movement."--Lila Abu-Lughod, Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University, author of Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society
Since there is no intellectual freedom allowed within Islam (and that goes double for those half-men called women) WTF is Ms. Abu-L. talking about?
She sounds like one more victim of the recent mental dilemma called "deconstructionism" (once known by its simpler original name, when it was still rigorous and serious, as "critical analysis"). It is a form of discursive diarrhea which causes titles like her "Selective Repudiation as a Dynamic of Postcolonial Cultural Politics..." zzzzzz....
The French concept of 'nostalgia for the gutter' appears to underscore her thinking. In this case, the 'gutter' is the quaint charm of what she romanticizes as 'real' Islam. Ah yes, the joys of acid in the face. The sublime glory of the clitorectomy!
Who is to say that a women with no possibility of experiencing orgasmic ecstasy isn't 'superior' to her cruder and more animalistically-oriented Western sister?
It may be that the limitations placed on thought by the dogmas of the Koran actually free the mind from ontological worries about such decadent concepts as "progress" and "liberty"?
You can spin this inane, topsy-turvy kind of pseudo-intellectual drivel till the sacred cows come home to Mecca.
Let her live in Saudi Arabia and then we'll hear her real Muslim female voice.
Silence.
In and of itself, deconstruction is nothing more than a technique, and can be used for rigorous and interesting work. I would say, myself, that these time-serving, dishonest sentimentalists would poison and abuse any technique they could lay their hands on. Alas, one of the few things that Islam does produce in extraordinary quantities is verbiage; a constant miasma of self-excuse and self-apology, capable of adopting any argumentative strategy and taking any rhetorical shape in order to defend the indefensible. After all, the more a certain kind of person realizes that what they are standing up for is indefensible, the more talkative they become.
Paolo
Great post, thanks.