One of my pet peeves in life is the way people sometimes don’t pay enough attention to causal relationships. This is probably because I am a theoretical physicist who specializes in general relativity. Paying attention to causality is crucial in my line of work and can make the difference between fancy math tricks that yield physics information and fancy math tricks that have no possibility of a relationship with reality. Anyway, because of this central role that being careful about causality plays in my work, I often cast other critical thinking endeavors in terms of questions about timeline.
We often talk about the importance of learning history so that we do not repeat humankind’s mistakes over and over again. But it’s clear that we are selective about the history that we learn/teach our children. For example, the Holocaust is a major feature in the curricula of many American school districts. But how many people know that the Taliban rose to power with significant American assistance, as part of a Cold War anti-Soviet strategy?
Playing a little game of being especially attentive to causality, how many people know that before the rise of the Taliban, some Muslim states were banning the veil and requiring men to wear Western dress?* Well, I had a guess about this, but didn’t formally know until I read Lila Abu-Lughod’s Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others.
Doing a little causal addition, it’s clear that there is a definite relationship between US interference in foreign governments and social movements and the enforcement of the burqa/niqab on women in at least one country.
I think the next appropriate question to ask is: how many places are women facing patriarchal oppression because the men imposing it had help from Western governments?
And as we ask that question, we must ask of ourselves: how serious can the Western world be about “saving” Muslim women when the Western world is the reason they need to be “saved” and the Western world isn’t acknowledging the enormity of that fact? Didn’t we learn in kindergarten that honesty is the best policy? Maybe not.
If we can acknowledge the causal relationship between imperialism, colonialism, and the oppression of women, we might be able to genuinely ask ourselves and Muslim women of all shades and veil/non-veil shapes: what do you need from first world feminists? What is your movement? Where do you want to go? Lead us!
*This clearly needs to be unpacked in the context of Western colonialism, but that will have to wait for another day.
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