Key to her argument is that we in the West look through lenses that prioritize very particular, situated values: choice, consent, and freedom. Some of the most rewarding material in
Do Muslim Women Need Saving? examines the obsession with constraint that counterposes perceptions of Muslim women to Enlightenment ideals of freedom and autonomy, connected to theoretical work by Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood. As Abu-Lughod notes, "we need to reflect on the limits we all experience in being agents of our own lives." Yet many non-Muslim women perceive themselves as free, while believing Muslim women to be utterly constrained. Muslim women live in a mythical place, which Abu-Lughod calls "IslamLand": a fantastic place where women are "undifferentiated by nation, locality, or personal circumstances," and live lives that are imagined to be "totally separate and different from our own." These are lives where women are caged by culture and oppressed by religion—their only possibility of rescue appearing in the form of intervention by the international community—and where their only hope is escape.
This notion that women could be liberated from their (univocally oppressive) culture into a space of freedom is reminiscent of Susan Moller Okin's controversial claim in her well-known essay, "Is Multiculturalism Bad For Women?" that some women (those subject to what Okin called "patriarchal minority cultures,") might be much better off if their cultures were to become extinct, so they could become integrated into a more enlightened majority culture.
3 The evangelizing Christian missionary of the historical rescue mission has been replaced by Okin—or by Nicholas Kristof. The Christian community of the saved has been supplanted, in Abu-Lughod's terms, by human rights, liberal democracy, and modern beauty regimes. While many readers of this book may take all three to be universally desirable values, Abu-Lughod repeatedly suggests that different women might choose different futures from ones that we might, futures that are manifestations of "differently structured desires."
More specifically, Abu-Lughod observes: "I cannot think of a single woman I know who has expressed envy of women in the United States, women they variously perceive as bereft of community, cut off from family, vulnerable to sexual violence and social anomie, driven by selfishness or individual success, subject to capitalist pressures, participants in imperial ventures that don't respect the sovereignty or intelligence of others, or strangely disrespectful of others and God." ("This is not to say," she notes, that these women "do not value certain privileges and opportunities that many American women enjoy.") As Abu-Lughod reminds us, when you are saving someone from something, you are also "saving her
to something." The presumption of those who would save Muslim women from their unfreedom is that identification with Islam can only be a negative experience and that they are being saved to a more ideal alternative. But, Abu-Lughod argues, different women might be "called to personhood, so to speak, in different languages." Over and over, Abu-Lughod insists that her readers contemplate the possibility that not all women seek an identical life.
