Posting on behalf of Fatma

Loving without the “Liberation” - Fatma Elsayed

After reading Lila Abu-Lughod’s piece titled “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others”, I was left with a lot of feelings about being a Muslim woman in the west and how my Muslim-ness effects the way I think about love and dating. Alongside a detailed commentary on cultural relativism as it relates to post-Taliban Afghanistan, Abu-Lughod taps into a larger discussion of how Western audiences percieve both Muslim women’s feminism and sexuality as a deviation from their own feminist structures.

In her piece, Abu-Lughod poses the interesting question, “Can we only free Afghan women to be like us or might we have to recognize that even after “liberation” from the Taliban, they might want different things than we would want for them?”(5) This question reminds of my own personal relationships with friends, who although care for me deeply, can also dip into this savior-istic tendencies to encourage me to explore dating and love in ways that aren’t always feasible. I was raised in a black, Sudanese, Muslim household where I was taught to always maintain a modest distance from men. This meant no going to guys houses, no boyfriends, no premarital relationships, etc - however, this does not mean that I was repressed. Although I do not explore love and dating the same way that my friends from Western and non-Muslim backgrounds do, I still love and want to be loved. 

Abu-Lughod’s piece resonates with the larger, complex experience of being a Muslim girl in Western spaces where your modesty and “veil”, whether it be literal with a hijab or abstract in the divisions between yourself and other men, is constantly examined by peers. Reconciling my desire to be in love and explore the dating scene with the need to also maintain a “veil” in college is challenging, but this “struggle” doesn’t necessarily mean that I am particularly repressed. I put these limits and expectations on myself from a source of love and dedication for my religion, Islam, and navigating dating is just a natural challenge that comes with that. 

However, when we, as women, talk about feminism being about sexual liberation for all and sex as a means to reclaiming our femininity, that is not inclusive of women like me. I believe in the right to a woman owning her body and her sexuality, but to universalize the way we explore our sexualities within a western contexts erases the sexual liberation Muslim women, specifically those who believe in modesty, express. 

This connects with an interesting point Abu-Lughod makes about this spectrum of feminisms by stating that “One of the things we have to be most careful about in thinking about Third World feminisms, and feminism in different parts of the Muslim world, is how not to fall into polarizations that place feminism on the side of the West.”(6)  Even though I may not own my body the same way other western feminists do, it does not make my feminism any less radical. It also does not make my exploration of love any less meaningful because no one entity or region has a monopoly over what feminism is and what love looks like.