Do Muslim Women Need Saving? Quotes

“What does freedom mean if we accept the fundamental premise that humans are social beings, raised in certain social and historical contexts and belonging to particular communities that shape their desires and understandings of the world?”
― Lila Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving?

“When they challenge the innocent morality of the rights regime, anthropologists join a number of political and legal theorists who have asked whether humanitarianism is the new face of colonialism. Some have pointed out the paradoxes of rights-based arguments: that they allow people to make claims, but lock them into fixed identities defined by their injuries rather than freeing them from these identities into a world of equals; or they absolve the perpetrators of past violence by making them the defenders of rights.”
― Lila Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving?