The White Savior Industrial Complex & The Repackaging of Muslim Women’s Narratives
One of the most prolific examples of Islamophobia in operation today can be observed in the dominant feminist discourse about the positioning of muslim women in their own societies. Portrayals of muslim women often depict them as oppressed and abused victims of muslim men. The construction of this narrative has been used to justify the involvement of the "Enlightened" West in MENA nation-states. As a result, these narratives provide a moral reasoning for military intervention by disguising them as a necessary missions based on principles of perceived altruism. It is important to note that these narratives are publicized at the expense of the Muslim woman it totes to save because it denies them an ability to provide their own testimonies in a conversation that is essentially about them. Instead, they make claims that the Muslim woman is a subject who has been brainwashed by Islam and is therefore incapable of recognizing what their own oppression looks like. Any analysis of the sociocultural, economic, geographical, historical, and/or political paradigms at work against Muslim women has been completely decontextualized. Instead, Islam as a religion has been problematized as backwards while the post-colonial and imperialist ideology is assumed to be progressive and without error.
Gayatri Spivak, a critical theorist who analyzes the cultural legacy of colonialism and imperialism in relation to the globalizing world, explains in her essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ that the colonial metropole vindicated its oppressive dominance over colonial subjects with the belief that their “White men are saving brown women from brown men.” In Lila Abu Lughod’s essay ‘Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?’ she applies Spivak’s ideas to explain the United States’ imperialist relationship with Afghanistan. She argues that in order for the United States to justify the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in 2001, it became advantageous to reframe the discourse of this event as a feminist issue and mission to liberate women from the oppression of Islam.
Gayatri Spivak, a critical theorist who analyzes the cultural legacy of colonialism and imperialism in relation to the globalizing world, explains in her essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ that the colonial metropole vindicated its oppressive dominance over colonial subjects with the belief that their “White men are saving brown women from brown men.” In Lila Abu Lughod’s essay ‘Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?’ she applies Spivak’s ideas to explain the United States’ imperialist relationship with Afghanistan. She argues that in order for the United States to justify the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in 2001, it became advantageous to reframe the discourse of this event as a feminist issue and mission to liberate women from the oppression of Islam.
In this framing, the Muslim woman was spoken about without any form of differentiation that acknowledged the existing diversity of culture among an estimated population of 1.6 billion practitioners. Instead, the image of the Muslim woman was essentialized and generalized, using the burqa as a site of female oppression rather than a cultural nuance that developed in a particular region. The entirety of the Muslim world was collapsed into an outsider’s perspective of Afghanistan in a particular historical moment to serve a specific agenda. George W. Bush’s administration, as well as several far-right politicians who had consistently made concerted efforts against the rights of women in the United States, had suddenly become desperately concerned in saving an ‘oppressed Afghan woman’ from a ‘barbaric Afghan man.’ This is exemplified especially in Laura Bush’s own presidential address to the nation, where she explained why it was necessary to involve American troops overseas. It is very clear here, that a moral appeal was used to legitimize an aimless and expensive war effort. This is just one example of how the constructed narrative has been applied, and as Edward Said explains in his book ‘Orientalism,’ the domination of the Constitutive Other by means of colonial structures lays its foundation on the notion that the subaltern, to use Spivak’s language, is oppressed by their own culture rather than by a colonial legacy.
There have been many developments in the discourse of Muslim women’s oppression since the invasion of Afghanistan, some of which include the testimonies of Muslim women experiencing forms of oppression themselves. However, their testimonies have been selectively edited, filtered, and used against their consent to further justify the asymmetrical power structure that allows for American occupation and continued Western influences. In order to explain the motive behind spotlighting these testimonies, we can use Spivak’s theory again to map out how it became possible for these accounts to be taken out of their original context. We can understand the original owners of these testimonies as subaltern women because they have been excluded from society’s established structure for political representation. Simultaneous to that, the use of their testimony by the "Enlightened" West reconceives and deflects knowledge of colonial history for the purpose of flattering the liberal-progressive consciousness. To further extrapolate on Spivak’s theory, the use of a Muslim woman’s testimony can be understood as an objectification of their personal experience for the purpose of providing qualitative data to support specific agendas. This is problematic, because it doesn’t provide an honest representation of the subaltern’s testimony and at the same time traps it within an objectified gaze.
Perhaps the most easily accessible example of this type of exploitation of testimony can be seen in the media frenzy that surrounded Pakistani activist Malala Yosoufazi, who stood against the Taliban to protect the schooling of women in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Following an assassination attempt by the Taliban, Malala became known around the world as a heroine. Her written works on education in the region, as well as her assassination attempt, have since been co-opted by the Western media to depict the region as anti-education and anti-women, so as to justify the continued US campaigns against the Taliban. In these narratives, Pakistanis who send their children to schools are ignored as victims of the Taliban and erased of their testimony to portray the region and its people as a whole as savages as a result of their religion. As Assed Baig explains in his 2013 article, the West has exploited her testimony to maintain a tradition of colonial legacy to serve its own interests. The following quotes from his article perfectly describe the paradigm in operation and the hypocrisy of the Western media.
“This is a story of a native girl being saved by the white man. Flown to the UK, the Western world can feel good about itself as they save the native woman from the savage men of her home nation. It is a historic racist narrative that has been institutionalised. Journalists and politicians were falling over themselves to report and comment on the case. The story of an innocent brown child that was shot by savages for demanding an education and along comes the knight in shining armour to save her... |
Harkening back to Spivak, she argues also that the subaltern is perfectly capable of speaking out against their oppressor(s). This point is exemplified by the fact that Malala herself is certainly aware of the way that her testimony has been co-opted by Western narratives in both the media and in foreign policy. Likewise, Malala's works are only reported in the West when they can be used to support the narrative that the West needs to save the women in Afghanistan and Pakistan from Islam.