Essay On Islamic Women In Popular Media

There has been a longstanding issue of the problematic representation of Muslim women, specifically in popular media. As far back one can remember, popular media has constructed a distorted view of Muslim women. This construction portrays Muslim women to be something that they aren’t in the eyes of Westerners, which leads many Westerners to form an opinion about how Muslim women are and should be in general. This is troublesome for Westerners may, and many times do, develop the notion that Muslim women are in need of help and “saving” by the Westerners for they are oppressed at the hands of men. This is an ethnocentric perspective for Westerners judge the culture of Muslim women according to the standards of their own culture. This may also
To address the problematic representation of Muslim women, Lila Abu-Lughod has written an article titled “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others” (2002). This touches on the historical tradition of Muslim women’s representation, which can be thought to be Eurocentric. There are, however, pieces of work that represent women in a much different light. Rebecca Popenoe does exactly this in the ethnography Feeding Desire, in which women are portrayed to be in control of their bodies and Popenoe understands this for she avoids looking at these women from her own perspective. I will expand on this discussion by first describing Muslim women’s representation in the movie Honor Diaries, then relate the movie to Abu-Lughod’s article, and end off with a different representation by Popenoe. It is interesting to see different anthropological and non-anthropological perspectives on the representation of Muslim women and the value of anthropological studies on Muslim