This was written by Özlem Sensoy and Elizabeth Marshall, and originally appeared in Rethinking Schools Online. Part I & Part II ran earlier this week.

Learning a Stereotype Lesson #3: Muslim Girls and Women Want To Be Saved by the West

For many in the West, the plight of Afghanistan is framed exclusively within a post 9/11, U.S.-led “war on terror.” While radical women’s organizations like RAWA have condemned brutality against women in Afghanistan for decades, their voices were absent, and are now muted, in a landscape of storytelling that is dominated by white Western women representing them. In an open letter to Ms. magazine, for instance, a U.S.-based supporter of RAWA notes that U.S.-centric women’s organizations such as the Feminist Majority fail to give “credit to the independent Afghan women who stayed in Afghanistan and Pakistan throughout the 23-year (and counting) crisis in Afghanistan and provided relief, education, resistance and hope to the women and men of their country.” Novels like Broken Moon play on popular scripts in which the West saves the people of the “East.” These stories cannot be seen as simply works of fiction. They ultimately influence real world experiences of girls in the Middle East and (most relevant to us) of Muslim and non-Muslim girls in our schools in the West.

Deborah Ellis and Suzanne Fisher Staples gain legitimacy as authors because they have visited, lived, and/or spoken to real girls and women in the Middle East. The Breadwinner trilogy and Under the Persimmon Tree each include a map and an author’s note that touches on the “tumultuous” history of Afghanistan and a glossary. The history offered in the end matter and in the texts themselves glosses over the history of colonization in the region. The authors dilute what is an extremely complex history that has led up to the current violence in the Middle East, particularly the role of U.S. foreign policy and military interventions that contributed to the rise of the Taliban.

The authors fail to capture the complexities of U.S. involvement and intervention in favor of stereotypical lessons about educating and saving Muslim girls. As Sonali Kolhatkar, vice president of the Afghan Women’s Mission, and Mariam Rawi, a member of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), argue: “Feminists and other humanitarians should learn from history. This isn’t the first time the welfare of women has been trotted out as a pretext for imperialist military aggression.” (2009) On one level these texts are part of a larger public pedagogy in which the United States and its allies are framed as fighting a good fight in Afghanistan and other regions of the Middle East. Readers are encouraged to continue to empathize with the lead character and the ideas that are associated with her: saving wounded children rather than critiquing U.S. policy, “pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps” rather than organizing together, fighting against all odds—ideas firmly rooted in mainstream U.S. ideals of exceptionalism and Western values of individuality.

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