{"id":5620,"date":"2010-03-24T00:00:09","date_gmt":"2010-03-24T08:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/muslimahmediawatch.org\/?p=5620"},"modified":"2010-03-24T00:00:09","modified_gmt":"2010-03-24T08:00:09","slug":"save-the-muslim-girl-part-iii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/mmw\/2010\/03\/save-the-muslim-girl-part-iii\/","title":{"rendered":"“Save the Muslim Girl!” Part III"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

This was written by \u00d6zlem Sensoy and Elizabeth Marshall, and originally appeared in Rethinking Schools Online<\/a>. Part I & Part II ran earlier this week. <\/em><\/p>\n

Learning a Stereotype Lesson #3: Muslim Girls and Women Want To Be Saved by the West<\/strong><\/p>\n

For many in the West, the plight of Afghanistan is framed exclusively within a post 9\/11, U.S.-led \u201cwar on terror.\u201d While radical women\u2019s 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<\/em>. magazine, for instance, a U.S.-based supporter of RAWA notes that U.S.-centric women\u2019s organizations such as the Feminist Majority fail to give \u201ccredit 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.\u201d Novels like Broken Moon<\/em> play on popular scripts in which the West saves the people of the \u201cEast.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> trilogy and Under the Persimmon Tree<\/em> each include a map and an author\u2019s note that touches on the \u201ctumultuous\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s Mission, and Mariam Rawi, a member of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), argue: \u201cFeminists and other humanitarians should learn from history. This isn\u2019t the first time the welfare of women has been trotted out as a pretext for imperialist military aggression.\u201d (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, \u201cpulling oneself up by one\u2019s bootstraps\u201d rather than organizing together, fighting against all odds\u2014ideas firmly rooted in mainstream U.S. ideals of exceptionalism and Western values of individuality.<\/p>\n

Teaching a More Complicated Truth<\/strong><\/p>\n

We support teachers using books like The Breadwinner<\/em> with the pedagogical goals of critical examination. We are not advocating for the one \u201cright\u201d Muslim girl story, nor do we suggest that teachers avoid using these books in classrooms (for we recognize that in many cases, decisions about what books teachers have access to are made by economic constraints at the school and district levels). We would, however, like to offer suggestions for the kinds of questions teachers could ask in order to use these resources in ways that are critically minded:<\/p>\n