The question: Can western feminism save Muslim women?

I don't think it is necessarily imperialistic to want Muslim women to have rights. After all, women's oppression is a global phenomenon and so it should also be a global concern; countenancing it in the name of religious or cultural differences just allows us to evade the responsibility of trying to do something about it.

But we should be clear that the US-led invasion of Afghanistan had nothing to do with the feminist sensibilities of George Bush (or Tony Blair). If Bush had been committed to women's welfare, his administration wouldn't have tried to undermine some of their hard-won rights in the US itself. The US "coalition" invaded Afghanistan to kill Osama bin Laden and his cohorts, not to save Afghan women. This is not to deny that Anglo-European men have long harboured the desire to be Muslim women's saviours; it is simply to point out that this desire becomes an alibi for imperialist ventures. Hence the ease with which Bush could package the Afghan war, which is a war for US global supremacy, as a war for Afghan women's freedom.

However, I do think that it is imperialist hubris to believe that the kind of power the US exercises can be benevolent, regardless of the personal charm of its new president, or that it is possible to bestow freedom through force or emancipate women from the men of their own culture. In fact, if after years of US war and occupation, "moderate" Afghans can only come up with an unspeakably ghastly law that would tie sex to food (allow a husband to starve a wife if she doesn't have sex with him), doesn't it testify to the limits of the US project of liberating Afghans? It should also tell us that the inveterate misogyny of tribal culture is not localised in the Taliban or their misogynistic interpretations of Islam.

Although it is not always productive to see the world from within the template of western history or values, I think we can learn some lessons from the history of western colonialism and, indeed, of civil rights movements in the west. One of the lessons is that whenever and wherever there was an expansion in racial or sexual or political rights or liberties, it was because the people themselves fought for them. In other words, rights weren't simply bestowed on people by the state or enforced by foreign occupiers. The old adage really is true, that real change cannot be compelled through force. This may be why the Qur'an (westernised "Koran") also forbids coercion in religion.

Read more... click on the link Asma Barlas, above.