Representations of Muslim Women after 9/11 and the Enduring Entanglements of “Writing Against”

Abstract

In the fall of 2021, I taught a graduate seminar entitled Women and Gender in the Arab World at Georgetown University. It had been two decades since 9/11 and the start of the “War on Terror,” events that most of my students were not old enough to recall, but which still had, in one way or another, profoundly shaped their interest or experience in the region. In planning the course, I received a syllabus that had been used in past years. The first week was an introduction to the course, and it consisted of two essays intended to frame the state of the field of Middle East women's studies: Lila Abu-Lughod's “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?” and Mounira Charrad's “Gender in the Middle East: Islam, State, and Agency.”