The Debate about Gender, Religion, and Rights: Thoughts of a Middle East Anthropologist

Abstract

I want to raise some questions in this essay about the impoverished way debates on the relation among gender, religion, and human rights are often framed. I approach this issue as an anthropologist who comes from a discipline that, whatever its flaws, thinks hard about social and cultural processes and what it is to be human; I also approach it as someone who has spent her academic life thinking about and studying the Muslim Middle East, a region that carries a heavy symbolic load in the Western imagination with respect to the relation between religion and women's rights.