THE ACTIVE SOCIAL LIFE OF “MUSLIM WOMEN’S RIGHTS”: A Plea for Ethnography, not Polemic, with cases from egypt and palestine

Rather than arguing about whether “Muslim women ” do or do not have rights, I suggest that we begin from the premise that the concept of, and the practices around, “Muslim women’s rights ” have an active social life today that can and should be studied ethnographically. Th e kinds of questions that guide us then become: In what debates and institutions do “Muslim women’s rights ” partake? How are they mediated? What work do the notion and the practices organized in its terms do in various places, for various kinds of women? What infra-structures support them? As an anthropologist, I examine just a few of the many sites where “Muslim women’s rights ” are diff erentially in play: in Egyptian and Palestinian women’s NGOs as well as in rural villages where ordinary women and girls live their lives at the intersec-tion of national media and local institutions. “Muslim women’s rights”—something to fi ght for, debate, con-sider historically, see cross-culturally, make happen, organize around, fund, and examine in action (as expressed or as violated)—have an extraordinarily active social life in our contemporary world. Th ere is no one in the US or Europe who does not know something or have an opinion about “Muslim women’s rights, ” and there are not many parts of the Muslim world where “rights ” are not also in play. As this concept of “Muslim women’s rights ” circulates across continents, traveling in and out of classrooms and government policy offi ces; UN forums in Ne