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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Lila Abu-Lughod
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Extract

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.

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Little-Known Documents
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PMLA , Volume 121 , Issue 5 , October 2006 , pp. 1621 - 1630
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2006

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