Responding Post: Safety, Saving, or Not

Although Ibrahim's essay "Living While Muslim" specifically targets Muslim American women, she touches upon topic that are relevant to many people whole struggles with identities, especailly those born in one country but raised and live in another. As an Chinese citizen living in America, I can empathize with Ibrahim's situation of always feeling like and outsider although we live in American and--to some extend--consider ourselves to be American; but no matter how long we lived in America, or what documents we have to prove our "American-ness," we usually are viewed as what our physical appearances show. After 9/11, Arabs, South-Asians, and Muslim Americans all were viewed as terrorists and face difficulty when traveling as they are commonly the ones needed to be searched--some see it as random selection while other view it as racial profiling. Under the name of protecting the safety of the nation, these "random" searches are justified and miss the main elements of the problem; like we have discussed in class about how supremacy crimes lack the conversations about the roles race, gender, and sexuality have in crimes committed by white heterosexual men, this discrimination against these groups of people in airports also disregard these factors. Therefore to what extend, does protecting the safety of the nation goes to far as to racial profiling and discriminating those whose does not fit into the the characteristics of being American? Ibrahim calls for this issues to be prevalent to not only Arabs, South-Asians, and Muslim Americans, but it also affects all travels and global citizens.                           

Abu-Lughod's "Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others" and Bunch's article "Whose Security" both provide reasons to further support Ibrahim's argument that this issues is prevalent to all and they also give suggestions to what can be done to globally to remedy this problem. Both authors criticizes America's obsession of using the idea that we are saving Muslim women to justify our actions overseas. However, in actually this reason hides the real agenda behind America's intervention in the Middle East. By saying that America is saving Muslim women it suggest that these women need and want to be saved, it undermines the Muslim culture, and imposes American values as the right one. On another note, both authors provide solutions to correct such notion. While Abu-Lughod suggest that people should be more tolerant, acceptable, and more respectful of other cultures, Bunch suggest that local politics should also incorporate global politics to expand such equal protection under the law to all. I agree with both authors suggestions. I think if a super power nation like the United States takes the initiative to understand and recognize that women rights is also a human right and that we can no longer use the idea of cultural relativism to justify that these issues does not pertain to us, then we can progress a step forward to realizing how everyone in the world is connected and we cannot just fix one nation and leave another to perish in poverty, inequality, discrimination, poor education, hungry, etc. While these suggestion are great solution, it is a bit too idealistic to be achieve. In a world obsessed with power, wealth, and superiority, no nation will see the need to help out another. We live in a world that upholds the tragedy of the commons: the individual interests outweigh the common goods.