This week in the Guardian‘s Comment is Free belief section, contributors are asked whether Western feminism can save Muslim women. Political scientist Asma Barlas argues in response that change can come only from within:

I don’t think it is necessarily imperialistic to want Muslim women to have rights. After all, women’s oppression is a global phenomenon and so it should also be a global concern; countenancing it in the name of religious or cultural differences just allows us to evade the responsibility of trying to do something about it.

[…]

However, I do think that it is imperialist hubris to believe that the kind of power the US exercises can be benevolent, regardless of the personal charm of its new president, or that it is possible to bestow freedom through force or emancipate women from the men of their own culture. In fact, if after years of US war and occupation, “moderate” Afghans can only come up with an unspeakably ghastly law that would tie sex to food (allow a husband to starve a wife if she doesn’t have sex with him), doesn’t it testify to the limits of the US project of liberating Afghans? It should also tell us that the inveterate misogyny of tribal culture is not localised in the Taliban or their misogynistic interpretations of Islam.

Find the series here, and read Barlas’s response here.