Muslim women are...? Discuss

As a Pakistani and an academic, I'm tired of the lack of nuance in discussions like this and of constantly having to tell people that gross generalisations, sweeping statements, and titillating pictures, don't make the argument any more solid or acceptable, even when the author is a local.

The most astounding characteristic of Eltahawy's piece is that it ignores one of the very first lessons that students of Orientalism are or should be familiar with. There's a simple exercise I use in one of my segments on women and religion in my courses. When we get to a discussion of Islamand Muslim women, I ask my students to fill in the blank for me: "Muslim women are ____ ". The students come up with many responses and all immediate. Now I ask them to imagine if I had asked them to finish this sentence: "Christian women are ____." And they look utterly confused.

What country am I talking about? What race? What kind of Christian? Are they evangelical? In short, they realise that the category of Christian woman is meaningless unless you have further specific details.

We accord complexity, diversity, and nuance to our understanding of other religions, but when it comes to Islam it all seems to be painted with one big brush stroke and usually in the colour black. That Eltahawy talks about "women in the Middle East" as one large, undifferentiated group, and in the same paragraph talks about women being "covered up, anchored to the home, denied the simple mobility of getting into their own cars, forced to get permission from men to travel, and unable to marry without a male guardian's blessing – or divorce either", gives the impression that the above rules apply to every woman, in every country in the Middle East.

That is, of course, not true. This is the kind of sloppy and sensationalistic journalism that has made the work of academics who study and teach about the region much more difficult.

As an academic and teacher, I'm also tired of the stifling opposition between cultural relativism and universalism. Each position, if adhered to staunchly, is problematic. Using these labels quickly undermines someone's position without engaging in the particularities of their argument. If you believe in universal rights you're ethnocentric or imperialistic; if you believe in cultural relativism you are willing to excuse all kinds of abuses and oppression. We leave no possibility for complexity: that it is possible to criticise without being a ethnocentric and it is possible to ask for context without being an apologist.

The idea that political correctness, as Eltahawy says, prevents people from criticising Muslim countries is dangerous since it encourages an all out, unapologetic attack on Muslims. Islamophobia is alive and well and you don't have to go very far before you run into it.

On my first day volunteering in my daughter's first grade class, a boy told me "people from Pakistan kill other people" and that they "drop bombs". When a six year old has absorbed these messages about Muslims, a call for an unleashing of sorts is the last thing we need to be doing. And journalism, like Eltahawy's recent piece, make academic considerations of the issue more urgent and more necessary than ever.