A LITTLE over a decade ago, in 2013, Lila Abu-Lughod`s book Do Muslim Women Need Saving? caused a stir, admittedly for its provocative title. The anthropologist dove into understanding the Western world`s obsession with saving Muslim women.

Words like `oppression`, `choice` and `freedom` `are blunt instruments for capturing the dynamics and quality of Muslim women`s lives in these places`.

The characterisation of `the oppressed Muslim women` has always been overly simplistic. We`ve seen this play out time and again in coverage or discourse around the `oppressive` hijab/ veil. She refers to the discussions in the media as `21st-century political project s` where t alk is around `culture` rather than the development of repressive regimes. And of course, how the debate is then linked to racist immigration policies. Feminism and secularism, as defined by the West, are portrayed as the panacea to Muslim culture ills.

Of course, we can distinguish between Muslim women`s reality versus their portrayal in the Western media but `the constant apologism` involved in pointing out these hypocrisies can be exhausting. When do policymakers `save` Muslim women and when do they not? I was working in this newspaper when the so-called war on terror began post-9/11 and the Americans bombed Afghanistan, one of their `aims` being to save women.

The media was more interested in framing the debate on the Taliban`s oppression of the poor Afghan women than on asking how the Taliban came to power in the first place. There were no questions about `why the bunkers and caves out of which Osama bin Laden was to be smoked `dead or alive` as President Bush announced on TV, were paid for and built by the CIA`, she wrote.

Once again, women are being used by many to justify bombing Iran. This scenario reminds me of what feminist scholar Gayatri Spivak wrote in her seminal essay, `white men saving brown women from brown men`. Women`s voices are rarely heard or I should ask, why are only white feminist voices heard? Because that is the only feminism the world will have you believe that matters. Or exists.

Once again we are hearing about Iran`s culture and religious beliefs, especially regarding its women, which is reduced to their veil, rather than exploring America`s role in creating regimes that comply with their goals. The Iranian diaspora, for example, is urging people to support the removal of an `oppressive` regime, but what do they want to replace it with? Living in exile, Reza Pahlavi, son of the deposed Shah of Iran, is openly pro-Israel. People are pawns in powerful games played by leaders withvested business interests.

Suddenly everyone`s an expert on what Iranian women want. Western `experts` are obsessed with, and stuck on, this notion that veiling `means a lack of agency` as Abu-Lughod wrote. And just like the Western world was shocked to discover that Afghan women did not throw off their burqas once they were `saved` post the US bombing in 2001, I expect we will witness something similar should a Zionist-backed coalition go in to save Iranian women.

The veil has long been used to justify military intervention. The call is never for gender justice but to rescue women from their own culture without an examination of that culture.

It is why the media in the West is used to highlighting campaigns saving, in this instance, Iranian women but not women in Gaza. Does any campaign by any Hollywood actor come to mind when you think of their showing solidarity with Palestinian women? I`m talking about something like celebrities cutting their hair to show solidaritywith Iranian women protesting the death of Mahsa Amini in custody in 2022. The hashtag for that protest movement was Hair For Freedom. What is the hashtag for the 28,000 women and girls killed by Israel since October 2023? Western feminists and their shills in brown countries are notour allies. They have silently watched as our mothers were bombed, our daughters assaulted by soldiers, as children as young as the day-old baby in Gaza died. They only speak of women`s liberation when it suits their country`s foreign policy agendas.

I find it ironic that the men who want to liberate women are wanted for crimes by the ICC, have armed Israel`s genocide and `threaten basic rights to women in their own bodies` as the filmmaker Cherien Dabais noted on social media.

It is rinse and repeat as we know too well.

Afghan women continue to be abandoned, Palestinian women continue to be starved and Iranian women`s freedom is being used to carve out new geopolitical interests.

`Projects of saving other women depend on, and reinforce a sense of superiority and are a form of arrogance that deserves to be challenged,` wrote Abu-Lughod.

Let Iranian women save themselves.

Support comes from respecting it as their resistance movement. • The wnter is an instructor of journalism.