Saving the Nameless Afghan Girl

For seventeen years Steve McCurry searched for the girl that captivated the western world with eyes that were “haunted and haunting, and in them you can read the tragedy of a land drained by war.” McCurry attempted to find this woman several times after the photograph was taken including several attempts in the nineties when the Taliban was in power. Unfortunately these endeavors ended in failure as he was limited by his ability to travel through the region during the time. However after the September 11 attacks in New York and the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan in the War of Terror, there was a large increase in interest for the girl who had been photographed in the 1980’s.

The interest for the woman in the photo stems not only from the fact that her eyes and face became a sort of spokes person for the war in Afghanistan in the eighties but also from the fact that nothing about her was known. McCurry says that when the photo was taken he didn’t expect it to stand out from any of the photos he had taken that day, photos he took while documenting life for refugees in a refugee camp in Pakistan. That is why he never bothered to ask for her name, about her family, about her life.

Yet could there be another explanation for the western media’s fascination for this woman? There is no doubt that the photo itself warrants attention, it is after all a very good photo of a young girl with strong piercing eyes. However, if this image had been of a boy with strikingly green eyes, would it have been able to garner the amount of attention and interest that this young girl did? What if the girl would have had brown eyes? There is the distinct possibility that the western medias interest also stems from our often-misplaced desire to save Muslim women.
According to Lila Abu-Lughod the history of saving Muslim women extends far back into the eras of colonialism. In India, the examples Abu-Lughod uses are the of interventions of Sati, in the Middle East and Arab regions she cites Englishman that opposed veiling and saw it as a form of oppression (while opposing women’s suffrage at home.)

The idea of saving Muslim women became central again with the current military campaigns that the United States is waging in Afghanistan and Iraq. After the invasion of Afghanistan Laura Bush, wife of then president George W. Bush, made a radio address to the nation in which she stressed the importance and impact the war had on the lives of Afghani women. While the invasion may have been justified by the attacks of September 11 alone (not to mention U.N. support), the radio address by Laura Bush added another element in support of the war. The speech was problematic because it approached the issue that women face under the scope of cultural relativism. That is, there was a concern for these women that intended to free them from the oppression imposed upon them by men and laws from the Taliban. It made those issues the primary ones while also mixing in other more important ones into the mix such as malnutrition, poverty, and poor health, issues that had had nothing to do with the Taliban. The issue in essence became one of “white men needing to save brown women from men.”

“The Politics of Fear”: Racializing Muslims in the Media

In July 2008, months before the presidential election, The New Yorker ran a cover cartoon entitled “The Politics of Fear” by Barry Blitt. In the caricature, Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, stand facing each other in an oval-shaped room. The presidential candidate is dressed in a tan tunic, sandals, and a turban. Michelle wears combat boots, camouflage army pants, and a tight black shirt. A machine gun is draped over her right shoulder and her hair crowns her head in an Afro. The Obamas are connected to each other by the fist-bump that became infamous in the summer of 2008. Behind Barack is a lit fireplace, in which burns an American flag, and above the mantel hangs a framed portrait of Osama Bin Laden. The cartoon is charged with criticisms of race, religion, and the politics of the War on Terror. I would like to argue that this cover of The New Yorker is an example of the Islamophobia that has permeated our society since September 11th.

Islamophobia, in its most basic form, is a fear or hatred of Islam and Muslims. In the post-9/11 American society, however,

Islamophobia has become attached to a racial component. Junaid Rana argues that race has a long history of attaching to a cultural or religious component of a group of people. For example, in the late 15th century, the Spanish Inquisition racialized Jews and Muslims by claiming that they were inherently inferior to Christians, and therefore needed to be converted or destroyed. Scientific racism of the late 18th and early 19th centuries allowed the religious component to be separated from race, and race was thus determined by white supremacy. Decades later, Hitler applied this biological ideology to Jews during the Holocaust.

As an immediate reaction to the September 11th terrorist attacks, Congress passed the USA PATRIOT Act, which expanded government surveillance powers and avoided both the bureaucratic and judicial systems. As a result of the act, Arab and Muslim Americans became the target of thousands of FBI and CIA arrests, most without knowledge of their charges or the evidence against them. Essentially, the liberty of these Americans was taken in order to keep the nation secure from future terrorist attacks. As Rana argues, racial profiling has become rampant in our nation, relying on the racialized logic that assumes Muslims can be identified solely on appearance. “Muslim” and “Arab” quickly became conflated terms, and anyone with a beard, turban, or veil was deemed an enemy.

“The Politics of Fear” cartoon takes the identity of Muslims a bit further. Barack and Michelle Obama are African-American, a historically racialized and consequently marginalized group in American society. Yet in the caricature, the identity of the Obamas is mapped onto the current ideology of Islamophobia and reflects the concerns of the time surrounding the true religion and ethnic origins of Barack Obama. Obama’s turban resembles that of Bin Laden’s in the background, and without any other indication, the reader assumes Obama is Muslim, based solely on appearance. Michelle, on the other hand, is not dressed in a traditional hijab that is so representative of Muslim women. Rather, she wears a militant outfit, coupled with wild hair and machine gun, and she can easily be classified as a terrorist. The skin color of the Obamas even seems to be lightened in order to give them the appearance of Arabs or Muslims rather than African-Americans. By appropriating their blackness and giving them a Muslim identity, Blitt effectively makes the Obamas the enemy of the nation, even including a burning American flag to further emphasize his point.