Do Women in Syria Need ‘Saving’?
What I witnessed in Damascus was women of all ages occupying public space with ease. They did not appear provisional or apologetic, but embedded in the city.
Don’t we all?!
When we look at the so-called international liberal order, with the US as its main anchor, what do we see? A crony, clientelist system revolving around the abuse of young girls and women. A system which, as Nancy Fraser argues in Cannibal Capitalism, in a way feeds on the flesh of women. Across social negotiations, cultures and nations, subtle or conspicuous, the patriarchal mindset continues to determine what women can do, cannot do, must do and must not do.
A panel of independent experts appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council recently concluded that the crimes revealed in the Epstein files showed a commodification and dehumanisation of women and girls. “So grave is the scale, nature, systematic character, and transnational reach of these atrocities against women and girls,” they wrote, “that a number of them may reasonably meet the legal threshold of crimes against humanity.”
So yes, women in Syria need ‘saving’. So do women anywhere else. The problem lies with the verb. “Saving” presumes victimhood as a starting point. It assumes that women wait to be rescued. But, as we say in Turkish, ‘ne münasebet ve sen kimsin beni kurtarıyorsun?’
Any support framed in that register — from different contexts, settings or temporalities — misses the point. Yani… Syrian women can do their own saving. Turkish women, Finnish women, French women can do theirs. What the feminist movement requires is not rescue but solidarity, and an approach to women’s rights that sheds its secular bias and recognises, as Saba Mahmood showed in her work Politics of Piety, that there are different modalities of agency.
The Western imagination maintains a morbid fascination with the “oppressed Muslim woman”. She is visualised as silent, monochrome, veiled — an empty vessel awaiting liberation. The image tells us less about Syria than about the West’s own anxieties. It still seeks its reflection in the Other, looking for what Homi Bhabha called neo-colonial mimicry. When it does not find that reflection, it declares the woman in question in need of saving.
From what exactly? From tradition? From Islam? Are women who live in religion-free, secular societies fully free, fully agentic? Just think about it for a moment. Wherever we feel agency, does it emerge from secularity itself, or from the daily negotiations we wage at home, at work, in society, against the state?
During and after my trip to Syria, the questions I received revolved obsessively around clothing. Do women cover their mouths?Wallahi for real. Has the number of veiled women increased since al-Sharra came to power? What did you wear? At one point I joked that I had to wear a burqa with swimwear underneath because that is apparently the dress code of Sharra-run Syria. Sometimes one has to exaggerate the absurd in order to expose it.
For those genuinely interested in how I felt walking through Damascus: I felt as I do in London, Istanbul or Paris, perhaps with more curiosity. There was no additional hostility towards women. I wore what I would normally wear at this time of year — lighter, because it was 19-20 degrees. Not once did I feel out of place or unsafe. There are parts of Syria, as in parts of many countries, where more modest clothing is customary — areas of Idlib or Raqqa, for instance. If you think life for women in Istanbul, Ankara or İzmir is the same as in Tokat, Yozgat or Batman, think again. These differences reflect demographic, social and customary variation. They are not unique to Syria or to Muslim-majority societies. Ask women in Uganda or India.
Government representation for Syrian women, though, is another matter. There are problems. For example, Aisha al-Dibs, head of the Women’s Affairs Office, appears sceptical about women’s inclusion in decision-making processes and espouses a conservative vision that does not prioritise expanding women’s public roles. Despite the fact that women bore much of the burden of fifteen years of war — inside Syria and as refugees — they remain underrepresented in the transitional administration. Women-led organisations have continued their work in education and rights awareness despite repression by the Baath regime and violence during the war. They called for 30 per cent representation in the new arrangement. That did not materialise. Unfortunately, this pattern is not, again, unique to Syria. It is hardly surprising in a world where the US president mocks a Swiss female president, Karin Keller-Sutter, and raises tariffs because he claims to dislike her.
The title of this piece draws on Lila Abu-Lughod’s Do Muslim Women Need Saving? In that work, she describes a flattened geography she calls “Islamland”, where women — rural Egyptian farmers or cosmopolitan Syrian entrepreneurs alike — are viewed as inhabitants of a single medieval prison, a narrative that serves a specific purpose by fueling a moral crusade that casts the West as enlightened liberator and Muslim women as passive victims.
Ethnographic research by Abu-Lughod and Saba Mahmood complicates that picture. Thankfully. Because the impulse to “save” often functions as an extension of secular-liberal hegemony, disregarding the voices and choices of the women concerned. Framing the issue as a binary struggle between tradition and liberation, or mobilising the familiar “veil as prison” trope, obscures the ways women navigate authority, faith and social expectation.
Muslim women are rarely the helpless figures of sensationalist coverage. Some invoke Islamic legal frameworks to challenge dictatorships supported by the West. Others embrace piety as a form of discipline and self-realisation. Agency does not always resemble Western-style rebellion.
What I witnessed in Damascus was women of all ages occupying public space with ease. They moved in groups, smoked shisha while conversing — in groups of five or six, in pairs, as sisters, as mothers and daughters — lingered in cafés, and crossed streets without hesitation. When I say they owned their space, I mean it. They did not appear provisional or apologetic, but embedded in the city. That presence felt more significant at this stage than the appointment of token female politicians to satisfy European expectations — a performance at which al-Sharra has shown himself adept. I relayed this observation about women to a young man who “fought for the revolution in Idlib” and describes himself as religious, telling him that no one should dare to push these women out, constrain them in anyway or narrow their public space; any government that tried would see a real slap in the face. He nodded and said, “Yes, yes, we know. Syrian women are no joke.”
Good, I thought.
Mahmood and Abu-Lughod, in different ways, dismantled the monopoly over how freedom is defined. Islamic doctrine, for some women, is not an obstacle but a resource — a means of negotiating authority within family and community. These women are not passive subjects of creed. They are actors within it. Western feminists sometimes fail to recognise this form of empowerment because it is articulated through tradition rather than against it. It took me half a lifetime to understand this, coming as I do from a stratum in Turkey in which the French version of laicite is considered the ultimate display of modernity and freedom, almost sanctified. So, as someone still ‘unlearning’, I try to be more alert to such binary framings of women, including in the case of Syria.
Meanwhile, today’s global order remains hostile to women. As Nancy Fraser argues, the formal economy rests upon a vast substratum of unwaged care work — cooking, cleaning, child-rearing — disproportionately performed by women. Capitalism demands more labour while cutting the welfare structures that once sustained domestic life. Add to this the persistence of femicide across continents.
Before we fixate on Eastern traditions and religions, these structural realities deserve acknowledgement. Feminist solidarity requires that we resist homogenising essentialism and recognise that women’s struggles are not limited to any particular culture or confined to one part of the world.
That is the way.