Abu-Lughod's father was the prominent Palestinian academic Ibrahim Abu-Lughod. Her mother, Janet L. Abu-Lughod, née Lippman, was a leading American urban sociologist. She graduated from Carleton College in 1974, and obtained her PhD from Harvard University in 1984.
Career
Lughod's body of work is grounded in long-term ethnographic research in Egypt, and is especially concerned with the intersections of culture and power, as well as gender and women's rights in the Middle East. Between the late 1970s and the mid-1980s, while she was still a graduate student, Lughod spent time living with the BedouinAwlad 'Ali tribe in Egypt. She stayed with the head of the community, and lived in his household alongside his large family for a cumulative two years. Her first two books, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society and Writing Women's Worlds, are based on this fieldwork. Both books draw on her experiences living with the Bedouin women and her research into their poetry and storytelling. She explores the way that ghinnawas, songs in a poetic form that she compares to haiku and the blues, express the cultural "patterning" of the society, especially with regard to the relations between women and men. Abu-Lughod has described a reading group that she attended while teaching at Williams College – its other members included Catharine A. MacKinnon, Adrienne Rich, and Wendy Brown – as a formative engagement with the field of women's studies and a major influence on these early books. Abu-Lughod spent time as a scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study, with Judith Butler, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Donna Haraway. She also taught at New York University, where she worked on a project, funded by a Ford Foundation grant, intended to promote a more international focus in women's studies. Her 2013 book, Do Muslim Women Need Saving? investigates the image of Muslim women in Western society. It is based on her 2002 article of the same name, published in American Anthropologist. The text examines post-9/11 discussions on the Middle East, Islam, women's rights, and media. Abu-Lughod gathers examples of the Western narrative of the "abused" Muslim women who need to be saved, and explains how the international focus on "saving" these women perpetuates racist ideas of Muslim societies as barbaric. Abu-Lughod further explains how the narrative of saving Muslim women has been used as a way to justify military interventions in Muslim countries. She deftly questions the motives of feminists who feel that Muslim women should be saved from the Taliban all the while supporting injustices occurring on a structural scale in their own countries.She argues that Muslim women, like women of other faiths and backgrounds, need to be viewed within their own historical, social, and ideological contexts. The book suggests that religion is not the main factor in global inequality, suggesting instead that the most significant sources are poverty and governmental abuses coupled with global tensions. Abu-Lughod's article and subsequent book on the topic have been compared to Edward Said and Orientalism. Abu-Lughod serves on the advisory boards of multiple academic journals, including Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society and Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies.
