WWHD

Abstract

“I appear as one girl, one person,” Malala Yousafzai said after accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014. But “I am not a lone voice, I am … those 66 million girls who are deprived of education. And today I am not raising my voice, it is the voice of those 66 million girls.” Yousafzai is arguably the most famous Muslim woman in the world. Born and raised in northwest Pakistan, Taliban militants attempted to kill her in 2012 because she believed girls should have access to a quality education. Since recovering, Yousafzai has become a symbol in the global fight against misogyny. Time magazine listed her as one of the world’s most influential people in 2014, 2015, and 2016.1 U.S. Foreign Policy and Muslim Women’s Human Rights is not about Yousafzai, but it explores the political and cultural networks that buttress her fame. During the last quarter of the twentieth century, Muslim women’s human rights went from the periphery to the center of U.S. foreign policy, and Kelly Shannon’s book explains why. She is interested in the activists who grabbed ahold of the issue after 1979 and the policymakers who engaged their demands earnestly during the 1990s. The relationship between these two groups organizes Shannon’s story, which presents “women as both objects and creators of U.S. foreign policy” while suggesting that “American cultural attitudes toward Muslim women” were “absorbed fully into U.S. policy, effectively dissolving the boundary between hard and soft power” (8). It is a capacious, provocative argument, and Shannon’s conclusions transcend the particularities of her case study. Women did not just have a seat at the table after the Cold War; they changed the conversation about American power, inventing the world that eventually recognized Yousafzai as a hero.