Rina Amiri, a research associate with the Women Waging Peace

Initiative at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, writes in a New York Times op-ed piece, Muslim Women as Symbols — and Pawns: ‘It has come to be assumed in much of the Muslim world that to be a proponent of

women’s rights is to be pro-Western. This enmeshing of gender and geopolitics

has robbed Muslim women of their ability to develop a discourse on their rights

independent of a cultural debate between the Western and Muslim worlds.’ NY Times