It's Not About the Burqa: Muslim Women on Faith, Feminism, Sexuality and Race

by Mariam Khan

‘Burqa’ is a word that has been politicized, and has become synonymous with Muslim female identity: it’s just another element in the narrative written around us by others.

Women are supposed to be ‘less than’, not ‘too much’. Women are meant to be quiet, modest, humble, polite, nice, well behaved, aware of the red lines. They are supposed to tread softly and within their limits.

Patriarchy demands that of all women, but the more women fall within intersections of oppression, the more they are expected to live by those demands, and Muslim women are especially vulnerable to what I call a trifecta of oppressions: misogyny (faced by all women), racism (faced by women of colour) and Islamophobia (faced by Muslims).

Muslim women are caught between a rock – an Islamophobic and racist right wing that is eager to demonize Muslim men, and to that end misuses our words and the ways we resist misogyny within our Muslim communities – and a hard place: our Muslim communities that are eager to defend Muslim men, and to that end try to silence us and shut down the ways we resist misogyny. Bot...

Our bodies – what parts of them are covered or uncovered, for example – are proxy battlefields in their endless arguments. It matters little what we women think because ultimately, both the rock and ...

The racist, right-wing Islamophobes conveniently ignore – pretend not to know – that misogyny is not exclusive to Muslim men. The Muslim communities that accuse Muslim women who expose misogyny of ‘making us look bad’ pretend not to know that Muslim men who abuse or assault Muslim women do a sterling job of ‘making us look bad’ all on their own.

For something to be irresistible, I believe it must be a combination of exciting and dangerous – it must entice and frighten. I first came across the word ‘feminism’ on the bookshelves of my university library in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Life for fifteen-year-old girls, dangling between girlhood and womanhood, is hard enough anywhere in the world. I fell into a deep depression soon after we moved to Jeddah. I might not have heard the word ‘feminism’ yet, but I knew that the way women and girls were treated in Saudi Arabia was wrong and that this was not the Islam I was taught, nor did it represent the home I was raised in.

Those books were irresistible. And they terrified me. So much so that I would pick them up, read a few pages, put them down in fear and walk away, only to be drawn back again the next day. I was terrified because I knew on a visceral level that those books – that feminism – would unravel something that I needed, something that would change me forever.

A revolution is ‘too loud’: it defies, disobeys and disrupts patriarchy. The revolution ‘swears too much’: it tells racists and Islamophobes to fuck off and that you will never ally with them, and it tells misogynists – our men and other men – to fuck off and that you will not shut up. Revolutions ‘go too far’: if your community is ready for you, then you are too late. You must challenge your community. You must throw down the gauntlet of freedom to your community and dare it to accept.

Who decides who is ‘too loud, swears too much and goes too far’? It is usually the ‘community’. While that word and concept can provide a sense of solidarity and strength in the face of racism, Islamophobia and other bigotries, it is imperative to ask who speaks for the ‘community’ and whose interests that community serves.

Too often, ‘community’ is synonymous with men, and too often those self-appointed male leaders are the ones who determine what is ‘too far’.

Who determined that it was culture and who speaks for the community? Men and men. That is the simple answer. The more complicated answer is men and men and a system – patriarchy – that enables and protects them at the same time as it socializes women to internalize the dictates of patriarchy and to accept them as culture and as community. If women created culture and community, we would not be accused of ‘going too far’.

I believe in the power of profanity and so I demand that we tell the powers that sit on either side of that see-saw to fuck off.

I say fuck because there is nothing civil about racists, Islamophobes and misogynists arguing over my body as if I did not exist.

In my work, I make it clear that I will never ally myself with the racist Islamophobes against my community, and I let my community know that I will never shut up about its misogyny.

those misogynist men of my community are never accused of providing plenty of fodder for those racist Islamophobes to use against us.

I recognize most of the faces – unsurprising, given that this yoga class is part of my job’s new wellness programme, and the people I work with are very ‘yoga’ (they self-define as ‘eco’, and have names like Orlando and Bruschetta).

The sweet spot was having a condition that was in no way chronic or serious (that would be a mood killer) but still involved substantial effort to power through. And the more unnecessary that effort was, the better.

But to us girls, no one talked about health. Rather they talked to us about bodies, flesh. How much of it was on show, where it was shown, to whom it was shown. They talked about the colour of it, the volume of it, the texture of it, and how it looked in photos to be passed around potential suitors.

Single parenthood isn’t renowned for its childcare options and so, by default, I was constantly at her side. Inseparable. I was there for every errand, every tedious wait at the pharmacy, every sly put-down from the assessor at the benefits office, every redundancy threat from her supervisor (‘your kid being in hospital ain’t my problem, love, either come in right now, or don’t bother coming back’).

She arrived in England a well-educated woman from an influential family, already holding a diploma from the finest art school in Pakistan but with dreams of further education, sophisticated conversation, and all the latest white goods in the kitchen. Instead she found herself in cramped social housing in a mostly Asian suburb of East London, her dreams of the world shrunk to the four walls she lived between, with only two new infants for company.

But like I said, it wasn’t the marriage that was the problem. Nor the divorce. Controversial as it was in the eighties, divorce is halal and even her family back home were surprised she’d put up with him for so long.

She found new friends, mainly other single mums (Kerry, Chantelle, Khadija), as her old ones – the Pakistani Stepford wives – began to distance themselves. They were suspicious of her. After all, could they trust a divorced woman in a room with their husbands? And she did notice a shift in how the husbands treated her; how they moved a little closer, how they looked at her with leering, entitled, hungry eyes.

And then there was the new man, the secret new man, Irfan, who was kind, ambitious and funny. She loved him so deeply he would still appear in her dreams decades later. Irfan. She thought Irfan was just like her, a lost soul stuck in an arranged marriage that hadn’t played out as he’d hoped. He said he loved her, and was going to leave his wife.

Oh no

She’d fallen pregnant with a daughter: me. Irfan needed to make a choice and he did. He chose his wife. Friends, even some family, told Mum to get rid of the baby, using words like ‘disgrace’ and ‘shame’. She refused.

Mum tried her best not to let the black mark placed upon our family suffocate me, and for the most part she was successful. I just assumed the Asian families disliked us for the same reasons the white ones did: we were poor.

Even so, I learned a very important lesson. Respectability is an exclusive club, and once you’re out, you’re out.

I describe my view from the floor, sprawled out and gasping for breath while Fat Frank – who isn’t even fat, and presumably earned the name from the Napa ’98 holiday he’s always shouting about – peacefully holds tree pose in a clinging T-shirt whose slogan reads ‘Blink if you want me’. He is so daft I genuinely wonder how he is alive.

‘But maybe you didn’t think of it as an option because toxic modesty narrowed your lens about what life could look like for me,’ I reply in a smart-arse tone, and then am immediately repulsed by myself. Man, I’m such a dick, I think. I really must get off Twitter.

In between sobs I told her that Auntie B said we were gunahgar for not going to mosque. ‘Your auntie cannot read. Did you know that? She is illiterate. She has not read the Quran because she cannot. Everything she knows about it is what she’s been told.’

Fizzy tells me that on OkCupid, a dude might say something like, ‘I take care of myself and am looking for a woman who does the same,’ meaning, ‘I love unrealistic body standards on women.’ Here, they are pulling no punches. Maybe it’s because for some of them English is a second language, but there truly is no hidden subtext to, ‘I don’t want fat wife.’

Sounds like most dating sites.

‘Inshallah, it will be, inshallah. You must come. You can come – for free of course – and we can catch up after.’ She looks down at the curve of my full stomach poking out from my sari and smiles at me. ‘Seriously, come along. You look like you could use some exercise.

Wooooof

As a Muslim of Indian heritage, in addition to learning to recite the Quran in Arabic, I was expected to learn to speak, read and write Urdu from a young age. The sole purpose of acquiring this language was so that I could learn about Prophet Mohammed (peace be upon him).

The book my father gave me, however, was not about Prophet Mohammed, and although flimsy in appearance, it was the one that sowed the seeds of feminism in my mind – it taught me that the foundations of my faith were fairness and justice, and that God does not promote gender inequality.

Khadija is known to Muslims as the Mother of Believers for her position as the Prophet’s first wife. She also holds the title of First Muslim as she was the first person to accept the Prophet’s message of the One Merciful God.

what fascinated me about Khadija had nothing to do with her role as a wife and mother. It was her professional life and business acumen that drew me to her like a magnet and made her my role model. And in all the times when I have felt othered or my confidence took a knock, she came to the rescue to lift me right back up.

She was the wealthiest merchant in Mecca, and was known as Al-Tahira, the Pure One, for her honesty and integrity.

The book my father gave me celebrated Khadija. It celebrated her wealth, and most importantly it celebrated the fact that she was reliant on no man. Her feminism was about a woman’s right to be independent of anyone else.

It was the opposite of what my patriarchal Asian culture tried to enforce on women, and what was enacted and enforced by women who were complicit in their own oppression, the dreaded ‘auntie-jis’. In the eyes of the auntie-jis in my community, all women belonged to fathers, brothers, husbands and finally, in old age, to adult sons.

Even as a young child I was fully aware that I was different from everyone else because my mother had been a single parent who had then remarried. It was a courageous and unique thing for a young immigrant woman to do.

‘What will people say?’ is a line that many Asians use to control the choices of their children, especially daughters. ‘Don’t stain the family honour’ is another line drummed into young minds, as if girls and women are walking vessels through which the family can be judged on worthiness and respect.

there was another very personal reason why Khadija’s independence resonated with me. It made me realize that the choice to live on one’s own terms was not forbidden in my religion.

My mother arrived as a seventeen-year-old in the 1970s to an industrial mill town in Greater Manchester. She made the journey from India to marry a distant relative in a match arranged by her mother, my nannyma.

These young women hailed from middle-class landowning families in Gujarat, west India. They grew up with wealth and status, and were now expected to live in tiny terraced houses, cold and damp with outside loos. Within weeks of my mother’s arrival to this new land, she dutifully married my biological father. The marriage failed to last six months and they separated. Concerned for her daughter thousands of miles away, my nannyma paid for my mum to fly back home to India.

Traditional roles dictate that daughters should remain within their marriages, regardless of their treatment. My nannyma did not subscribe to this view.

Stories of boys being valued over girls is nothing new in South Asia. Boys are regarded as breadwinners for elderly parents, whereas girls are seen as burdens that have to be married off with dowries. I have engaged in enough women’s rights activism to know that the belief ‘sons are better than daughters’ is a huge problem in some parts of the world, especially in India.

For those who have little knowledge of Islam, there is the assumption that Muslim women’s oppression stems from Islamic teachings. This is simply not the case. In fact Muslim imams preach about the value of daughters, often citing that ‘a daughter opens the gates of paradise for a father’.

Islamic teachings are clear that a father has to fulfil his duty to raise and care for his daughters, and that the obligations go beyond providing financial support. He must provide a safe, peaceful and loving home environment that is conducive to his daughter’s overall spiritual and moral development.

The imams’ sermons about valuing daughters fell on many deaf ears, allowing the cultural practice of viewing daughters as burdens to flourish. The labels of ‘single parent divorcee’ and ‘fatherless girl’ were attached to my mother and me as news of my birth spread.