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

by Mariam Khan

I couldn’t be a proper Muslim, and I couldn’t be properly gay. I couldn’t even kill myself properly.

I’m not going to supply you with quotes from the Quran or the hadith to justify my own existence. You can google those yourself. I’ve had to justify my own existence to myself for too long. I’m not doing it any more.

Tomorrow, the next day, and the next, when I’m getting dressed, I will look at myself in the mirror and decide there and then if today will be a hijab day. It looks like the scarves had better come with me.

‘Don’t speak for me. I’m perfectly capable of speaking for myself. Does that sound oppressed or weak?’

We are stuck between two sets of people who try to use us as pawns, then get angry when we don’t oblige.

I’m too busy fucking shit up in the hope of making a better future for the generations that come after me. What are you doing?

Whilst Islam gives a woman the right to choose her partner and the right to leave him, Pakistani culture, the culture of my parents, does not.

There is a difference between guilt and shame. Guilt comes from recognizing one’s own mistake. Shame is heaped upon us by others. And there is a place for shame in society. It should be heaped upon the patriarchal cultures that subjugate women. It should be felt by the women who allow it to continue, both through their silence and their actions. It should be placed upon the men who stand by and allow their mothers, their sisters, their wives and their aunts to oppress women in the name of Islam, men who benefit from their privilege. And it also belongs to the men who abandon us to its effects, simply because they are too afraid to speak up.

Where a man needs to state his desire to divorce his wife on three separate occasions, a woman need only make the request once.

I am an emancipated Muslim woman. There is no contradiction in this.

‘If you know the enemy and you know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.’

So, Black Muslim Women need to take up space. To be unapologetically Muslim, unapologetically black and unapologetically women.

The question of Islamophobia today is primarily one that is encouraged and legislated by politicians, institutionalized by state agencies, and reproduced in spaces of education, employment, housing, and health.

The bedtime stories I was raised on were not of blonde princesses, waiting for a man to save them, but of Ma and Aunt: two resourceful and resilient Muslim matriarchs from whom I was descended.

And I am their granddaughter, the daughter of storytellers, the daughter of stories.