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

by Mariam Khan

Photographs of Muslim women holding up placards explaining exactly how they were not #TraditionallySubmissive spread across the internet.

It does not represent the experiences of every Muslim woman or claim to cover every single issue faced by Muslim women. It’s not possible to create that book. But this book is a start, a movement: we Muslim women are reclaiming and rewriting our identity. Here are essays about the hijab*

We are not asking for permission any more. We are taking up space. We’ve listened to a lot of people talking about who Muslim women are without actually hearing Muslim women. So now, we are speaking. And now, it’s your turn to listen.

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.

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).

When a woman is ‘too much’, she is essentially uncontrollable and unashamed. That makes her dangerous.

Writing is dangerous because we are afraid of what the writing reveals: the fears, the angers, the strengths of a woman under a triple or quadruple oppression.

Revolutions rattle the privileged and discomfort the complacent. They are never about the comfortable majority. Rather, it is always the minority, especially those who are caught by the intersection of multiple oppressions, who instigate and inspire.

Profanity – especially delivered by women – is a powerful way to transgress the red lines of politeness and niceness that the patriarchy – shared by the rock and the hard place – demands of us as women. I say fuck because I am not supposed

Women swearing is considered rude for fear that it strips off their elegance and submissiveness. Even in an environment where it feels "acceptable", there's the invisible line that somehow reminds them not "to do it too much". Again, for the same fear of losing the docile feminity.

We are the ones we have been waiting for. We are the revolution. Be too loud. Swear too much. Go too far.

Health and wellbeing, I repeat to myself, my little mantra. It has a nice rhythm to it. Health and wellbeing. I might not have done much in the way of physical fitness but this feels right. I am Indian. Yoga runs through my blood, it’s as natural to me as my vitamin D deficiency. OK, so maybe

They liked to gather around and compare notes on minor ailments as a leisurely pastime; an opportunity to flaunt their martyrdom and indulge in a touch of the Bollywood melodrama they enjoyed so much.

ankle wrapped above her salwar for maximum visibility, telling anyone who’d listen how she simply had to come out and get the materials for her daughter’s wedding as planned (even though the wedding wasn’t for months and the shopping could definitely be done another day).

Single parenthood isn’t renowned for its childcare options and so, by default, I was constantly at her side. Inseparable.

He wanted his peers to envy him for his wonderful, modern wife. But should one of them show it, he’d fly into a jealous rage, banning her from anything but a salwar kameez, and telling her whose name was on the lease.

She was suitably disapproving of my own ‘improper’ behaviour – the drinking, the boys, my total disregard for sound economic choices, and how I’d recoil at the thought of children – but never gave me enough grief for it to make a meaningful difference to my behaviour. Perhaps she had a quiet sympathy. Perhaps she had more important things to think about. Or perhaps I simply remember it wrong.

Respectability is an exclusive club, and once you’re out, you’re out.

‘The notion of modesty is abused by men across the planet – they just give it different names. It winds me up. Why is it always men leading the debate on what’s appropriate or not?’

‘Never, ever let people make you feel ashamed for who you are. You know what is right and wrong in your heart, and it is your heart that Allah sees, that I see, and that you have to see every day when

you

look in the mirror. No one has the right ...

‘No way!’ I yelp in Fizzy’s direction as the penny drops. ‘That’s Hussein, that’s her husband from the rishta site!’ ‘Remind me to look at the site when I get home,’ Fizzy says, without returning my gaze. Her eyes are locked on the magnificent couple dancing, synchronized, iridescent. After

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.

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. Khadija’s business and her money belonged to her, and that gave her freedom.

‘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.

Or she could return to England with me as a baby of British descent. My mother knew that England could give me everything that would be denied to me in a wealthy but parochial rural community that dictated that girls remain in the home.

She spoke of the poverty; the small rooms she rented; the rats scurrying in the corners; the damp in the walls and the freezing cold of northern England winters.

‘no one can make you feel inferior without your consent’.

I decided that I would no longer allow the auntie-jis to make me feel as if I were a second-class citizen.

was a young man of Pakistani origin.

Is it me, or is it always the Pakistani/Indian men who implement this cold-hard patriarchy attitude even in countries that are not their home.

‘I have every right to be here. Your family must be proper backwards to keep daughters locked up at home.’

As if my being an Asian Muslim woman somehow rendered me a second-class citizen behind all the white English people and the Asian Muslim men.

society’s patriarchal chains are strong. Despite my role model and the advantage of a girls’ school education, there were many days when I felt I didn’t belong, and that I didn’t deserve the career and success I had.

You see, in my twenties and thirties, I always felt that to accept praise of any kind was to show myself up to be an awful, boastful person.

Different campaigns highlighted different injustices. Some were common to all women, regardless of race and religion, like rape and domestic violence.

It was the disparity between the life of Khadija and the lives of some modern British Muslim

women,

Above all, Khadija taught me that I had every right to exist as I chose. Just like she did as the wealthiest merchant in Mecca.

Muslims take to social media proclaiming that these shows do not represent Muslims or the British Muslim experience.

Why do we need representation, and if it is a means to an end, what is the end goal?

The use of a Muslim woman is seemingly dependent on what’s being promoted or sold.

There is a monolithic brush that all Muslims are painted with because of our common thread: the belief in Allah, his messengers and his book.

women align themselves with feminist movements in order to uphold and fight for the rights that have been given to us in Islam, and those women have continuously come under scrutiny, one of the critiques being that these movements are predicated on the equality of the sexes rather than equality in the eyes of our creator,

But as Western feminism erases God from the scene, there is no standard left—except men.

If our feminism is not intersectional then we run two risks: that we will never escape this idea of the default being male, and that we dilute our faith in our attempts to mould Islam to make it more palatable to outsiders.

Mariah Idrissi, who then went on to be dubbed one of the first global Muslim hijab-wearing models. Idrissi – by her own admission – was overwhelmed by the response which, overall, seemed to be one of praise: H&M

and Mariah Idrissi were breaking barriers, they said.

Representation had arrived! The Muslim moment really was here and it was matched with headline upon headline about the Muslim pound, how much Muslim consumer segments were worth, and how it was Muslim women in particular who were breaking stereotypes.

representation within a secular system with the primary purpose to make money for large companies had been held up as the solution to racism, to othering and to ignorance.

by all of this representation politics.