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

by Mariam Khan

We see our work as a tool for cultural change, but what sort of change we want to be associated with is something we

over-indexed by those in the mainstream.

A marker of success, liberation, and modernity. Yet this symbol supposedly aiming to help Muslim women feel included, for many, has done the exact opposite of what it set out to do. In including one faction of society, it has ostracized another, and a number of Muslim women no longer feel represented.

We cannot deny that there is a cookie-cutter model of a Muslim woman that is seen in campaigns, movies, the media and amongst brands.

wanted Muslims as an aesthetic,

We want your hijabs but we don’t want your thoughts; we only want diversity for the pictures. And furthermore, the backlash convinced those with platforms that they had to audit their accounts, their opinions and their pasts, to ensure that they didn’t ‘offend’, so that they would never have to write an apology after being dropped from a campaign.

She was made an example of: as an immigrant Muslim woman of colour, her opinions were not welcomed.

Representation is sold to our communities as the holy grail of acceptance.

an exemplar for representation.

they are a complete deformation of my commitment to social justice.

‘Millions are eating halal food without knowing it’, and the debates about whether halal meat should be served in schools to see that consumer decisions by minorities tend to bring about political commentary.

Representation will always come in bits and pieces, and those representing will not all look like me or be cut from the same cloth.

I can’t, in good conscience, accept this award from the brand and celebrate Gal’s ambassadorship after the IDF imprisoned a 16-year-old girl named Ahed Tamimi

last month, an activist who is currently still incarcerated.

I cannot expect that everything Muslim women in the public eye do will resonate with my own ideals of what I want to see in the world.

Someone like Stormzy, who shares my values and my belief that we should seek to speak truth to positions of power, does more to represent me than a Muslim fashion blogger, despite the fact that others might assume that I would have more in common with the latter.

The diversity amongst Muslims makes it increasingly difficult to sing from the same hymn sheet on where and why we should be represented.

if we have no guidelines, no points of difference, no sense of having some barriers that we must not break,

If being Muslim is about faith, the representation of Muslims should come with terms and conditions.

For many Muslims, it is a feeling with which we can seldom identify. We find ourselves more ostracized than ever, like strangers roaming this world with no place to call home.

have negligible ‘association’ with them, have frequently been refracted through a prism that sees Islamic beliefs as regressive, constituting oppression and violence.

Muslim women to reassert their socio-political and cultural identities and act as an affirmation of their ethno-religious selves.

resulting in ‘gendered Islamophobia’, there has been a backlash: both the hijab and veil have come to signify an anti-colonial struggle and submission to something other than the hegemonic power

In fact it exacerbates those inequalities: though we make a great visual, any deviation from popular politics, beliefs, and the image of the moderate Muslimah results in alienation from those who supposedly wish to work with us.

We’ve allowed Islam to be reduced to ‘what Muslims do’ as opposed to Islam being submission to God.

I worry that we’ve contributed to this dichotomy of the fashionable, modern, ‘liberal’ Muslim woman, versus a supposedly regressive, traditional, ‘conservative’ Muslim woman.

We have to be fashionable, we have to wear make-up, we have to be pretty and on trend,

there is only room for the attractive, palatable, and fashionable Muslim woman, and the other is not just excluded, she is vilified.

I do not take kindly to aspects of my religion suddenly being acceptable, and not only tolerated but celebrated, only when a tall, white model is dressed in my ethno-religious attire.

Representation in the beauty and fashion industries has done nothing for productive progression; rather it has fetishized the hijab and taken away from its true meaning.

‘I wear hijab for me and my Lord, not for you, not for him, not for her, not for them, but for me and my Lord alone.’

My own choice to wear the hijab had been politicized and commercialized to the point where I didn’t know what to do, and for this I blame an industry that consumes women, creating insecurities where there were none.

Have We not expanded for you your breast? And We removed from you your burden which weighed down your back.

is that in the recent past, fighting for Muslim women to be able to own their faith and have confidence in Islam was a small battle to be won.

We have witnessed the creation of a new normative version of hijab, one that is acceptable, tolerable, and digestible.

Many interpretations of Islamic dress are still shunned, including the jilbab, the salwar kameez (until, ironically, we saw it modelled on a white woman for H&M, who added an extortionate price tag for a staple form of clothing),

I implore you to have confidence and stand tall for what you believe in. You are not what the media tells you to be. You do not have to watch your religion become racialized. You do not need to contribute to the dichotomy.

Our cups are overflowing with life to explore but there are so few occasions to do so wholly on our own terms, that to squander the chance would be folly.

The space we are allowed to take up is so limited, it leaves little room for the ribbons of our voices to unfurl.

What was easier? What am I talking about? Well, perhaps to explain, we need to take a few steps back. Let’s set the scene.

the search for a new life beyond a repressive post-colonial regime.

we were a ‘founding family’ for the North African migrant community.

qualifications that included an advanced diploma, two undergraduate degrees, four Master’s degrees, and a PhD (mashallah!).

That's amazing.

The method was simple: Don’t pay attention to your difference. Do what you want to do.

I truly believed that I was an equal in all the spaces I entered. Being female, a migrant, an African and a Muslim meant I was often the only one deviating from the norm in a room.

The answer seemed obvious and within my control: get a job on the rigs.

‘Do you need any . . .’ He hesitated. ‘Specialist equipment, seeing as you’re a woman?’

The fuck do you mean specialist equipment? Just get her the same equipments in her size.

The rigs were a different world. During my undergraduate studies, the power dynamic between my peers and me was fairly even.

power. I was a young, female graduate in a hyper-masculine working environment, and a clear deviant from ‘the norm’.

The norm is that the rigs are particularly the 'man's job' for years with the assumption that women, as dainty as they are, cannot and will not have the same capacity or power to do dirty works like men do.

young women don’t think they need feminism until they have a child.