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

by Mariam Khan

Her statement bore some truth, but in my case, it wasn’t having a child that spurred my belief in the cause. Rather it was my entrance into a space where my gender was inescapably obvious and so unarguably different from the accepted norm that something was going to have to change.

blocking involves using verbal blocks of any kind to stop any mention of gender or gender identity.

Rationalizing is a more cognitive process whereby female engineers convince themselves that they’re ‘OK with’ unfair or discriminatory behaviour.

‘I’m not like other girls, I can hack it!’ ‘It’s no big deal . .

Is this also the one that perpetuates the so-called 'pick me' or 'not like other girls' behavior when you become one of the boys.

Proving oneself is as simple as it sounds: being so good that you outperform your gender, or, ostensibly, your entire identity.

when impression management embraced ‘gender ownership’, the women were coping by owning their gender and projecting positive aspects of being a ‘woman engineer’.

‘Identity work’ is an extensive and exhausting process, and many women – and any group that doesn’t enjoy the power and individuality of being in the dominant demographic – are doing this work at all times.

retention of female employees in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) is dismal:

Naivety, arrogance, or an unexpected blessing in disguise? Either way, the belief took root because I wasn’t aware.

Why don’t you, like, just focus on them?’

for. I could be proud of my difference, wholly and fully. In a way where I wasn’t confined by borders drawn by others, but where I took ownership and chose to define the space I wanted to take up myself.

If we are equal in the eyes of the Lord, how can anyone allow otherwise? This was what I would now fight for, until my dying day, inshallah.

My story is not representative; it is simply my own. It is not a reflection of anyone else’s truth. It does not cancel another’s pain or want to be seen as more than what it is.

I did say it was easier, back when I wasn’t woke. I didn’t say it was right.

When our mental health is good, we are supposed to be able to handle the normal pressures of everyday life. But what is normal? Normal for one person is not normal for another.

Within the Muslim community, there is often a lack of acknowledgement of mental health issues, but many also fear judgement. In Islam, alcohol, drugs and pre-marital relations are all forbidden, as is suicide.

if a Muslim has an eating disorder such as anorexia, then encouraging them to fast, even during Ramadan, can be potentially dangerous.

There is a high number of Muslims in social housing and we have low levels of full-time employment. We have less money and less access to services than the general population, and even something as trivial as our names can stop us getting employed.3 These stresses impact on our mental health – how can they not?

world is against the Muslim community. Islamophobia in the UK is increasing,4 and the dehumanization

someone is experiencing depression, or suicidal thoughts, because their faith is low.

The sentiment that mental health issues stem from a lack of faith is in fact both incompatible with Islamic thought and practices, and historically inaccurate.

Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Al-Ghazali and Al-Kindi were all pioneering Muslim thinkers who paved the way for mental health treatments and aimed to remove the stigma surrounding them.

But the emphasis on prayer as the sole solution can be hugely problematic. Prayer for Muslims is personal, and everyone has different experiences and a different relationship with

it.

When at my lowest, I found that prayer offered me companionship, because even though I felt alone, I still had God to talk to, and I knew He was listening.

Islam is a religion that empowers women. And yet, for many young Muslim girls, their understanding of Islam comes entirely from a series of cultural interpretations of their faith dictated by the patriarchy.

White Feminism doesn’t recognize that my identity as a Muslim and a person of colour (PoC) cannot be set aside in the pursuit of equality for ‘all women’.

Later, as I sat in my lectures and began to understand what feminism was, to realize that my voice could matter, that there was a movement where women were encouraged to speak up, I was reminded of those Saturday mornings.

Feminism for White and mainstream feminists has been about many things, be that #freethenipple, period poverty, the freedom to wear revealing clothing, the freedom not to wear high heels to work, shared parental leave or the fight for equal pay.

Self-proclaimed feminist Caitlin Moran proudly responded, ‘Nope. I literally couldn’t give a shit about it.’

she was a feminist and I was someone who’d newly happened on feminism. But I was wrong. So long as Caitlin’s white privilege served

I’m so tired of conversations about how ‘Islam treats women’, when in actuality the person lecturing me doesn’t even know how Islam says women should be treated. They don’t know that the rights feminism

‘As a proud feminist with little desire to diet, get plastic surgery or hire a personal trainer, I have almost no personal experience with men asking me to meetings in their hotel rooms,’ further explaining, ‘I dress modestly.’2 Though

she is in fact saying exactly that. Well-meaning feminists are often the people who perpetuate an exclusionary feminism that centres their experience as universal.

as if Muslim women who dress modestly have never been sexually abused.

a black woman – has since been co-opted by White Feminism and well-meaning white feminists who will easily exclude an entire group of women based on the assumption that dressing modestly somehow protects them from sexual harassment or assault.

A conversation that should have been completely centred on Muslim women and their trauma was once again co-opted by outsiders with an Islamophobic agenda.

The term ‘intersectionality’, originally conceived by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989,

how power structures overlap and reinforce each other and how feminism today is dominated by white, cis-gendered, middle-class, able-bodied women who refuse to acknowledge the multiple layers of oppression women of colour have to go through.

If White Feminists want to be a part of the narrative they will need to de-centre themselves and their views of empowerment to include women of colour, trans women, non-binary women, gender-queer people and women of faith.

My cousins thought of me as ‘the weird one who’s making us all look bad’. My father loved it. He could turn to all his friends and tell them that his daughter was so religious that she had decided all by herself that she wanted to wear hijab. My mother was less impressed. She saw and felt the racism that wouldn’t register with me until I was older.

He could turn to all his friends and tell them that his daughter was so religious that she had decided all by herself that she wanted to wear hijab.

Teachers couldn’t seem to recognize me, as though they had never actually seen my face, just ‘the brown girl with the long hair’.

bisexual. I had been aware of sex and sexuality (the ways in which people would sexualize me) as something that was mysterious and forbidden, from a young age.

My ‘coming out’ was about finding a term that fitted what I already knew about myself. And then I started reading: stories in the media of imams shunning gay people in the UK or killings of homosexuals in Saudi Arabia.

All of them led me to the conclusion that non-heterosexual relations were forbidden. Part of me didn’t even want to research further for fear of finding out that, in fact, I could be a sinner simply for desiring.

I still wanted to be Muslim. I wanted to be good. I fasted during Ramadan because my family did. I prayed with my parents.

Free from Islam, free from representation, and free from having to act in certain ways. I felt as if I could finally be who I wanted to be. Or, at least have the freedom to find out who I was separate from Islam.

My religion fell away, only coming into play on dark nights when I cried for the Lord to end it all.

‘The hijab will protect you,’ he said, and my mother packed me some headscarves.