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

by Mariam Khan

Seeing the hijab being showcased in industries that quite literally profit from creating insecurities in women, and objectifying and sexualizing them, is cognitive dissonance at its finest.

With so many differing realities, consequentially an identity crisis is quick to catch up, and we find that we now have two unattainable standards we need to live up to; the Western beauty industry and the spiritual level we wish to reach.

When this struggle first began, I felt I had no one to turn to. On one hand, people would tell me that it was a personal journey so I should take my hijab off until I was ready, and others told me I was committing a grave sin if I didn’t stick to it. But neither of these was enough; I knew I wanted to keep it on even if I wasn’t enjoying wearing it.

I wanted to continue wearing my hijab, and the only reason for this was because I believed I had submitted entirely to my creator and if it was what He wanted, then it was what I wanted. But it was hard. It was hard because I found I was caught between different communities, wandering between camps and increasingly disliking both.

Research by Deneen M. Hatmaker at the University of Connecticut published in 2013 shows that women in engineering tend to fall within two main categories when dealing with the male dominance of the workplace: coping mechanisms and/or impression management.1 Internal coping mechanisms include ‘blocking’ and ‘rationalizing’: blocking involves using verbal blocks of any kind to stop any mention of gender or gender identity. This serves the purpose of bringing one’s professional identity to the foreground, and attempts to prevent any gendered biases, expectations or stereotypes affecting an interaction. Rationalizing is a more cognitive process whereby female engineers convince themselves that they’re ‘OK with’ unfair or discriminatory behaviour. Importantly, these techniques help with coping (they help the engineer – me – feel better about the situation), but rarely change long-term behaviour in any substantive manner.

I fell into the rationalizing category, hard. It was easy to do: when trying to fit into a group, where you’re the only one who is ‘different’ and when your income is dependent on being accepted, there is an enormous amount you can rationalize to yourself. It also helps if you’re unaware of the biased dynamics at play.

Impression management, the second category of survival strategy, I also used in spades. The two techniques within impression management, according to Hatmaker, are ‘proving oneself’ and ‘image projection’. Both of these are ‘external facing’ strategies that try to influence the perception of others. Proving oneself is as simple as it sounds: being so good that you outperform your gender, or, ostensibly, your entire identity. The ultimate achievement is to be recognized as a technical expert. On the other hand, image projection involves women typically choosing to project a ‘gender neutral’ version of themselves.

I could no longer accept the conditional equality that I had been socialized to be grateful for. I would accept nothing less than substantive, transformative and unconditional equality, for myself and for others. 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.

While religious practices may offer help in some ways – be that as distraction or a space to practise mindfulness and meditation – they often do not combat the root of the issue, and in some situations they can exacerbate the problem.

Every time someone asked me, ‘Are you a feminist?’ and I replied, ‘Yes, I am,’ they would instantly question me: ‘But how, aren’t you a Muslim?’ All the while, they were eyeing my hijab, probably imagining how it was thrust upon me each morning. How could I know what feminism was if I subscribed to a faith that they believed oppressed women? How could I be a feminist? 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.

I believe we should all exclusively identify as intersectional feminists; in doing this we are allowing ourselves to recognize 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. Empowerment comes in many forms and oppression shouldn’t be defined by what isn’t default to a White Feminist’s world view.

A 2015 report found that Muslim women were 71 per cent more likely than white Christian women to be unemployed.

Muslim men will often insist we brush any wrongdoings, such as abuse or domestic violence, under the carpet for the sake of the community, and both the Muslim and the feminist in me is outraged when that happens. But I’m also not willing to see my community assaulted by a barrage of racism. It’s all so frustrating: being a Muslim feminist too often means taking the blame for Muslim men’s weakness.

For too long Islam has been interpreted through the eyes of men. If, as we are taught, God loves his people many times more than a mother, can a man judge what that love feels like, and how much space for growth and bad judgement that encompasses?

In fact, often Muslim communities in the West are more resistant to change or modernization, because they already exist in worlds that would have them change everything. Resisting change is a defence mechanism, and so by proxy, they cling on to waning mentalities about sex and a stubborn refusal to adapt.

Because the fact was, in the world I now found myself in, being Black and Muslim simply wasn’t compatible: ‘Muslim’ was an identity that the South Asian community had taken sole custody of. Every Eid I’d request to wear salwar kameezes and saris so I could look the part, and yet ‘you don’t look Muslim’ was a recurring statement I had to refute from fellow Muslim kids.