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

by Mariam Khan

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.

Muslim women are caught between a rock – an Islamophobic and racist right wing that is eager to demonize Muslim men, and to that end misuses our words and the ways we resist misogyny within our Muslim communities – and a hard place: our Muslim communities that are eager to defend Muslim men, and to that end try to silence us and shut down the ways we resist misogyny.

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

The Muslim communities that accuse Muslim women who expose misogyny of ‘making us look bad’ pretend not to know that Muslim men who abuse or assault Muslim women do a sterling job of ‘making us look bad’ all on their own.

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 to. I say fuck because I believe that the crimes of racism, bigotry and misogyny – enabled and protected by patriarchy – are more profane than swear words. I say fuck because there is nothing civil about racists, Islamophobes and misogynists arguing over my body as if I did not exist.

But memories are one of those things. You think all your memories are yours alone, but often they are given by others: versions of events repeated by family, scenes stolen from a movie watched half-sleeping, dreams willed into existence. I want to say that everything that follows here are my memories but I’m not sure. I’m not sure whose they are, or if they indeed ever belonged to anyone. In the end I’m not sure it matters.

Sometimes all we know of families are the myths we are told and the fragile heaviness we carry inside, the sound of snapping in the ear.

It was Confucius who said that you cannot open a book without learning something. A book can make a home for itself in both your heart and mind, and it can provide the direction you need to succeed in life.

For those who have little knowledge of Islam, there is the assumption that Muslim women’s oppression stems from Islamic teachings. This is simply not the case. In fact Muslim imams preach about the value of daughters, often citing that ‘a daughter opens the gates of paradise for a father’. Indeed, the person most beloved to Prophet Mohammed (pbuh) was his youngest daughter, Fatima.

Islamic teachings are clear that a father has to fulfil his duty to raise and care for his daughters, and that the obligations go beyond providing financial support. He must provide a safe, peaceful and loving home environment that is conducive to his daughter’s overall spiritual and moral development. My

Representation of Muslim women flip-flops between fitting a stereotype or breaking one, not the middle ground where most of us are. The use of a Muslim woman is seemingly dependent on what’s being promoted or sold.

What we so often forget is that God has honored the woman by giving her value in relation to God—not in relation to men. But as Western feminism erases God from the scene, there is no standard left—except men. As a result, the Western feminist is forced to find her value in relation to a man. And in so doing, she has accepted a faulty assumption. She has accepted that man is the standard, and thus a woman can never be a full human being until she becomes just like a man.

For Afia, such representation didn’t allow for authenticity, and had only paved the way to making a more palatable version of Muslims.

What is the point of being represented if it is only our image that is invited to the table?

Is a Muslim woman being in a fashion campaign the end in itself? Is the hope that, in making Muslim women more visible, it will open doors for others?

As a member of a minority she had terms and conditions to her free speech.

In fact, celebrating individuals also plays a role in cementing the problem – it means we act as if the gates are suddenly wide open or the glass ceiling and structural inequalities no longer exist. We create an illusion that success is at the tip of our fingers.

Often, Muslims feel like the ‘wrong’ Muslims have been given a platform, or that Muslims have stepped onto the wrong platforms – be it music videos or Playboy magazine.

For me, the diverse nature of Muslim communities ultimately means there will never be one figure we’d be happy to see representing us.

Representation will always come in bits and pieces, and those representing will not all look like me or be cut from the same cloth. We also need to understand that one person’s whole existence cannot seek to represent us.

What we need in our representation will always be fluid based on our context and our changing politics.

The ‘hijab’ (usually understood as a head covering) and ‘veil’ (a face covering), terms often used interchangeably and excessively by people who either observe neither or have negligible ‘association’ with them, have frequently been refracted through a prism that sees Islamic beliefs as regressive, constituting oppression and violence.

And it is these very items of clothing that have come to define millions of Muslim women, me amongst them.

Engaging with and understanding the structural nature of inequalities in the world is crushing, and it’s not just the weight on one’s shoulders. Sometimes it feels as if my very bones are heavy; the marrow weighed down with lead. Truth has turned my soul’s light spirit into the viscous tar of molasses. Opening your eyes to the light can help you see, but it can also blind you. That is not the fault of the light, but our bodies can only carry so much, and our eyes cannot continue to see without blinking.

That’s why the space to talk about different realities for Muslim women is so important. Our lives are not uniform. 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.

Mine is a single person’s lived experience. An experience full of contradictions, imperfections and incongruities, but my lived experience nonetheless.

We must cultivate compassion for our past selves, trusting that we did the best we could at the time, while simultaneously striving to do better.

only knew that wearing it meant that you belonged. I spent the first five years of my life watching hijabi women in Dubai walking around in groups, laughing, talking, and most importantly belonging to something bigger than themselves. I wanted to belong, I wanted comfort, and I wanted a sense of community in this new country.

Whilst arguing in a philosophy class that not all Muslims were homophobic, I realized I didn’t want the burden of representation any more. Wearing the headscarf that labelled me as Muslim didn’t allow me an opinion of my own; to others, my opinion was Islam. And apparently everyone knew what Islam was. For the two years that I removed my headscarf, I felt a little freer.

Have we really accepted Muslim women or have we embraced the ‘acceptable’ face of modern Islam? The non-hijabi and the ‘liberal’ Muslim woman. How far have we come when we still don’t really accept the multiplicities and the diversity of Muslim women – be they conservative or those that might have a more casual relationship with faith?

Depending on the narrative, my words will either be used to signal that I am guilty by association or that I am a whistleblower who is finally revealing ‘the truth’ about my own community.

Honour is the strongest currency in South Asian families. It is the bedrock on which friendships are built and marriages are arranged. I still carry the scars of my hard-won freedom today.

Consider segregation in mosques: the genders split to enter through different doors, then worship in different rooms. For a young Muslim, it is the first indication that liaising with the opposite sex is not acceptable, a message that is then reinforced by the cultural segregation of social spaces. Even the interactions between family and friends send a message: men hug men and women kiss women, but everyone is careful never to touch anyone outside their own gender, no matter how much ‘like family’ they are.

In short, we have grown up in environments that have consistently told us that men and women don’t mix, a constant spotlight on the division between the two.

Back in Zanzibar I had belonged, and I knew belonging was a wonderful thing. Belonging is like a trampoline. It is having the awareness that no matter how high you jump, how many risks you take, there is a place down there that will absorb the force of your fall should you ever come crashing down. Belonging will propel you back up from such a fall. Higher.

It is impossible to have a conversation about how I am perceived as a Muslim without trespassing on my existence as a woman, and my existence as a woman cannot be isolated from my race, as being a black woman is very different to just being a woman.

The imperialist obsession with the Muslim woman being simultaneously a source of intelligence with regard to the threat posed by the mythical barbarism of the racialized Muslim man, the key to disciplining the Muslim household, and the victim to be saved from her male counterpart (which therefore justifies state violence and surveillance) is still an underlying ideological foundation in the continued War on Terror that sustains the marginalization and oppression of Muslim women.

In their absence, Ma and Aunt’s presence was magnified. It was perhaps through the sharing of their stories, the way each member of my family revered them, that I began to understand the connection between storytelling and isolation, even grief.

Spearheaded by Ma and Aunt, Islam gave my family a shared identity of faith and understanding, as well as heritage, belonging and cultural practices in a society marked by racial divides into which they, like many, didn’t easily fit.

Stories allowed them to still lay claim to that heritage; they were the vehicle used by my family to ensure that this knowledge was passed down.

I felt as if I had been unwittingly placed in the middle of a tug of war, and was trying desperately to hold on to myself. The more one side pulled, the more I began to feel separated from the other. My identity seemed constantly up for negotiation by everyone else but me, as if I were forever trying to navigate an in-between space into which others projected their questions about my body, my family, my beliefs:

I cannot unpick my sense of who I am in relation to Islam from the thread of being a part of Ma, Aunt and my wider family.