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

by Mariam Khan

We’ve seen many Muslim 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, Allah: 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.3