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was a feminist and defining myself in this way sparked something inside me: a need to understand the rights I had as a Muslim and the rights I had as a woman, and if they were compatible. I would come to know that, although Islam allowed me space to explore this compatibility, feminism refused it.
Now I have come to that crossroads. I am a feminist, but I’m not sure feminism is for me.
Every White Feminist I have come across will argue until they are blue in the face that women should have the right to decide how to dress themselves. And then those same people are unwilling to stand up for a Muslim woman who wears a hijab or burqa because they ‘don’t believe in it’ or ‘feel like Muslim women are oppressed’.
am a woman, but I am also a Muslim and a person of colour, and these identities cannot be separated. I can’t set aside being a woman of colour when it comes to being a feminist and I can’t set aside being a Muslim woman when it comes to being a feminist. More to the point, I will not set it aside.
Feminism is no good to me if it doesn’t fight for every different type of woman.
At each stage, people who had no business judging my choices had something to say. Wearing it means telling people you are religious and not wearing it means you are not religious any more, they’d say. What they saw was a hijab binary that didn’t allow for complex, contradictory people to exist. I was a walking contradiction: a queer Muslim.
I’m done being scared. If I don’t take ownership of my body, my religion, my headscarf and my sexuality, then I’m telling the bigots they have won. I’m done giving power to racists and White Feminists who want to dictate how Muslim women should dress. I’m done engaging in conversation with people who don’t understand that human beings are complex. That I can wear a hijab and a dress. That I can be queer and Muslim. That I can exist.
I started writing about Muslim women that year for two reasons: I hadn’t seen any journalism reflecting the lived experiences of British, liberal, educated and unapologetically Muslim women like me and, to be quite frank, I was tired of waiting for anyone else to do
Challenging misconceptions became the focus of my journalism, and that meant I became the focus of some pretty hateful responses online.
‘Don’t speak for me. I’m perfectly capable of speaking for myself. Does that sound oppressed or weak?’ one of my interviewees says.
I’m terrified. It’s bad enough seeing it in the newspapers, but being amongst people who voted for a party that conflates my faith with ‘evil’ is a whole new experience.
It reminds me that my message – campaigning for the right for Muslim women to be seen and heard on their own terms – can travel across the world.
No one plans to take a vicious beating online and then pay the price by skipping lunch. It’s not as if the effort I’m making in dispelling myths and humanizing women like me instantly converts to a tuna baguette.
Anything I write on faith still comes under fire. Have we really accepted Muslim women or have we embraced the ‘acceptable’ face of modern Islam? The non-hijabi and the ‘liberal’ Muslim woman.
why get angry when you can be sassy? Nothing hurts the ego of a self-important man – be he imam or racist – more than the laughter of a carefree young woman who knows what she’s worth.
I need to take this attitude, because being a Muslim feminist means being caught between radical Islamists and white supremacists (as well as your garden variety racists), which for the record isn’t as fun as it sounds.
According to my mum and dad, it’s simple: if you’re not a good person then the foundation of any beliefs you may hold is corrupt.
I just know it can do better, and until we stop mollycoddling Muslim men there won’t be any substantial change.
The willingness of white racists to use our community’s problems as ammunition makes it incredibly hard to criticize it without feeling like a traitor. 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.
Same goes for the racists that perpetually orbit my world: once I understood that most of their actions result from ignorance and fragile masculinity it became easier to dismiss them. I no longer feel the desire to educate them, but rather to humiliate them. It’s more fun. It is not my job to appease racists, nor am I required to rise above them. This tedious high school advice is not only outdated but also dangerous, because it means that the oppressed are always required to hold a higher level of decorum than the oppressor – and that’s just another mode of silencing.
Whilst Islam gives a woman the right to choose her partner and the right to leave him, Pakistani culture, the culture of my parents, does not.
There is a difference between guilt and shame. Guilt comes from recognizing one’s own mistake. Shame is heaped upon us by others.
Islam gave women a voice; cultural interpretation took it away.
There is a misconception that Islam does not allow a woman the right to divorce her husband. This lie is spread and made powerful by the halting of the education of girls and women by men, by cultural stigma, and by the mullahs who want to maintain power. But a woman who can read the Quran soon learns that her subjugation and oppression is a man-made construct, very much against the law of Allah and his prophet. She learns that Islam gives her the right to choose her own spouse, and the right to leave a man she does not like. He must release her with kindness and return to her what is hers.
My nani taught me that Islam is simple. ‘It is about two things,’ she said, ‘loving God and loving his people.’ And in this fight to be good Muslims, that is the bedrock on which we should build our faith.
They will know that Islam gives a woman the right to choose her partner and to leave him with only the reason that she doesn’t like him. Where a man needs to state his desire to divorce his wife on three separate occasions, a woman need only make the request once.
When I finally sailed down from the cloud of new awareness and womanhood I had ascended to, my conversations with Muslim girlfriends told me that my blithe happiness was a far cry from their own emotions and I realized something was wrong. ‘Did you feel guilty?’ was the first question asked, followed by, ‘did you pray after?’ The not-so-subtle message was that a sin had been committed and now was the time for redemption.
Add in the narrative that sex is haram – and of course anything haram is punishable by hellfire – and it’s easy to understand why so many women discuss sex, shame and guilt in the same sentence. They have become so tangled with one another that they’re now part of a single conversation.
Women are given information that is heavily informed by a patriarchal scholarship, and they believe it, internalize it, and begin to live their life within its narrow confines – because after all, who wants to be cursed by angels all night?
The two things that most of the women I spoke to knew about sex were that anal sex and sex during menstruation are forbidden. That, it seems, is the extent of knowledge and information we are passing on to women as they prepare for their first sexual encounters. Muslim women are only taught what is wrong, never what is allowed,
even on their wedding nights with their Muslim husbands, these women have been unable to enjoy sex because somewhere in their subconscious remains the residue of a fire and brimstone upbringing and the idea that, even though they’ve been married with the blessing and joy of their families behind them, they are doing something wrong.
Young Muslims might not be living Islam in the ways their parents had hoped, but they are still living it, and the louder the ringing of the word sin reverberates through them, the harder it gets to live in Islamic communities.
So it is hard to accept that in twenty-first-century Britain, depending on the faith you follow, you have a high chance of being left with no legal rights after your marriage.
But if one has travelled abroad for her nikah ceremony whilst the other has had the same nikah ceremony in the UK, but hasn’t then gone on to legally register her marriage, that sister has a ‘non-marriage’: if her relationship breaks down she could be left homeless overnight as she is – in the eyes of the court – nothing more than a girlfriend.
Imams told me repeatedly that they were under pressure from their congregation not to register marriages as it would lead to women having legal rights. I cannot express how depressing it was hearing my fears confirmed. We had gone backwards twenty years. In the 1990s and earlier, registration was the norm and women would refuse proposals if the man or his family suggested not
An unregistered religious marriage allows them the chance for perceived ‘halal dating’: being with someone without a legal commitment but with a religious and community stamp of approval.
A woman may have been brought up to believe that all that matters is the Islamic marriage and that she must have faith that her spouse will be God-fearing and will not take advantage of her. This behaviour is very hard to change: if her family do not and have never registered marriages, she is unlikely to.
We cannot overlook the fact that unregistered marriages have actively encouraged polygamy. There is nothing to stop a Muslim man taking multiple wives, so long as his marriages are not legally registered and he does not commit bigamy.
It is a common misconception that a Muslim woman cannot be autonomous. In Islam, a woman can keep her property, her earnings, and even her own name after marriage. Although in an Arabic, Asian or African context, a man has full control over his wife, Islam asks women to stand on their own feet within a marriage contract. If she wants tafweed (an equal right to divorce), she can put it in the marriage contract. If she does not want her husband to take another wife, she makes that a condition. If she wants maintenance after divorce, she can stipulate that to protect herself.
But today women are not even asking for their basic human rights because it is considered unfeminine and immodest. The Quran provides these rights, and we need to go back to that source. So many women find it a relief to hear this from me and feel empowered.
to be black in Britain is to see your life used as a prop in a pantomime that you cannot direct.
dressed like a practising Muslim without realizing that to be visibly Muslim is to make a statement that you should be ready to defend and justify.
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.
corporate boardrooms want to increase the number of Muslim employees to fulfil diversity quotas, I assume they wouldn’t go looking for a black Muslim man or a non-hijab-wearing black Muslimah. No, to be Muslim you must look it, and looking Muslim is still to look South Asian.
And remember, at school being black was cool. The Asian kids, that group who ‘owned’ being Muslim, weren’t. I had a decision to make, and I chose to be black at school and Muslim at home. I would sometimes wear my scarf in a different way and call my hijab a ‘head wrap’, removing any theological undertones.
And there was another pair of clashing identities to contend with too. I was a first-generation immigrant – I needed to learn to be East African at home but British outside, a Britishness I knew not to bring inside the house lest I be told I was becoming too western.
We are all governed by certain stereotypes that may or may not pertain to a truth in our own lived experiences, but to be a young Black Muslim girl is to tolerate and balance stereotypes that have no business being together.
The closer you are to whiteness or fairness in the Muslim community (as with any other non-white community), the closer you are to being the perfect Muslim.
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.
This race to proximity explains why, even though Islam says that its followers should accept a black Muslim as their own, the trend is in the opposite direction.
