Muslim Women Are Not Victims
- Varisha Tariq
- 12 minutes ago
- 5 min read
How the media pushes for a narrative that Muslim women are victims to be saved, when they are, in fact, survivors.
“I don’t understand why I have to put a stole to cover myself up,” I said, horrified. I was fourteen, with simmering teenage anger, making sense of the world and not liking the position Muslim women were often put into. I had clarity; if you want to wear something, you wear it, whether Hijab or dresses, and if you don’t like something you don’t wear it. But my extended family was insistent that it was the ‘right’ age for me to start covering up, a narrative common for many Muslim Women.
My uncle composed himself as if he had to teach me how to be a woman. “When you get a new iPad, dear child, what is the first thing you do?” He was condescending even though I was well aware where this was going.
“Get an iPad cover.”
“Exactly, and women are so much more precious than an iPad. Shouldn’t they be treasured similarly?”
“Women,” I snarled at him, “are breathing and living beings with agency, and rights. They are not devices that can be controlled by men or anyone else. If you have to compare, they can only be compared to men, not to things, animals or ‘treasures’.”
He dismissed me as he had nothing left to say, but this, even at fourteen, made something clear; for the world at large, Muslim women were objects, not subjects. Something to be covered up, treasured, ‘saved’, and looked after. This understanding only deepened in the years that followed.
I completed a master’s in Gender Studies and Law from SOAS, where I decoded Human Rights of Women across the developing world. This was after a year-long stint in the political landscape of South Asia, working in the developing sector for the welfare and education of marginalised girls and women. I learnt on the ground how the worldly narrative of Muslim women as victims was unfair to us all.
At the beginning of the Iran and US war, one key theme that reportedly kept coming up, to justify the US's side, was how they were saving Iranian women. Yet, if anyone were to ever read the words of Iranian women themselves, they would know how fiercely they have been battling patriarchal control.
In social and political landscapes, Muslim women are often reduced to being objects that certain men have to save from other men. Whether it is women impacted by strict regimes in war-torn countries, or spaces of heightened violence across the Global South. The ‘saving’ often looks like copy-pasting the model of Western feminism, which can work for some, but not for all. Where do these women, who are impacted, get to have a say? It is reported that often the narrative of victimising Muslim women stems from a justification of taxing foreign policies that pushes for wars. Yet another reason why Muslim women are so easily deemed small, fragile and vulnerable is because there is a failure to recognise their soft power, which helps them resist in the most difficult of spaces.
Even in feminist discussions, intersectionality often takes a backseat, with the Western model of feminism often used as the ultimate way of living the 'free' life. And it is a beautiful interpretation, but it works only for a specific region with a specific socio-political economy. For survivors, the fight is multilayered, often fighting against patriarchy, political forces, religious misinterpretation, and cultural toxicity, things that all Muslim women are constantly battling with. They don't require men to save them from men (as has always been a war narrative for the past two hundred years) or reduce them to damsels, but require an intersectional approach when engaging with their existence and creating tools for survival from the media.
The resistance of Muslim women, whether in Egypt as it toppled the government, in India with a 100 day long sit-in process, or a Yemeni revolution of peaceful protests, or the Anti Taliban movement by Afghan feminists, the world has seen multiple examples of their bravery. Across the globe, many Muslim women have constantly fought for their rights. The portrayal of them as damsels to be saved does a disservice to their intersectional identity where culture, religion, and regional nuances play a significant role.
Kimberly Crenshaw’s term ‘intersectionality’ is central to my understanding of a Muslim woman. When Kershaw uses the analogy of a car accident that occurs at a crossroad, she means that each vehicle coming from all directions represents a layer of intersectionality. For Muslim women, their gender, religion, caste, class, and sexuality are the intersectionalities they deal with. They have been ‘othered’ due to religion and deemed insignificant due to their gender.
When I am analysing Muslim women and how the media portrays them as victims, instead of agents of change, intersectional feminism is an important framework that needs to be the foundation. In postcolonial feminist theory, which focuses on feminism after incorporating the impact of colonial rule, a woman is impacted by three structures. First, the national structure, which is her country, where she has to adhere to the woman her countrymen expect her to be, one who can birth leaders; second, the patriarchal structure, where a woman’s existence has to appeal to the men around her; and third, the religious structure, where her piousness becomes imperative in her being a woman.
These dynamics play a role in furthering the marginalisation of women as they punish them for deviating from structures. Minority women therefore might struggle to be treated equally and are disadvantaged by both the religion and the nationalistic structures. In this ‘gendered Orientalism’, Muslim women are supposedly ‘distressed’ under the toxic patriarchal control of Muslim men and will be rescued by the liberated West. And this is where Western feminism also does them a disservice by wanting to ‘free’ them.
Equating the Western feminist model as the ultimate version of feminism negates, for example, a Nigerian woman whose battle includes fighting not just equal pay but pay in itself compared to the West’s battle for equal pay. Battles being fought in other spaces, for example, fighting against the Hijab ban and letting women in Kerala, India, wear a Hijab while giving an exam, becomes a distant future for women in Sudan as they are currently battling something more dire like sexual abuse and war crimes. Both of them are extremely important, but they have varying degrees of intensity to it both.
The intensity continues to shift across regions and structures, and it is high time, as feminist people, for us to incorporate the intersectionality of Muslim Women and recognise that they have been fighting wars, without weapons or armies, for centuries, for their gendered rights. Muslim Women are survivors, not victims. They do not need ‘saving’, instead, we must join forces in speaking against injustice, and provide platforms to their voices whenever we are.
This article has been sponsored by the Psychiatry Research Trust, who are dedicated to supporting young scientists in their groundbreaking research efforts within the field of mental health. If you wish to support their work, please consider donating.
