Defining Muslimahgyny
How anti-Muslim racism, sexism, and gender-based violence impact Muslim women
(Originally published via Medium on March 17, 2024)
Muslim women* experience a unique form of discrimination and prejudice when anti-Muslim racism, sexism, and gender-based violence are coupled with each other. In order to understand and contextualize the everyday experiences of Muslim women, it is important that we consider the nuanced ways in which Muslim identity is constructed across cultural contexts and geographical borders and how it intersects with race, ethnicity, and gender.
Mainstream narratives of feminism, women’s rights and empowerment often fail to define and center the experiences of Muslim women who are disproportionately impacted and harmed by the compounding effects of gendered Islamophobia, Orientalism, and colonial feminism. In an effort to counter these narratives, I introduce the term “Muslimahgyny” which seeks to intentionally draw attention toward the nuanced ways in which Muslim women experience misogyny and sexism. I believe it is integral that any such discourse is grounded in the context of place and space. For this article, I am intentionally choosing to focus on the experiences of (immigrant) Muslim women living in diasporic contexts, under settler-colonial nation-states such as the United States of America and Canada, etc.
In my work, I emphasize the use of a gender-expansive lens that disrupts the normative gender binary. Although my understanding and conceptualization of misogyny includes queermisogyny and transmisogyny, I believe that discussing the experiences of LGBTQIA+ Muslims warrants its own dedicated space and considerations. I will note that the discussion here is not exclusively limited to cis-gender Muslim women, and some of the phenomena shared may resonate with queer, transgender, gender non-conforming, and gender-fluid Muslims too.
Before we move forward, I think we need to unpack how Muslims are often racialized, and how this factors into their experiences within sociocultural contexts. Sahar Aziz introduces the idea of the “Racial Muslim” in her book, where she explains how racism is weaponized to quash religious freedom.
She highlights how “. . . what we are witnessing in the post-9/11 era is a type and degree of profiling and targeting more closely resembling the racial discrimination historically experienced by African American, Native American, and Asian American communities (of all faiths). Muslims are being treated as a race, and more specifically, a suspect race, rather than as a religious minority to be protected from persecution (Aziz, 2021).”
I believe this lens is critical to understanding how the intertwinement of race and religion contributes to the creation of a racialized Muslim identity and inevitably produces anti-Muslim racism. We can trace the historical roots of the production of Islamophobia back to the 7th century when the Islamic faith started to spread to the Byzantine empire and become a “threat” to Western European societies (Bakali, 2016). It is also important to name here how colonial empires within the past few centuries have constructed representations of Muslim-majority nation-states as the “Other” by positioning them as primitive, uncivilized, or culturally-backward.
Edward Said, a Palestinian-American scholar, explained how “Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient — dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism [is] a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient (Said, 1978).”
Islamophobia, often positioned as a fear of Muslims and the perceived threat of Islam seeks to rationalize an irrational phenomenon, serves as a scapegoat for colonial power and imperial domination. While Islamophobia is often positioned as a political ideology based on difference, it has far-reaching impact beyond “fear” or “hatred” and actively leads to the harassment, discrimination, dehumanization, and vilification of Muslims and those perceived to be Muslim.
Muslim women are a very diverse group across race, ethnicity, cultural background, degree of orthodoxy, etc. yet they are often homogenized and their experiences reduced down to harmful tropes that present them as either submissive, oppressed, or t*rrorists. We must resist any narratives that portray Muslim women as a monolithic group that either need to be saved or de-radicalized.
Building on Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism, we can highlight how Western, European feminist discourse represents “non-western women as “ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domestic, family-oriented, victimized, etc.,” and western women as “educated, modern […] having control over their own bodies and sexualities, and the freedom to make their own decisions” simply widens the already huge gap in global sisterhood (Hasan, 2005).”
This rhetoric is often weaponized to justify colonialism or imperialism by positioning it as a “feminist struggle to liberate Muslim women suffering at the hands of the oppressive, authoritarian regimes” in Muslim-majority nation-states. We understand this phenomenon as colonial or imperial feminism and have seen countless examples within the past several decades that have employed this tactic of control and domination. Harsha Walia, a Punjabi Sikh activist, discusses how “a politics of interconnection allow us to not only move beyond our silos, but also help us understand how these interrelated systems of violence are at times weaponized against each other. For example, one of the main justifications for the occupation of Afghanistan was this imperialist feminist logic of liberating Afghan women.”
By portraying Islam as inherently oppressive, we also risk normalizing misogyny and gender-based violence against Muslim women by making it seem like an everyday, “acceptable” reality. Rather, we need to intentionally untangle how Muslim women face patriarchal oppression within their own communities and simultaneously recognize how colonial feminists have overemphasized that narrative to portray Muslim men as violent, oppressive, and needing to be saved from.
On the one hand, conservatives and Islamists in Muslim communities reject gender equality and gender plurality as impositions from ‘the West’. On the other hand, Western discourses (from popular media to mainstream journalism to academic writing) often stigmatize Muslim communities for limitations placed on both women’s rights and bodily rights. The authors here reject this reductive perspective. They recognize that such an approach not only ignores the sexual plurality that existed in Muslim communities and cultures prior to encounters with ‘the West’, but also fails to recognize the way women in Muslim societies have designed empowerment strategies within their own societies that draw on existing traditions (Helie, 2012).
This rhetoric also undermines the agency of Muslim women in being able to define their experiences on their own terms, and contributes to the erasure of how Muslim women have been involved in and led resistance movements and freedom struggles since time immemorial. Some critics would also argue that Muslim women are participating in their own oppression by choosing to practice Islam. This stems from the understanding that “women Islamist supporters are pawns in a grand patriarchal plan, who, if freed from their bondage, would naturally express their instinctual abhorrence for the traditional Islamic mores used to enchain them (Mahmood, 2005).”
We can see how the politics of salvation itself not only undermines the agency and autonomy of Muslim women but also seeks to further contribute to the demonization and dehumanization of Muslim men. Lila Abu-Lughod, a Palestinian-American anthropologist, highlights how the idea of “saving” Muslim women implies that “you are saving her from something. You are also saving her to something. What violences are entailed in this transformation? What presumptions are being made about the superiority of that to which you are saving her? (Lughod, 2013)”
This leads us to question the ways in which Muslim women experience structural violence and institutional oppression within Western, European contexts that are seemingly positioned as “emancipatory” or “liberating”. When Muslim women do not conform to the trope of being submissive or subservient, they can be labelled as deviant since they are seemingly defying the perceived “normal” experience of what it means to be Muslim and a woman.
Sahar Aziz explains how in the context of hijabi Muslim women the shift from someone who needs saving to someone who is seen as violent or threatening happens quite seamlessly. “The debate no longer centers on whether the “veil” serves to oppress women by controlling their sexuality and, by extension, their personal freedoms and life choices or if it symbolizes choice, freedom, and empowerment for Muslim women. Rather, the Muslim headscarf now “marks” women as representatives of the suspicious, inherently violent, and forever foreign “T*rrorist other” in our midst (Aziz, 2012).
This is integral to our conceptualization of Muslimahgyny experienced by Muslim women because it complicates our understanding of how anti-Muslim racism exacerbates gendered forms of violence. The Justice for Muslims Collective defines Gendered Islamophobia to draw attention to the nuanced ways in which hatred and violence against Muslims intersects with gender.
Gendered Islamophobia consists of the ways the state utilizes gendered forms of violence to oppress, monitor, punish, maim and control Muslim bodies. Gendered forms of violence that are inflicted on Muslim bodies include the use of sexual violence, torture, harassment, murder, and state reproductive control, coercion and violence (Justice for Muslims Collective).
It is important that we understand how gendered Islamophobia exists on multiple levels: internalized, interpersonal, institutional, and structural (refer to the diagram below). One of the pertinent aspects to highlight here is how internalized gendered Islamophobia makes it increasingly challenging to address sexism and misogyny that exists within Muslim communities. Sabrina Alimahomed-Wilson explains how “Muslim women activists walk a tightrope in addressing these issues because their work can be co-opted to bolster gendered Islamophobia at the structural and disciplinary domain of power (Alimahomed-Wilson, 2020).”
Gendered Islamophobia also harms Muslim men as it reinforces tropes that demonize them by portraying them as inherently sexist, violent, and oppressive. At the same time, Muslim women “ face invisibility within, or lack of support from, the Muslim community. Turning a blind eye to within-community sexism undermines Muslim women’s collective efforts to dismantle a core aspect of gendered Islamophobia, which is the persistent notion that Muslims are more sexist than the general public (Alimahomed-Wilson, 2020).” As mentioned earlier, this rhetoric when weaponized can be used to further strengthen colonial, imperial feminist narratives. We can begin to notice the interconnection between gendered Islamophobia and colonial feminism and how one feeds into the other and vice versa.
Source: Community Report on Partnership to End Gendered Islamophobia
A concentric circle diagram created by the Justice for Muslims Collective and collaborators to show the nested dimensions of gendered Islamophobia
Lastly, I want to close out this article by offering some additional reflections on how we may leverage this framework to better understand the complexities of how Muslim women relate to Islam and how that shapes the ways in which they move throughout the world. As brought up earlier, we must oppose any monolithic constructions that try to “universalize” the experience of being a Muslim woman. It is also important to highlight that Muslimahgyny does not exist in isolation and is connected to other forms of oppression, violence, and discrimination. For example, in order to better understand the experiences of Black Muslim women, we must recognize the interplay between Muslimahgyny and misogynoir, as defined by Dr. Moya Bailey where anti-Black racism and sexism meet. Thus, emphasizing the need for any discussion of gender, sexuality, and religion to also be grounded within a spatiotemporal context wherever possible because one’s relationship to Islam or the question of faith, in general, is emergent and open to interpretation.
This framework is not meant to be all-encompassing, rather it only serves as a springboard to complicate and contextualize our understanding of how Muslim women experience sexism and misogyny within everyday contexts. Additionally, this lens should not be imposed forcibly as a means of categorizing or labelling someone’s experience a certain way. We must intentionally create space for Muslim women to exercise their own agency and self-determination.
An illustration showing how Orientalism, Gendered Islamophobia, and Colonial Feminism contribute to Muslimahgyny experienced by Muslim women
Resources and Citations
Throughout this article, I have incorporated reflections and excerpts from the works of several different authors. I invite and encourage you to engage with and help amplify their work too. Beyond citation, I believe we need to recognize how our work is in conversation with each other’s and draws upon the incredibly rich and diverse scholarship that exists as learning never happens in a vacuum.
Abu-Lughod, L. (2013). Do Muslim Women Need Saving? Harvard University Press.
Alimahomed-Wilson, S. (2020). The Matrix of Gendered Islamophobia: Muslim Women’s Repression and Resistance. Gender & Society, 34(4), 648–678.
Aziz, S. (2021). The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom. University of California Press.
Aziz, S. (2012). From the Oppressed to the T*rrorist: Muslim-American Women in the Crosshairs of Intersectionality. Hastings Race & Poverty L.J.
Bakali, N. (2016). Islamophobia: Understanding Anti-Muslim Racism Through the Lived Experiences of Muslim Youth (Transgressions: Cultural Studies and Education). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
Hasan, M. M. (2005). The Orientalization of Gender. American Journal of Islam and Society, 22(4), 26–56.
Helie, A. (2012). Introduction: Policing gender, sexuality and ‘Muslimness’.
Mahmood, S. (2005). Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton University Press.
Multiple Authors. (2020). Partnership to End Gendered Islamophobia. Community Report.
Said, E. W. (1978). Orientalism. New York, Pantheon Books.
You are welcome to use this resource to further develop our collective knowledge of how layered and intersecting forms of oppression impact Muslim communities across identities, diasporas, and borders. I would appreciate you recognizing and honoring my labor, insight, and expertise when engaging with this resource and sharing it with others.
Please use the following citation appropriately:
mayed, s. (2024). Defining “Muslimahgyny”: How anti-Muslim racism, sexism, and gender-based violence impact Muslim women
