Transcription
When you search “Muslim woman TED talk” on YouTube, these are the first four titles that come up: one, “What does the Koran really say about Muslim women’s age”; two, “Up to the Muslim on the aeroplane”; three, “What Islam really says about women”; and four, “What do you think when you look at me”. These are four of hundreds of talks by brilliant, intelligent Muslim women. Women with different backgrounds, different dress styles, different races. And, yeah, as these titles show, they talk about similar issues. They battle against stereotypes—in fact, misconceptions—about Muslim women.
Now, they’re important conversations, don’t get me wrong. I’ve had them myself, plenty of times. But I’m frustrated. Why is it that women like me in the West have to always talk about being Muslim women? Is it really the most valuable use of our time? And what does it mean when not talking about those are the questions I asked myself when I was invited to speak here today. And that’s the reason I’m not going to talk to you about stereotypes. Instead, I’m going to ask a question. I’m gonna ask why we’re so fascinated with Muslim women at all.
So, the usual conversations about Muslim women focus on what we wear, our bodies, and our behavior, seeing us mainly as victims of sexism. Now, you’d assume that that concern would benefit us in some way, that would improve our quality of living. But the truth is, it rarely does. Because society tends to pick and choose the issues that it cares about when it comes to Muslim women, and pick and choose which issues are deemed sexist.
So, I’m sure we’ll all be familiar with issues like forced marriage, female genital mutilation, and honor crimes. We know to see these as sexism facing Muslim women. But we’re less familiar with thinking about the way sexism harms Muslim women more broadly. We’re less familiar with thinking about the way sexism overlaps with racism and Islamophobia. And that means that we don’t also think about the issues facing Muslim women like the physical and verbal harassment visibly Muslim women face day to day due to Islamophobia. We’re less aware of the fact that Muslim women are discriminated against in employment, in the workplace. We rarely think about the issues of migrant, refugee, and asylum-seeking Muslim women. And I don’t think we even know what the issues of Muslim women in detention and imprison are.
So this picking and choosing of the issues we care about when it comes to Muslim women means we don’t actually help women like me with the whole range of problems that we face. Instead, our picking and choosing makes it seem that all of the problems facing Muslim women come from Muslim men and from Islam. In that hypocrisy, we make it seem that sexism is a Muslim problem, when in reality, sexism is everybody’s problem.
I’m gonna give you a few examples to show this hypocrisy more clearly. So, last year in southern France, some beaches tried to ban the burqini—that’s a full body swimsuit that some women wear to the beach. The assumption behind the ban was that Muslim men force Muslim women to cover their bodies. So, in order to liberate them, they’d be made to undress. But the irony is that forcing somebody to undress is just as violent and oppressive as forcing them to dress a certain way. In reality, very few feminists came out to cry that the ban removed from women the choice to do what they want with their own bodies—a usual feminist rallying cry. To me, this shows the hypocrisy. Instead of the ban being seen as sexist, the sexism that was focused on was the assumed sexism behind why women dressed as they did. It’s hypocrisy.
Another example is the focus on honor crimes. So, honor crimes are associated with Muslims, particularly of South Asian heritage. They seem to happen when girls or women behave in ways their families disapprove of, and it leads to violence and sometimes murder. Now, that kind of violence is used as proof that Muslims are much more misogynistic than the rest of society. This kind of misogyny is incomprehensible to us. But the truth is, in Britain, we’re very familiar with this kind of violence. In fact, when it happens in non-Muslim households, we know it as domestic violence. And domestic violence leads to the murder of two women a week in Britain. 10 to 12 women a year are killed in honor killings in the UK, and two a week in domestic violence cases. Neither number is justifiable, but the point is, if we actually cared about Muslim women, we would clarify these connections, think about why there is violence against women, rather than just sensationalize the violence in one type of household and pretend it doesn’t happen in the other.
So, the burqini ban and honor crimes are just two of many examples I could have given you to show you the hypocrisy behind our picking and choosing of the issues we care about when we talk about Muslim women. Rather than benefiting women like me, what we do is make it seem that all of Muslim women’s problems stem from Muslim men and Islam. That means women like me only ever get to talk about those stereotypes, as the talk titles I already showed you. Sure, it means as a society we believe that we’re justified in dehumanizing Muslim men because they’re the real villains in society. So we detain them without conviction, we arrest them without reasonable suspicion, and most importantly, by scapegoating sexism as a problem of Muslims, we ignore, conveniently, that we live in a deeply sexist society. I mean, rape culture is a term we have for the kind of society we live in. It’s commonly acknowledged the people who aren’t men don’t feel safe to walk home alone at night.
That’s why I’m bored of disproving stereotypes about Muslim women. There is a much bigger battle to be fought, and I ask you to fight with me. Next time you see a headline about Muslim women, ask yourself this: Am I really being asked to care about Muslim women, or am I being distracted from something bigger? Don’t just feel sorry for the women you read about. Consider: are there not parallels in this story to my own life, so my own household, in my own neighbourhood? Because there are. And those connections are where we begin to dismantle oppressive structures in society. Look closer, listen harder, and ask more questions. Thank you.