Wearing the Niqab: Muslim Women in the UK and the US
Abstract
Bringing niqab wearers’ voices to the fore, discussing their narratives on religious agency, identity, social interaction, community, and urban spaces, Anna Piela situates women’s accounts firmly within UK and US socio-political contexts as well as within media discourses on Islam.
The niqab has recently emerged as one of the most ubiquitous symbols of everything that is perceived to be wrong with Islam: barbarity, backwardness, exploitation of women, and political radicalization. Yet all these notions are assigned to women who wear the niqab without their consultation; “niqab debates” are held without their voices being heard, and, when they do speak, their views are dismissed.
However, the picture painted by the stories told here demonstrates that, for these women, religious symbols such as the niqab are deeply personal, freely chosen, multilayered, and socially situated. Wearing the Niqab gives voice to these women and their stories, and sets the record straight, enhancing understanding of the complex picture around niqab and religious identity and agency.
... Whereas both niqabs and surgical masks obstruct the view of a speaker's mouth, only niqabs carry information about a speaker's religious affiliation. In contrast, for speakers without face coverings, there is no obstruction to a speaker's mouth, yet hijabs are likely to be perceived as a religious symbol (Bakht 2022;Piela 2021). This study is unique because few studies in this area have targeted L2 French, and no research, apart from Lybaert et al. (2022), has examined the role of religious symbols in listeners' understanding of L2 speech. ...
... In Québec, as in many Western societies, cultural and popular media have constructed niqabs, along with burkas, as symbols of oppression, inequality, lack of agency, and insecurity (Inglis 2017;Kearns 2017), without regard for the actual perspectives of the women wearing these garments (Bakht 2022;Jahangeer 2020). It may be that for a majority of Québec residents, their very limited, indirect experience of women wearing niqabs is further affected by a largely undifferentiated portrayal of Muslim women in the media as victimized and powerless (Ahadi 2009;Benhadjoudja 2017;Piela 2021;Selby 2014), contributing to listeners' perception of women and their speech as unconsciously linked to such negatively-valenced concepts as "obstacle", "impediment", "obscurity", or "challenge". As a result, listeners' performance on intelligibility and comprehensibility tasks may have been reduced. ...
Previous research has shown that speakers’ visual appearance influences listeners’ perception of second language (L2) speech. In Québec, Canada, the context of this study, pandemic mask mandates and a provincial secularism law elicited strong societal reactions. We therefore examined how images of speakers wearing religious and nonreligious coverings such as medical masks and headscarves influenced the comprehensibility (listeners’ ease of understanding) and intelligibility of L2 French speech. Four L2 French women from first language (L1) Arabic backgrounds wore surgical masks while recording 40 sentences from a standardized French-language speech perception test. A total of 104 L1 French listeners transcribed and rated the comprehensibility of the sentences, paired with images of women in four visual conditions: uncovered face, medical mask, hijab (headscarf), and niqab (religious face covering). Listeners also completed a questionnaire on attitudes toward immigrants, cultural values, and secularism. Although intelligibility was high, sentences in the medical mask condition were significantly more intelligible and more comprehensible than those in the niqab condition. Several attitudinal measures showed weak correlations with intelligibility or comprehensibility in several visual conditions. The results suggest that listeners’ understanding of L2 sentences was negatively affected by images showing speakers’ religious affiliation, but more extensive follow-up studies are recommended.
... The proof is that after the verse about the hijab came down, Umar told Saudah as he would explain. However, it is also possible that he meant ordering them to cover their faces (Piela, 2021). Then after receiving the order as he expected, he also wanted the Prophet's wives to close themselves (in the house). ...
This research discusses the interpretation of the obligation to wear hijab for Muslim women according to various sources, such as hadith scholars and also verses of the quran. Moreover, it has received a series of inputs from literary sources in the form of books and also writings of Islamic committees, which we have reviewed to obtain answers to the research questions. The data were processed through data review system to verify, code, interpret and summarize the results to obtain accurate data and high validity. Based on the data, we can convey that the obligation to wear the hijab is legally obligatory following the hadith which states that women should wear their headscarves all over their bodies. In closing, women are required to cover their private parts, which means Muslim women must wear clothes that cover their bodies from heads to toes except for their faces and palms; and if this is violated, they will receive sanction.
... As such, the media's framing of women is 'highly restricted' and often negative (Byerly and Ross 2008, 8), with Ahmed and Matthes (2017, 233) exemplifying the portrayal of Muslim women in the media as 'victims' and a 'threat to the modernization of women…in developed countries'. Our panellist Dr Anna Piela highlighted the distinct lack of voice Muslim women are given in the media, while representations of women wearing the niqab or burka remain overwhelmingly negative, perpetuating the victim narrative specified by Ahmed and Matthes (2017) or a newer extremist narrative (Piela 2021). However, Asad (2009, 20) conceptualises Islam as a 'discursive tradition' where continually discussed practices are a reflection of how the past relates to the future, rather than simply repetition of an old form. ...
In the UK, belief, and faith are protected under the legal frame of the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA) and the Equality Act 2010 (Perfect 2016, 11), in which a person is given the right to hold a religion or belief and the right to change their religion or belief. It also gives them a right to show that belief as long as the display or expression does not interfere with public safety, public order, health or morals, or the rights and freedoms of others (Equality Act 2010). The Equality Act 2010 protects employees from discrimination, harassment and victimisation because of religion or belief. Religion or belief are mainly divided into religion and religious belief, and philosophical belief (Equality Act 2010, chap. 1). The Dialogue Society supports the Equality Act 2010 (Perfect 2016, 11). Consequently, The Dialogue Society believes we have a duty to eliminate discrimination, advance equality of opportunity, and foster good relations within our organisation and society. The Dialogue Society aims to promote equality and human rights by empowering people and bringing social issues to light. To this end, we have organised many projects, research, courses, scriptural reasoning readings/gatherings, and panel discussions specifically on interfaith dialogue, having open conversations around belief and religion. To encourage dialogue, interaction and cooperation between people working on interreligious dialogue and to demonstrate good interfaith relations and dialogue are integral and essential for peace and social cohesion in our society, the Dialogue Society has been a medium, facilitating a platform to all from faith and non-faith backgrounds. The Dialogue Society thrives on being more inclusive to those who might be overlooked in society as a group. Although women seem to be in the core of society as an essential element, the women who contravene the monotype identity tend to remain in the shadows. The media is not just used to get information but also used as a way of having a sense of belonging by the audience. The media creates collective imaginary identities for public opinion. It gathers the audience under one consensus and creates an identity for the people who share this consensus. Hence, a form of media functions as a medium for identity creation and representation. Therefore, the production and reproduction of stereotypes and a monotype representation of women and women of faith in media content are the primary sources of the public's general attitudes towards women of faith. In the context of this report, the media limits not only women's gender but also their religious identity. The monotype identity of women opposes the plurality of the concept of women. Notably, media outlets are criticised for not recognising the differences in women's identities. Women of faith are susceptible to the lack of representation or misrepresentation and get stuck between the roles constructed for their gender and religion. Women who do not fit in these policies' stereotypes get misrepresented or disregarded by the media. Moreover, policymakers also limit their scope to a single monotype of women's identity when policies are made, creating a public consensus around women of faith. As both these mediums lack representation or have very symbolic and distorted representations of women of faith, we strive to provide a platform for all women from faith and non-faith backgrounds. The Dialogue Society has organised women-only community events for women of faith to have a bottom-up approach, including interfaith knitting, reading, and cooking clubs. Several women-only courses have informed women of the importance of interfaith dialogue, promoting current best practices, and identifying and promoting promising future possibilities. We have hosted panel discussions and held women-only interfaith circles where women from different faith backgrounds came together to discuss boundaries within religion and what they believed to transgress their boundaries. Consequently, we organised a panel series to focus on the roles of women of faith within different areas of society, aiming to highlight their unique individual and shared experiences and bring to light issues of inequality that impact women of faith. Although women of faith exist within all areas of society, we chose to explore women's experiences within three different settings to give a breadth of understanding about women of faith's interactions within society. Therefore, we held a panel series titled 'Women of Faith', including three panels, each focusing on a particular area: Women of Faith in Community, Women of Faith in Public Service, and Women of Faith in Media. In this report, following the content analysis method to systematically sort the information gathered by the panel series, we have written a series of recommendations to address these issues in media and policymaking. This paper has a section on specific policy recommendations for those in decision-making positions in the community, public service, and media, according to the content and findings gathered. This report aims to initiate and provide interactive and transferable advice and guidance to those in a position. The policy paper gives insight to social workers, teachers, council members, liaison officers, academics and relevant stakeholders, policymakers, and people who wish to understand more about empowering women of faith and hearing their experiences. It also aims to inspire ongoing efforts and further action to accelerate the achievement of complete freedom of faith, gender equality in promoting, recommending, and implementing direct top-level policies for faith and gender equality, and ensuring that existing policies are gender-sensitive and practices are safe from gender-based and faith-based discrimination for women of faith. Finally, this report is to engage and illustrate the importance of allyship, the outstanding achievement through dialogue based on real-life experience, and facilitate resilient relationships among people of different religious positions. We call upon every reader of this report to join the efforts of the Dialogue Society in promoting an equal society for women of faith.
... 9 Each of the interview-based studies conducted with niqab-wearing women in liberal democracies revealed similar reasons for wearing the niqab. Religion was central to most women's decisions to don the niqab in the Netherlands (Moors 2014, p. 28), Denmark (Østergaard et al. 2014, p. 59), Belgium (Brems et al. 2014, p. 82), France (Unveiling the Truth 2011 and Bouteldja 2014, p. 115), the United Kingdom (Bouteldja 2014, p. 148), Canada (Clarke 2013;Bakht 2020) and the United States (Piela 2021). They stated that their primary reason for wearing the niqab was religious: to further their spiritual journey, to become a better Muslim or to deepen their relationship with God. ...
Governments around the world have gone to great lengths to discourage and prohibit wearing of the niqab, often relying on the justification that this form of Muslim women’s dress represents and produces the oppression of women. Setting aside that these prohibitions are themselves detrimental to women’s equality, this article focuses on the voices of women who wear the niqab or face veil. I describe and analyze how women explain their decision to wear the niqab based on interviews in seven liberal democracies. For most women, the primary motivation for wearing the niqab is religious, though supplementary reasons are also offered. The niqab is an embodied practice that represents a personal spiritual journey. Women’s explanations for why and when they wear the niqab suggest a complex intermingling of doctrinal knowledge and practical lived experience that negotiates religion day to day. Women often pair their religious agency with a sophisticated rights-based framework to justify their sartorial choices. Women refute the idea that the niqab makes them submissive. Their empowered interpretations of their religion and their conviction to lead a life that is different from most, in countries with pervasive anti-Muslim racism, suggest a great deal of independence and courage. This research offers nuance to the depiction of women who are typically portrayed monotonously, dispelling inaccurate stereotypes used to support discriminatory decision making about niqab-wearing women.
... The same variety can be visible in the meaning and interpretation of hijab. While Islamic veil has been understood as a symbol of reductivism, extremism, conservatism, backwardness, and civilization deficit (Piela 2021) (Al-Hejin 2015), Islamic scholars have concentrated on veil as a religious observance. They believe that taking hijab resonates with avoiding the male gaze and observing (Rumaney and Sriram 2021) modesty, piety, virtue , spirituality, mysticism, and desexualizing rules (Al-Absi and Theology 2018). ...
Face veil as one of the most challenging manifestations of hijab in the cultural geography of Islamic countries operate as a distinguisher. In this study, 12 Baloch Muslim women have participated to explicate semantic implications of the niqab in Balochistan region. The method of phenomenology has been applied to analysis the perspectives of participants on niqab. The data was coded, categorized and analyzed by using MAXQDA qualitative software. The semi-structured interviews and field observations indicated that Baluch women wear Niqab as a symbol of their collective ethnical identity to prove their greatest religious commitment, this all-black cloth, niqab, not only is devoid of any user identification and diversity in production but also allows women to travel in a Shia-Persian centered context. Accordingly, niqab carries a certain symbol with respect to ethnic-religious structures to operate as a powerful cultural signifier of otherness, decentralization of Shia-Persian majority discourse, and strengthening collective identity to maintain the social cohesion.
... Facial expressions are important vehicles for nonverbal communication, and consumers and service providers will need to learn how to convey emotions and intentions without a visible smile. Individuals may need to learn from the practices of Muslim women, whose niqab leaves only the eyes visible for communication (Piela, 2021). For example, Duchenne smiles, which crinkle the corners of the eyes, convey intrinsic motivation (Cheng, Mukhopadhyay, & Williams, 2020) and should be visible even when the mouth is covered. ...
In this research, we document some of the many unusual consumer behavior patterns that came to dominate the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. We offer insights based on theory to help explain and predict these behaviors and associated outcomes in order to inform future research and marketing practice. Taking an environmentally-imposed constraints point of view, we examine behaviors during each of three phases: reacting (e.g., hoarding and rejecting), coping (e.g. maintaining social connectedness, do-it-yourself behaviors, changing views of brands) and longer-term adapting (e.g. potentially transformative changes in consumption and individual and social identity). We discuss implications for marketing researchers and practice.
COVID-19 in Tanzania was both a health and religious puzzle. The government insisted all citizens regardless of their religious affiliations to join hands in fighting the disease through prayers and by adherence to the health measures. Muslims in Tanzania complied with the disease control measures instituted by the government. These measures in turn affected their prayers and fasting rituals. In this context, Muslims turned to religious texts and scholarly interpretations to seek for guidance and clarification (fatwa) on how to practice Islam under COVID-19 situation. Consequently, this shaped Muslims’ perceptions and responses towards the pandemic. This article analyses challenges of COVID-19 to Muslim rituals and the role of religion in shaping their responses during the first four months of the onset of COVID-19 in Tanzania. The article uses online publications, religious teaching provided through social media, interviews and personal observation in Dar es Salaam and Kilimanjaro regions. The article argues that the role played by Islamic religion in understanding COVID-19 pandemic justifies the importance of involving faith-based communities in solving health related problems.
Does criticism in digital spaces matter to journalism? Legacy news media face intense criticism on social networks or blogs, while their accountability towards the public is weak. This dissertation explores the contribution of digital media critics and their criticisms to journalism, through qualitative interviews with journalists, critics and media accountability agents. The main findings show how journalists negotiate a variety of criticisms (from the rational to the uncivil) and critics (with varying expertise and influence) in digital spaces. The study is relevant today because digitality complicates the journalist-critic relationship as critical text from the public circulate in the same universe as journalistic text. What this means is that journalists must find new ways to cope with the logics of digital platforms, such as social networks and blogs. At the same time, news professionals must respond to pressure to conform to social norms such as equity in gender representation in the news, that comes through, for example, hashtag campaigns on social networks.
Terrorist attacks often dominate news coverage as reporters seek to provide the public with information. Yet, not all incidents receive equal attention. Why do some terrorist attacks receive more media coverage than others? We argue that perpetrator religion is the largest predictor of news coverage, while target type, being arrested, and fatalities will also impact coverage. We examined news coverage from LexisNexis Academic and CNN.com for all terrorist attacks in the United States between 2006 and 2015 (N = 136). Controlling for target type, fatalities, and being arrested, attacks by Muslim perpetrators received, on average, 357% more coverage than other attacks. Our results are robust against a number of counterarguments. The disparities in news coverage of attacks based on the perpetrator’s religion may explain why members of the public tend to fear the “Muslim terrorist” while ignoring other threats. More representative coverage could help to bring public perception in line with reality.
Religion in Europe is currently undergoing changes that are reconfiguring physical and virtual spaces of practice and belief, and these changes need to be understood with regards to the proliferation of digital media discourses. This book explores religious change in Europe through a comparative approach that analyzes Atheist, Catholic, and Muslim blogs as spaces for articulating narratives about religion that symbolically challenge the power of religious institutions. The book adds theoretical complexity to the study of religion and digital media with the concept of hypermediated religious spaces. The theory of hypermediation helps to critically discuss the theory of secularization and to contextualize religious change as the result of multiple entangled phenomena. It considers religion as being connected with secular and post-secular spaces, and media as embedding material forms, institutions, and technologies. A spatial perspective contextualizes hypermediated religious spaces as existing at the interstice of alternative and mainstream, private and public, imaginary and real venues. By offering the innovative perspective of hypermediated religious spaces, this book will be of significant interest to scholars of religious studies, the sociology of religion, and digital media.
In a political moment that includes various iterations of a "Muslim Ban," and a resurgent mainstreaming of white nationalism, race and religion clearly remain hotly contested in American life. And yet, in much of the recent scholarship and public debate on these issues, the intersecting experiences of Black Muslims are often elided, if not entirely forgotten. This Article focuses in on the experiences of policing faced by Somali Muslims, within a larger Black Muslim community. In it, I examine the ways in which the federal "Countering Violent Extremism" program has been mobilized against this particular group of Black Muslims- not only as a technology of surveillance, but a racializing one as well. I seek to center this case study within the broader historical context of Black Muslims in America, as an example of how religion and race have often been co-constitutive of Black Muslims' racial experience. Examining the intersectional racial experience of Black Muslims reveals that which might otherwise be missed-the inherent racialization of religion, and the antiblack origins of American Islamophobia.
With the idea, as a starting point, that some images incite one to acts of contemplation, mediated by ambivalent meanings and sensations, this study proposes an interpretation of the photographs of Islamic women in the Brazilian press. Their condition as a fi gure present in the media is a concern, above all recurring in the contemporariness, in the places usually occupied by political content involving the confl icts between the East and West, and therefore on the whole and in the economy of the illustrative visual information of the fi rst page news or the World section. Thus, the Muslim woman’s image in several articles metaphorically appears as a source of evocation of a culture characterized by restrictions of behavior and values that seem strange to us, apparently personifi ed in the solitary and anonymous fi gure or in the ordered crowd of women covered by the black veil of furtive glances.
This note introduces the concept of inclusive journalism in a bid to encourage a critical dialogue of the press’s ability to challenge hegemonic notions of inequality under the rubric of social diversity. Over the last century journalism’s authority in fast processing of information has moved from the privileged position of reporting life to the more privileged position of reporting life that matters. Its capacity to separate individual lives from the life of society has enabled it to turn persons into representative of the groups. By forming and un-forming groups and by constructing a sense of who we are in relation to others, the journalistic sector of the media participates in the larger process of inclusion and exclusion.
In choosing and displaying news, editors, newsroom staff, and broadcasters play an important part in shaping political reality. Readers learn not only about a given issue, but also how much importance to attach to that issue from the amount of information in a news story and its position. In reflecting what candidates are saying during a campaign, the mass media may well determine the important issues – that is, the media may set the "agenda" of the campaign.
In this article, I apply Bourdieu’s field theory to research on the trajectories, strategies and relations of sources and journalists. I argue that the relational emphasis of field theory, modified by the concept of media meta-capital, can be a fruitful way of examining the social context in which representations of Muslims are produced. This advances scholarship that relies too heavily on content analysis to support judgements about news representations of Muslims. I use examples from original fieldwork in Glasgow to discuss the capital, autonomy and heteronomy of Muslim sources who are ‘authorised knowers’ and ‘new entrants’ in their source communities. These various positions are evident in their relative success in managing journalist–source relations, which encompass ‘legacy’ media platforms and emerging communication tools such as Twitter. The field theory perspective exposes relations that contribute to the work of representation but are invisible to other forms of analysis.
This research is about race and religion. While scholars typically understand them separately, I propose instead to explore occurrences in which they are conflated. Specifically, I track instances of racial reasoning that occur in relation to the religion of Islam in Western societies, by focusing on the specific experiences of Muslim converts. By crossing religious boundaries, converts shed light on the nature and content of such boundaries, and enable us to decide whether they are simply religious or also embody racial difference. The case of white converts is particularly interesting: because their conversion implies transitioning from one social status (majority) to another (minority), they offer a near-experimental case to investigate how racial categorization operates. Methodologically, I combine the meticulousness of qualitative methods with the bird’s eye view of comparatism. Using in-depth interviewing with 82 converts in France and the United States; ethnographic observations in convert associations in Paris and Chicago; and content analysis of media and historical documents, I compare the past and present experiences of French and American converts to answer the following: how and when is conversion to Islam interpreted in terms of changing one’s racial status rather than a mere change in religious orientation? In addition to shedding light on the complex interplay between race and religion, this research contributes to transatlantic comparative scholarship, by highlighting differences across the French and American contexts in the conversion process, the encounter with race and the strategies used by converts to reclaim control over their definition of self.
Written by the leading scholars in digital Islam, this book provides detailed case studies that explore the vibrant digital expressions of diverse groups of Muslim cybernauts: religious clerics and Sufi mystics, feminists and fashionistas, artists and activists, Hajj pilgrims and celebrities. Together, these stories span a vast cultural and geographic landscape, including Indonesia, Iran, the Middle East, and the United States.
These case studies are contextualized within the backdrop of broader social trends, including racism and Islamophobia, gender dynamics, celebrity culture, identity politics, and the shifting dynamics of contemporary religious piety and practice.
Authors examine a wide-range of digital multimedia technologies as primary ''texts." These include websites, podcasts, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube channels, online magazines and discussion forums, and religious apps. The book's contributors draw on the methodological and theoretical models of multiple academic disciplines, including Religious Studies, Cultural Anthropology, Global Studies, Communication and Media Studies, Religious Studies, and Islamic Studies.
Right-wing populist movements and related political parties are gaining ground in many EU member states. This unique, interdisciplinary book provides an overall picture of the dynamics and development of these parties across Europe and beyond. Combining theory with in-depth case studies, it offers a comparative analysis of the policies and rhetoric of existing and emerging parties including the British BNP, the Hungarian Jobbik and the Danish Folkeparti.
The case studies qualitatively and quantitatively analyse right-wing populist groups in the following countries: Austria, Germany, Britain, France, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Italy, Netherlands, Hungary, Belgium, Ukraine, Estonia, and Latvia, with one essay exclusively focused on the US.
This timely and socially relevant collection is essential reading for scholars, students and practitioners wanting to understand the recent rise of populist right wing parties at local, countrywide and regional levels.
This article uses two dimensions of Black feminist standpoint epistemology to investigate Black political economy. It suggests that centering on Black women's experiences and analyzing those experiences via intersectional paradigms fosters rethinking the significance of family within gender, sexuality, race, class, and nation. The article concludes by identifying how these new views of family might inform gendered analyses of Black political economy.
Introducing innovative new research from international scholars working on Islamic fashion and its critics, Islamic Fashion and Anti-Fashion provides a global perspective on muslim dress practices. The book takes a broad geographic sweep, bringing together the sartorial experiences of Muslims in locations as diverse as Paris, the Canadian Prairie, Swedish and Italian bath houses and former socialist countries of Eastern Europe.
What new Islamic dress practices and anxieties are emerging in these different locations? How far are they shaped by local circumstances, migration histories, particular religious traditions, multicultural interfaces and transnational links? To what extent do developments in and debates about Islamic dress cut across such local specificities, encouraging new channels of communication and exchange?
With original contributions from the fields of anthropology, fashion studies, media studies, religious studies, history, geography and cultural studies, Islamic Fashion and Anti-Fashion will be of interest to students and scholars working in these fields as well as to general readers interested in the public presence of Islam in Europe and America.
In the summer of 2016, around 30 French cities banned the burkini—swimwear used by Muslim women that covers the entire body and head—from public beaches. French authorities supported the ban by claiming that the burkini was unhygienic, a uniform of Islamic extremism, and a symbol of women’s oppression. Muslim head-coverings, including the burkini, are religious objects whose materiality points to complex semantic meanings often mediated in Internet discourses. Through a qualitative analysis of visual and textual narratives against the burkini ban circulated by Muslim women, this article looks at the way digital media practices help counteract stereotypes and gain control of visual representations. Muslim women focus on two main topics: 1) they challenge the idea of Muslims being ‘aggressors’ by describing the burkini as a comfortable swimsuit not connected with terrorism; 2) they refuse to be considered ‘victims’ by showing that the burkini holds different meanings that do not necessarily entail women’s submission. Muslim women’s digital narratives positively associate the materiality of the burkini with safety and freedom and focus on secular values rather than religious meanings.
According to some interpretations of Islam supported by gender activists, the veil can be perceived as a passport that enables women to participate in public affairs. This argument has been overlooked by the courts, including the European Court of Human Rights. The latter has adopted a discourse that considers the veil to be a threat to public order and gender equality, and more recently, an obstacle to social cohesion. By doing so, the Court has excluded veiled European Muslim women from the public sphere. The Court has justified curbing freedom of religion by granting states a wide margin of appreciation on the basis of the concept of "living together." I argue that the Court needs to take the "passport veil" into account to be consistent with its argument on living together. A shift of approach and discourse would constitute a new way of understanding integration through the veil.
In August 2018, Denmark became the latest European country to ban the wearing of the niqab (face veil) in public. Indeed, several European countries such as France, Belgium and Austria have already implemented a ban on the wearing of the niqab in public places in these countries on the basis that the niqab is a symbol of gender oppression, Islamist fundamentalism and lack of integration. This issue has been the subject of heated media, political and public debates; however, the voices of veiled Muslim women remain unheard. Within the framework of Critical Race Feminism, the paper draws on qualitative interviews with Muslim women who wear the niqab in the United Kingdom (UK), in order to explore their views on legislation banning the wearing of the niqab in public.
This paper represents the first empirical qualitative research study on Islamophobic violence against Muslim women in the Canadian context, and presents a novel characterisation of Islamophobic violence against Muslim women as a form of gender-based violence. Twenty-one Muslim women in Toronto and its surrounding areas were interviewed regarding their encounters with Islamophobic violence: they disclosed over 30 incidents, only three of which were reported to police. The spectrum of Islamophobic violence disclosed by participants includes attempted femicide, physical assault, sexual assault and verbal assault. Moreover, two participants disclosed situations of intimate partner violence (IPV) that were entangled with Islamophobic abuse, representing a hitherto uncharacterised intersection of Islamophobia and IPV in the Canadian context. All incidents of physical and sexual violence disclosed by participants were said to have been perpetrated by white men. Many participants believed that they were targeted for Islamophobic violence because of the impact of gendered Islamophobic discourses that construct Muslim women as being passive, weak and oppressed – and therefore as ‘acceptable targets’ for violence. I offer the novel term ‘Islamophobic gender-based violence’ in order accurately name the reality of violence that Muslim women face in the nexus of misogyny and Islamophobia.
Being U.S. Muslims: A Cultural History of Women of Color and American Islam offers a previously untold story of Islam in the United States that foregrounds the voices, experiences, and images of women of color in the United States from the early twentieth century to the present. Until the late 1960s, the majority of Muslim women in the U.S.—as well as almost all U.S. Muslim women who appeared in the American press or popular culture, were African American. Thus, the book contends that the lives and labors of African American Muslim women have—and continue to—forcefully shaped the meanings and presence of American Islam, and are critical to approaching issues confronting Muslim women in the contemporary U.S. At the heart of U.S. Muslim women’s encounters with Islam, the volume demonstrates, is a desire for gender justice that is rooted in how issues of race and religion have shaped women’s daily lives. Women of color’s ways of “being U.S. Muslims” have been consistently forged against commonsense notions of racial, gendered, and religious belonging and citizenship. From narratives of African American women who engage Islam as a form of social protest, through intersections of “Islam” and “feminism” in the media, and into contemporary expressions of racial and gender justice in U.S. Muslim communities, Being U.S. Muslims demonstrates that it is this continual againstness— which the book names affective insurgency —that is the central hall marks of U.S. Muslim women’s lives.
Over the last decades, Europe debates on Islam have been framed increasingly through the lens of cultural difference. In this discursive climate, culture constitutes a crucial terrain of investment for European Muslims in their struggle for inclusion and recognition. Based on two different ethnographic research projects among European Muslims, this essay examines two distinct types of culture discourses. One employs an Islam-versus-culture trope that serves to disconnect Islam from certain patriarchal practices perceived to exist within Muslim communities. The other discourse defends the intrinsic and symbiotic link between Islam and culture, especially in order to elevate the place of artistic practices within Muslim communities. To make sense of these seeming contradictions, I explore the multivalent meanings contained in my interlocutors’ uses of the culture concept by tracing the respective genealogies of these meanings. This includes an investigation of culture's conceptual histories, formulated successively by Enlightenment thinkers, Romanticists, and early anthropologists, as well as by Islamic reformers and their more recent successors. My investigation into these conceptual histories exposes broader concerns about individual freedom and agency on the part of cultural theorists, which have furthermore enabled various claims about modernity and backwardness. While European Muslims creatively integrate various articulations of the culture concept into their world-making projects, I argue that the ontological assumptions underpinning the culture concept continue to haunt and render precarious efforts to demonstrate Muslim belonging to Europe via culture.
The term “British Muslim” has over the last three decades become a familiar part of public discourse, to the extent that it is becoming naturalised as a neutral social descriptor rather than as an active or contested concept. This article examines the genealogy of the term in relation to three overlapping discourses: (i) state-led discourses of racialised citizenship (ii) tacit academic support for forms of civic nationalism and (iii) emergent Muslim agencies and mobilisations through the concept of “British Muslim”. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, the article interrogates the tension between determinism and agency contained within conceptions of British Muslimness. It is claimed that while the term “British Muslim” is implicated by public debates concerning racialised citizenship—and a corresponding academic response viz civic nationalism—there is a flourishing of Muslim imaginaries through the re-appropriation of British Muslimness. The article therefore offers new theoretical insights into the language concerning Muslim minorities and makes a series of methodological observations that are relevant for writing and research conducted in this field.
Young Muslims in the West are often at the forefront of efforts to explain, demystify and de-stigmatise Islam and Muslim identity through everyday knowledge-sharing – from formal initiatives such as Speed-Date-a-Muslim and Coffee and Islam to informal fielding of questions from classmates, colleagues and strangers. This paper draws on contact theory to investigate conditions and drivers for young Australian Muslims who seek to explain their religious community to outsiders. We consider how explaining can be situated in a shift in Australian multicultural politics towards intercultural communication and knowledge exchange. We investigate how this focus on cross-cultural awareness shapes young Muslims’ everyday experiences of accounting for themselves, either reluctantly or enthusiastically, in the contact zones of Australian educational institutions, workplaces and neighbourhoods. We suggest that the work of young Muslims as everyday explainers should be acknowledged both for its contribution to social cohesion and the toll it exacts from them. We argue that while ‘explaining’ is often an agentic effort for connection and participation, it is also often unequally divided labour, and if over-determined as the key strategy to counter anti-Muslim sentiment can serve to assign responsibility to individuals and communities for social cohesion, and miscast racism as ignorance and misunderstanding.
Even as many people view Latinos and Muslims as growing threats in US discourse, Latino Muslims celebrate their intersecting identities in their daily lives and in their mediated representations. The story of Latinos embracing Islam is set in an American religious landscape that is characteristically “diverse and fluid.” It follows distinctive immigration patterns and laws, metropolitan spaces, and new media technologies that have increasingly brought Latinos and Muslims into contact with one another. It is part of the mass exodus out of the Catholic Church, the digitization of religion, and the growth of Islam. It is set in a national context dominated by particular media politics, information economies, and the hyper-racialization of its inhabitants and their religious identities. The historically specific character of groups like Latino Muslims increasingly compels scholars to approach the categories of race, religion, and media as inextricably intertwined. This monograph therefore draws on and engages central categories, theories, and issues in the fields of religious, ethnic, and media studies. By carefully attending to the stories that Latino Muslims tell about themselves, the work examines the racialization of religion, the narrating of religious conversion experiences, the dissemination of post-colonial histories, and the development of Latino Muslim networks across the United States. This study of how being Latino and Muslim in America becomes mediated is a cautionary analysis of how so-called minority groups are made in the United States and how they become fragmented and nevertheless struggle for recognition in a “diverse and fluid” landscape.
At the end of Women’s History Month 2017, social media sites were filled with posts using the hashtag #MuslimWomensDay. Muslim women have often been framed in media as either victims of a violent faith and its believers or enablers of that violence, rarely are they given the space to tell their own stories. The #MuslimWomensDay hashtag was designed to draw attention to the stories and experiences of Muslim women. This qualitative textual analysis of approximately 300 tweets explores how Twitter users deployed the #MuslimWomensDay hashtag in their posts in order to understand the story users told of what it means to be a Muslim woman as well as what narratives of Islam they had to fight against.
The niqab, the main subject of this article, is the garment worn by some Muslim women that conceals the face of its wearer, leaving only eyes visible. The Niqabi, as the wearer of the niqab is called, gives rise to high anxiety in the West. She generates an intense repugnance, a repugnance, I shall argue, that is paradoxically about desire. We need to ask why the niqab unsettles and who is unsettled by it and to ask these questions in a historically specific and contextualized way, keeping a sharp look out for the violence unleashed by bans. I suggest that in the West the niqab generates a deep anxiety surrounding knowing and possessing the woman who is covered. Bans on the niqab express a command to Muslim women to yield to racial and sexual superiority, and what is unbearable is her refusal to yield to the Western gaze. To make my case around possession, and to show its racialized, gendered, and sexualized dynamics, I offer an argument in two parts. First, I turn to legal cases banning the niqab, focusing primarily on the fantasamatic scenes of their legal geographies. Together these cases show that the primary legal logic on which bans rest-the idea, for instance, that an uncovered face is necessary for social interaction, is flimsy at best. The illogic that characterizes bans pushes me in the direction of psychoanalysis. Second, in an effort to understand what is at stake in these legal moments when law abandons logic, I reflect on the nature of the subject whose coherence cannot withstand the sight of a covered woman. The sexual nature of the responses to the Muslim woman wearing the niqab, the command to her to yield to the white masculine gaze, demands that we consider desire. Bans seek to reroute desire, damming up its flow and removing from sight the object of desire. I draw on Meyda Yeǧenoǧlu's exploration of colonial fantasy to explore the psychoanalytic basis to bans, emphasizing how the veil and niqab are experienced by many as obstacles to the visual control of Muslim women. I then turn to Susan Schweik, who considers the historical example of the banning of unsightly beggars. Schweik explores the scopic regime underpinning bans-that is, the removal from sight of anyone who threatens a subject's coherence. I suggest that we consider unveiling along these psychoanalytic and spatial lines, tracing the ways in which the subject is made racially and sexually superior through removing from sight the woman who refuses to yield to his or her gaze. We do not master by seeing; we are ourselves altered when we look.-Anne Cheng, Second Skin¹.
Debates about Islamic veiling practices often focus on legal aspects of wearing the hijab and niqab and the recent banning, actual and proposed, of the veil in several countries has received substantial media coverage. This ethnographic research paper adds to the discussion by providing insight into the views of women from the Sultanate of Oman, using questionnaire and interview data to examine their understanding of and beliefs about laws relating to veiling practices in Oman and in other countries. The research also explores Omani women’s views on the niqab, which has dominated much of the global media debate. The results indicate that Omani women typically believe that veiling practices should not be mandated by a legal framework but reflect personal choice rooted in Islamic notions of piety and respect and that non-Muslim countries should respect women’s freedom to dress according to their religious beliefs.
Visual securitization (the discursive processes by which images are assigned security implications) is integral to understanding how war and political violence is made possible. However, its insights have yet to be coupled with feminist international relations (IR) scholarship, which is alert to the connections between gender and (in)security. This article synthesizes these two research areas through Lene Hansen’s (2011) framework of visual securitization to investigate the gendered logics that underpinned the 2001 war in Afghanistan. By analyzing 123 photojournalistic images alongside American media texts and foreign policy discourse, I argue western images of Afghan women enacted a specific visuality through which they became constructed as a legitimate matter of security. The article makes two important contributions through this analysis. Firstly, it extends feminist understanding of the war in Afghanistan by demonstrating how the interplay between the visual and textual, and the gendered and racial logics operating within such interplay, visually produced Afghan women as a referent object of security. Secondly, this argument illustrates how gender can be critical in enabling the acceptance of visual securitizations, and how such securitizations can be enacted through gendered representations of insecurity and threat.
Islam is a vital, growing religion in America. Little is known, however, about the religion except through the biased lens of media reports which brand African American Muslims as "Black Muslims" and portray their communities as places of social protest. African American Islam challenges these myths by contextualizing the experience and history of African American Islamic life. This is the first book to investigate the diverse African American Islamic community on its own terms, in its own language and through its own synthesis of Islamic history and philosophy.
Although women have been central to cultural healing practices historically, their participation in the production of indigenous knowledge remains marginal. This contribution traces the history of indigenous healing traditions among women, both in Western and non-Western cultures. Specific attention is given to the history of patriarchal oppression, including witch-trials and the branding of non-Western indigenous healers as witches during European colonization. Utilizing a feminist post-colonial lens, this work seeks to examine how the history of persecution, oppression, and gendered violence has shaped attitudes toward indigenous practices by women as well as women’s own engagement in indigenous ways of healing and knowing.
