Drawing from the Blackboard article Gendered Islamophobia: hate crime against Muslim women, Muslim women are particularly vulnerable to Islamophobia due to their multiple subject positions as an historically marginalized sex (by Western, non-Muslim society), a religious minority, and a (perceived) racial minority. I want you to be sure that you discuss the issue of intersectionality, hegemony, privilege, and ethnocentrism in your response.

According to your reading Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Lughod), the West has had a history of employing something called the “colonial appropriation of women’s voices” in order to literally colonize Muslim-majority countries. Please discuss what the colonial appropriation of women’s voices means, and how we have used this tactic to colonize other countries. Then I’d like you to address why it has been so ironic that the West has used the rhetoric of women’s oppression (in particular, the veiling of Muslim women) to legitimize their “liberation.” Remember, as the author asserts, in order to liberate women from something, we need to liberate women “to” something.

Do Muslim women really need saving?
Anthropoligical reflections on cultural relativism
and its others
Abu-Lughod, Lila . American Anthropologist ; Oxford  Vol. 104, Iss. 3,  (Sep 2002): 783-790.

ProQuest document link

ABSTRACT
Abu-Lughod explores the ethics of the current “War on Terrorism,” asking whether anthropology, the discipline

devoted to understanding and dealing with cultural difference, can provide a critical purchase on the justifications

made for American intervention in Afghanistan in terms of liberating, or saving, Afghan women.

FULL TEXT

Headnote

Ethics Forum: September 11 and Ethnographic Responsibility

Headnote

ABSTRACT This article explores the ethics of the current “War on Terrorism,” asking whether anthropology, the

discipline devoted to understanding and dealing with cultural difference, can provide us with critical purchase on

the justifications made for American intervention in Afghanistan in terms of liberating, or saving, Afghan women. I

look first at the dangers of reifying culture, apparent in the tendencies to plaster neat cultural icons like the Muslim

woman over messy historical and political dynamics. Then, calling attention to the resonances of contemporary

discourses on equality, freedom, and rights with earlier colonial and missionary rhetoric on Muslim women, I argue

that we need to develop, instead, a serious appreciation of differences among women in the world-as products of

different histories, expressions of different circumstances, and manifestations of differently structured desires.

Further, I argue that rather than seeking to “save” others (with the superiority it implies and the violences it would

entail) we might better think in terms of (1) working with them in situations that we recognize as always subject to

historical transformation and (2) considering our own larger responsibilities to address the forms of global

injustice that are powerful shapers of the worlds in which they find themselves. I develop many of these

arguments about the limits of “cultural relativism” through a consideration of the burqa and the many meanings of

veiling in the Muslim world. [Keywords: cultural relativism, Muslim women, Afghanistan war, freedom, global

injustice, colonialism]

WHAT ARE THE ETHICS of the current “War on Terrorism,” a war that justifies itself by purporting to liberate, or

save, Afghan women? Does anthropology have anything to offer in our search for a viable position to take

regarding this rationale for war?

I was led to pose the question of my title in part because of the way I personally experienced the response to the

U.S. war in Afghanistan. Like many colleagues whose work has focused on women and gender in the Middle East, I

was deluged with invitations to speak-not just on news programs but also to various departments at colleges and

universities, especially women’s studies programs. Why did this not please me, a scholar who has devoted more

than 20 years of her life to this subject and who has some complicated personal connection to this identity? Here

was an opportunity to spread the word, disseminate my knowledge, and correct misunderstandings. The urgent

search for knowledge about our sister “women of cover” (as President George Bush so marvelously called them) is

laudable and when it comes from women’s studies programs where “transnational feminism” is now being taken

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52?accountid=7043

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seriously, it has a certain integrity (see Safire 2001).

My discomfort led me to reflect on why, as feminists in or from the West, or simply as people who have concerns

about women’s lives, we need to be wary of this response to the events and aftermath of September 11, 2001. I

want to point out the minefields-a metaphor that is sadly too apt for a country like Afghanistan, with the world’s

highest number of mines per capita–of this obsession with the plight of Muslim women. I hope to show some way

through them using insights from anthropology, the discipline whose charge has been to understand and manage

cultural difference. At the same time, I want to remain critical of anthropology’s complicity in the reification of

cultural difference.

CULTURAL EXPLANATIONS AND THE MOBILIZATION OF WOMEN

It is easier to see why one should be skeptical about the focus on the “Muslim woman” if one begins with the U.S.

public response. I will analyze two manifestations of this response: some conversations I had with a reporter from

the PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and First Lady Laura Bush’s radio address to the nation on November 17, 2001.

The presenter from the NewsHour show first contacted me in October to see if I was willing to give some

background for a segment on Women and Islam. I mischievously asked whether she had done segments on the

women of Guatemala, Ireland, Palestine, or Bosnia when the show covered wars in those regions; but I finally

agreed to look at the questions she was going to pose to panelists. The questions were hopelessly general. Do

Muslim women believe “x”? Are Muslim women “y”? Does Islam allow “z” for women? I asked her: If you were to

substitute Christian or Jewish wherever you have Muslim, would these questions make sense? I did not imagine

she would call me back. But she did, twice, once with an idea for a segment on the meaning of Ramadan and

another time on Muslim women in politics. One was in response to the bombing and the other to the speeches by

Laura Bush and Cherie Blair, wife of the British Prime Minister.

What is striking about these three ideas for news programs is that there was a consistent resort to the cultural, as

if knowing something about women and Islam or the meaning of a religious ritual would help one understand the

tragic attack on New York’s World Trade Center and the U.S. Pentagon, or how Afghanistan had come to be ruled

by the Taliban, or what interests might have fueled U.S. and other interventions in the region over the past 25

years, or what the history of American support for conservative groups funded to undermine the Soviets might

have been, or why the caves and bunkers out of which Bin Laden was to be smoked “dead or alive,” as President

Bush announced on television, were paid for and built by the CIA.

In other words, the question is why knowing about the “culture” of the region, and particularly its religious beliefs

and treatment of women, was more urgent than exploring the history of the development of repressive regimes in

the region and the U.S. role in this history. Such cultural framing, it seemed to me, prevented the serious

exploration of the roots and nature of human suffering in this part of the world. Instead of political and historical

explanations, experts were being asked to give religiocultural ones. Instead of questions that might lead to the

exploration of global interconnections, we were offered ones that worked to artificially divide the world into

separate spheres-recreating an imaginative geography of West versus East, us versus Muslims, cultures in which

First Ladies give speeches versus others where women shuffle around silently in burqas.

Most pressing for me was why the Muslim woman in general, and the Afghan woman in particular, were so crucial

to this cultural mode of explanation, which ignored the complex entanglements in which we are all implicated, in

sometimes surprising alignments. Why were these female symbols being mobilized in this “War against Terrorism”

in a way they were not in other conflicts? Laura Bush’s radio address on November 17 reveals the political work

such mobilization accomplishes. On the one hand, her address collapsed important distinctions that should have

been maintained. There was a constant slippage between the Taliban and the terrorists, so that they became

almost one word-a kind of hyphenated monster identity: the Taliban-and-the-terrorists. Then there was the blurring

of the very separate causes in Afghanistan of women’s continuing malnutrition, poverty, and ill health, and their

more recent exclusion under the Taliban from employment, schooling, and the joys of wearing nail polish. On the

other hand, her speech reinforced chasmic divides, primarily between the “civilized people throughout the world”

whose hearts break for the women and children of Afghanistan and the Taliban-and-the-terrorists, the cultural

monsters who want to, as she put it, “impose their world on the rest of us.”

Most revealingly, the speech enlisted women to justify American bombing and intervention in Afghanistan and to

make a case for the “War on Terrorism” of which it was allegedly a part. As Laura Bush said, “Because of our recent

military gains in much of Afghanistan, women are no longer imprisoned in their homes. They can listen to music

and teach their daughters without fear of punishment…. The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights

and dignity of women” (U.S. Government 2002).

These words have haunting resonances for anyone who has studied colonial history. Many who have worked on

British colonialism in South Asia have noted the use of the woman question in colonial policies where intervention

into sati (the practice of widows immolating themselves on their husbands’ funeral pyres), child marriage, and

other practices was used to justify rule. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988) has cynically put it: white men

saving brown women from brown men. The historical record is full of similar cases, including in the Middle East. In

Turn of the Century Egypt, what Leila Ahmed (1992) has called “colonial feminism” was hard at work. This was a

selective concern about the plight of Egyptian women that focused on the veil as a sign of oppression but gave no

support to women’s education and was professed loudly by the same Englishman, Lord Cromer, who opposed

women’s suffrage back home.

Sociologist Marnia Lazreg (1994) has offered some vivid examples of how French colonialism enlisted women to

its cause in Algeria. She writes:

Perhaps the most spectacular example of the colonial appropriation of women’s voices, and the silencing of those

among them who had begun to take women revolutionaries … as role models by not donning the veil, was the

event of May 16, 1958 [just four years before Algeria finally gained its independence from France after a long

bloody struggle and 130 years of French control-L.A.]. On that day a demonstration was organized by rebellious

French generals in Algiers to show their determination to keep Algeria French. To give the government of France

evidence that Algerians were in agreement with them, the generals had a few thousand native men bused in from

nearby villages, along with a few women who were solemnly unveiled by French women…. Rounding up Algerians

and bringing them to demonstrations of loyalty to France was not in itself an unusual act during the colonial era.

But to unveil women at a well-choreographed ceremony added to the event a symbolic dimension that dramatized

the one constant feature of the Algerian occupation by France: its obsession with women. [Lazreg 1994:135]

Lazreg (1994) also gives memorable examples of the way in which the French had earlier sought to transform Arab

women and girls. She describes skits at awards ceremonies at the Muslim Girls’ School in Algiers in 1851 and

1852. In the first skit, written by “a French lady from Algiers,” two Algerian Arab girls reminisced about their trip to

France with words including the following:

ON Protective France: Oh! Hospitable France! … Noble land, where I felt free Under Christian skies to pray to our

God: …. God bless you for the happiness you bring us! And you, adoptive mother, who taught us That we have a

share of this world, We will cherish you forever! [Lazreg 1994:68-69]

These girls are made to invoke the gift of a share of this world, a world where freedom reigns under Christian skies.

This is not the world the Taliban-and-the-terrorists would “like to impose on the rest of us.”

Just as I argued above that we need to be suspicious when neat cultural icons are plastered over messier

historical and political narratives, so we need to be wary when Lord Cromer in British-ruled Egypt, French ladies in

Algeria, and Laura Bush, all with military troops behind them, claim to be saving or liberating Muslim

women.

POLITICS OF THE VEIL

I want now to look more closely at those Afghan women Laura Bush claimed were “rejoicing” at their liberation by

the Americans. This necessitates a discussion of the veil, or the burqa, because it is so central to contemporary

concerns about Muslim women. This will set the stage for a discussion of how anthropologists, feminist

anthropologists in particular, contend with the problem of difference in a global world. In the conclusion, I will

return to the rhetoric of saving Muslim women and offer an alternative.

It is common popular knowledge that the ultimate sign of the oppression of Afghan women under the Taliban-and-

the-terrorists is that they were forced to wear the burqa. Liberals sometimes confess their surprise that even

though Afghanistan has been liberated from the Taliban, women do not seem to be throwing off their burqas.

Someone who has worked in Muslim regions must ask why this is so surprising. Did we expect that once “free”

from the Taliban they would go “back” to belly shirts and blue jeans, or dust off their Chanel suits? We need to be

more sensible about the clothing of “women of cover,” and so there is perhaps a need to make some basic points

about veiling.

First, it should be recalled that the Taliban did not invent the burqa. It was the local form of covering that Pashtun

women in one region wore when they went out. The Pashtun are one of several ethnic groups in Afghanistan and

the burqa was one of many forms of covering in the subcontinent and Southwest Asia that has developed as a

convention for symbolizing women’s modesty or respectability. The burqa, like some other forms of “cover” has, in

many settings, marked the symbolic separation of men’s and women’s spheres, as part of the general association

of women with family and home, not with public space where strangers mingled.

Twenty years ago the anthropologist Hanna Papanek (1982), who worked in Pakistan, described the burqa as

“portable seclusion.” She noted that many saw it as a liberating invention because it enabled women to move out

of segregated living spaces while still observing the basic moral requirements of separating and protecting women

from unrelated men. Ever since I came across her phrase “portable seclusion,” I have thought of these enveloping

robes as “mobile homes.” Everywhere, such veiling signifies belonging to a particular community and participating

in a moral way of life in which families are paramount in the organization of communities and the home is

associated with the sanctity of women.

The obvious question that follows is this: If this were the case, why would women suddenly become immodest?

Why would they suddenly throw off the markers of their respectability, markers, whether burqas or other forms of

cover, which were supposed to assure their protection in the public sphere from the harassment of strange men by

symbolically signaling to all that they were still in the inviolable space of their homes, even though moving in the

public realm? Especially when these are forms of dress that had become so conventional that most women gave

little thought to their meaning.

To draw some analogies, none of them perfect, why are we surprised that Afghan women do not throw off their

burqas when we know perfectly well that it would not be appropriate to wear shorts to the opera? At the time these

discussions of Afghan women’s burqas were raging, a friend of mine was chided by her husband for suggesting

she wanted to wear a pantsuit to a fancy wedding: “You know you don’t wear pants to a WASP wedding,” he

reminded her. New Yorkers know that the beautifully coiffed Hasidic women, who look so fashionable next to their

dour husbands in black coats and hats, are wearing wigs. This is because religious belief and community

standards of propriety require the covering of the hair. They also alter boutique fashions to include high necks and

long sleeves. As anthropologists know perfectly well, people wear the appropriate form of dress for their social

communities and are guided by socially shared standards, religious beliefs, and moral ideals, unless they

deliberately transgress to make a point or are unable to afford proper cover. If we think that U.S. women live in a

world of choice regarding clothing, all we need to do is remind ourselves of the expression, “the tyranny of fashion.”

What had happened in Afghanistan under the Taliban is that one regional style of covering or veiling, associated

with a certain respectable but not elite class, was imposed on everyone as “religiously” appropriate, even though

previously there had been many different styles, popular or traditional with different groups and classes-different

ways to mark women’s propriety, or, in more recent times, religious piety. Although I am not an expert on

Afghanistan, I imagine that the majority of women left in Afghanistan by the time the Taliban took control were the

rural or less educated, from nonelite families, since they were the only ones who could not emigrate to escape the

hardship and violence that has marked Afghanistan’s recent history. If liberated from the enforced wearing of

burqas, most of these women would choose some other form of modest headcovering, like all those living nearby

who were not under the Taliban-their rural Hindu counterparts in the North of India (who cover their heads and veil

their faces from affines) or their Muslim sisters in Pakistan.

Even The New York Times carried an article about Afghan women refugees in Pakistan that attempted to educate

readers about this local variety (Fremson 2001). The article describes and pictures everything from the now–

iconic burqa with the embroidered eyeholes, which a Pashtun woman explains is the proper dress for her

community, to large scarves they call chadors, to the new Islamic modest dress that wearers refer to as hijab.

Those in the new Islamic dress are characteristically students heading for professional careers, especially in

medicine, just like their counterparts from Egypt to Malaysia. One wearing the large scarf was a school principal;

the other was a poor street vendor. The telling quote from the young street vendor is, “If I did [wear the burqa] the

refugees would tease me because the burqa is for ‘good women’ who stay inside the home” (Fremson 2001:14).

Here you can see the local status associated with the burqa-it is for good respectable women from strong families

who are not forced to make a living selling on the street.

The British newspaper The Guardian published an interview in January 2002 with Dr. Suheila Siddiqi, a respected

surgeon in Afghanistan who holds the rank of lieutenant general in the Afghan medical corps (Goldenberg 2002). A

woman in her sixties, she comes from an elite family and, like her sisters, was educated. Unlike most women of her

class, she chose not to go into exile. She is presented in the article as “the woman who stood up to the Taliban”

because she refused to wear the burqa. She had made it a condition of returning to her post as head of a major

hospital when the Taliban came begging in 1996, just eight months after firing her along with other women. Siddiqi

is described as thin, glamorous, and confident. But further into the article it is noted that her graying bouffant hair

is covered in a gauzy veil. This is a reminder that though she refused the burqa, she had no question about wearing

the chador or scarf.

Finally, I need to make a crucial point about veiling. Not only are there many forms of covering, which themselves

have different meanings in the communities in which they are used, but also veiling itself must not be confused

with, or made to stand for, lack of agency. As I have argued in my ethnography of a Bedouin community in Egypt in

the late 1970s and 1980s (1986), pulling the black head cloth over the face in front of older respected men is

considered a voluntary act by women who are deeply committed to being moral and have a sense of honor tied to

family. One of the ways they show their standing is by covering their faces in certain contexts. They decide for

whom they feel it is appropriate to veil.

To take a very different case, the modern Islamic modest dress that many educated women across the Muslim

world have taken on since the mid-1970s now both publicly marks piety and can be read as a sign of educated

urban sophistication, a sort of modernity (e.g., Abu-Lughod 1995, 1998; Brenner 1996; El Guindi 1999; MacLeod

1991; Ong 1990). As Saba Mahmood (2001) has so brilliantly shown in her ethnography of women in the mosque

movement in Egypt, this new form of dress is also perceived by many of the women who adopt it as part of a bodily

means to cultivate virtue, the outcome of their professed desire to be close to God.

Two points emerge from this fairly basic discussion of the meanings of veiling in the contemporary Muslim world.

First, we need to work against the reductive interpretation of veiling as the quintessential sign of women’s

unfreedom, even if we object to state imposition of this form, as in Iran or with the Taliban. (It must be recalled that

the modernizing states of Turkey and Iran had earlier in the century banned veiling and required men, except

religious clerics, to adopt Western dress.) What does freedom mean if we accept the fundamental premise that

humans are social beings, always raised in certain social and historical contexts and belonging to particular

communities that shape their desires and understandings of the world? Is it not a gross violation of women’s own

understandings of what they are doing to simply denounce the burqa as a medieval imposition? Second, we must

take care not to reduce the diverse situations and attitudes of millions of Muslim women to a single item of

clothing. Perhaps it is time to give up the Western obsession with the veil and focus on some serious issues with

which feminists and others should indeed be concerned.

Ultimately, the significant political-ethical problem the burqa raises is how to deal with cultural “others.” How are

we to deal with difference without accepting the passivity implied by the cultural relativism for which

anthropologists are justly famous-a relativism that says it’s their culture and it’s not my business to judge or

interfere, only to try to understand. Cultural relativism is certainly an improvement on ethnocentrism and the

racism, cultural imperialism, and imperiousness that underlie it; the problem is that it is too late not to interfere.

The forms of lives we find around the world are already products of long histories of interactions.

I want to explore the issues of women, cultural relativism, and the problems of “difference” from three angles. First,

I want to consider what feminist anthropologists (those stuck in that awkward relationship, as Strathern [1987] has

claimed) are to do with strange political bedfellows. I used to feel torn when I received the e-mail petitions

circulating for the last few years in defense of Afghan women under the Taliban. I was not sympathetic to the

dogmatism of the Taliban; I do not support the oppression of women. But the provenance of the campaign worried

me. I do not usually find myself in political company with the likes of Hollywood celebrities (see Hirschkind and

Mahmood 2002). I had never received a petition from such women defending the right of Palestinian women to

safety from Israeli bombing or daily harassment at checkpoints, asking the United States to reconsider its support

for a government that had dispossessed them, closed them out from work and citizenship rights, refused them the

most basic freedoms. Maybe some of these same people might be signing petitions to save African women from

genital cutting, or Indian women from dowry deaths. However, I do not think that it would be as easy to mobilize so

many of these American and European women if it were not a case of Muslim men oppressing Muslim

womenwomen of cover for whom they can feel sorry and in relation to whom they can feel smugly superior. Would

television diva Oprah Winfrey host the Women in Black, the women’s peace group from Israel, as she did RAWA, the

Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan, who were also granted the Glamour Magazine Women of the

Year Award? What are we to make of post-Taliban “Reality Tours” such as the one advertised on the internet by

Global Exchange for March 2002 under the title “Courage and Tenacity: A Women’s Delegation to Afghanistan”?

The rationale for the $1,400 tour is that “with the removal of the Taliban government, Afghan women, for the first

time in the past decade, have the opportunity to reclaim their basic human rights and establish their role as equal

citizens by participating in the rebuilding of their nation.” The tour’s objective, to celebrate International Women’s

Week, is “to develop awareness of the concerns and issues the Afghan women are facing as well as to witness the

changing political, economic, and social conditions which have created new opportunities for the women of

Afghanistan” (Global Exchange 2002).

To be critical of this celebration of women’s rights in Afghanistan is not to pass judgment on any local women’s

organizations, such as RAWA, whose members have courageously worked since 1977 for a democratic secular

Afghanistan in which women’s human rights are respected, against Soviet-backed regimes or U.S.-, Saudi-, and

Pakistanisupported conservatives. Their documentation of abuse and their work through clinics and schools have

been enormously important.

It is also not to fault the campaigns that exposed the dreadful conditions under which the Taliban placed women.

The Feminist Majority campaign helped put a stop to a secret oil pipeline deal between the Taliban and the U.S.

multinational Unocal that was going forward with U.S. administration support. Western feminist campaigns must

not be confused with the hypocrisies of the new colonial feminism of a Republican president who was not elected

for his progressive stance on feminist issues or of administrations that played down the terrible record of

violations of women by the United State’s allies in the Northern Alliance, as documented by Human Rights Watch

and Amnesty International, among others. Rapes and assaults were widespread in the period of infighting that

devastated Afghanistan before the Taliban came in to restore order.

It is, however, to suggest that we need to look closely at what we are supporting (and what we are not) and to think

carefully about why. How should we manage the complicated politics and ethics of finding ourselves in agreement

with those with whom we normally disagree? I do not know how many feminists who felt good about saving

Afghan women from the Taliban are also asking for a global redistribution of wealth or contemplating sacrificing

their own consumption radically so that African or Afghan women could have some chance of having what I do

believe should be a universal human right-the right to freedom from the structural violence of global inequality and

from the ravages of war, the everyday rights of having enough to eat, having homes for their families in which to

live and thrive, having ways to make decent livings so their children can grow, and having the strength and security

to work out, within their communities and with whatever alliances they want, how to live a good life, which might

very well include changing the ways those communities are organized.

Suspicion about bedfellows is only a first step; it will not give us a way to think more positively about what to do or

where to stand. For that, we need to confront two more big issues. First is the acceptance of the possibility of

difference. Can we only free Afghan women to be like us or might we have to recognize that even after “liberation”

from the Taliban, they might want different things than we would want for them? What do we do about that?

Second, we need to be vigilant about the rhetoric of saving people because of what it implies about our attitudes.

Again, when I talk about accepting difference, I am not implying that we should resign ourselves to being cultural

relativists who respect whatever goes on elsewhere as “just their culture.” I have already discussed the dangers of

“cultural” explanations; “their” cultures are just as much part of history and an interconnected world as ours are.

What I am advocating is the hard work involved in recognizing and respecting differences-precisely as products of

different histories, as expressions of different circumstances, and as manifestations of differently structured

desires. We may want justice for women, but can we accept that there might be different ideas about justice and

that different women might want, or choose, different futures from what we envision as best (see Ong 1988)? We

must consider that they might be called to personhood, so to speak, in a different language.

Reports from the Bonn peace conference held in late November to discuss the rebuilding of Afghanistan revealed

significant differences among the few Afghan women feminists and activists present. RAWA’s position was to

reject any conciliatory approach to Islamic governance. According to one report I read, most women activists,

especially those based in Afghanistan who are aware of the realities on the ground, agreed that Islam had to be the

starting point for reform. Fatima Gailani, a U.S.-based advisor to one of the delegations, is quoted as saying, “If I go

to Afghanistan today and ask women for votes on the promise to bring them secularism, they are going to tell me

to go to hell.” Instead, according to one report, most of these women looked for inspiration on how to fight for

equality to a place that might seem surprising. They looked to Iran as a country in which they saw women making

significant gains within an Islamic framework-in part through an Islamically oriented feminist movement that is

challenging injustices and reinterpreting the religious tradition.

The situation in Iran is itself the subject of heated debate within feminist circles, especially among Iranian

feminists in the West (e.g., Mir-Hosseini 1999; Moghissi 1999; Najmabadi 1998, 2000). It is not clear whether and

in what ways women have made gains and whether the great increases in literacy, decreases in birthrates,

presence of women in the professions and government, and a feminist flourishing in cultural fields like writing and

filmmaking are because of or despite the establishment of a socalled Islamic Republic. The concept of an Islamic

feminism itself is also controversial. Is it an oxymoron or does it refer to a viable movement forged by brave

women who want a third way?

One of the things we have to be most careful about in thinking about Third World feminisms, and feminism in

different parts of the Muslim world, is how not to fall into polarizations that place feminism on the side of the

West. I have written about the dilemmas faced by Arab feminists when Western feminists initiate campaigns that

make them vulnerable to local denunciations by conservatives of various sorts, whether Islamist or nationalist, of

being traitors (Abu-Lughod 2001). As some like Afsaneh Najmabadi are now arguing, not only is it wrong to see

history simplistically in terms of a putative opposition between Islam and the West (as is happening in the United

States now and has happened in parallel in the Muslim world), but it is also strategically dangerous to accept this

cultural opposition between Islam and the West, between fundamentalism and feminism, because those many

people within Muslim countries who are trying to find alternatives to present injustices, those who might want to

refuse the divide and take from different histories and cultures, who do not accept that being feminist means being

Western, will be under pressure to choose, just as we are: Are you with us or against us?

My point is to remind us to be aware of differences, respectful of other paths toward social change that might give

women better lives. Can there be a liberation that is Islamic? And, beyond this, is liberation even a goal for which all

women or people strive? Are emancipation, equality, and rights part of a universal language we must use? To quote

Saba Mahmood, writing about the women in Egypt who are seeking to become pious Muslims, “The desire for

freedom and liberation is a historically situated desire whose motivational force cannot be assumed a priori, but

needs to be reconsidered in light of other desires, aspirations, and capacities that inhere in a culturally and

historically located subject” (2001:223). In other words, might other desires be more meaningful for different

groups of people? Living in close families? Living in a godly way? Living without war? I have done fieldwork in

Egypt over more than 20 years and I cannot think of a single woman I know, from the poorest rural to the most

educated cosmopolitan, who has ever expressed envy of U.S. women, women they tend to perceive as bereft of

community, vulnerable to sexual violence and social anomie, driven by individual success rather than morality, or

strangely disrespectful of God.

Mahmood (2001) has pointed out a disturbing thing that happens when one argues for a respect for other

traditions. She notes that there seems to be a difference in the political demands made on those who work on or

are trying to understand Muslims and Islamists and those who work on secular-humanist projects. She, who

studies the piety movement in Egypt, is consistently pressed to denounce all the harm done by Islamic movements

around the world-otherwise she is accused of being an apologist. But there never seems to be a parallel demand

for those who study secular humanism and its projects, despite the terrible violences that have been associated

with it over the last couple of centuries, from world wars to colonialism, from genocides to slavery. We need to

have as little dogmatic faith in secular humanism as in Islamism, and as open a mind to the complex possibilities

of human projects undertaken in one tradition as the other.

BEYOND THE RHETORIC OF SALVATION

Let us return, finally, to my title, “Do Muslim Women Need Saving?” The discussion of culture, veiling, and how one

can navigate the shoals of cultural difference should put Laura Bush’s self-congratulation about the rejoicing of

Afghan women liberated by American troops in a different light. It is deeply problematic to construct the Afghan

woman as someone in need of saving. When you save someone, you imply that you are saving her from

something. You are also saving her to something. What violences are entailed in this transformation, and what

presumptions are being made about the superiority of that to which you are saving her? Projects of saving other

women depend on and reinforce a sense of superiority by Westerners, a form of arrogance that deserves to be

challenged. All one needs to do to appreciate the patronizing quality of the rhetoric of saving women is to imagine

using it today in the United States about disadvantaged groups such as African American women or working-class

women. We now understand them as suffering from structural violence. We have become politicized about race

and class, but not culture.

As anthropologists, feminists, or concerned citizens, we should be wary of taking on the mantles of those

19thcentury Christian missionary women who devoted their lives to saving their Muslim sisters. One of my favorite

documents from that period is a collection called Our Moslem Sisters, the proceedings of a conference of women

missionaries held in Cairo in 1906 (Van Sommer and Zwemmer 1907). The subtitle of the book is A Cry of Need

from the Lands of Darkness Interpreted by Those Who Heard It. Speaking of the ignorance, seclusion, polygamy,

and veiling that blighted women’s lives across the Muslim world, the missionary women spoke of their

responsibility to make these women’s voices heard. As the introduction states, “They will never cry for themselves,

for they are down under the yoke of centuries of oppression” (Van Sommer and Zwemer 1907:15). “This book,” it

begins, “with its sad, reiterated story of wrong and oppression is an indictment and an appeal…. It is an appeal to

Christian womanhood to right these wrongs and enlighten this darkness by sacrifice and service” (Van Sommer

and Zwemer 1907:5).

One can hear uncanny echoes of their virtuous goals today, even though the language is secular, the appeals not

to Jesus but to human rights or the liberal West. The continuing currency of such imagery and sentiments can be

seen in their deployment for perfectly good humanitarian causes. In February 2002, I received an invitation to a

reception honoring an international medical humanitarian network called Medecins du Monde/Doctors of the

World (MdM). Under the sponsorship of the French Ambassador to the United States, the Head of the delegation of

the European Commission to the United Nations, and a member of the European Parliament, the cocktail reception

was to feature an exhibition of photographs under the clicked title “Afghan Women: Behind the Veil.”

The invitation was remarkable not just for the colorful photograph of women in flowing burqas walking across the

barren mountains of Afghanistan but also for the text, a portion of which I quote:

For 20 years MdM has been ceaselessly struggling to help those who are most vulnerable. But increasingly, thick

veils cover the victims of the war. When the Taliban came to power in 1996, Afghan Women became faceless. To

unveil one’s face while receiving medical care was to achieve a sort of intimacy, find a brief space for secret

freedom and recover a little of one’s dignity. In a country where women had no access to basic medical care

because they did not have the right to appear in public, where women had no right to practice medicine, MdM’s

program stood as a stubborn reminder of human rights …. Please join us in helping to lift the veil.

Although I cannot take up here the fantasies of intimacy associated with unveiling, fantasies reminiscent of the

French colonial obsessions so brilliantly unmasked by Alloula in The Colonial Harem (1986), I can ask why

humanitarian projects and human rights discourse in the 21st century need rely on such constructions of Muslim

women.

Could we not leave veils and vocations of saving others behind and instead train our sights on ways to make the

world a more just place? The reason respect for difference should not be confused with cultural relativism is that it

does not preclude asking how we, living in this privileged and powerful part of the world, might examine our own

responsibilities for the situations in which others in distant places have found themselves. We do not stand

outside the world, looking out over this sea of poor benighted people, living under the shadow-or veil-of oppressive

cultures; we are part of that world. Islamic movements themselves have arisen in a world shaped by the intense

engagements of Western powers in Middle Eastern lives.

A more productive approach, it seems to me, is to ask how we might contribute to making the world a more just

place. A world not organized around strategic military and economic demands; a place where certain kinds of

forces and values that we may still consider important could have an appeal and where there is the peace

necessary for discussions, debates, and transformations to occur within communities. We need to ask ourselves

what kinds of world conditions we could contribute to making such that popular desires will not be overdetermined

by an overwhelming sense of helplessness in the face of forms of global injustice. Where we seek to be active in

the affairs of distant places, can we do so in the spirit of support for those within those communities whose goals

are to make women’s (and men’s) lives better (as Walley has argued in relation to practices of genital cutting in

Africa, [1997])? Can we use a more egalitarian language of alliances, coalitions, and solidarity, instead of salvation?

Even RAWA, the now celebrated Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, which was so

instrumental in bringing to U.S. women’s attention the excesses of the Taliban, has opposed the U.S. bombing

from the beginning. They do not see in it Afghan women’s salvation but increased hardship and loss. They have

long called for disarmament and for peacekeeping forces. Spokespersons point out the dangers of confusing

governments with people, the Taliban with innocent Afghans who will be most harmed. They consistently remind

audiences to take a close look at the ways policies are being organized around oil interests, the arms industry, and

the international drug trade. They are not obsessed with the veil, even though they are the most radical feminists

working for a secular democratic Afghanistan. Unfortunately, only their messages about the excesses of the

Taliban have been heard, even though their criticisms of those in power in Afghanistan have included previous

regimes. A first step in hearing their wider message is to break with the language of alien cultures, whether to

understand or eliminate them. Missionary work and colonial feminism belong in the past. Our task is to critically

explore what we might do to help create a world in which those poor Afghan women, for whom “the hearts of those

in the civilized world break,” can have safety and decent lives.

Footnote

NOTES

Footnote

Acknowledgments. I want to thank Page Jackson, Fran Mascia-Lees, Tim Mitchell, Rosalind Morris, Anupama Rao,

and members of the audience at the symposium “Responding to War,” sponsored by Columbia University’s

Institute for Research on Women and Gender (where I presented an earlier version), for helpful comments,

references, clippings, and encouragement.

References

REFERENCES CITED

References

Abu-Lughod, Lila

1986 Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society. Berkeley: University of California Press.

1995 Movie Stars and Islamic Moralism in Egypt. Social Text 42:53-67.

1998 Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

2001 Orientalism and Middle East Feminist Studies, Feminist Studies 27(1):101-113.

Ahmed, Leila

1992 Women and Gender in Islam. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Alloula, Malek

1986 The Colonial Harem. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Brenner, Suzanne

1996 Reconstructing Self and Society: Javanese Muslim Women and “the Veil.” American Ethnologist 23(4):673-

697.

El Guindi, Fadwa

1999 Veil: Modesty, Privacy and Resistance. Oxford: Berg. Fremson, Ruth

2001 Allure Must Be Covered. Individuality Peeks Through. New York Times, November 4: 14.

Global Exchange

2002 Courage and Tenacity: A Women’s Delegation to Afghanistan. Electronic document,

01 – Homepage

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tours/auto/2002-03-05_CourageandTenacityAWomensDele. html. Accessed February 11.

Goldenberg, Suzanne

2002 The Woman Who Stood Up to the Taliban. The Guardian, January 24. Electronic document,

http://222.guardian.co.uk/ afghanistan/story/0,1284,63840.

Hirschkind, Charles, and Saba Mahmood

2002 Feminism, the Taliban, and the Politics of Counter-Insurgency. Anthropological Quarterly, Volume 75(2):107-

122. Lazreg, Marnia

1994 The Eloquence of Silence: Algerian Women in Question. New York: Routledge.

MacLeod, Arlene

1991 Accommodating Protest. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Mahmood, Saba

2001 Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival.

Cultural Anthropology 16(2):202-235.

Mir-Hosseini, Ziba

1999 Islam and Gender: The Religious Debate in Contemporary Iran. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Moghissi, Haideh

1999 Feminism and Islamic Fundamentalism. London: Zed Books. Najmabadi, Afsaneh.

1998 Feminism in an Islamic Republic. In Islam, Gender and Social Change. Yvonne Haddad and John Esposito,

eds. Pp. 59-84. New York: Oxford University Press.

2000 (Un)Veiling Feminism. Social Text 64: 29-45. Ong, Aihwa

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1988 Colonialism and Modernity: Feminist Re-Presentations of Women in Non-Western Societies. Inscriptions 3-

4:79-93.

1990 State Versus Islam: Malay Families, Women’s Bodies, and the Body Politic in Malaysia. American Ethnologist

17(2):258-276. Papanek, Hanna

1982 Purdah in Pakistan: Seclusion and Modern Occupations for Women. In Separate Worlds. Hanna Papanek and

Gail Minault, eds. Pp. 190-216. Columbus, MO: South Asia Books.

Safire, William

2001 “On Language.” New York Times Magazine, October 28: 22. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty

1988 Can the Subaltern Speak? In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg,

eds. Pp. 271-313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Strathern, Marilyn

1987 An Awkward Relationship: The Case of Feminism and Anthropology. Signs 12:276-292.

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1907 Our Moslem Sisters: A Cry of Need from Lands of Darkness Interpreted by Those Who Heard It. New York:

Fleming H. Revell Co.

2002 Electronic document, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/11/20011117. Accessed January 10.

Walley, Christine

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Cultural Anthropology 12(3):405-438.

AuthorAffiliation

LiLA ABu-LUGHOD Department of Anthropology, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027

DETAILS

Subject: Culture; Women; Political persecution; Anthropology; Terrorism

Location: United States US Afghanistan

Publication title: American Anthropologist; Oxford

Volume: 104

Issue: 3

Pages: 783-790

Number of pages: 8

Publication year: 2002

Publication date: Sep 2002

Publisher: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Place of publication: Oxford

Country of publication: United Kingdom, Oxford

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Bibliography

Gendered Islamophobia

: hate crime against Muslim women

Barbara Perry*

Faculty of Social Science and Humanities, University of Ontario Institute of Technology,
Oshawa, ON, Canada

(Received 12 June 2012; accepted 27 June 2013)

Post 9/11, most western nations have seen dramatic increases in bias motivated
violence against Muslims and those perceived to be Muslim. Predicated on the long-
lived vilification of Muslims by the media and the state, such violence is a reactionary
reminder of Muslims’ outsider status. Interestingly, little attention has been paid to the
particular vulnerability of women and girls to anti-Muslim hate crime. This paper
begins such a dialogue.

Keywords: hate crime; Islamophobia; gendered violence

To name only the ethnic hatred is to make gender hatred invisible. It names the gender violence
as something different from hatred. It normalizes the violence against women by not naming it.
This invisibility of violence toward women sustains it. (Zillah Eisenstein, 2006, p. 26)

Generally, women are not particularly vulnerable to hate crime. Just as the majority of
perpetrators are male, so too are the majority of victims. However, this is not the case
within the Muslim community. There, women and girls appear to be extremely vulnerable
to violence motivated by their status as Muslims, but especially as Muslim women. In
part, this is due to the fact that those who are covered, in particular, are readily
identifiable. Yet it also has to do with the controlling images of Muslims, women, and
Muslim women that render the latter especially attractive and available targets.

To understand the hate crime experienced by Muslim women, it is necessary to
understand the multiple subject positions they occupy, with particular attention to their
cultural identities and their gender. Thus, in what follows, I explore first, bias motivated
violence against Muslims and those perceived to be Muslims, and secondly, gendered
violence against women. This allows us, then, to move on to discuss the intersectionality of
religion, race, and gender which makes women vulnerable to complex patterns of bias
motivated violence. The patterns that are described here tend to be replicated across western
nations, such as the UK, Australia, Canada and the US. While the emphasis here is largely
on America, I also draw on emerging scholarship across other western nations as well.

Motive forces: anti-Muslim imaging

Prior to the terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington DC in 2001, Muslims
were not generally recognized as frequent targets of racially or religiously motivated

*Email: Barbara.perry@uoit.ca

Social Identities, 2014
Vol. 20, No. 1, 74–89, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13504630.2013.864467

© 2013 Taylor & Francis

mailto:Barbara.perry@uoit.ca

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13504630.2013.864467

violence. In the US, for example, they were far outstripped by violence directed toward
African Americans, Latinos and Jews. Yet that has changed since September 2001. The
reaction was immediate. In the US, within 24 hours of the attacks, as many as eight
homicides were attributed to racially motivated, reactionary violence. Most major cities
experienced a rash of hate crime, ranging in seriousness from verbal abuse to graffiti and
vandalism to arson and murder. By 18 September 2001, the FBI was investigating more
than 40 possible hate crimes thought to be related to the terrorist attacks; by 3 October,
they were investigating more than 90; the number had leapt to 145 by 11 October. The
Muslim Public Affairs Council of Southern California reported 800 cases nationwide by
mid-October, and the ADC (American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee) had
recorded over 1100 such offenses by mid-November.

The underpinnings of anti-Muslim violence are the invocation of negative images and
stereotypes associated with Muslims. The slogans that often accompany the violence –
‘Go home?’ ‘You are not American!’ – reveal a strong sense of the illegitimacy of Arab
residence in the west along with a similarly strong desire for revenge. Thus, while the
current wave of anti-Muslim violence clearly was motivated by anger and outrage at the
9/11 terrorist attacks, it is also informed by a broader history and culture that supports
anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Middle East sentiments. Muslims and Arabs in general
have a long, if largely unknown, history of defamation, violence, and non-violent
discrimination in the US. Moreover, the past and current patterns are nested in an array of
cultural and political practices that enable the hostility to fester, and violence to ensue.

Foremost among the motivating forces shaping bias-motivated violence generally are
ideologies and images that mark the Other, and the boundaries between self and Other, in
such a way as to normalize the corresponding inequities. It is within the cultural realm
that we find the justifications for these inequities, and for ethnoviolence. For it is this
body of discourse which articulates the relations of superiority/inferiority, thereby
establishing a hospitable environment for openly racist activity. In line with an essentialist
understanding of racial classification, the overriding ideology is that of inscribed traits,
wherein ‘the stereotypes confine them to a nature which is often attached in some way to
their bodies, and which thus cannot easily be denied’ (Young, 1990, p. 59). The ‘New
Racism’ (Barker, 1981) tends to see such characteristics less in biological and more in
cultural terms, but nevertheless conceives the boundaries between cultures as relatively
fixed and immutable, resulting effectively in a similar essentialism.

Stereotypes which distinguish the racialized Other from white subjects are thus
grounded in what are held to be the identifying features of racial minorities. They help to
distance white from not-white. Here ‘white’ may be a metaphor for western or non-
‘Third-World-looking’, rather than a matter of skin pigmentation or other such phenotype
(Hage, 1998). The latter are to be feared, ridiculed, and loathed for their difference as
recognized in the popular psyche. Almost invariably, the stereotypes are loaded with
disparaging associations, suggesting inferiority, irresponsibility, immorality, and non-
humanness, for example. Consequently, they provide both motive and rationale for
injurious verbal and physical assaults on minority groups. Acting upon these interpreta-
tions allows dominant group members to recreate whiteness as superiority, while
punishing the Other for their presumed traits and behaviours. The active construction
of whiteness, then, exploits stereotypes to justify violence.

Such negative constructions of Islam undoubtedly provide motivation for the victim-
ization of Muslims in most Western nations. In fact, many commentators have suggested
that Arabs generally and Muslims specifically may represent the last ‘legitimate’ subjects

Social Identities 75

of slanderous imagery and stereotypes (Abraham, 1994; Said, 1997; Stockton, 1994;
Suleiman, 1999). For example, Moore (1995, p. 16) observes that,

Crude caricatures of Muslims appear abundantly in the production and organization of
popular culture. Events and situations, whether fictional or real, are presented to us within a
framework of symbols, concepts, and images through which we mediate our understanding
about reality … The news and entertainment media both generate stereotypes and rely on our
familiarity with them in order to formulate the world in their terms and communicate ideas in
an efficient, i.e., timely, fashion.

As Moore suggests, the media are especially complicit in the dissemination of anti-
Muslim imagery. The widespread perpetuation of such caricatures – by the media and by
public figures – fuels sentiments of suspicion and mistrust by shaping public perceptions
in less than favourable ways. There are few, if any, positive images of Arabs, Muslims, or
Middle Easterners generally. Rather they are portrayed collectively as wholly evil and
warlike. Based on his observations of cartoons and other public media, Stockton (1994)
has identified eight ‘assigned image themes’ that consistently appear in depictions of
Arabs: sexual depravity (e.g., harems and belly dancers), creature analogies (e.g., vermin,
camels), physiological and psychological traits (e.g., unappealing physical characteristics,
fanaticism, vengeance), savage leaders (e.g., warmongers), deceit (in business and
politics), secret power (e.g., use of oil wealth to manipulate others, especially the West),
hatred of Israel, and terrorism.

In a 2002 nationwide survey of some 300 Canadian Muslims of South Asian, Arab,
African and European background, CAIR-CAN found that 55% of respondents thought
the Canadian media were more biased since 9/11. The report remarked on ‘A startling
similarity between media myths on Islam and Muslims and the hate-text of many
documented anti-Muslim incidents’ (Khan, Saloojee & Al-Shalchi, 2004). Disparaging
and inflammatory coverage of Islam, tending to emphasize extremist ‘tendencies’ is
endemic. Writing of Canada, for example, Ismael and Measor (2003) observe that, after
9/11,

The blend of the xenophobic fears of the ‘other’, and that of terrorism, provided media
consumers in Canada with a clear path to the conclusion that Islam was a faith in which acts
of unspeakable violence were acceptable and that terrorism was endemic to Muslim and Arab
culture. This framed Arab and Muslim societies and individuals as somehow fundamentally
different from the average Canadian. By refusing to represent the diversity of Islam as a faith,
the obfuscation of its tenets, and through their lack of coverage of the articulated ideas of
Muslims the world over endorsing peace and supportive of human rights, the media
conducted reductive exercises of the highest order.

This did not begin in September 2001, they point out, but the ‘war on terror’ marked an
intensification of existing Islamophobia in the media. It is also important to keep in mind
that the patterns of anti-Muslim sentiment and activity that have characterized Canada,
the US, Australia and other nations have a historical grounding. In the western world,
anti-Muslim sentiment is not new. Rather, it is often latent, overshadowed by what are the
typically more evident schisms among whites and blacks, Asians, and Aboriginal
peoples, for example. Nonetheless, there exists a history of colonialist deprecation that
provides the foundation for the current rash of anti-Muslim threats and intimidation:
western preoccupation with things Islamic is episodic, to say the least; it seems to take
moments of extreme gravity – the Arab-Israeli wars, the Palestinian Intifadas, the 1979

76 B. Perry

revolution in Iran and the ensuing hostage crisis, the Gulf War of 1991, the terrorist
attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon – to awaken its dormant interest.
Little wonder, then, that Islam has been at the receiving end of so much stereotyping –
depicted as intolerant, reactionary, fanatical, and, when resisted, violent. Such caricature
notions of Islam rarely are far from the surface (Malley, 2001). As Malley contends, it is
not uncommon for reactionary incidents to follow triggering events. In particular, the 30-
year trend toward typifying Arabs as ‘evil’ or as ‘terrorists’ has yielded a similarly long
history of backlash violence, of which the months following the September attacks are the
most recent in a lengthy series of retaliatory violence directed toward US citizens and
residents of Middle Eastern descent. Abraham (1994, p. 194) concurs: ‘The pattern of
jingoistic violence … had become fairly predictable. Events occurring in the Middle East,
particularly violence against U.S. citizens, often trigger jingoistic violence against Arabs
and others who could conceivably be confused with them, such as Muslims, Iranians, or
Palestinians.’ Abraham (1994, p. 193) characterizes such ‘jingoistic racism’ as a
dangerous hybrid of ‘knee-jerk patriotism and homegrown white racism toward non-
European, non-Christian dark skinned peoples … spawned by political ignorance, false
patriotism, and hyper ethnocentrism.’

A series of recent historic events that include the 2001 attack on the World Trade
Center by Islamic revolutionaries, the ensuing US invasions of two predominantly
Muslim countries (Afghanistan and Iraq) and President George Bush’s vilification of two
other Muslim countries (Iran and Syria) as ‘evil,’ have reinforced this tendency to vilify
Muslims. For example, when survey respondents were asked ‘when you hear the word
Muslim, what comes to mind?’ 32% used negative terms, many of which alluded to
images of war, guns and violence. In addition, a stunning quarter of the respondents
believed that Muslims teach their children to hate (Council on American-Islamic
Relations [CAIR], 2006). The result has been a significant increase in blatant and often
violent forms of religious persecution and discrimination of not only Muslims, but also of
those associated with them, as well as those who appear to be Muslim but who are not.

Gendered hate crime

Few social scientists have applied a hate crime perspective to the problem of violence
against women (DeKeseredy, 2008). Certainly, what Elizabeth Pendo (1994, p. 157)
noted 15 years ago still holds true today. Not only has there been neglect of the issue;
there is in fact, ‘tremendous resistance to the recognition of gender-based violence against
women as a hate crime and the institutionalized inequality which that resistance reflects.’
For example, in the US, 24 states still do not include gender as a protected category in
their hate crime statutes. In contrast, gender is included in Canada’s sentencing
enhancement statute (S.718) but it has never been the basis for a prosecution, in spite
of the high rates of violence against women. Indeed, as Jenness (2003, pp. 82–83)
observes, ‘gender is best envisioned as a ‘second-class citizen’ in social, political, and
legal discourse in the US that speaks directly to the larger problem of violence motivated
by bigotry and manifest as discrimination (i.e., bias motivated violence).’

There are multiple points of dissent in the debate over whether any subset of violence
against women should be considered a form of bias motivated crime. McPhail and
DiNitto (2005, p. 1165) summarize the standard rationales for exclusion as follows:

Social Identities 77

Many women know their attackers (unlike hate crimes where perpetrators are usually
strangers), violence against women is prevalent (unlike hate crimes, which occur less
frequently), and special laws already address violence against women.

By now, each of these has been seriously challenged and largely refuted in the literature
(e.g., Lynch, 2005; McPhail, 2002; McPhail & DiNitto, 2005; Pendo, 1994). In large
part due to efforts of feminist and anti-violence activists, by the early part of the new
millennium there has been an increasing recognition of the parallels between hate
crime against women and that committed against more ‘typical’ victim classes (e.g.,
race, religion). According to McPhail (2002, p. 270), ‘Violence against women fits the
hate crime paradigm when women are selected as victims due to their gender … or due
to the perpetrator’s hatred of women.’ Lynch (2005) provides an interesting typology
by which to characterize violence as hate or bias motivated. She asks a series of
questions:

Does this crime use gender bias as motivation? Does/can the crime hurt beyond the initial
victim to their entire social group? Does it send the dominant society-endorsed message onto
the body of the target? In what ways is the perpetrator or dominant society rewarded for the
crime? (Lynch, 2005, p. 7)

In her subsequent analysis, she argues that a great deal of gender violence can be
characterized as arising out of gender animus. Some level of violence against women
may, in fact be, indistinguishable from other hate crimes. Like racially or religiously
motivated violence, for example, gender motivated violence is predicated upon wide-
spread assumptions about gender appropriate behaviours. In particular, these
assumptions revolve around essentialist constructions of gender which represent
polar extremes inhabited by masculine and dominant men, and feminine, subordinate
women. Violence is but one means by which men as a class enforce conformity of
women as a class. Moreover, it is not necessary for all men to engage in violence
against women, since the very threat of violent censure is constantly with women.
Violence against women, then, is indeed a ‘classic’ form of hate crime, since it too
terrorizes the collective by victimizing the individual. In so doing, hate crime against
women reaffirms the privilege and superiority of the male perpetrator viz the female
victim.

Feminist scholars acknowledge the parallel between violence against women –
especially sexual violence – and lynching of black males (Brownmiller, 1975; Pendo,
1994) as means to exert control and identity. There is little difference in the broad
motives. Both groups are victimized because of their identity, often for very similar
illusionary ‘violations:’

… for being uppity, for getting out of line, for failing to recognize ‘one’s place,’ for assuming
sexual freedoms, or for behaving no more provocatively than walking down the wrong road
at night in the wrong part of town and presenting a convenient isolated target for group
hatred and rage. (Brownmiller, 1975, p. 281)

Just as racially motivated violence seeks to re-establish ‘proper’ alignment between racial
groups, so too gender motivated violence is intended to put women back in ‘their place.’
Victims are chosen because of their gender and because of the assumptions about how
they should enact their gender. The gender polarization that permeates so many Western

78 B. Perry

cultures is taken as a ‘natural’ ‘given’ fact, wherein women are expected to be deferential.
This dichotomy presupposes mutually exclusive scripts for males and females; it also
defines any person or behavior that deviates from these scripts as problematic. Gender
motivated violence is one readily available means by which men and women rehearse
their scripts, ensuring that women act ‘like women’ in the bedroom, in the kitchen, in the
workplace or on the street.

Gendered Islamophobia

Of course, the waters become even murkier and, in fact, stormier where gender intersects
with other elements of identity. Regardless of the cultural background of women, it is
highly likely that they become even more vulnerable to bias motivated violence when
they can be ‘othered.’ Indeed, women of colour – or in this case, Muslim women – are
feared and reviled on the same basis as all Muslims. Yet in addition, they are often
constructed as racialized, exotic Others who do not fit the Western ideal of womanhood.
Moreover, Crenshaw (1994) makes clear that women of colour are uniquely vulnerable to
gendered violence because of their multiply determined structural disempowerment. They
are often simultaneously oppressed by their class, gender, ethnic, racial and, here,
religious position. Writing specifically of Muslim women, Abu-Ras and Suarez (2009,
p. 59) highlight the complexity of these women’s identities:

(1) their gender status as women, who generally face more discrimination in access
to educational, financial, health, and social resources (cited in Bianchi, Casper &
Peltola, 1996);

(2) their cultural identity that is shaped by structural social and cultural constraints
provided by gender socialization and patriarchal processes, that also justify
certain types of discrimination (cited in Essers & Benschop, 2009);

(3) their status as immigrants and minorities in a Western country and the resulting
social and economic marginalization;

(4) their language barriers, which often result in loss of power, influence, and control
over their family members (cited Predelli, 2004);

(5) their religious identity, which results in their separation from men and the wider
society; and finally,

(6) their Islamic dress code (cited Haddad, 2007) that symbolizes modesty and
physical integrity, and identifies them from non-Muslims, marking them as targets
for hate crimes, discrimination, and possible violations of their bodily integrity.

Thus, it is because of the intersecting spaces that Muslim women occupy that they
become vulnerable to violence, and in unique ways. For these women, the Islamophobic
violence they experience is different in its dynamics and impacts from that perpetrated
against Muslim men; yet their gendered violence is experienced in ways that are distinct
from that experienced by differently raced women.

Evidence appears to be mounting that Muslim women may be unexpectedly
vulnerable to Islamophobic violence. This is very much in contrast to the demographics
of hate crime generally, which tend to target men disproportionately (excluding domestic
violence). Recent reports suggest, however, that Muslim women are at elevated risk. For
example, an Australian Community Relations Commission (Dreher, 2006) on post-9/11
experiences of Muslims found that 50.4% of the victims were female, whereas only

Social Identities 79

44.4% were male (the remainder were institutions/buildings). Other, similar reports from
Australia confirm this trend, as do some from the UK. Githens-Mazer and Lambert’s
(2010) London study also discovered that while racist violence typically targets men,
Muslim women are more vulnerable to religiously motivated hate crime. Abu-Ras and
Suarez’s (2009) American study of the PTSD effects on Muslims after 9/11 found that a
significantly larger proportion of women (86.3%) than men (54.9%) had experienced hate
crime. Unfortunately, there has been little else published on this in North America.

Nonetheless, we can glean from anecdotal reports and from media representations the
contexts in which Muslim women are most likely to be targets of bias motivated violence.
The following are examples of the sorts of experiences Muslim women have had across
the western world:

Muslim parents complained that their 11-year-old daughter was harassed, humiliated,
choked, and threatened with death by a sixth-grade boy. For over a week, he harassed her,
punched her in her arms and shoulder, and once pressed her into a wall with his hands
around her throat. He ripped off her hijab in science class, frightening her and causing her to
cry. The next day he threatened to start rumors that she was a lesbian, and said he would get
a BB gun and kill her. The girl said that the teacher witnessed the hijab incident, but told her
that, before she would be allowed to move to a seat away from the boy, she would have to
‘work for it.’ Earlier in the school year, eighth-graders had taunted her for wearing the hijab,
called her a terrorist, and ‘asked if she was hiding any bombs.’ (Githens-Mazer & Lambert,
2010, p. 54)

A South Asian student at Baylor University was attacked on campus. The assailant grabbed
her hijab, threw her to the ground, slapped and kicked her several times in the ribs, shouting
‘Arabian (expletive)’ and ‘(expletive) Muslims.’ She suffered bruises and a dislocated
shoulder. She had experienced previously harassment on campus because of her dress.
(Githens-Mazer & Lambert, 2010, p. 56)

Embedded in the language and context of these illustrative examples, are insights into the
constructs shaping violence against Muslim women. Interestingly, the motives for
Islamophobic violence against women are both the same and different from those
underlying violence against men. That is, they are informed by parallel negative images –
‘Like Muslim males, she too bears the brunt of entrenched stereotypes profiling Muslims
as the primary threat to American national security. But unlike her male counterpart, the
headscarved Muslim woman is caught at the intersection of discrimination against
religion and discrimination against women’ (Aziz, 2012, p. 25). Like men, Muslim
women are ‘presented as outsiders: as foreign, distant “others,” and as members of a
religion (Islam) that does not promote “Canadian” values, but anti-Canadian values such
as indiscriminate violence and gender oppression’ (Bullock & Jafri, 2002, p. 35). Yet
women are further subject to specific gendered constructs, which serve to Other them in
very specific ways, ways that render them vulnerable to harassment and violence. In
short, their position outside the boundaries of the dominant white, Christian culture
means that they are less valued and thus less protected (Jiwani, 2005). In this way,
‘gendered and racialized violence dictat(es) what “men”, “women” and racialized
categories such as “white”, “black”, “Arab/Muslim” or “oriental” are supposed to be
and do’ (Nayak, 2006, p. 47).

Bullock and Jafri (2002, p. 36; see also Posetti, 2007) highlight three ‘personas’ that
Muslim women are thought to occupy in the popular imagination, and thus define what
Muslim women ‘are supposed to be and do’:

80 B. Perry

The first is the ‘harem belly-dancer character,’ the mysterious and sexualized woman of the
‘Orient’; the second is ‘the oppressed Muslim woman,’ often represented as the hijab
(headscarf) wearer or the woman who is unable to drive; and, finally, there is the ‘militant
Muslim woman,’ often shown in hijab with a gun and military clothes.

I turn now to discuss the ironies and implications of these characterizations as they inform
violence against Muslim women.

Sexualized and assailable bodies

At the heart of Edward Said’s (1978) thesis on orientalism is the notion of the
exoticization and colonization of the Other through popularly held imagery. Historically,
this has been central to the desirous gaze by which colonized women – including
Muslims and Arabs – have been viewed. Early male travelers to the Middle East went
with erotic fantasies in mind, having been fed images of the exotic beauty ‘behind the
veil’, and thus sexualized expectations of women found there. Travel writers and
‘explorers’ published their accounts of the seductive and alluring women of the East.
Postcards often carried images of scantily clad – but veiled – women in tempting poses.
The fantasy lingers today, albeit in different form. As Agathangelou and Ling (2004,
p. 528) describe it,

the female Other remains a silent, inscrutable object of desire … Indeed, contemporary
media outlets like National Geographic have popularized an image of the Muslim woman
as a half-veiled, muted waif, eyeing the white-male world beseechingly and remotely.
This motif reflects a long-standing, Orientalist tradition of treating the female Other as
young (under-developed), appreciative (subordinate), and tantalizingly mysterious
(unknowable).

Like many women of colour, Muslim women are sexualized, such that they are reduced
to their bodies. And the body is, according to Eisenstein (2006, p. 186), ‘a horribly
powerful resource for those who wish to conquer, violate, humiliate, and shame.’
Interestingly, the context in which this becomes most apparent is in depictions of female
terrorists. While men are typically described as barbaric and dirty, women are often
described in breathless terms as beautiful, striking, exotic. Their motives and activities
seem less important than their physical appearance. There seems to be something
provocative about beautiful and sexually enticing women when they are armed!

Muslim women’s bodies become assailable because of their exotic allure, but
also because of the threat that such attraction represents to white culture. They are
not like ‘our’ women in ways that are at once titillating and disturbing, captivating
and frightening. Violence can be a way to simultaneously avail oneself of what the
foreign other offers, while nonetheless reinforcing the boundaries between ‘us’ and
‘them.’ Violence – whether verbal, physical or sexual – expresses ‘both yearning
for possession of and ability to degrade the exotic other’ (Nayak, 2006, pp.
54–55).

Western perceptions of the veil exacerbate this dynamic. The veil enhances the allure;
what is hidden becomes desired. Much as it symbolizes chasteness (see below), it also
induces sexualized fantasies of what lies beneath. Ayotte and Husain (2005, pp. 120–121)
write of ‘titillating’ titles and phrases often found in the media that speak to the western
desire to denude Muslim women:

Social Identities 81

Other accounts of ‘unveiling’ objectify Afghan women with less than subtle sexual
figurations. In a story on women living under the Taliban regime, Tom Brokaw enticed
viewers by explaining that this story would provide ‘a rare look behind the veil’ (‘Life
of Women’ 2001). The 60 Minutes II segment entitled ‘Unveiled’ promised that the
viewer would meet young Afghan women who ‘unveil more than just their faces.’
(‘Unveiled’ 2001)

What could be more enticing – or sexual – than the promise implied here? It is, perhaps,
no surprise then that so many attacks on Muslim women involve ripping off her hijab. To
satisfy the male fantasy, she must be at least metaphorically stripped, unveiled and thus
exposed.

Women in need of salvation

The nature of the violence to which Muslim women are subjected is telling in other ways.
As noted earlier, the veil, the burqa, the hijab and other forms of covering are taken as the
central identifier of the female Muslim body, and thus the sign of seductive, yet reviled
difference. Consequently,

While a male Muslim’s ideology is not necessarily obvious from his dress, a female wearing
a headscarf becomes an easy target for those fearing Islamic fundamentalists. Therefore,
while individuals who are actually dangerous may remain potentially invisible, their pacifist,
veiled sisters may be heavily scrutinized and potentially victimized. (Wing & Smith, 2006,
p. 754)

There is a familiar dichotomy at play here. For white women, there is the duality of the
Madonna/whore that characterizes their roles and identities. For black women, there is the
Jezebel and Mammy distinction. So too there is a second contradictory piece to Muslim
women’s imposed identity. Juxtaposed to the wholly sexual ‘belly dancer’ is the wholly
pure ‘oppressed’ woman in need of salvation.

Paradoxically, then, coverings are also the central reminders of women’s place in
Muslim cultures. And in the West, this is not a safe space. Although women have and
continue to wear the veil for a variety of reasons, both cultural and political, in the West,
it ‘has remained a static colonial image that symbolizes Western superiority over Eastern
backwardness’ (Razak, 2008, p. 120). With this narrow understanding in mind, where
western literature and popular commentary have paid attention to violence against
Muslim women, they have done so as a means of drawing a line between the West and
Islam, between ‘progress’ and ‘backwardness,’ between ‘equality’ and ‘oppression’ of
women. In short, it has focused almost solely on violence perpetrated by their Muslim
partners, brothers, or other male family members, and taken this as an inherent
characteristic of Muslim ‘culture.’ Indeed, a search of electronic data bases for such
terms as ‘violence against Muslim women’ brings up almost exclusively literature on
private rather than public violence. Razak (2008, p. 4) reminds us how ‘Muslim women
have been singled out as needing protection from their violent and hyper-patriarchal
men,’ but evidently not from white perpetrators.

Ironically, this popular stereotype of the ‘weak’ victim has become part of the
controlling image of Muslim women, and thus a trigger and key rationale not only for
public violence against Muslims, but also for the ‘war on terror.’ The ‘justness’ of
military action in Afghanistan in particular was certainly expressed as an attempt to root
out terrorism. But especially after the WMD ‘hoax’ was revealed, supporters of the war

82 B. Perry

turned to the narrative of saving Muslim women from their oppressors. Ironically, the
patriarchal model of Islam was to be defeated by an alternative patriarchy: ‘women are
characterized primarily as victims in need of saving by the paternalistic masculinity of
patriarchal social or governmental institutions. This formula extends to the realm of
international relations, where “the heroic, just warrior is sometimes contrasted with a
malignant, often racialized, masculinity attributed to the enemy”’ (Ayotte & Husain,
2005, p. 122).

Covering has come to be seen as the primary symbol of this presumed oppression.
Indeed, women who are covered are at a dramatically increased risk of violence (Kwan,
2008). Yet ironically, in the case of public violence, the presumptive victims of this
oppression also become victims of Islamophobic violence. It is a playing out of a victim-
blaming scenario, wherein Muslim women are punished for succumbing to patriarchal
pressures to remain concealed. Again, they are ‘not like our women,’ but passive and
yielding. Again, this is evident in so many attacks where hijabs are torn off. It is the hijab
that signals them as weak, oppressed, vulnerable and thus as available victims. In this
way, the very vulnerability for which they are degraded is exploited by perpetrators.

Muslim women as terrorists

Identifiable Muslim women are also seen as the threatening other in some contexts; not
someone who needs saving, but from whom the nation needs saving. Another paradox
arises. While the veil is often taken as a sign of submissiveness, it is also taken as a sign
of Islamic aggression. So, if women are not characterized as exotic, or as oppressed,
especially when they are veiled, they are represented as mysterious, dangerous and
threatening. This, too, is fuelled by the controlling image of ‘Muslim-as-terrorist.’ Thus,
covered women are represented as ‘agents’ of terrorism or, as in France in recent
years, ‘as the tools of Islamic organizations aiming to infiltrate France’ (Freedman, 2007,
p. 170). One right wing politician was quite explicit in his association of the hijab
with security threats, claiming that ‘there has been so much evidence that we can no
longer afford to ignore the real meaning of the headscarf for fundamentalists’ (cited in
Freedman, 2007, p. 170). Another claimed, in parallel fashion, that wearing a headscarf
constituted a ‘militant act which is supported by real fundamentalist propaganda’
(cited in Freedman, 2007, p. 177). Covering is thus seen as at least tacit support for
fundamentalism and terrorism.

Aziz (2012) also draws attention to the popular spectre of the Muslim woman
‘warrior’ or terrorist. Alongside her male counterpart, the militant female warrior is also
ready to wage war on the west. Jiwani (2005, p. 17) describes Canadian media reports
showing the Middle Eastern reaction to the 9/11 attacks, with particular attention to
women. A Globe and Mail journalist wrote of a woman in burqa, who cried out ‘America
is the head of the snake! America always stands by Israel in its war against us.’ Women
were described as ‘mothers of suicide bombers’ whose apparent lack of compassion for
the American losses ‘was described with resounding condemnation.’ These were not
‘real’ women or mothers like Western women. They were the reproducers of evil and
barbarism, active promoters of the most violent forms of Islamic fundamentalism.

So strong is the notion of ‘veiling as danger’ that there have been moves across the
west to ban the hijab, burqa, etc., especially in public schools. In France, one right wing
member of Parliament went so far as to call for a total ban on the burqa, arguing that
women could use it to conceal a bomb (Posetti, 2007, p. 73). A Washington Times

Social Identities 83

editorial similarly claimed that granting religious accommodation to Muslim women who
wear the headscarf would enable terrorists to use it to elude security measures. Indeed, the
title of the editorial is telling in and of itself: Terrorists Hiding in Hijabs: Muslims Seek
Special Treatment to Elude TSA Groping (Washington Times, 2010). Such sentiments are
heightened by pictorial images of veiled and armed women, thereby establishing an
equation between the oppression of women, fanaticism and terrorism (Macmaster &
Lewis, 1998, p. 128).

That such sentiments are shared by people on the street, and that they are willing to
act on them is also apparent in the language that accompanies attacks on Muslim
women. One could easily catalogue myriad examples in which perpetrators shouted
such phrases as ‘she’s got a bomb under there.’ Consider the following illustrative
cases:

An Arab-American Muslim woman, two months pregnant, who wears the hijab (Muslim
headscarf) was walking with her ten-month old baby from a relative’s house to her home in
Massachusetts when a man and his dog approached them. When the woman asked the man
to restrain his dog, he allegedly proceeded to curse at her and verbally harass her, calling her
a terrorist. He allegedly continued to yell, followed her, and then pulled off her hijab and beat
her until she was unconscious. (ADC, 2008, p. 13)

On December 24, 2010, a man in Twin Falls, Idaho harassed a Muslim woman wearing a
headscarf and with her two children. After asking if she was Muslim, the assailant reportedly
told her he spent time in Iraq and ‘my friends were killed by you, I was blown up by you.’
(Botkins, 2010)

In Ann Arbor, Michigan, on August 7, 2011, a motorist pulled up to a 21-year-old
Palestinian woman while she was stopped at a red light and screamed racial epithets, yelling,
‘You’re a terrorist,’ and, ‘Your people need to be killed,’ before pointing a handgun at her.
(CAIR-MI Asks FBI to Probe Threat Against Muslim Driver, PR NEWSWIRE, August 7,
2011, http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cair-mi-asks-fbi-to-probe-threat-against-
muslim-driver-127096513.html)

The ‘war on terror’ provides another entrée into an understanding of violence against
Muslim women if we consider the lessons from the scholarship on violence against
women in the context of war (Ayotte & Husain, 2005). There is an extensive literature
that (en)genders the war on terror, thereby bringing to the surface the ways in which
gender, and especially intersectionally with other identities, provides the very terrain on
which the ‘war’ has been ‘constructed, waged and legitimized’ (Hunt & Rygiel, 2006,
p. 2). In this context, women’s bodies become a medium on which to inscribe hostility
and enmity.

The most virulent of bias offenders may very well be waging their own private war
against Muslims. In general, Anders Breivik certainly fits in this camp. Akin to Levin
and McDevitt’s ‘mission’ offenders, these are the perpetrators who believe they are
doing good works for their God or their nation. They are engaged in moral and physical
battle against barbarous followers of Islam. Women, in this context, are fair game, and
in fact, powerfully appealing as targets. Consider the case of a self-proclaimed white
supremacist in Seattle who wielded a knife in the face of a woman and her child. He
allegedly walked up to the woman, pointed at her hijab and said, ‘you Muslim people
scare people when you wear things like that!’ (Seattle Times, 2009). Moreover, the
Southern Poverty Law Centre has, in recent years, carefully monitored the growth and
activity of organized anti-Muslim groups across the US. These groups share a virulent

84 B. Perry

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cair-mi-asks-fbi-to-probe-threat-against-muslim-driver-127096513.html

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cair-mi-asks-fbi-to-probe-threat-against-muslim-driver-127096513.html

hatred of Islam and its followers, as expressed in their rhetoric around such issues as
sharia law, terrorism, and the threat of the impending Islamic ‘takeover’ of the western
world.

Impacts of gendered Islamophobia

As with any victim of hate crime, Muslim women’s experiences shape their sense of ease
and of belonging in their environment. Such violence is intended, in fact, to encourage
victims to (re)consider their place, to send the message that they are, in fact, out of place.
Thus, they are forced to rethink their visibility. They must consider whether to alter their
performance of gender and religion in accordance with what they recognize as the
socially established rules for doing so. It is not uncommon, then, for Muslim women to
change activities, habits, and ways of being in the world. In this respect, the potential for
anti-Muslim violence serves its intended purpose of enforcing appropriate public
performances at the very least. It has the additional effect of further isolating members
of the Muslim community not only from non-Muslims, but also from one another,
perhaps as a means of limiting their collective ‘threat’ to the current gender, race and
religious orders. As Kwan (2008, p. 656) expresses it, ‘The totalization of all Muslims as
terrorists by the dominant master narrative has not only produced American Muslims as
feared/hated subjects but also turned many of them into fearful subjects.’

The oppressive impacts of the threat of Islamophobic violence against Muslim
women are wide-ranging, as indicated by the findings of an Australian study.

Women spoke of the detrimental impact racism had on their sense of wellbeing;
freedom of movement and sense of safety; sense of belonging and participation in
society; and sense of control and agency over their lives. Many participants stated that
they experienced a consistent sense of low grade fear and vulnerability (Islamic Women’s
Welfare Council of Victoria Inc [IWWCV], 2008). Indeed, several studies corroborate the
observation that their real and potential victimization has the intended effect of terrorizing
and instilling fear among Muslim women – fear of violence, fear of harassment, fear of
profiling, and a generalized fear of appearing in public (Abu-Ras & Suarez, 2009; Human
Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission [HREOC], 2004; Kwan, 2008).

Managing their own safety, then, has become crucial for Muslim women. Sadly, the risk
of victimization often means that women are forced to prioritize their safety over their
expression of identity and over their independence. Recognizing the visibility represented
by the hijab, many women have come to question their choice to be covered (HREOC,
2004; IWWCV, 2008). The following illustrative statements were reported to the HREOC:

I thought long and hard about taking the scarf off after September 11 like many women … I
remember within one hour of going out I had been spat on, had someone threaten me as if
they were going to hit me, the shop assistant at Coles would swipe my card and would not
look at me in the eye. I remember coming home crying my eyes out and asking myself, ‘Do I
take this scarf off?’

People are always going to pick on you for being different. Why should I change for this
handful of ignorant people and they will never be happy with me anyway? A lot of girls have
taken the scarf off after September 11. It’s sad because they [the perpetrators] have won.
These handfuls of ignorant people have won and why should we cater for their needs?

Living in Australia it makes me want to wear the hijab less and I shouldn’t have to feel
that way.

Social Identities 85

Even more extreme, other women opt to remain out of the public eye completely,
reluctant to leave the security of their homes (Abu-Ras & Suarez, 2009; HREOC, 2004).
As noted in the IWWCV report, ‘some Muslim women reported hiding at home with their
children for up to a month in the periods immediately following Muslim terrorist attacks
overseas.’ A participant in the HREOC study reports that ‘My experience is if something
happens to me on the street, I stay in for one week. I used to always go down to the city
as a day out with my kids but a year ago I was physically abused and since then I no
longer step out of the house alone, not a train to the city or anything.’

This woman also suggests yet another response to the risk of violence: an unwilling-
ness to appear alone in public. Like many others, she recognizes that there is safety in
numbers. For some, this means going only where they know there will be several other
Muslims in attendance: ‘If I go to the beach I go with a large group of people, and we’ll
go to a beach that is well known, and is really busy, and there are lot of, I know this
might sound racist, but there’s a lot of Arabic or Muslim people there. You know at least
if there are people there you feel safer’ (HREOC, 2004). For others, it means being
escorted by family or friends: ‘My mother is proud of taking my older brother, who is 23
years old, out with her shopping and stuff. She feels its more protective’ (HREOC, 2004).
Ironically, violence reproduces the dependency for which Muslim women are so
frequently berated. This is a paradox noted by Ahmad (2002, p. 110), who argues that
‘in the same moment that we decry the Taliban’s cruel restrictions on the mobility of
Afghan women, our racial oppression confines women in the United States to their homes
as well. We have engaged in our own form of purdah.’ In the interests of safety, fearful
women forfeit whatever independence they might have attained.

What to do?

The evidence is growing and compelling. Islamophobic violence against women is a
reality. Our attention must expand from a singular obsession with private violence against
‘oppressed’ women by their ‘patriarchal’ husbands to include public violence perpetrated
by others who are motivated by both racism and sexism. The dialogue must occur not
only in the public arena but also within the academy. As noted earlier, public violence
against Muslim women has not been the focus of our attention. Rather, our energies have
been devoted largely to debating whether or how Muslim women are uniquely vulnerable
to private violence at the hands of male relatives in particular. It is to be hoped that this
paper initiates such a conversation.

It is also crucial, however, that public awareness of Islamophobic violence generally,
and gendered Islamophobic violence specifically, be increased. Neither piece of this
equation has garnered much public attention. To the extent that it is not in the realm of
popular consciousness, the violence thought to be perpetrated by Muslims rather than that
perpetrated against them will continue to occupy centre stage. We might engage here in
some ‘public criminology’ whereby researchers in the field take their findings to the street
– via media, public seminars, etc. – rather than confining their discussion to the obscure
pages of dusty refereed journals.

If it is to have any impact on the level of violence directed at Muslims and at Muslim
women specifically, the emerging dialogue must unpack the misperceptions and
stereotypes that are at its roots. There is much work to be done around breaking through
the rhetoric to get at the ‘realities’ of Islam. Nowhere is this more obvious, perhaps, than
in the context of public (mis)understanding of Muslim women’s decisions to cover/not

86 B. Perry

cover. As noted, this is narrowly seen as a symbol of their oppression, rather than as a
complex, multiply determined choice. Muslim women’s voices must be heard in this
respect. Interestingly, at a recent public forum, an hijabi university student indicated her
intent to establish a Facebook page devoted to an open dialogue wherein other women
who choose to wear hijab or niqab could share their reasons, their rationales for choosing
to cover. Such initiatives have tremendous potential to open up honest exchanges between
those who live with the threat of Islamophobia and those who might be complicit in
supporting that threat.

The directions suggested here presuppose an active research agenda around Islamo-
phobia and violence against Muslim women. Such a programme of research emerged in
the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but has lost some steam in recent
years, especially in North America. We could learn from Australian and UK scholars who
continue to highlight the vulnerability of Muslims to religiously and racially motivated
violence. Indeed, there are boundless opportunities for comparative research with our
colleagues elsewhere. Regardless, research that addresses anti-Muslim violence should
attend to the intersectionalities of those forms of violence, to take into account not just
gender, but sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, class and other crucial identities that might
moderate or exacerbate the risk of violence.

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• Abstract

Motive forces: anti-Muslim imaging
Gendered hate crime
Gendered Islamophobia
Sexualized and assailable bodies
Women in need of salvation
Muslim women as terrorists
Impacts of gendered Islamophobia
What to do?
References