By Faizaan Bhat
Last week, I met a friend in Jammu. He brought along a white French acquaintance. The moment my friend introduced me as a Muslim, the Frenchman launched into a lecture about Islam being backward, barbaric, and oppressive toward women.
He spoke with the confidence of someone who had assumed he knew better than any Muslim woman alive.
This scene plays out repeatedly, and often with a clear intent behind it.
Western audiences absorb the same message through books, films, and political speeches: Muslim women live under a religion that hates them. Western feminists frame themselves as rescuers, swooping in to save brown women from brown men.
During the Afghan war, media was filled with images of women in burkas labelled oppression and women in miniskirts labelled freedom.
The message was clear that clothing meant liberation and liberation was defined as looking like us. But the reality is far more layered.
Some Western thinkers built entire careers on this misunderstanding. Jacques Derrida claimed Islam lacked democracy, Slavoj Žižek fixated on the oppression of Muslim women, and John Rawls imagined a fictional Muslim world that could join the global order only by meeting Western standards of human rights.
These thinkers spoke about Muslim women rather than asking them to define their own lives.
Hollywood and Bollywood often cast veiled women as either terrorists or victims. The veil becomes a sign of danger or submission, and choice is erased.
At the same time, the Islamic world holds its own contradictions.
Sudanese journalist Lubna Al-Hussein was arrested in July 2004 for wearing trousers in public. Saudi activist Malek Al Shehri faced arrest in November 2016 for posting a photo bare-headed. Banaz Mahmod was killed by her own family for choosing her husband.
These horrors are real and tied to specific places and specific men, rather than Islam as a whole or all Muslim women.
Some Muslim men do compound the problem. Andrew Tate, the former kickboxer turned social media star with millions of followers, converted to Islam in October 2022 while continuing his misogynistic rants.
Scores of Muslims defend him, and this hypocrisy exists, though it does not define the faith or the women who practice it.
But then, Western politicians have made the veil a political football. Boris Johnson, during his time as a British columnist, called Muslim women in veils “letterboxes” and “ninjas.” Martha Nussbaum wrote in the New York Times in 2010 that veiling signals oppression and fails to defend a woman’s right to choose her own dress.
Pierre Bourdieu provided a rare counterpoint, arguing that veiling resists capitalism by refusing to turn the female body into a commodity. But his voice remains the exception.
Much of this ‘veiled’ attack comes from a white savior mentality rooted in colonial history.
European powers justified their invasions by calling Eastern people barbaric, uneducated, and incapable of self-governance. They imposed their culture at gunpoint, and that mentality survived the end of empire.
Edward Said, in Orientalism, showed how the West constructed the East as its opposite: enlightened versus backward, civilized versus savage.
This framework dehumanized entire populations. Today, it manifests as the othering of Muslim societies and the Islamicate world.
But Muslim women bear the heaviest cost of all.
Joan Wallach Scott noted in her 2007 book The Politics of the Veil that 80 percent of Muslim women reported feeling harassed and discriminated against, up from 35 percent seven years earlier.
Those numbers came from 2007, and eighteen years later, the figure has almost certainly climbed higher.
Banning the veil in Western countries is a symbolic act. It declares Islam itself a threat. Australian politician Bronwyn Bishop called the veil “the icon of the clash of cultures,” adding that it runs “much deeper than a piece of cloth.”
The message is clear that patriarchy is seen as something unique to Islam.
When the war on Palestine began, 50,000 pregnant women were left without healthcare, food, or safe shelter. About 150 babies were born every day in those conditions. Many white feminist organizations stayed silent because the suffering did not fit their narrative.
The veil has meaning that Western critics refuse to see.
Many Muslim women wear it as a protest against colonialism and Western ideals. It is a refusal to participate in the commodification of the female body, restores personhood, and is part of Islam and its culture. It gives women respect and a sense of self rooted in modesty and religious belief.
Saba Mahmood, in Politics of Piety, argued that people in different societies think about freedom in different ways. The concept shifts based on community, religion, culture, and upbringing. Muslim women interpret the veil through their own histories, including the discrimination and violence their cultures endured under colonial rule.
Their understanding of freedom looks different because their experience of the world looks different.
My French acquaintance in Jammu spoke with certainty about a life he never tried to understand. He spoke about Muslim women instead of asking them why they cover their hair. He filled the gaps with prejudice instead of considering that their choice may be active, informed, and deeply personal.
He saw a piece of cloth and only his own assumptions.
The politics of the veil is about power. It decides who defines freedom, who speaks for Muslim women, and who is seen as enlightened.
Muslim women have their own voices. The West would do well to listen.
- — The author is an independent researcher based in Jammu, with contributions to several regional and national media platforms. He can be contacted at [email protected].
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