It's Not About the Burqa

When a woman is ‘too much’, she is essentially uncontrollable and unashamed. That makes her dangerous.

The more complicated answer is men and men and a system – patriarchy – that enables and protects them at the same time as it socializes women to internalize the dictates of patriarchy and to accept them as culture and as community.

The deplorable campaign by FEMEN, a group that called for an ‘International Topless Jihad’ day by bearing their breasts outside mosques across Europe in 2013 to supposedly ‘free’ Muslim women, was an example of women’s rights and demands being mobilized as part of the sustained attack against the Muslim community.

Because women in such unregistered marriages cannot get a legal divorce, if the husband refuses to give an Islamic divorce, they are referred to as ‘chained women’.

Shame is heaped upon us by others.

Other than that, he was quiet, highly reserved.

I’m not averse to bread; I would just rather eat brioche.

I started writing about Muslim women that year for two reasons: I hadn’t seen any journalism reflecting the lived experiences of British, liberal, educated and unapologetically Muslim women like me and, to be quite frank, I was tired of waiting for anyone else to do it.

Studies have found that Muslims are often reluctant to get help regarding their mental health as they face stigma from both within the community and outside it.1 Muslims are often afraid that they may experience Islamophobia when seeing non-Muslim therapists and practitioners, particularly because that therapist may not understand the role of faith as either part of their problem or part of the possible solution.

Hatmaker at the University of Connecticut published in 2013 shows that women in engineering tend to fall within two main categories when dealing with the male dominance of the workplace: coping mechanisms and/or impression management.1