Unveiling Gendered Islamophobia

Saving Muslim Women and Punishing Muslim Men

The following the introduction to an academic article, forthcoming in the California Law Review, titled “Unveiling.” The article is authored by Dr. Nura Sediqe and myself, introducing a new theory of gendered Islamophobia rooted in law. It examines how the emergent laws that police Muslim women are rooted in imperial discourses, which fixate on regulating Muslim women’s bodies as the vehicle for advancing colonialism, wars and the “War on Terror.”

The full article can be downloaded here.

“The so-called modesty of [Muslim] women is in fact a war tactic.”

—   Fatima Mernissi, Scheherazade Goes West

“Let’s win the women and the rest will follow.”

—   Franz Fanon, Algeria Unveiled

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      A swelling crowd of boys and men raced toward the jet wheeling across the runway. It would be the American plane’s last time rolling atop that Kabul tarmac. And, the final time the soldiers within it would step foot in Afghanistan – a nation ravaged by twenty years of American war and occupation.

      A different fate, however, awaited the Afghan boys and men scurrying behind. They, too, dreamt of an escape. Then, upon announcement of the American military’s exit, scrambled to flee the marching reign of the Taliban. They ran, and ran faster, as the plane bearing the American flag made its way toward liftoff.

      Moving in sync with the moving plane, television cameras honed in on the faces of men clad with traditional turbans and Afghan dress. Some men donned beards, a symbol of Islamic piety converted into a marker of terrorism since the beginning of the “War on Terror” and its first campaign in Afghanistan. Boys born into war wore looks of frenzy in place of beards as they followed the footsteps of their male elders.   

      Many in the crowd clung onto the hope that their desperation would invite rescue. They prayed that the “western savior” that descended into Kabul two decades earlier to save their sisters and daughters, aunts and mothers would also return for them. While those familiar with the sobering truth that only Muslim women get saved clenched onto the landing gear hatches of Air Force Plane 1109 to save themselves.

      Seventeen-year-old boy Zaki Anwari was one of the men that took matters into his own hands. Five weeks earlier, President Biden announced immediate plans for the U.S. military evacuation from Afghanistan. Five minutes later, the young man with dreams of soccer stardom and greener American fields held tightly onto the plane as it ripped through the clouds. He held, and held. Until he could hold no more.

      Zaki fell. His body plunged from the sky toward the soil he desperately sought to flee. A soil that summoned a War on Terror that targeted him on account of his Muslim masculinity; an identity that invited the global crusade’s harshest indictment. There was no rescue from that cardinal charge of “terrorism,” and no planes to evacuate Muslim men like Zaki.

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      The Afghan girls landed safely in Mexico City. It was their first time setting foot in the North American nation. However, one would have never guessed that based on the celebrity reception awaiting them.

      Members of the celebrated “Afghan Girls Robotics Team,” the five young women were met with hot flashes of cameras and the warmth of Mexican state dignitaries. They handed praise and presented passports to the famous evacuees. In the days before, the Afghan girls were courted by western governments and white American women. They all stepped in to save the girls for the very same reasons that the Taliban sought to punish them.

      The girls were honored residents of Mexico, asylees-in-waiting in the U.S., and refugees met with red carpets wherever they went. But most profoundly, they were “victims” – the headlines announced – printed alongside images of their faces veiled by facemasks and draped with loose-fitting hijabs revealing the hair above their foreheads.

      Victims, the conjoined popular and political discourse echoed, of a revived Taliban bent on reimposing the burqa and the “barbaric” oppression of women that it – and more potently they – embody. The threat of terror was inextricably tied to their Muslim masculinity, and the markings of savagery and sexism, patriarchy and rage ascribed to their brown bodies. These charges made them, and any Muslim male that fits the description,  villains that warrant war; not victims worth saving.

      Saving Muslim women, however, was no altruistic mission. While masquerading as a humanitarian or feminist campaign, winning over Muslim girls and women is that ideological tenet of Islamophobia built upon a gendered dialectic of masculine violence and feminine subordination. A gendered binary of victimhood and oppression, that positions Muslim women as the former and men as the ominous latter. This potent dialectic reproduces our imagining of Afghan men and boys, like Zaki, as putative terrorists. And, on the other end, spurs our envisioning of Muslim women and girls – like the Afghan Girls Robotics Team– as victims of a masculine Muslim terror that compels our rescue.   

      Villains and victims, terrorists and the terrorized – strategic tropes ascribed to Muslims bodies exclusively along gendered lines. This discourse forms the foundation of a narrative that drove the War in Terror, which imposed distinct indictments upon the heads of Muslim women and men. Twenty years after the beginning of this War, this Article interrogates the gendered anatomy intrinsic to Islamophobia and its attendant discourses. It then contributes a new theory of gendered Islamophobia absent from legal and interdisciplinary literatures.

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The full article can be downloaded here.