As a hijabi myself, this piece both breaks my heart and soothes my wounds. It’s something I’ve noticed and something my non hijabi friends have mentioned to me as well. It’s so terrifying to know the stares that come from men are either pure hatred or perversion because of what’s being shared and popularized. The Muslim community for some reason avoids discussing this - our men and communities at large aren’t protecting us. We truly have to watch out for each other as Muslim women. This piece was so necessary. Thank you thank you thank you for starting the hard conversations and writing so beautifully 💕🤲🏻 subscribed and here to stay honestly.
Salaams! It was the French orientalists who built up a fantasy of porn like hijabi Algerian and Moroccan women because they were never allowed to see real muslim women
Sermons are supposed to address communal and societal issues, but we either have fully Arabic sermons in communities that don't speak Arabic, or the sermons often never touch on any topic that isn't about Ihsan, Taqwa, etc.
Thank you for writing this, especially as a Muslim guy. It's never occured to me that my sister or mother or in the future perhaps my daughter could be (are) subject to these types of gazes and intents.
I've only thought of hate against Muslims and how Muslim-looking women (hijabis and niqabis) are the biggest targets of Islamaphobia, but this adds many more sickening layers.
Literally exactly what I wonder lol. There’s a disservice being done in our communities when these issues aren’t being raised - but no one wants to talk about such things. No one wants to talk about the safety of Muslim women and our protection. It’s unfortunate how unprotected we are, especially when it comes to other Muslim men. Thank you for your comment - I really do appreciate your sincerity in wanting to be in the know mashallah.
Alhamdulillah. I can probably thank the good women in my life who've had the positive impact on me in making me curious to see things from their povs.
I saw a vid by Dr. Sofia Rehman just earlier where she talks about patriarchy amongst other things like colonialism, and as of now I don't get what's wrong about a patriarchal system. Clearly something is wrong, but the word doesn't have the same connotations to me right now as it does to women.
My sister is against it too and I gotta find out why. If you ask me about patriarchy right now, all I'll say is that the khilafa rashidah and even the prophet pbuh's leadership was a patriarchy and that was the best era of Islam, so what's wrong with it? (The question for me right now is if the prophet's (pbuh) leadership and the khilaafa raashidah was even a patriarchal system to begin with, but I won't get anywhere until i find out what Muslim women mean when they say "patriarchy.")
Not asking you to answer btw, just sharing thoughts. But if you want to, then thanks in advance!
So, let me take a stab at this.Patriarchy as how (I’m assuming) you see it is just a society being governed by men. When prophet Muhammad PHUH was alive, women were not oppressed or othered in the community. They were not meant to be demeaned and their rights were enforced. This was an Islamic society, first and foremost. I feel like it was less of a patriarchy and more of a religious system being upheld. But in the modern contemporary sense, the patriarchy is used to actively oppress women. It’s, what I believe to be, the inherent demeaning of women which results in women being unsafe (men being able to get away with r*pe, society telling women it’s their fault they were abused, etc.) I believe the patriarchy is inherently unislamic because it doesn’t allow for Muslim women to receive their rights and in that case as well, the patriarchy isn’t a good thing because it’s not men in charge as prophet Muhammad PBUH him was. I think there’s a lot more to say but I don’t want to ramble lol.
Yes, that's exactly it lol. I hear the word and think "society with men in charge." As you've described it, I'm 100% behind the "down with the patriarchy" banner.
Or the "let's make patriarchy great (and Islamic) again" banner haha. I like the idea of calling early Islamic society just an Islamic society. Just like saying "I'm Muslim" when someone asks what specific sect and whatnot you belong to.
This comment was really disappointing to read as a woman. “I honestly think behind every man who fails there's a line up of horrible narcissistic women too, from caregivers to classmates to teachers to colleagues.” There’s nothing radically interesting or even remotely correct about this statement, and if we want to play true gender wars, the inverse could be said about how every awful woman should blame a line of awful men behind her. However, women don’t receive such excuses or justifications in regards to their actions. Women don’t have the privilege to pin their issues on someone else, because our issues are always our own to be responsible for. Mothers, teachers, caregivers, they're always at fault for a boy's bad behaviors, but not the boy's father, male coach, male teacher, male mentor, etc? Right? To place the blame on women for men’s poor actions isn’t the incredible think-piece you think it is. It’s lazy thinking, and it just shows your internalized misogyny.
For further context, NPD patients can create more NPD patients, especially in children who are exposed to the spiritual abuse of this. Or toxic codependent empaths. It's something I have personally faced, that has crippled me for years with extreme OCD, and as I'm not writing an article just a comment based on my individual truth, in no way am I required to make "a point" as you say. Respectfully, one size does not fit all and yet you are doing exactly that.
Thanks for your input. I just want to say that I believe you've taken my words out of context, and missed the over arching point that evil is interrelated, which popular feminism (not well researched academically done) often ignores, putting the blame fully on a specific definition of patriarchy. (I base this in part on a guardian article by a woman who worked in prisons and explained that both genders are equally capable of evil and men are just more likely to commit violence. If anyone's line of evil is only violence, and not all the gaslighting, hurt, manipulation and control and awful things that other forms of abuse can cause, then we do not have any moral common ground, as such evil is spiritually just as wrong as violence and causes violence). That both men and women are responsible for evil in both genders, and you can't exclude the tremendous evil female input to evil men who fail, not just evil men, and the fine details of ignoring this by popular feminism can tip codependent empaths who are struggling into abusive behaviors. This is what I have faced myself as a women before I healed from emotional abusiveness, as such a culture although not fully to blame was definitely a factor in influencimg my behavior growing up. As a Muslim if you understand the concept of Nafs Amara be A sou, then a collective community of evil souls can create further evil. I am in no way talking about normal healthy men and women who would fall under healed codependents or empaths. I'm talking about people who border on the insane even though they don't look like they do.
I can appreciate discussions like this but I don’t think your point was taken out of context. Your comment misses the entire context of the discussion. My essay was commenting on the oppression Muslim women face at the hands of men. This turned to a conversation of the patriarchy and my opinion of it and how it affects women, especially Muslim women. Of course it’s true that women can hurt men and negatively impact men, but that’s not what needs to be called out at this moment. It’s very obvious that each gender can be harmful but societally, men have oppressed far worse. I don’t agree with a lot of the values within modern feminism because as a Muslim woman, the messaging is reflective of white-feminism. I never even said women are always right or the “angelic victim” as you shared. But if I’m sharing how men are oppressing women, why do you feel the need to say “but women do it too?” I don’t feel your comment to be conducive to the larger conversation at hand.
I never thought about it like that, but it makes so much sense that if behind every good, successful man, there are many great women who have nurtured and supported him, then the opposite is often or can be true as well. A morally corrupt man may very well have had/has morally corrupt women in his life.
And yes, this messaging of feminisim that women are always better in judgement than men or men are always more likely to oppress others, esp women, this kind of messaging is deeply demoralizing for men, especially young boys, teens, young adult men who are trying to find their place in society and come to terms to the injustices of the world and how they can make it a better place all the while healing from their own trauma.
You've said it well and true that emotional abuse can be just as harmful. A punch can bruise, but fruquent hurtful words can also "bruise," just in a different way. The worst part is that often times they both happen together.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts and experiences!
thank you for sharing this post. i’m not muslim, but i’m arab and many of my family members/friends are hijabis. it’s so important that those of us who aren’t muslim are thinking about the ways that we can protect and care for the hijabis in our community. and think about how being more “visibly” part of a targeted group puts them at greater risk of violence and harm. i feel like this is especially important for me as a palestinian because muslim women have been so so involved in our movement and put so much on the line to support us at protests/rallies/etc 💗💗
The normalised oppression and hatred for Muslim women is so true. A lot of people I know love to call themselves feminists but find it so difficult to defend a Muslim woman just because they don't agree with Islam. Or will go out of their way to be uncomfortable around me when I don't conform or confirm their preexisting prejudice.
I would like to add the perspective of the hijab being sexualized within the Muslim community, often times girls are told the hijab is a piece of protection so that men don’t look and lust over you it’s supposed to protect you from harassment from men, but time and time again we see from hijabi to women in burqas getting r*ped, SAed, harassed, etc and it leaves them in confusion they were told the hijab was supposed to protect them from this and it harbors this feeling to betrayal and resentment it leave a nasty trauma wound that’s very hard to overcome
Unfortunately, no woman is free from the perversion that runs deep through our society, not even muslim women. I remember the year the M*a Kh*lifa video dropped, and the irreparable damage it caused towards muslim women. It also sickens me how old orientalist ideas about how “slyly seductive” muslim women are still persist to this day. But isA we can push back against these backwards ideas and achieve proper representation for ourselves 💖
Not really sure if this is relevant but as a hijabi, all my life I’ve heard the “pearl in a clamshell” analogy where your beauty is the pearl and the hijab is the clamshell and protects you, as if no one can sexualize you because you’re a hijabi and that because you’re a hijabi nothing can happen to you and if something does, you’re doing it wrong. This is such a beautiful piece that argues against that and I love it. It makes me glad to know we aren’t bowing to ideologies that disempower us and make us only into objectifiable objects
I thought about this for a while and thought it was just another weird fetish that we -women- do not understand. Lately, however, after I’ve witnessed the fetishization of freedom fighters, the masked men that is, I did an in-depth study of the phenomenon and thought it’s probably comparable to fascination around Batman, Zoro or any other masked hero, “the allure of the mystery” and that made me see the whole “hijab” fetish in a new perspective.
I grew up as non-hijabi, in an extremely misogynistic community. One of the reasons why I was nervous to wear the hijab was because of the blatant sexualisation of the hijab by the Muslim boys around me at school. As a girl struggling to put it on and growing up with the pseudo belief that the point of the headscarf was to deter men from gazing at women, it was baffling to see hormonal Muslim boys running around and entertaining their lust for women. These boys would shame Muslim girls for not wearing the hijab whilst DM’ing the same girls on Instagram AND THEN have the audacity to declare that they can’t wait to marry a hijabi so they can ‘run their fingers through her hair’. ‘Hijab purely to avert the male gaze’? I don’t buy it!
As a more recent and newer hijabi that's a little older, I don't worry about what men are thinking about when they look at me. That being said, I do wear a body camera when I go out walking at waist level. Sometimes I swing it around so it faces behind me. People who are sick in the head will behave accordingly, regardless of religion. The police won't always reach you in time. I believe it's given more than one shady character a second pause. I agree that the there should be more discussions about actively protecting our safety. For me, I take different measures at different times, depending on the situation.
As a hijabi myself, this piece both breaks my heart and soothes my wounds. It’s something I’ve noticed and something my non hijabi friends have mentioned to me as well. It’s so terrifying to know the stares that come from men are either pure hatred or perversion because of what’s being shared and popularized. The Muslim community for some reason avoids discussing this - our men and communities at large aren’t protecting us. We truly have to watch out for each other as Muslim women. This piece was so necessary. Thank you thank you thank you for starting the hard conversations and writing so beautifully 💕🤲🏻 subscribed and here to stay honestly.
This comment moved me! I hope we, as Muslim women, build communities and rely on each other. Thank you for being here🥰💕
Salaams! It was the French orientalists who built up a fantasy of porn like hijabi Algerian and Moroccan women because they were never allowed to see real muslim women
Now why isn't this part of the Friday sermon??
Sermons are supposed to address communal and societal issues, but we either have fully Arabic sermons in communities that don't speak Arabic, or the sermons often never touch on any topic that isn't about Ihsan, Taqwa, etc.
Thank you for writing this, especially as a Muslim guy. It's never occured to me that my sister or mother or in the future perhaps my daughter could be (are) subject to these types of gazes and intents.
I've only thought of hate against Muslims and how Muslim-looking women (hijabis and niqabis) are the biggest targets of Islamaphobia, but this adds many more sickening layers.
Literally exactly what I wonder lol. There’s a disservice being done in our communities when these issues aren’t being raised - but no one wants to talk about such things. No one wants to talk about the safety of Muslim women and our protection. It’s unfortunate how unprotected we are, especially when it comes to other Muslim men. Thank you for your comment - I really do appreciate your sincerity in wanting to be in the know mashallah.
Alhamdulillah. I can probably thank the good women in my life who've had the positive impact on me in making me curious to see things from their povs.
I saw a vid by Dr. Sofia Rehman just earlier where she talks about patriarchy amongst other things like colonialism, and as of now I don't get what's wrong about a patriarchal system. Clearly something is wrong, but the word doesn't have the same connotations to me right now as it does to women.
My sister is against it too and I gotta find out why. If you ask me about patriarchy right now, all I'll say is that the khilafa rashidah and even the prophet pbuh's leadership was a patriarchy and that was the best era of Islam, so what's wrong with it? (The question for me right now is if the prophet's (pbuh) leadership and the khilaafa raashidah was even a patriarchal system to begin with, but I won't get anywhere until i find out what Muslim women mean when they say "patriarchy.")
Not asking you to answer btw, just sharing thoughts. But if you want to, then thanks in advance!
So, let me take a stab at this.Patriarchy as how (I’m assuming) you see it is just a society being governed by men. When prophet Muhammad PHUH was alive, women were not oppressed or othered in the community. They were not meant to be demeaned and their rights were enforced. This was an Islamic society, first and foremost. I feel like it was less of a patriarchy and more of a religious system being upheld. But in the modern contemporary sense, the patriarchy is used to actively oppress women. It’s, what I believe to be, the inherent demeaning of women which results in women being unsafe (men being able to get away with r*pe, society telling women it’s their fault they were abused, etc.) I believe the patriarchy is inherently unislamic because it doesn’t allow for Muslim women to receive their rights and in that case as well, the patriarchy isn’t a good thing because it’s not men in charge as prophet Muhammad PBUH him was. I think there’s a lot more to say but I don’t want to ramble lol.
Yes, that's exactly it lol. I hear the word and think "society with men in charge." As you've described it, I'm 100% behind the "down with the patriarchy" banner.
Or the "let's make patriarchy great (and Islamic) again" banner haha. I like the idea of calling early Islamic society just an Islamic society. Just like saying "I'm Muslim" when someone asks what specific sect and whatnot you belong to.
A true Islamic society would be perfect but people who rule Muslim countries can’t even stick to basic Islamic principles lmao 😭
Tell me about it. Like, do you even Islam bro?
This comment was really disappointing to read as a woman. “I honestly think behind every man who fails there's a line up of horrible narcissistic women too, from caregivers to classmates to teachers to colleagues.” There’s nothing radically interesting or even remotely correct about this statement, and if we want to play true gender wars, the inverse could be said about how every awful woman should blame a line of awful men behind her. However, women don’t receive such excuses or justifications in regards to their actions. Women don’t have the privilege to pin their issues on someone else, because our issues are always our own to be responsible for. Mothers, teachers, caregivers, they're always at fault for a boy's bad behaviors, but not the boy's father, male coach, male teacher, male mentor, etc? Right? To place the blame on women for men’s poor actions isn’t the incredible think-piece you think it is. It’s lazy thinking, and it just shows your internalized misogyny.
For further context, NPD patients can create more NPD patients, especially in children who are exposed to the spiritual abuse of this. Or toxic codependent empaths. It's something I have personally faced, that has crippled me for years with extreme OCD, and as I'm not writing an article just a comment based on my individual truth, in no way am I required to make "a point" as you say. Respectfully, one size does not fit all and yet you are doing exactly that.
Thanks for your input. I just want to say that I believe you've taken my words out of context, and missed the over arching point that evil is interrelated, which popular feminism (not well researched academically done) often ignores, putting the blame fully on a specific definition of patriarchy. (I base this in part on a guardian article by a woman who worked in prisons and explained that both genders are equally capable of evil and men are just more likely to commit violence. If anyone's line of evil is only violence, and not all the gaslighting, hurt, manipulation and control and awful things that other forms of abuse can cause, then we do not have any moral common ground, as such evil is spiritually just as wrong as violence and causes violence). That both men and women are responsible for evil in both genders, and you can't exclude the tremendous evil female input to evil men who fail, not just evil men, and the fine details of ignoring this by popular feminism can tip codependent empaths who are struggling into abusive behaviors. This is what I have faced myself as a women before I healed from emotional abusiveness, as such a culture although not fully to blame was definitely a factor in influencimg my behavior growing up. As a Muslim if you understand the concept of Nafs Amara be A sou, then a collective community of evil souls can create further evil. I am in no way talking about normal healthy men and women who would fall under healed codependents or empaths. I'm talking about people who border on the insane even though they don't look like they do.
I can appreciate discussions like this but I don’t think your point was taken out of context. Your comment misses the entire context of the discussion. My essay was commenting on the oppression Muslim women face at the hands of men. This turned to a conversation of the patriarchy and my opinion of it and how it affects women, especially Muslim women. Of course it’s true that women can hurt men and negatively impact men, but that’s not what needs to be called out at this moment. It’s very obvious that each gender can be harmful but societally, men have oppressed far worse. I don’t agree with a lot of the values within modern feminism because as a Muslim woman, the messaging is reflective of white-feminism. I never even said women are always right or the “angelic victim” as you shared. But if I’m sharing how men are oppressing women, why do you feel the need to say “but women do it too?” I don’t feel your comment to be conducive to the larger conversation at hand.
That was bars right there. Straight up bars!
I never thought about it like that, but it makes so much sense that if behind every good, successful man, there are many great women who have nurtured and supported him, then the opposite is often or can be true as well. A morally corrupt man may very well have had/has morally corrupt women in his life.
And yes, this messaging of feminisim that women are always better in judgement than men or men are always more likely to oppress others, esp women, this kind of messaging is deeply demoralizing for men, especially young boys, teens, young adult men who are trying to find their place in society and come to terms to the injustices of the world and how they can make it a better place all the while healing from their own trauma.
You've said it well and true that emotional abuse can be just as harmful. A punch can bruise, but fruquent hurtful words can also "bruise," just in a different way. The worst part is that often times they both happen together.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts and experiences!
thank you for sharing this post. i’m not muslim, but i’m arab and many of my family members/friends are hijabis. it’s so important that those of us who aren’t muslim are thinking about the ways that we can protect and care for the hijabis in our community. and think about how being more “visibly” part of a targeted group puts them at greater risk of violence and harm. i feel like this is especially important for me as a palestinian because muslim women have been so so involved in our movement and put so much on the line to support us at protests/rallies/etc 💗💗
The normalised oppression and hatred for Muslim women is so true. A lot of people I know love to call themselves feminists but find it so difficult to defend a Muslim woman just because they don't agree with Islam. Or will go out of their way to be uncomfortable around me when I don't conform or confirm their preexisting prejudice.
Clicked so fast I broke my finger
I hope it lives up to your expectations 🥹💕
It has 🥹💕
I would like to add the perspective of the hijab being sexualized within the Muslim community, often times girls are told the hijab is a piece of protection so that men don’t look and lust over you it’s supposed to protect you from harassment from men, but time and time again we see from hijabi to women in burqas getting r*ped, SAed, harassed, etc and it leaves them in confusion they were told the hijab was supposed to protect them from this and it harbors this feeling to betrayal and resentment it leave a nasty trauma wound that’s very hard to overcome
Unfortunately, no woman is free from the perversion that runs deep through our society, not even muslim women. I remember the year the M*a Kh*lifa video dropped, and the irreparable damage it caused towards muslim women. It also sickens me how old orientalist ideas about how “slyly seductive” muslim women are still persist to this day. But isA we can push back against these backwards ideas and achieve proper representation for ourselves 💖
(also absolutely obsessed with your writing, msA!!!)
Ameen!!💕
🙌
Wonderfully written
Not really sure if this is relevant but as a hijabi, all my life I’ve heard the “pearl in a clamshell” analogy where your beauty is the pearl and the hijab is the clamshell and protects you, as if no one can sexualize you because you’re a hijabi and that because you’re a hijabi nothing can happen to you and if something does, you’re doing it wrong. This is such a beautiful piece that argues against that and I love it. It makes me glad to know we aren’t bowing to ideologies that disempower us and make us only into objectifiable objects
i will continue to cover myself and wear my veil and my hijab unapologetically, this is my resistance.
I thought about this for a while and thought it was just another weird fetish that we -women- do not understand. Lately, however, after I’ve witnessed the fetishization of freedom fighters, the masked men that is, I did an in-depth study of the phenomenon and thought it’s probably comparable to fascination around Batman, Zoro or any other masked hero, “the allure of the mystery” and that made me see the whole “hijab” fetish in a new perspective.
I grew up as non-hijabi, in an extremely misogynistic community. One of the reasons why I was nervous to wear the hijab was because of the blatant sexualisation of the hijab by the Muslim boys around me at school. As a girl struggling to put it on and growing up with the pseudo belief that the point of the headscarf was to deter men from gazing at women, it was baffling to see hormonal Muslim boys running around and entertaining their lust for women. These boys would shame Muslim girls for not wearing the hijab whilst DM’ing the same girls on Instagram AND THEN have the audacity to declare that they can’t wait to marry a hijabi so they can ‘run their fingers through her hair’. ‘Hijab purely to avert the male gaze’? I don’t buy it!
Love your writing 🩵🩵
Would love to connect on Insta 🫶🏻
@sarah.o333
As a more recent and newer hijabi that's a little older, I don't worry about what men are thinking about when they look at me. That being said, I do wear a body camera when I go out walking at waist level. Sometimes I swing it around so it faces behind me. People who are sick in the head will behave accordingly, regardless of religion. The police won't always reach you in time. I believe it's given more than one shady character a second pause. I agree that the there should be more discussions about actively protecting our safety. For me, I take different measures at different times, depending on the situation.