by MOHJA KAHF

A Muslim woman writing in the West in these times enters a commercial book industry that on one hand has begun to treat her texts as a hot commodity, and on the other hand has a limited repertoire for placing her work, especially if her fiction or nonfiction is related to Islam and gender. It’s not a conspiracy; it’s mostly cluelessness. The existing “spectrum” consists of two Eurocentrically slanted slots for Muslim women’s stories: Victim and Escapee. No matter how much a Muslim woman may have something different to say, by the time it goes through the “machine” of the publishing industry, it is likely to come out the other end packaged as either a “Victim Story” or “Escapee Story.” Then the Muslims yell at her for contributing to stereotypes. Between an ignorant industry and an ungenerous homebase community of readers, how can a Muslim woman write and publish in the West and do her best to dodge the machine?

Muslim Woman as Victim

The biggest Western stereotype there is about Muslim women is The Victim. It goes way back to the era of Romantic literature, and the Byronic plot of a white man saving a harem girl continued to thrive in the heyday of European colonialism, feeding a white Christian supremacist hero complex. The U.S. book industry today loves a good read about oppressed Muslim women.
Mix and match these ingredients and you too can make a Muslim-Woman-As-Victim story:

• Mute Marionnette. Portray the Muslim woman as powerless to speak, but for the Westerner giving her a voice. Think Jean Sassoon, giving her poor oppressed Saudi subject a voice in Princess. Theo Van Gogh’s film Submission gave voice to “oppressed Somali woman” Ayaan Hirsi Ali — that he was reprehensibly murdered for doing so does not make the bigotry in this modern replay of the white hero complex less reprehensible. Egyptian feminist Nawal Elsaadawi’s extensively translated oeuvre consists almost entirely of Victim stories; her books that don’t tell Victim stories don’t stay in print in the West.
• Meek Mother. Make the mother figure in the story powerless. Eliminate the vibrant subcultures of Muslim women from the picture, all empowering relationships with sisters, grandmothers, friends, and turn them into harem slaves. Ignore homegrown non-Western feminisms. The English translation of early Egyptian feminist Huda Sharawi’s memoirs leaves out the strong personality of her Circassian mother and makes it seem as if Sharawi’s sense of gender equality was birthed by European mentors.
• Forbidding Father. Make her father figure tyrannical and motivated only by an inscrutable patriarchalism, not by the feelings of a human father to protect his daughter, not by love. Include no kindly brothers, uncles, or grandfathers, and no Muslim men who champion women’s rights.
• Rotten Religion. Make sure there are no nice imams in the picture. Make the mosque a nasty-smelling place. Have the adhan called while she is beaten by her husband, like in the movie Not Without My Daughter, explicitly linking Islamic symbols with misogyny. (By contrast, Samina Ali’s Madras on Rainy Days shows a protagonist who takes comfort in learning the Qur’an from her mother-in-law.)
• Cruel Country. Cast her entire society as rigid, homogenous, and utterly woman-hating, without redemption, so that help can only come from outside — from the West. Bonus: deploy this story during a U.S. war against a Muslim country so everyone gets the message that Muslim women need to be liberated from their evil heritage by those nice clean-shaven Marines.
• Vile Veil. Cast veiling as the most oppressive thing since the rack. Never mind that forced unveiling, a trauma almost unrecognized in Western publishing,has been a more prevalent experience than forced veiling for masses of Muslim women in our times. Veiling is different from how Western culture says women should dress, so of course it is appalling.
• Stifled Sexuality. Include lots of sexual oppression. Female genital mutilation and honor killings should be a prime focus, because the West has nothing comparable (never mind date rape and child molestation statistics) to these “Muslim” forms of sexual oppression. Here’s the thing: Muslims do have sexual oppression and are as flawed as any other human. Honor killing is a real problem. It is a crime, and Muslims need to redress it (and maybe what happens when we don’t address it is that other people will take up the cause on their own terms). It just becomes extremely difficult to speak against it as a Muslim without your voice getting stolen for other, Eurocentric agendas. This is a terribly secondary thing to have to worry about when your time should be spent fighting honor killing itself.

That’s how stereotypes distort us as human beings; they take our energy away from real spiritual development and make us defensive, reacting instead of acting. When we say that Muslim women do not fit the Victim stereotype, we must not deny that there are real Muslim women who are victims, or that Muslim sexism exists, and we must not step away from our moral obligation to change those realities. It’s just that we do not accept the way these injustices are presented, tinged with anti-Muslim bigotry, made into insupportable monolithic claims about our faith and our communities.

Case in Point: The Mukhtaran Mai Incident, from First Facts to Western Spin

Last season’s attempt to package another Victim narrative was the U.S. media’s handling of Mukhtaran Mai’s story. What happened to her is horrible: A woman was gang-raped in a remote Pakistani village by members of a feudal clique that bullied the local populace. Her father tried to get into the house where the crime was being committed and later threw his shirt around her and walked her home; the village imam expressed outrage about the crime from his pulpit; a Pakistani journalist publicized her cause. They and other Muslims helped her to bring the perpetrators to justice, and death sentences were meted out thanks to shariah’s capital punishment for rape. Because a higher court took into consideration the legal checks and balances built into the country’s judicial system, the death sentences were overruled and lesser sentences imposed, causing many in the Pakistani society, including feminists and other supporters of women’s rights, to stir public debate about the handling of her case and the injustice of the lighter sentences. She was awarded punitive damages and with the money, opened a girls’ school in her hometown, surviving the horrific ordeal with her dignity and strength of soul.