BOOk Review: It's Not About the Burqa: Muslim Women on Faith, Feminism, Sexuality and Race
Writing this is a little bit embarrassing for me. Growing up in a very white Midwest smallish town (we were the proud #2 on the list of cities with the most churches per capita, losing out to none other than Rome), you can imagine I my education on the experience of Muslim women was less than illuminating, and what I did learn from my environment left me with the impression that Islam was inherently oppressive to women, and if a muslim woman couldn’t see that, she must be brainwashed and need saving (by the always altruistic uber feminist United States of course). (I would love to say I immediately knew this was false, but I wasn’t really in an environment where I heard otherwise, and so I didn’t have much to counter it with.)
Luckily, I also have a tendency of questioning anything anyone ever tells me (both a great and annoying feature I am told), and thus have some (some) immunity to propaganda. I now operate under the realization that I have been fed a lot of western narratives, and not nearly enough directly from the people whom those narratives are actually about. One of the goals of our book club is to expand upon the super well-rounded, totally unbiased, and deeply accurate (just kidding) western education and social conditioning some of us (me) have had the pleasure of receiving, and this collection of essays was a really good one for me.
What I appreciated most about this book was how clearly it pushed back against the idea that there’s any single “Muslim woman experience.” Yes, there are common themes across the essays, especially around how patriarchy shows up in different cultural contexts, but the women in this collection make it clear that their identities, beliefs, and struggles are their own. There’s no one-size-fits-all story here, and we do real harm when we try to flatten people into symbols or headlines.
What also stood out was how many of the writers pointed to patriarchy, not Islam, as the source of their oppression. And how, when they do speak up about the very real issues in their communities, their words are quickly weaponized to attack their religion as a whole. That double bind, of being silenced if you say nothing, and exploited if you speak, sounds absolutely fucked.
Overall, this was a powerful and nuanced read that helped me check some of my assumptions and better understand voices that have been ignored, distorted, or erased entirely. I leave you with this quote from one of my favorite of the essays: “Feminism is no good to me if it doesn’t fight for every different type of woman” - Mariam Khan, Feminism Needs to Die
