“[The West] is so obsessed with Afghan women, saying these girls need to be saved, but the reaction is, okay let’s bomb the sh** out of their country. How does that make sense?” Says Maheen Haq, a civil rights litigator based in Washingotn DC.

“No one is centring what Muslim women are saying,” she adds.

Maheen has spent a large amount of her career working with Muslim women that have faced Islamophobic discrimination. 

Discrimination that skyrocketed after 9/11 in which media outlets merged Islam and terrorism into one, morphing terrorism into a ‘islamic issue’. The global terror datat base has proven that non-Muslim people are in fact the largest group of terrorists across the U.S. with only 12% of terrorism between 2011 and 2015 caused my Muslim people. Building on this, Muslim perpetrator generate 375% more news attention than when the perpetrator is a non-Muslim, the news as such builds a false construction of terror, through an Islamophobic lens. 

Maheen notes how this preconception of Islam trickles down into the treatment of women and the underpinning of Western feminism today. 

“Islam is constructed as barbaric, crazy, and not in touch with the modern day. It’s used as a scapegoat for nationalism, and it’s a narrative that is still used to uphold the colonial agendas of the United States and Western governments,” she explains. 

“Being a Muslim woman, a hijabi, what we face is not comparable to what Muslim men face. We are clearly Muslim, we are like the flag bearers of Islam, wearing the Hijab is like saying hey, I’m Muslim.” 

Both Maheen and large bodies of literature have drawn attention to the obsession western feminism has with ‘saving’ Muslim women from their ‘oppressive’ faith and ‘oppressive men’, painting the hijab as a form of oppression. Deciding that the hijab is ‘oppressing’ on behalf of Muslim women removes and censors their voice and identity, stripping them of their strength and power, as they are not included in the conversation of what empowerment means to them. 

“The programming and the amount of things we have consumed, indicates to us that sexuality is empowerment, and this is not to come at women who feel this way. But to say that a covered woman is not powerful, as to be oppressed is to have no power and to have all these inputs in the media and all these things that say it’s a prerequisite of power. 

“So If you have a problem with somebody privatizing their sexuality, and you say that means that they don’t have power, then what are you saying about sexuality? You’re saying that sexuality is the only means of power,” she says.

In the Quran itself it is noted that there is no compulsion in religion. 

“You can’t force anybody to wear the hijab, and people who do that are committing a serious sin. However, these are the things that are publicized, but that’s not following the religion.

“The people who claim to be Muslim are imperfect, but the religion itself is perfect,” Maheen adds. 

Maheen draws attention to the fact that there is a patriarchy that exists in the Muslim community, just like it exists in every single community, the West included. 

“My contention with colonial [Western] feminism is not that we’re saying these things don’t exist. It’s that we’re not being heard in the way we want our advocacy to be done.”

In France speicfically there are a plethroa of laws promoting the unveiling of a Mulsim women, especially in educational spaces, justified as the adivation of the “strengthening of measures aimed at promoting equality between women and men”.

This justification has a long history, with unveilings in Alergia in the 1930s and more recently to justify the American-led war on terror in which Laura Bush famously said in her speech: “the fight against terrorism is also the fight for rights and dignity of women” (U.S. Government, 2002).

“White and colonial feminism comes down to using women in third world countries, or women who are like ‘others’ as stepping stones to uphold white supremacy and colonialism,” Maheen says.

Maheen grew up in Hagerstown, a city in Maryland in the USA, an area with a majority white population. 

“We had a KKK growing up, they would put letters in our mailboxes, we were verbally harassed, and yelled at. I never really felt safe, it absolutely created an inferior complex” she explains. 

She chose to wear the Hijab aged 10, the first in her family to do so. A choice she explains was originally a reaction to her environment. 

“[Wearing the hijab] is such a powerful choice at a young age, people would say things like towel head, or Osama’s daughter, but It really sends a message,” she says.

“For me it was always an F you. That was my message – you can’t change me, I don’t care. That was always what I wanted.”

Now that she’s older, wearing the Hijab has become a symbol of love and something she notes that the religion has ordained for her. 

“It’s really empowering, because I feel like people don’t have access to my body, only certain people do, and that is really special to me,” she says.

“I play sports, I’m a lawyer, and when the narrative is oh, the hijab restricts you, or these women aren’t in touch with modern culture, seeing that challenges the notion of what a hijabi woman is.”