Last week, I met a friend in Jammu. He brought along a white French acquaintance. The moment my friend introduced me as a Muslim, the Frenchman launched into a lecture about Islam being backward, barbaric, and oppressive toward women. 

He spoke with the confidence of someone who had assumed he knew better than any Muslim woman alive.

This scene plays out repeatedly, and often with a clear intent behind it.

Western audiences absorb the same message through books, films, and political speeches: Muslim women live under a religion that hates them. Western feminists frame themselves as rescuers, swooping in to save brown women from brown men. 

During the Afghan war, media was filled with images of women in burkas labelled oppression and women in miniskirts labelled freedom. 

The message was clear that clothing meant liberation and liberation was defined as looking like us. But the reality is far more layered. 

Some Western thinkers built entire careers on this misunderstanding. Jacques Derrida claimed Islam lacked democracy, Slavoj Žižek fixated on the oppression of Muslim women, and John Rawls imagined a fictional Muslim world that could join the global order only by meeting Western standards of human rights. 

These thinkers spoke about Muslim women rather than asking them to define their own lives.

Hollywood and Bollywood often cast veiled women as either terrorists or victims. The veil becomes a sign of danger or submission, and choice is erased. 

At........

© Kashmir Observer