Hijab, Gendered Islamophobia, and the Lived Experiences of Muslim Women
بِسْمِ اللهِ الرَّحْمٰنِ الرَّحِيْمِ
Introduction
As the world awaited the results of the 2020 US presidential election with mounting apprehension, Muslim women had ongoing conversations both online and in person, at individual and communal levels, about the consequences, not just of a second Trump presidency, but of the obvious masses of voters who supported him across the country. In particular, many Muslim women who wore the hijab shared newfound or heightened feelings of fear and anxiety about being visibly and identifably Muslim in public, even in their own hometowns and familiar local spaces. Although perhaps exacerbated, these conversations were not new, and have become more and more frequent with the rise of populist and nationalist sentiments in the US and across the world. Globally, current events like the renewed violence in France and subsequent crackdown by the French government on Muslims in the country, have once again brought to the fore the discrimination faced by Muslims in Western societies. And for Muslim women, a significant portion of the conversation revolves not only around religion but around gender and, in many cases, around the physical marker of their Islam: the hijab.
Islamophobia is more than just a fear or hatred of Muslims. As Julianne Hammer put it, it is “an ideological construct produced and reproduced at the intersection of imperial ideology, political expediency, and the exploitation of nationalist, racial, and religious insecurities.”
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Therefore, when examining Islamophobia, there are many facets through which it can be understood. In our investigations of Islamophobia, a crucial dimension, which has helped us and others to better understand the lived realities of Muslims with this form of racism,
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is that of gender. Understanding gendered experiences of Islamophobia can help flesh out how the Muslim ‘Other’ is constructed in the eyes of a nationalist subject, or those from the majoritarian culture, as Muslim women’s and men’s experiences with Islamophobia are distinct.
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In mainstream narratives that objectify Muslim women—and that often use the image of the hijab to do so—the archetype most commonly associated with them is that of the oppressed and imperiled victim.
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At the same time, Muslim women are seen as a threat to liberal values, justifying violence against them and their communities. These representations stand in stark contrast to the actual lived experiences of Muslim women who wear the hijab, which are complex and extend well beyond a singular trope.
This paper explores the experiences of Muslim women with race, racialization, and Islamophobia while wearing the hijab. Through a process of storytelling, we highlight the experiences of individual Muslim women as a way to connect them to the broader contexts of race, religion, and belonging in North American societies. Elsewhere, the notion of storytelling and how it is fundamental to understanding the realities of race and racism have been discussed in detail.
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Through storytelling, the voices of the marginalized and oppressed are heard in place of the narratives of dominant groups in society. In this way, this article will utilize the hijab, and the individual and collective experiences of Muslim women who wear it, as a lens through which to understand the workings of Islamophobia in the West. The stories included in this article have been drawn from a number of interviews exploring Muslim women’s experiences with Islamophobia in North America.6
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