Islam and feminism? Isn’t that a contradiction in terms? Of course you can’t be a Muslim and a feminist. That’s like saying you can be a Ku Klux Klan member and an anti-fascist.
That’s just a small sample of the responses I got on Twitter last week when I said I was taking part in a panel discussion about Islam and feminism. It is a knee-jerk response that shows at best ignorance and at worst bigotry; at the very least, a lack of desire to look outside a pre-existing, blinkered set of assumptions. Those assumptions are perhaps unsurprising given that the media almost universally portrays Muslim women as victims. There they are in Afghanistan or Pakistan, being oppressed; there they are in France, being legislatively protected from men forcing them to wear a face veil (or, in another reading, criminalised for choosing to wear one). Amongst all this hand-wringing about the oppression of Muslim women, there are remarkably few attempts to solicit the views of Muslim women themselves. During the recent resurgence of the niqab debate in the UK, veiled – or even headscarf-wearing – women were initially absent from the discussion, until a few days into the furore when a few broadcasters and newspapers made an effort to redress the balance.
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