It's Not About the Burqa: Muslim Women on Faith, Feminism, Sexuality and Race

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And if they do not give us the mic to speak, we build our own stage – I was never a fan of their stage anyway; how correct it stood, how sturdy and mute, how cold it was. On 17 April 2020, eleven soldiers of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) were killed during a battle with 40 fighters of the Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) in Patikul town, in the Sulu region of Mindanao, southern Philippines. In one fascinating essay, Sufiya Ahmed, whose mother divorced shortly after she was born, finds insight in the sixth-century life of Khadija bint Khuwaylid, a successful 40-year-old merchant who married the 25-year-old prophet Muhammad: “It was the disparity between the life of Khadija and the lives of some modern British Muslim women, still repressed under cultural rules in the 21st century, that inspired me to become a women’s rights activist.

It’s Not About the Burqa – Mariam Khan in conversation It’s Not About the Burqa – Mariam Khan in conversation

In recent years, the wearing of the full-face veil or burqa/niqab has proved a controversial issue in many multi-cultural European societies. While the it-narrative, the thing-poem and thing theatre have been around for some time, the essay – which is often considered literature’s fourth genre – is still lacking its thing-subgenre. In the first essay, author Mona Eltahawy speaks of how Muslim women are caught “between a rock — an Islamophobic and racist right wing that is eager to demonize Muslim men, and to that end uses our words and the ways we resist misogyny within our Muslim communities — and a hard place: our Muslim communities that are eager to defend Muslim men, and to that end try to silence us.Her essay centres around the idea that the repression of conversations about sex results in Muslim women being woefully underprepared for healthy relationships.

It’s Not About the Burqa – Edited by Mariam Khan Book Review: It’s Not About the Burqa – Edited by Mariam Khan

Legislation prohibiting or limiting face veiling now exists in Belgium, Bulgaria, Austria, France and Germany.

She recognises that her thoughts and opinions will continually evolve on the matter of representation. Feeling as though the voices of Muslim women were being pushed increasingly into the very fringes of the conversations of which they were the subject, Mariam set into action, and It’s Not About the Burqa began to take shape.

It’s Not About the Burqa review – courageous essays

For the longest time, I wanted everyone else to realise the diversity of what it meant to be a Muslim woman. Mir’s essay outlines some of the gruelling challenges faced by a minority of Muslim women who are expected to conduct themselves as both trophy wives and domestic slaves. Raifa Rafiq speaks on an important issue: the hegemonic image of a Muslim woman in the UK being a thin, South Asian and light-skinned. We are all Muslim women – but that doesn’t mean we have the same opinions or personalities and through editing and events and the friendship we’ve built amongst the INATB sisterhood I’m grateful that we are all Muslim women but each individual with different opinions and views and we aren’t afraid to respectfully explore each other’s views. Years later the state of the national discourse has deteriorated even further, and Muslim women’s voices are still pushed to the fringes – the figures leading the discussion are white and male.I’d recommend this to late teen readers as well as it captures some of the experiences that they’ll inevitably come to know. Bringing together the voices of leading experts in the field, this edition offers an up-to-date and diverse review of the best in social policy scholarship over the past year. It’s not about the Burqa is a timely collection; each essay is equally necessary in beginning to understand how Muslim women, across the intersections of race, nationality, ethnicity and sexuality, navigate their identity. Bringing niqab wearers' voices to the fore, discussing their narratives on religious agency, identity, social interaction, community, and urban spaces, Anna Piela situates women's accounts firmly within UK and US socio-political contexts as well as within media discourses on Islam. It's Not About the Burqa is an anthology of essays by Muslim women about the contemporary Muslim female experience.