The world must stop trying to 'rescue' Muslim women

Submitted by Soumaya Ghannoushi on Fri, 09/18/2026 - 15:24 The measure of our freedom is not how closely we resemble somebody else's image of liberation

A woman prays at Al-Aqsa Mosque complex in occupied East Jerusalem’s Old City on 27 September 2023 (Ahmad Gharabli/AFP) Off

There is perhaps no woman in contemporary political discourse who has been rescued quite as relentlessly as the Muslim woman.

The image is familiar: the Muslim woman, particularly the woman in a hijab, appears as the passive victim of religion, tradition, family and patriarchy. Her clothing is treated as evidence: a visible confession of subjugation, rather than a religious or personal choice.

A woman in a miniskirt may be making a choice. A woman in a bikini may be expressing herself. A woman who surgically alters her face or tattoos her body is exercising bodily autonomy.

But put a scarf over a woman’s hair, and an extraordinary transformation occurs: apparently, she ceases to possess a will of her own. Someone must have made her do it.

This is one of the peculiar contradictions at the heart of certain contemporary western ideas about women’s liberation. A woman is sovereign over her body - until she uses that sovereignty in ways liberal society finds insufficiently “liberated”. Then intervention becomes necessary.

Nowhere has this contradiction been more dramatically displayed than in France, where restrictions on Muslim women’s clothing have repeatedly been presented as acts of emancipation.

French laicite is conventionally understood as governing the relationship between religion and state. Yet in its more militant contemporary form, neutrality has increasingly come to resemble the policing of religious visibility, with Muslim women bearing a considerable share of the consequences.

And so we arrive at the curious spectacle of governments liberating women by telling them what they cannot wear.

Imaginary figure

For centuries, patriarchal societies presumed the authority to regulate women’s bodies in the name of morality. Today, states regulate Muslim women’s bodies in the name of freedom. The vocabulary has changed; the entitlement has survived.

The deeper problem is that the entire discussion rests upon an imaginary figure: the Muslim woman. She does not exist.

There are Muslim women - hundreds of millions of them, living across radically different societies, classes, political systems and historical experiences. A woman in Kabul is not a woman in Jakarta. A woman in Tehran is not a woman in Istanbul. A farmer in rural Morocco is not a lawyer in London.

Yet these radically different lives are repeatedly compressed into a single explanatory formula: Muslim woman, hijab, oppression. Reality is considerably less convenient.

Once the Muslim woman has been placed inside the conceptual box marked 'oppressed', reality itself begins to lose its power to contradict the theory. Her choices cease to be evidence of what she wants

There have been Muslim societies in which governments compelled women to cover themselves, and others in which governments compelled them to uncover. There have been states that excluded women from education and public life in the name of religion, and states that excluded them from universities and employment because they insisted on wearing religious dress.

History is particularly troublesome for the simple oppression narrative.

Take Iran. The Islamic Republic’s compulsory hijab is well known and rightly criticised as coercive. Less often remembered is the earlier history of state-enforced unveiling under Reza Shah, whose 1936 Kashf-e hijab policy banned traditional veiling and subjected women who wished to remain covered to state coercion.

Turkey subjected women who wore the headscarf to sweeping restrictions, particularly after 1997, when the ban was enforced far more aggressively. Thousands were denied access to higher education; students wearing headscarves were barred from university campuses and examinations, while women in teaching and other public-sector professions faced suspension or dismissal.

Tunisia went further still. Under President Habib Bourguiba and later Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the hijab was officially disparaged as “sectarian dress”. Circular 108 and related measures were used to exclude hijab-wearing women from schools, universities and public employment.

Under Ben Ali, the campaign intensified: women were harassed in the streets, summoned to police stations, interrogated and pressured to remove their veils - all in the name of secularism, modernity and women’s emancipation.

Western stereotypes

For women living through such circumstances, wearing the hijab could acquire a meaning almost exactly opposite to that assigned to it by western stereotypes: an act of defiance, something claimed rather than imposed - a refusal to let the state dictate the terms by which a woman might study, work or participate in public life.

Calling such a woman a passive prisoner of tradition does not merely misdescribe her. It inverts her history.

If the standard modernisation story were correct, then education, urbanisation and economic development should gradually have swept the hijab away. Yet modern Muslim societies have produced something far more complicated.

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Walk through Cairo, Istanbul, Algiers, Amman, Kuala Lumpur, or any number of large Muslim cities, and you encounter women who confound the neat categories inherited from an older Orientalist imagination: the hijabi medical student, architect, journalist, engineer, academic, entrepreneur.

You may even see a mother and daughter walking side by side: the mother dressed traditionally, her head uncovered; the daughter university-educated, wearing a hijab. Which one is modern?

The question begins to look rather silly. Modernity, it turns out, is untidy.

Education does not necessarily dissolve religious identity. Urbanisation does not automatically produce secularisation. Economic independence does not guarantee that women will dress according to the expectations of European liberalism.

Indeed, for some women, greater education and independence may give them more freedom - not less - to adopt religious practices consciously.

None of this requires romanticising the hijab. Some women wear it because their families or societies expect them to. Others wear it out of deeply held religious conviction - as a reflection of modesty, identity or privacy, or as a personal act of faith. For some, it is simply what they choose to wear, requiring no political theory, sociological explanation or defence whatsoever.

Ultimately, it is the woman’s concern. She need not submit an explanatory memorandum to the world.

Structures of power

The intellectually serious position is therefore neither to declare the hijab inherently liberating, nor to pronounce it inherently oppressive. Its meaning depends upon the woman, the circumstances, and the structures of power surrounding her.

The same piece of cloth can be imposed on one woman and prohibited for another; inherited unquestioningly by one, and adopted after intense reflection by another.

To insist that all these experiences mean the same thing is not analysis. It is the tyranny of the category. And once the Muslim woman has been placed inside the conceptual box marked “oppressed”, reality itself begins to lose its power to contradict the theory. Her choices cease to be evidence of what she wants, and become symptoms of what has supposedly been done to her.

The stereotype becomes unfalsifiable - a prison built for her by somebody else’s imagination. Nowhere does this stereotype strain harder than when confronted with Muslim women living in western democracies.

Universities across Britain, France, the United States and elsewhere are full of Muslim women in hijab. They become doctors, researchers, teachers, engineers, journalists, barristers, academics, entrepreneurs, even politicians.

They speak the languages of the countries in which they were born, navigate their institutions, know their legal rights, argue politics, earn degrees and choose careers. Yet we are still occasionally invited to imagine that a scarf on their heads has somehow suspended the operation of their intellects.

Some undoubtedly face family pressure. Muslim families, like every other kind of family, are capable of control and coercion.

But the assumption that an educated adult woman must secretly be acting under male instruction, simply because her religious choices perplex a secular observer, is not feminism. It is paternalism dressed in feminist garb. And sometimes, reality runs almost precisely in reverse.

Some young Muslim women adopt the hijab despite opposition from parents who worry that it will expose their daughters to discrimination, or make them too conspicuously Muslim.

Consider the difficulty this woman presents to the conventional liberation narrative. Her father would prefer her not to wear it; she insists on wearing it; the surrounding society pressures her to remove it; and then that same society explains that she wears it because her father pressured her into it.

At some point, the contradiction becomes almost comic.

Colonial domination

The fantasy of rescuing Muslim women has a long history. Colonial power frequently justified itself through the language of civilisation: colonised societies were backwards, their men barbaric, their women oppressed - and imperial intervention could therefore be presented as moral rescue, rather than mere domination.

The coloniser conquered you for your own good, and conveniently, he was particularly concerned about your women.

That structure of thought did not disappear with the collapse of empire. It survives whenever Muslim women are transformed from political subjects into objects upon whom somebody else’s “enlightened” values must be enacted.

If she removes the hijab, she has been liberated. If she chooses it, she has been indoctrinated. The Muslim woman is free to choose anything she wants - provided she chooses correctly

The old colonial administrator announced that native women needed civilisation. The modern politician announces that Muslim women need liberation. Both are remarkably confident that they know what freedom should look like - and both become strangely impatient when the women they propose to emancipate answer back.

This is why the rhetoric surrounding Muslim women’s clothing so often carries an undertone of condescension.

If she says she is oppressed, she has discovered her authentic voice. If she says she is not oppressed, she has internalised her oppression.

If she removes the hijab, she has been liberated. If she chooses it, she has been indoctrinated.

The Muslim woman is free to choose anything she wants - provided she chooses correctly.

Inherent contradiction

None of this means denying the very real injustices suffered by women in many Muslim societies. They exist, sometimes brutally.

But context matters. Many societies across the Muslim world have endured war, occupation, authoritarianism, civil conflict, economic collapse, poverty and political instability. Entire populations suffer, although women and children frequently bear a particularly heavy share.

To extract women from these broader political, economic and historical realities, and to explain everything that happens to them through Islam, patriarchy or the veil, is not sophistication. It is reductionism.

And from that reductionism emerges the same imaginary figure with whom we began: the Muslim woman.

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There is no such woman. There are Muslim women.

Yet the discourse that claims to liberate them begins by depriving them of individuality. A discourse supposedly concerned with their voices begins by speaking over them. A discourse proclaiming their agency refuses to believe them when they exercise it in unapproved ways.

That is the contradiction at the heart of the rescue narrative. A Muslim woman is not a child, nor a minor requiring some enlightened guardian to lead her towards the promised paradise of liberation.

The measure of Muslim women’s freedom is not how closely they resemble somebody else’s image of liberation. It is whether they are recognised as full human beings: diverse, complicated, thinking subjects capable of belief and doubt, conformity and rebellion - and, above all, of making their own choices.

Perhaps, after centuries of explaining the Muslim woman to herself, her would-be rescuers might attempt something genuinely radical: listen to her.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

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