When leaders or public figures use discriminatory stereotypes to characterise political opponents or members of the general public, they are either indicating their ignorance of the historically negative implications – or they know and just don’t care.
Either way, we can feel it in our gut.
– Anita Rufus
Being a Muslim comes with quite the stigma. I can chart my entire life from the things random people have told me about my burqa. When I was a kid, I remember clinging onto my father to buy me one – yes, that seemingly abhorrent garment of oppression. I was hardly eight but I was happy. Thankfully, the country I was living in was used to seeing even younger children hop around in their tailor-made burqas. When I came to India, two years later, that same burqa was a sight of astonishment and condescension. As a child I found it so embarrassing that I hid it somewhere nobody would find, though a year later I got back to wearing it again.
A few more years ahead, I would find myself in the same uneasiness in school when for some odd unexplainable reason the burqa was the subject of my teachers’ ridiculous remarks. From their lens, I was living with an oppressive fanatically religious father. Once, a geography teacher scolded, “If u make more noise, I will send you to Iran. You will have to wear burqas all day. You know women there are forced to wear burqas?” When a friend of mine left her collar button undone because of the heat, our English teacher chided her and said, “You don’t mind having your collar open but you go around wearing a burqa!” We couldn’t fathom how a collar button could spark sarcastic jibes at our religious practices. Having just stepped into our teens, it was too early for us to see this kind of religious prejudice. We, however, never felt the need to retaliate because it was something we had never seen or heard of in our households – others’ religious beliefs and practices were their private affairs. Ironically, this stereotype was reinforced in a secular school, which had its name often printed in gold for girls’ education, leaving some with a sense of alienation and urging many more to avoid wearing their burqas all together. I can only imagine the trouble that the less fortunate in other schools have had to endure.
When I started college, the comments became a background buzz, but yes, my Hijab was suddenly a signal for unreasonable security checks in exam halls and unsolicited needless explanations. During my post graduation, we were told we looked prettier without the burqa, and that wearing it in class was rather unhygienic because of all the pollution it might have come in contact with outside the college premises. I learnt that beauty and hygiene just gave a gloss of invisibility to their religious prejudice in their statements.
The truth all along was that I was just a child who got a burqa on a whim. For me, it was just another dress my mamma was wearing. But for others it was different. In retrospect, I realise I was being victimised. Not by any oppressive religion or patriarchy but because the Muslim woman that I am, is repeatedly negatively stereotyped. Even as a child I was being forced to fit into a description which was not even a hair’s breadth close to my reality. Women in my family were never discouraged from pursuing their careers. In fact, only a few of them chose to be stay-at-home mothers. Education was never sidelined for any member of the family; we were never excused, the result being that most children, especially women grew up to be post graduates in their respective fields. A number of my friends out there are studying, excelling in whatever jobs they have chosen. One of them recently described to me how aghast our school teachers were to find out that she was currently working as an architect in Dubai.
Our mainstream media undoubtedly plays a key role in endorsing these antiquated stereotypes. Its agenda has always been to deflect focus at a handful of Muslim women in distress away from thousands of happy Muslim women with happy husbands and happy homes. And in this matter, our tabloids are among the most vindictive, hateful and intellectually emaciated at the same time. They have long dictated what is deemed politically permissible – that Islam is sexually harassing its women, and in turn that Islam is unfit and needs to be revamped. They are more likely to report on stories about Muslim women’s rights violations than areas where their rights are respected. They bow down to one or two women, who are either victims of some domestic violence or rebels while thousands of other women with no domestic violence from any patriarchal system or the need to rebel against any sort of oppression, may protest with all their strengths only to be excluded as non entities or delegitimized as burqa-clad extremists.
When a Muslim woman faces harassment or her rights are violated by a Muslim man who has misused his position as her guardian, I feel a fire burning in the pit of my stomach. But if that Muslim woman’s situation is applied (through headlines as “Modi speaks of ‘freeing Muslim women from all injustices”) to all Muslim women and falsely portrayed to be under some immense suffering, that fire burns even more because we are being bullied; bullied into thinking that our lives are as miserable as those few women the media chooses to celebrate.
If one doesn’t know the history of how this negative portrayal of Muslim women came into being, it would be very easy to accept those feminist, heroic, saviour narratives in the tabloids that are backed by a government whose less than glorious history includes legitimising hate, vengeance and notorious interference in the private affairs of the public. It might be worth interjecting at this point that images of burqa-clad women who needed saving began flooding the media during the US’s war on the West Asia and were used as propaganda to justify the bloodbath. Very soon the world found itself in deep disfavour centred on the false link between Muslims and terrorism. If this was interpreted on face value, we have grown up with a biased vision of what it means to be a part of a Muslim society or to be around it. Anyone who understands social development knows that impressions from such images are bound to create negative emotions of inferiority, fear or isolation in those targeted and hate and hostility in others around them.
Despite many women actively rejecting the media’s portrayal of their lives, the press continues to vividly paint them in a very narrow narrative. Such officially backed distorted narrative doesn’t exist in vacuum but is a clear reflection of how much this hate culture has been promoted and deliberately filtered into government policies.
When the media devotes more than the necessary coverage to unscrupulous words of those in power like “Muslims should marry Hindus to escape halala” and “ Should we open child producing centres?” and flaunt violations of a community, the message is quite clear- we are unwanted and unworthy, that our individual identities, our religious and cultural diversity mean nothing.
For anyone not to recognise this negative stereotyping of a community is either plain hypocrisy or stark ignorance. What has become more obvious over the past few years, however, is that many, irrespective of education, religion or caste, simply don’t understand the nature of this bigotry and why it is so deeply offensive and damaging. Every time we are exposed to headlines riddled with prejudice and misinformation we are subliminally primed. Repeated exposures reinforce stereotypic thinking, and in the long run, even a simple disagreement with a member of a stereotyped group may reactivate these false images. They become self-perpetuating especially in those who have little personal experience and in victims of this charade who begin to feel a stereotype threat.
So any time we meet a Muslim woman in a burqa, images of patriarchal oppression start flickering. If we aren’t visible in the workforce, it’s because we are more prone to being just housewives. If we don’t have plans to study further, it’s because we are interested in early marriages. If we don’t prefer family planning, it’s because we want a dozen parasitic children. If we don’t lash out at our plight, we are ignorant extremists. If it isn’t our physical presence, it’s our name. If it isn’t our name, it’s something else. Even if we name a hundred Muslim women who we personally know, who don’t fit into this stereotype we would still be brutally homogenised into one voiceless group by our tabloids; our existence challenging this bigotry, our fears and concerns of the rising hostility never figure in the mainstream media. And if they do by any chance, they are marginalised as being complicit in women oppression.
Our religious appearance has become the epitome of oppression and backwardness. It’s rather un-feminist to measure my true worth by my burqa, my source of income, and ability to bear fewer children. As a woman we just have to fit into those tags: wear fashion, money or be a rebel, only then we may walk on the path of independent women. If not, we are nothing more than too much of a mother, or too much of a wife.
What good is ‘liberty’ if it strips me of my identity and my right to be myself? Why does others’ fight for justice attack my religious freedom? Why am I a collateral damage in somebody else’s war against patriarchy? Why do I need to be saved and be given a voice when I already have one?
Stereotypes often translate into emotionally manipulative forms of abuse into actual lives. Every Muslim woman is inherently different living her own time, and we need to look at them as such because at the end of all this labelling and finger pointing are real women, with real emotions and families and children, just trying to live normal lives.