Islam, Women, and War - Utilizing Western Stereotypes Against Muslim Women

Opinion Analysis by Dima Yehia, Visiting Contributor

August 25th, 2021

With the declaration of the War on Terror, the US launched its marketing campaign that helped gain the public’s support. It all started when Bush announced that: “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists,” as a means of simplifying things for the people through reducing the war to good VS evil. Nonetheless, the efforts to justify the war didn’t stop here: multiple discourses were established to operate for the benefit of characterizing the war as mundane. Some of these discourses of selling the war were set by women who were used as part of the justificatory approach. As such, American women eased the way and mobilized public support through framing them in normative gender roles as the wives and mothers of the heroic military men, seeking security and protection of the country. However, they didn’t only make use of US women to embed the logic of the war, but also Muslim women. The image of the oppressed Muslim women in need of a protector to rescue them, especially veiled women, circulating in the Western culture helped in maintaining the support for the war and the military. This paper argues that these stereotypes about Muslim women were utilized to function within the justificatory logic of the war on terror.

The construction of the gendered rescue narrative allowed the US to preserve the support of the public on the War on Terror. Lady Laura Bush set this motion by hoping that US families will help in extricating Afghani women and children (Hesford 5). This way, a common mission was built in the name of human rights, evacuating any concerns regarding Western imperialism, the politics behind it, and most importantly, the inhumane acts committed by the US (Hesford 5). Through depoliticizing human rights and ignoring the facts that the US was the main reason behind the atrocious conditions in Afghanistan, a sense of hierarchy is created between holders of the rights and those who can’t manage to have rights independently (Hesford 4), thus placing the US at a moral high ground for its aim to establish rights for Afghani women and children, therefore gaining the public’s support. In order to further reinforce the rescue narrative, media outlets focused on the hardships faced by women due to the Taliban occupancy. For example, Atlanta Journal and Constitution interviewed women from Afghanistan “who described how the Taliban had destroyed their dreams and aspirations” (Stabile & Kumar 772) hence emphasizing the need to liberate these women from the Taliban and ignoring the US intervention that fostered the rise of the terrorist group back in 1989 (Stabile & Kumar 773). In the documentary, The Beauty School of Kabul, such orientalist discourse was very clear when the superiority of the US women was established over the Afghani women. It was visible in the way that the US women treated them as if they’re in kindergarten teaching the Afghani women new things when in fact most of the Muslim Afghani women were already established hairdressers with experience. It was also visible when they compared their free lives to that of Afghani women and saying, “they went through so much”. Through the orientalist discourse emerged the discourse that suggests that these women need protection to justify the attacks done by the US on Afghanistan.

The act of unveiling Muslim women became the symbol of the United States’ success in freeing Muslim women. The veil is automatically considered a sign of oppression with respect to the West, ignoring the agency of Muslim women in wearing the Hijab. This makes the unveiling process a human rights spectacle which is the “liberation of the Muslim other” (Hesford 6). The human rights spectacle refers to “social and rhetorical processes of incorporation and recognition mediated by visual representation and the ocular epistemology that underwrites the discourse of human rights” (Hesford 7). This spectacle is visible and reinforced by popular culture such as Time magazine which described the experience of women unveiling as the “greatest pageant of mass liberation since the fight for suffrage”. They also said that these women emerged “from the dark cellars of house arrest”. Another example from popular culture is the Spanish series Elite. In this series, a Muslim woman Nadia Shano, played by Mina El Hammani, is granted a scholarship in a top-tier school. In a critical scene in season two, we see Nadia in a bar, looking hot as she crosses the floor of the club without her hijab. She proceeds to drink liquor and eventually gets it on with the rich white kid – the strong popular white guy of the show – Guzman. The fact that all the attention was on Nadia minus her hijab fortifies that Nadia needed a white man to save her from the oppression she’s dealing with: the veil. Besides, in the fashion industry, the first hijab model Halima Aden quit after she felt that the industry is compromising her religious beliefs. She posted a series of Instagram stories sharing photos from different campaigns and editorials and her thoughts about each which she had suppressed. In one of her stories, she said: “When I tell you I was trying to live my best of both worlds as if I was Hannah Montana, like can we just have our Disney Hijabi princess already? Or must I get out my notebook and write the script myself?” In another post, the photo showed Halima’s head covered with jeans instead of an actual Hijab with the caption “Find Your Style”. She expressed her regrets by saying: “But… this isn’t my style. Never was. Why did I allow them to put jeans on my head?” And finally, a post with her face edited on the Girl with a Pearl Earring oil painting by Johannes Vermeer with no Hijab at all. These incidents faced by Halima go hand in hand with how the West perceives the hijab: a symbol of oppression. That perception leads them to believe that they could liberate her from oppression by trying to erase her hijab or make it less visible through substituting it with jeans, as mentioned above. Her Hijab was controversial to the spectacle, and they wanted to liberate her even though Halima herself had complete agency in wearing the hijab.

Figure 1: Halima as the Girl with a Pearl Earring painting

Figure 2: Halima as Hannah Montana

Figure 3: Halima’s head covered in jeans

The media’s continuous bombardment of images showing Muslim women suffering resulted in a Western public that believes that this is the normal in Muslim societies (Sontag 15; Zizek 21).  This normal is determined by the media discourses that work on producing a reality that “instructs media audience in how they should regard women within specific realms” (Vavrus, introduction 7). Thus, women’s oppression is considered to be mundane in such archaic cultures, instead of being considered a result of the US intervention and the War on Terror. The US public, therefore, is overwhelmed by the images and their power; they forget to question it and simply become an audience watching passively (Smith) forgetting to take a step back and “learn, learn, and learn” (Zizek 8).  Taking a step back, looking at the bigger picture, and asking what the conditions and agents that created this cycle of violence are (Butler 16). In order to understand how the War on Terror came to happen, we must study the conditions of the people who are being violently attacked, and how the US played a part in creating these conditions through their support to Islamic Fundamentalists and leaving them without any infrastructure or funding to help them rise back once they’ve achieved their political goals.  For instance, the “imagine” campaign done by Amnesty International USA back in 2002 featured an Afghan girl refugee in a hijab with a caption that says “human dignity, human rights” (Hesford 1). The image was edited in a way that isolated the refugee from the material conditions surrounding her and making her the “archetypal Afghan refugee”. Eventually, she became a victimized symbol of “American charity and compassion” who deserves being protected by the US, hence establishing the rescue narrative which denies the United States’ role in the war in Afghanistan and its relation to the Taliban (Hesford 2).  According to Sontag, this is predatory. It violates the girl since “it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed”, and it captures them in ways (angles, a certain frame) that they don’t have control over. In addition, since the photo seems like a “miniature” of reality (Sontag 3) which makes the true reality more distant, and because the media operates within human rights discourses and the gendered rescue narrative, then the only image shown is the dominant narrative (Smith) and is the only “reality” the average viewer knows (Sontag 13). This is a form of objective violence, known as systemic violence, since it is the media that is determining the abstract and showing it as real to its people to serve Western political purposes (Zizek 13).

The US is assumed to be the symbol of democracy, freedom, and power.  The discourses established in the context of the War on Terror suggest power relations that assume that Western women are liberated by inventing the idea of third world women (Hesford 6). Hesford further explains that the unquestioned discourses “of American nationalism produce female subjects who [see] themselves as ‘free’ in comparison to their ‘sisters’ in the developing world” (7). This logic operates in the post-feminist ideology which assumes that feminism is no longer needed because equality is already achieved when in fact gender discrimination still exists. In other words, post-feminist representation centers women to highlight their role and empowers their voices, but at the same time reinforces patriarchy. Vavrus explores post-feminist ideology by investigating how the war and military media makes use of patriarchal and feminist ideologies to gain women’s support in the war by selecting certain aspects of gender equality and neglecting all discrimination against women in order to establish a postfeminist ideology (Introduction 4) that assumes a safe space for women in the military. In the Beauty School of Kabul, Debbie Turner, a volunteer teaching at the beauty school, showed signs of post-feminist ideology by playing the role of an empowered fearless American woman who isn’t afraid to drive a car in Kabul, Afghanistan where women don’t usually drive. In addition, throughout the documentary, some Afghani women expressed their wishes to be in the United States because they’re free over there; they’re allowed to love whomever they choose and wear whatever they please (miniskirts, no headscarf). All of these are examples that suggest the superiority of white western women in comparison to the backward Afghani society led by the Taliban, which leads to the assumption that US women are free. One last example that also engages with post-feminist ideology is on security moms. Their role is to advocate war to protect their homeland and children, which means that they “advocate destruction in the name of preservation”. Those security moms, although they seem empowered, portray a gendered dichotomy of the protector (a male) and the protected (the female). Furthermore, they advocate the Bush administration by highlighting “patriarchal family values, pro-war propaganda, and maternal fearfulness” (Vavrus, Counterintuitive Mothering 78).

Several gendered discourses were established in hopes of maintaining support for the War on Terror. Muslim women, in specific hijabi women, were used as a tool to legitimize the war by claiming they need to be rescued from oppression although the US themselves were a factor in evoking their suffering.

Work Cited:

Al Jazeera. “Hijab-Wearing Supermodel Halima Aden Quits Fashion Industry.” Somalia | Al Jazeera, Al Jazeera, 26 Nov. 2020, www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/11/26/lost-their-soul-to-fashion-model-halima-aden-quits-industry.

“Counterintuitive Mothering in the Media-Military-Industrial Complex.” Postfeminist War: Women and the Media-Military-Industrial Complex, by Mary Douglas Vavrus, Rutgers University Press, 2019.

Butler, Judith. “Preface.” Precarious Life.

“Explanation and Exoneration, or What We Can Hear.” Precarious Life, by Judith Butler.

Hesford, Wendy S. “Introduction.” Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms, Duke University Press, 2011.

“In Plato’s Cave.” On Photography, by Susan Sontag.

Stabile, Carol A., and Deepa Kumar. “Unveiling Imperialism: Media, Gender and the War on Afghanistan.” Media, Culture & Society, vol. 27, no. 5, 2005, pp. 765–782., doi:10.1177/0163443705055734.

Smith, Shepard, et al. "Militainment, Inc.: Militarism & Pop Culture." Online video clip. SAGE    Video. Media Education Foundation, 24 Jun. 2015. Web. 2 Oct. 2020.

“SOS Violence.” Violence, by Žižek Slavoj.

“The Image World.” On Photography, by Susan Sontag.

“The Tyrant's Bloody Robe.” Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, by Žižek Slavoj, Profile, 2009.

Vavrus, Mary Douglas. “Introduction.” Postfeminist War: Women and the Media-Military-Industrial Complex, Rutgers University Press, 2019.

“The U.S. 'War on Terror' Has Displaced At Least 37 Million People.” National Priorities Project, www.nationalpriorities.org/blog/2020/09/23/us-war-terror-has-displaced-37-million-people/.

Zizek, Slavoj. “Fear Thy Neighbor As Thyself.” Violence.