The Matrix of Gendered Islamophobia: Muslim Women’s Repression and Resistance

Islamophobia’s Intersections

As the leaders of the War on Terror, the United States and United Kingdom are the preeminent English-speaking countries unifying the West in the fight against “Islamic terrorism.” This “war without borders” is a military, state-driven global project that solidifies Western power, while applying pressure on other countries to adopt similar state policies that further the incarceration, surveillance, repression, and exclusion of Muslims (Grewal 2017). The War on Terror espouses a shared, collective Western consciousness and protection of Western, non-Muslim subjects, while simultaneously devaluing Islam and Muslim subjectivities (Butler 2006).

Muslims have been discursively constructed as “threats to Western civilization” and Judeo-Christian values, conflating both Islam and ordinary Muslims with violence, barbarism, and terrorism (Said 1978). Since Said’s influential work on Orientalism, scholars have debated, theorized, and refined the concept of Islamophobia to distinguish discrimination waged against “Muslims as a people” not just toward Islam as a religion (Halliday 1999, 898). Moving beyond conceptualizing Islamophobia as merely “an unfounded hostility toward Islam, and therefore fear or dislike of Muslims” (Runnymede Trust 1997, 4), Sayyid (2014, 19) argues that “Islamophobia is a form of racialized governmentality” which has political aims and impacts. This form of governmentality is epitomized in the “Islamophobic State,” which configures the counterterrorism apparatus as the central production of Islamophobia, making it the “backbone of anti-Muslim racism” (Massoumi, Mills, and Miller 2017, 8). Racialization shapes anti-Muslim racism through the consolidation of religious, cultural, linguistic, and ethnic markers as an immutable, biologized racial typology of Muslims (Rana 2011; Selod and Embrick 2013). Naber (2008, 278) argues that the “wide range of signifiers such as particular names (e.g. Mohammed), dark skin, particular forms of dress (e.g. headscarf or beard) and particular nations of origin (e.g. Iraq or Pakistan)” are signified as “an imagined ‘Arab/Middle Eastern/Muslim’ enemy” within the War on Terror.

The role of gender within the War on Terror also remains a central aspect in constructing Muslims as the foreign enemy “Other” of the West (Bhattacharyya 2008). The pervasive myth of the oppressed Muslim woman as the penultimate victim of gender oppression is a dominant narrative that has been used to justify U.S. military intervention throughout Muslim-majority countries (Abu-Lughod 2013; Razack 2004). The expression of these ideologies coincides with the mistreatment of Muslim women domestically within European societies—what Farris (2017, 8) theorizes as “femonationalism,” which refers to the “fundamental agreement that gender relations in the West are more advanced and must be taught to Muslim women who are otherwise taken to be agentless objects at the mercy of their patriarchal cultures.” Muslims are viewed as unable to coexist in multicultural, democratic, and secularized societies because of an irrational fear that Muslims will impose their cultural and religious values on the rest of majority non-Muslim society (i.e., female genital mutilation, gender segregation, Sharia law, forced marriage). Veiling has come to represent one such politically contested site for Muslim women (Bullock 2002; Dwyer 2008). Because Muslim women have “been expected to mark culture and be its faithful carriers as well as scrupulously follow what is understood to be religiously prescribed morality in their daily lives” (Badran 2005, 16), this subjects them to twin forces of sexism within their communities and gendered Islamophobia from dominant society.

Farris (2017, 78) further argues that femonationalists “portray sexism as the exclusive domain of the racialized other.” This timeless patriarchy fixates the figure of the Muslim woman in the past, outside of the bounds of modern, liberal society. Because Islamophobia is “an undermining of the ability of Muslims as Muslims, to project themselves into the future,” this suggests that Islamophobia delimits Muslims’ agency and potential in unidimensional static ways (Sayyid 2014, 14). Muslim women’s agency, if represented at all, is depicted as a threat to the State’s security interests in images of terrorist sympathizers (Afshar 2013). Aziz (2012, 193) argues that “some headscarved Muslim women are perceived as individuals incapable of developing their own beliefs and protestations. Instead, they are viewed as mere extensions of familial relationships with actual or presumed male terrorists.” While Muslim women living in the United States and United Kingdom are cast as victims of a fundamentalist patriarchy (either through their subservient status or assumed terrorist accomplices), they are notably absent as victims of Western racism. In this paradox, they can be worthy victims of patriarchy only when their aggressors are Muslim men of color, but not when they experience structural racism within white-dominated Western societies. Muslim women’s experiences of Islamophobia are qualitatively different than those of Muslim men, a phenomenon Selod (2018) describes as “gendered racialization” where “women have become the often unwilling standard bearers of otherization” (Afshar 2013). Most important, Muslim women’s political engagement within religious and secular spaces has led “them to cross boundaries and overcome challenges such as patriarchy, racism” (Bhimji 2010, 12).

According to Zine (2004, 178), “For racialized Muslim women, these systems of oppression based on race, ethnicity, religion, and gender are interlocking and connected, and particular attention needs to be paid to the ways that racism and religious discrimination can effectively shore up sexism and gender inequality.” Therefore, gendered Islamophobia is a form of “ethno-religious and racialized discrimination leveled at Muslim women that proceed from historically contextualized negative stereotypes that inform individual and systemic forms of oppression” (Zine 2006, 240). This is prevalent in how Islamophobic violence plays out as a form of gender-based violence impacting Muslim women (Ahmad 2019; Alimahomed-Wilson 2017). Building on Zine’s concept of gendered Islamophobia, I synthesize this concept with Collins’s theory of the matrix of domination to provide a more comprehensive and nuanced account of how gendered Islamophobia operates in Western societies. Specifically, I demonstrate how the matrix of gendered Islamophobia operates within four domains of power, which are simultaneously contested by Muslim women’s activism.

The Matrix of Gendered Islamophobia

The matrix of gendered Islamophobia is composed of four interrelated domains of power: structural, hegemonic, disciplinary, and interpersonal. These four domains work in concert to sustain and reproduce gendered Islamophobia. This research foregrounds a decolonized research orientation (Sandoval 2000) by emphasizing the deconstruction of “Muslim women” by centering their resistance and counterhegemonic knowledge as the point of departure to understand these interrelated domains of power. Muslim women’s social justice organizing reflects an opposition, resistance, and contestation to all four domains of power.

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Figure 1:

The Matrix of Gendered Islamophobia

This analytical framework provides insight into the particular organization of gendered Islamophobia that is structured and embedded across multiple levels of social organization that affect Muslim women’s lives. The structural domain focuses on institutionalized Islamophobia, which is the exclusion and/or restrictions of Muslim women that lead to unequal outcomes in social institutions such as labor, education, family, media, politics, and the legal system. These social institutions can be interlocking, and they reproduce inequities more acutely for those oppressed along multiple axes of subordination such as class, immigration status, race, and sexuality. The role of the disciplinary domain of power focuses on surveillance and the counterterrorism security apparatus that surveils, monitors, targets, and inculcates a societal ethos of surveilling Muslims because of their supposed predilection to terrorism, including producing gendered “terrorist” profiles and gendered strategies of counterterrorism. A core feature of this domain is disciplining Muslim women to accept their collective subordinated position within society while simultaneously discouraging their agency and resistance to the ensuing inequalities they experience.

The hegemonic domain manufactures gendered Islamophobic ideology, which provides the rationale for the demonization of Muslims within mainstream Western culture. The ideological justifications for Muslim women’s subordination are rooted in controlling images of Muslims, including femonationalist (Farris 2017) and homonationalist (Puar 2007) narratives. The hegemonic domain focuses on mobilizing ideological weapons that normalize various forms of oppression occurring at the institutional and disciplinary domains. Last, the interpersonal domain is concerned with the everyday experiences of Muslims, including the double sword of oppression that Muslim women experience with sexism in Muslim communities and gendered Islamophobia in public spaces, including violence. This domain focuses on the resistance of Muslim women within the matrix of gendered Islamophobia. Everyday acts of resistance can vary depending on the social context of oppression, and they operate at the micro level of social organization. The matrix of gendered Islamophobia offers a new framework to analyze the cross-cutting domains of power that affect Muslim women.

Methods

Data for this research were collected over the course of two years spanning 2017 and 2018. My sample includes 75 in-depth, semi-structured qualitative interviews conducted with Muslim women social justice activists ages 18–30 years who were organizing in the United Kingdom and in the United States. Interviews ranged from 1 to 2 hours, and all interviews were digitally recorded. The majority of interviews were conducted in Los Angeles and London because these are two significant sites of Muslim women’s organizing against gendered Islamophobia. See the appendix for demographic details.

The United Kingdom and United States have adopted similar domestic security approaches under the War on Terror that have put Muslims at risk for intensive surveillance and subjected them to disproportionate public scrutiny (Heath-Kelly 2012; Kundnani 2014), thereby making these Western nations strategic to research in tandem. However, the migration histories of the United States and United Kingdom are quite different because of British colonialism and American immigration policy, and this has produced different processes of racialization. The racial demographic population of Muslims in the United Kingdom are 68 percent Asian, 10 percent Black, 8 percent White, and 6 percent Arab (Muslim Council of Britain 2015). In the United States, 41 percent of Muslims are “White” (a category that includes those who describe their race as Arab, Middle Eastern, Persian/Iranian), 28 percent Asian, including those from South Asia, and 20 percent are Black (Pew Research Center 2017).

Muslims also face different structural inequalities in regard to labor, education, and class that impact their racialization in the United States versus the United Kingdom. Although 24% of U.S. Muslims earn incomes over $100,000 yearly, 40% are more likely to earn incomes less than $30,000 a year (Pew Research Center 2017). On the other hand, Muslims in the United Kingdom find themselves in a much more socioeconomically disadvantaged position; more than 50% live in poverty (Muslim Council of Britain 2017). Because the subjugation of Muslims is tethered to class inequality in the United Kingdom, it creates additional social problems for Muslims, most prominently the labor market for Muslim women, where only roughly one-quarter of the population is employed (Muslim Council of Britain 2017).

Rather than attempt a comparative project or a distinct assessment of the two nations, instead I highlight the parallels found within these differing national contexts that produce gendered Islamophobia as a multifaceted phenomenon produced in conjunction with domestic War on Terror securitization measures. Notably, during the time of this research, the political trajectories in both the United Kingdom and United States contained significant anti-immigrant/anti-Muslim public sentiment as a result of the passage of Brexit and the election of President Donald Trump (Lipka 2017). In both contexts, these political developments led to an enhanced gendered Islamophobic climate.

When I interviewed women for this research, my positionality was often read as a cisgender professor, racialized as a brown (non-hijab wearing) Muslim with U.S. class and citizenship privileges. Among queer Muslim women, I was often read as queer, but passed as straight among other straight women because of my femme presentation. Because the sample was quite diverse, there were many differences in our identities, personal histories, and perspectives, including age, class background, immigration status, and race/ethnicity. However, my background as a research fellow in a well-known U.S. Muslim civil rights organization, along with a personal history of social justice activism established credibility and rapport with most of the women whom I had never met.

In the United Kingdom, recruiting took the form of contacting women who were involved in Muslim community and student organizations that were working on issues related to Muslims. In addition, as a visiting research fellow at a London university, I was able to forge preliminary contacts within the broader Muslim community in London. I also conducted ethnographic observations by attending Muslim community events, listening sessions with community members, working group meetings, events at mosques, panels, and conferences. Once securing preliminary interviews, I used a snowball sample to recruit other potential interviewees. In the United States, the majority of the interviews were conducted with women who had organized in the greater Los Angeles area. Three Muslim women undergraduate research assistants at my university assisted with the research interviews, including interviewing by phone a few key activists living in New York, North Carolina, Michigan, and Georgia.

Because the community of young Muslim women social justice activists is small, activists were sometimes known to each other through national, or regional grassroots collectives, and national umbrella student activist organizations such as the U.S. Muslim Student Association and Students for Justice in Palestine. In the United Kingdom, many of the activists had been involved with the National Union of Students (NUS). representing seven million students across the United Kingdom’s universities. Assuming important leadership positions in the NSU as Black and Minority Ethnic Officers and Women’s Officers allowed them to integrate organizing on gendered Islamophobia and institutional racism through concerted yearly campaigns. Although they began as student activists, their involvement often branched out to nonprofit and/or grassroots organizing later on. Among the women interviewed, a sizeable number were involved in radical grassroots abolitionist, socialist, and transnational organizing that seeks to challenge the nonprofit industrial complex, and aims to abate discrimination toward Muslims by furthering inclusion and participation within the state’s mainstream apparatus. On the other hand, an equally sizeable group of activists were integral to organizing liberal events and campaigns such as the Women’s March, voter drives in the Muslim community, immigrant/refugee support services, and working on “know your rights” trainings.

At the conclusion of the interviews, a two-page demographic survey was collected from all interviewees. These survey questions asked interviewees to self-report their gender identity, socioeconomic background, race/ethnicity, education, sexuality, and birthplace as well as their parents’ occupations, educational attainment, and birthplaces. All audio interviews were uploaded to the Dedoose research platform and were transcribed. Next, I used first cycle coding methods primarily focused on structural coding, which helped organize the data set. “Structural coding both codes and initially categorizes the data corpus to examine comparable segments’ commonalities, differences, and relationships” (Saldaña 2016, 98). Qualitative interview data involves coding and recoding data in a cyclical strategy as opposed to a linear form. Thus, after initial codes were determined, these categories were revised and then subcoded. After coding for recurring themes in the data, I wrote analytical memos on these themes in the data.

Structural Domain: Institutionalized Islamophobia

In early 2017, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 13769, casually referred to as the Muslim Ban. However, not all Muslims in the United States were affected in the same way. The first order, issued in January 2017, placed additional restrictions on people entering the United States from seven Muslim-majority countries: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, and Libya (BBC News 2018). According to reports from 2017–2018, “citizens of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen . . . received approximately 14,600 U.S. visas. That is down 80 percent from approximately 72,000 visas issued for citizens of those countries in 2016” (Al Jazeera 2019). As a consequence of the Muslim Ban, institutionalized Islamophobia played a pivotal role in the decline of immigrants and refugees entering into the United States.

Several women activists were quick to respond to the Muslim Ban as organizers of grassroots social justice movements, civil rights organizations, and as student activists. Rasmiah, who is an activist leader in socialist and Palestinian political organizing, was arrested in Los Angeles while protesting the Muslim Ban:

We were blocking traffic at the second-floor terminal. We told the police officer that “we were demanding the release of one detainee.” There was this woman [Iraqi refugee] who had stage 3 or 4 breast cancer and she wasn’t allowed to access her cancer medication. She was also being pressured to sign away her green card. They were trying to target people who weren’t fully fluent in English or who might have a harder time reading and understanding a contract in English versus Arabic. We wanted to warn her to not sign anything and tell her that “she shouldn’t be held in detention.” Instead of honoring our request, the police gave the order to disperse, so many people left, but my friends and I refused to move. . . . That’s when the police opted to arrest us.

Rasmiah describes how an Iraqi woman was targeted by immigration authorities on the first day the Muslim Ban went into effect. Rasmiah notes the structural vulnerability of speaking limited English as a site of coercion where immigrants were forced to sign over their rights when they were unable to read the formalities noted in the immigration paperwork. In this case, the matrix of gendered Islamophobia impacts those most vulnerable at the intersections of oppression within this institutional domain. While the activists share their collective identity as Muslim women with the woman de-boarding, they also draw on their privileged positionalities as citizens to protest at the airport without fear of being deported.

In addition to the Muslim Ban, Muslims experience recurrent targeting when traveling through airports, where they are disproportionately singled out for additional screenings (Selod 2018). Many of the Muslim women interviewed shared a similar story, including Shireen; she and her family were profiled for “flying while Muslim” on several occasions.

Everyone in my family gets stopped at the airport all the time. I always get randomly selected even when I am by myself. My dad’s last name is …, which is known to be part of some kind of terrorist organization. When he is coming back into the country they hold him for hours, which is sad because he is just a CPA. He is so boring, it’s great! I was recently stopped at the airport and sexualized. He went through my stuff and looked at my panties and was making lewd comments. He later found me on Instagram, messaged me and asked if I wanted to be his plaything. A TSA guy! When I told him no, he started deleting all his things and then blocked me. I was like alright, he totally sexualized me. Sometimes you are perceived as a bad person but then you are perceived as exotic and “I want to sleep with you.”

Whereas Shireen notes that her dad and brother are stopped because of their names and their appearance, her experience of racial profiling is exacerbated when she is sexually harassed and then stalked by a state agent. The hypersexualized exoticism attributed to Muslim women results in a distinct form of racial, sexual, and gender oppression for women versus men, occurring exactly at the same institutional site and under the same presumption of racial profiling.

Several of the women in the United States discussed the routinization of being stopped where their hijab was the focus of the search. Sadiah recalls, “Going through TSA, I don’t think I’ve ever gone through it and not had an additional pat down of my hijab or screening necessarily. That kind of stuff has unfortunately become normalized because of how prevalent it is.” She locates her hijab as the place of the pat down, indicating that her dress as a Muslim woman is suspicious in itself, despite being commonplace. Sadiah’s exposure to disproportionate screening for her hijab is also rendered unremarkable, demonstrating a key aspect of the structural domain of power: that its bureaucratic functioning conceals this practice as normal.

Although the Muslim Ban garnered significant attention, it is not, however, new; the first homeland security registry program that originated after 9/11 was the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS) which focused on fingerprinting, documenting, and registering foreign national Muslim men and boys over the age of 16 years (Cainkar 2009). The suspicious profile cast by the State focuses on men and boys, making gender an integral part of their registry and leaving many families within the Muslim community impacted by the registry. Waaliyah’s father was required to register under the NSEERS program. Waaliyah discloses, “I grew up in an abusive family. My dad was being abusive towards my mom and she was being abusive towards me. I grew up in a very poor family; we were homeless at one point. And, I grew up with undocumented parents.” Waaliyah further elaborates on her father being arrested as a result of the NSEERS’ registry program.

My dad has been arrested three times. The first two times it was for the [NSEERS] registry program that was implemented after 9/11. The last time was for abusing my mom. But, the first time he was gone significantly longer, and for what he did to my mom, he was barely punished. So, I feel like that’s a good example of a time when I realized that doesn’t make any sense to me. I really want to say my sense of morality comes from experiencing things like that or realizing what’s legal is not moral, or necessarily right, or just.

Waaliyah’s father was arrested for being an undocumented Muslim under NSEERS, a status that she acknowledges as an injustice against her family. However, the gendered family violence that she experienced was regarded as less important by the State, despite its having a more negative impact on her life than her father being undocumented. Despite this, she emphasizes the contradiction in that while her father is legally vulnerable to this form of institutionalized Islamophobia, her mother—who is also undocumented and a victim of domestic violence—is unworthy of protection or intervention by the State.

In the context of the United Kingdom, the State has advanced a more ubiquitous agenda of monitoring Muslim communities. Mounia discusses the State’s intensified focus on targeting working-class Muslim women more explicitly as part of a de-radicalization agenda.

When you look at the institution, forms of gendered Islamophobia in particular, they’re becoming stronger and more explicit in targeting Muslim women. For example, when I spoke about [women’s name], this is happening particularly among working-class, single mothers. And nobody is paying attention, [the State] knows to target them because nobody notices when these women are gone. If people in the community don’t see them for weeks at the mosque, they’ll just assume that they have four kids and they’re juggling two jobs, living in a tiny house on their own, and just doing what they need to do as women. The scale of this is rising because the State’s approach towards these women is that they are the entry point. They’re the point of de-radicalization within the Muslim community.

In this case, the woman had her children taken away by the U.K. State because she was suspected of radicalizing her children. However, although no criminal charges were ever brought against her, she was not able to regain custody of her children because family courts are independent of policing authorities. Some of the Muslim women activists who were involved in grassroots community organizing in London identified this changing terrain as an important nexus of organizing. “The targeted policing of Muslim women involves the scrutiny of motherhood, a strategy that has long been in use against suspect communities,” as well as solicits mothers, wives, and daughters to surveil their families and communities within counterterrorism policing (Kapoor 2018). These women are now being subjected to additional sites of institutional power that are not leveraged against Muslim men; thus, gender is weaponized to increase the scope and magnitude of institutionalized Islamophobia.

Disciplinary Domain: Surveilling Muslims

Within the matrix of gendered Islamophobia, the disciplinary domain is significant because of its capacity to saturate a wide array of institutional arenas. Under the guise of the War on Terror, Muslims are managed, monitored, and tracked as potential domestic security threats, which has become a normalized, routine feature of state security (Alimahomed-Wilson 2018). In the United Kingdom and the United States, some Muslim activists also experience “political profiling” as a consequence of the disciplinary domain. The State’s counterterrorism infrastructure attempts to neutralize Muslim dissent and activism through this disciplinary mechanism (Maira 2016). In the United States, Sali discusses how her house was surveilled as a result of her sister’s political organizing:

I don’t know if you heard of [well-known legal case involving Muslim student activists]. So, she and her best friend were the campaign managers. She dealt with a lot of surveillance then. She talks about how one night, she woke up and looked outside the window and there was a tinted windowed car and a man standing outside of it just staring at our house.

The man, whose identity was later confirmed to be an FBI agent, was spotted on another occasion surveilling their house, and the family suspected that their phone conversations were also being recorded. Their notable legal case had received significant media attention because criminal charges were levied against a small group of young Muslim student activists for a nonviolent political protest. Sarah also discusses how her family’s political organizing incurred FBI surveillance:

The FBI raided my house with guns drawn. I was like, wow, my life is really in danger. They destroyed a lot of the house. This is what it is like to live here, being black and Muslim. . . . This is a political thing, not just the simple “I do not like Muslims or Islam.” It is not like this happens to every Muslim family. It happens to mine because my dad does work within the black community. When the Black Panther party was in the ’60s the government did everything to destroy them because they did not want to see black people fighting for their liberty, or black people coming together. White people were destroying black people and now they want black people to destroy themselves. That is what they do in Muslim countries too.

Sarah’s comments illustrate the particular nexus of state repression of Black Muslim activism. Sarah also draws a parallel between Muslims in the Middle East and Black people in the United States, by stating how “white people” benefit from the violence occurring among people of color. While several interviewees highlighted how Muslim communities and activists were surveillance targets, the intersection of their racial background located them within different sociopolitical histories of the racialization of Islam.

Within the United Kingdom, universities have become the front line of contested sites of counterterrorism policies. Some interviewees remarked that this was an outcome of conservative attacks on higher education to portray universities as hotbeds of left-wing activism as well as sites of radicalized Muslims who could potentially pose a threat to society. This portrayal provides the ideological rationale for neoliberal attacks to defund public institutions. For students who were both leftists and Muslim, surveillance is a vehicle to subdue their activist organizing. Several of the student activists that I interviewed were instrumental leaders who collectively developed the U.K. campaign “Students not Suspects.” This campaign arose after Prevent, a U.K. national security mandate, required educational, social welfare, and health institution officials to become mandated reporters for preventing terrorism. Students responded by organizing against their collective criminalization as potential security threats to the State with marches, protests, and political campaigns.

Almost exclusively, the interviewees discussed Prevent and its impact on the planning of Muslim student events, including Aminah at her university:

So, it was an event for Brothers mafia night, and we [sisters] told the brothers to make sure that they just wrote “mafia night” [not “brothers” on the flyer], because we’re constantly being watched by Prevent officers. Apparently, that was taken out of context, and was later mentioned in the [newspaper] article that we had gender-segregated events, which separated the women and the men and this is unjust. It was just a social for some guys to get together, but that was completely misinterpreted. So, we had to delete the event page, and every event that we have now, we write “contact this person for more details.”

Because each U.K. university campus has a Prevent officer, the tactics of surveillance can vary; however, the issue of gender segregation at Muslim events has been used as an avenue to infiltrate and keep a watchful eye on Muslim activities. Under the rationale of ensuring gender equality, Muslim student organizations and events must be reported to Prevent officers on campus when hosting gender segregated events. This has meant that the mundane, everyday organizational activities of students have become magnified as possible national security–related issues. Within the United States and the United Kingdom, countless gender-segregated spaces have existed without intervention, including those sponsored by universities. Women’s colleges, gender-segregated sports, fraternities and sororities, and gender-segregated bathrooms are just a few examples that are still widely accepted institutionally. This demonstrates that if gender segregation is a precursor to radicalism, or poses a cultural threat to British values, then it certainly would be prudent to examine all practices of gender segregation within the university setting, not just those related to Muslims. However, gender segregation has been singled out to the attention of Prevent officers only when Muslims are engaged in it; that reveals it has less to do with gender, and more to do with surveillance of Muslims at universities.

As reported by many of the activists, the scrutinization of student organizations also occurred when Prevent officers monitored their political and educational events. At a university in London, Fowsaa describes how her university’s Palestinian Society event became a site of surveillance:

PALSOC [Palestinian Society] had to have a neutral chair for an event, the Prevent officer said if someone is going to come, you have to give us a script of every word they say. So, this poet came and she sent them the poem. They checked it, which took three weeks. Then, the poet was wearing a key (necklace) at the event. So, she was explaining what the key is about, then the staff members said she “went off script.” So now, the university said, “We’re going to take that into consideration when you come to us to put on an event.”

The poet was wearing a necklace symbolizing Palestinian freedom; the key represents a struggle for Palestinians’ right of return to their ancestral homeland. Even after complying with all Prevent requirements, including providing a script of the speaker’s poem, soliciting a neutral chair, and submitting documentation ahead of time for approval, the event ended with further suspicion of the students’ activities.

State monitoring of student activists is also a phenomenon that has occurred widely in the United States, where university Muslim Student Associations (MSAs) have been surveilled by both police departments and the FBI. The most notable example is the massive New York Police Department’s (NYPD) surveillance of Muslims at mosques, businesses, and MSAs at universities on the east coast, spanning over a decade (Ali 2016). Rasha explains how Muslim women in her MSA were targeted by women informants orchestrated by the NYPD:

There was an undercover informant in our community, at our MSA, and at the time, she had come to MSA events and the office. While I was doing all of this organizing, she was actually surveilling me and my community. I actually believed she was a friend of mine, and I could not believe it when I realized she was an informant. . . . But, it is so haunting, years after this, the undercover arrested two women that could have easily been us. And that’s not to say that we care about it because it could have been us, or that it was so close to home, but the idea that this is even happening to innocent people, and to women no less.

Another interviewee, Safiya, was also part of an FBI sweep of MSAs and local mosques: “My MSA and the mosque that I go to have also been targeted by the FBI and by surveillance.” The importance of Safiya’s comments are that notably the two institutions she has the most daily contact with were surveilled. When surveillance is occurring at both of these sites, it illustrates that there is no “safe” space from possible intrusion of the counterterrorism security apparatus.

Hegemonic Domain: Constructing Counterhegemonic Knowledge

The hegemonic domain of power concerns itself primarily with shaping consciousness “via the manipulation of ideas, images, symbols, and ideologies” (Collins 2000, 285). Thinking for oneself then becomes an important area of resistance to dominant ideology. “Thus, the hegemonic domain becomes a critical site for not just fending off hegemonic ideas from dominant culture but in crafting counter-hegemonic knowledge that fosters changed consciousness” (Collins 2000, 285). A detrimental and pervasive hegemonic idea projected onto Muslims is their assumed homogeneity. Amira discusses how she strategically challenges this dominant ideology in her grassroots community organizing:

I think if we can bring different communities together—and they’re not so different, a lot of these communities are overlapping communities, so it’s not just bringing different voices to the table, but it’s really bringing voices that are intersectional to help people understand that it’s not just an issue facing one group. So, for example, being undocumented is an issue facing all immigrant communities. Or, Islamophobia is connected to larger structures of racism. I think also as people of color we’re trying to make sure that we’re not just pushing for only immigrant issues, but we’re also pushing for black issues and for LGBTQ issues.

Because the Muslim community comprises undocumented, queer, and people of color, such an organizing strategy centers those typically relegated to the margins of the mainstream Muslim community. Centering the marginal results in a stronger base of solidarity for diverse social issues and builds support within the Muslim community against anti-Black racism, sexism, and heterosexism while simultaneously building coalitions with subordinated groups not typically working in collaboration with the Muslim community.

Sadiah was involved in similar consciousness raising within a community-based organization she co-founded to counter Islamophobic policies through community education, direct action, and policy advocacy:

There’s no way you can talk about Islamophobia without giving it historical context such as, “What were the experiences of black Muslims in the Black Panther movement?” That is the beginning of what Islamophobia looked like in the United States. . . . Our community organizing focuses on understanding the internment of the Japanese American community and then using this to say “never again” in solidarity with the Muslims of today. We are very focused on how this is not new or unique to the Muslim community. When we think of the Muslim community we need to change our image that it’s not just South Asian and Arab Muslims but that up to 20 percent of the Muslims in our community are black.

As a South Asian activist, Sadiah was able to construct alternative knowledges through grassroots organizing that helped shaped the collective consciousness of the Muslim community. She offered multiple histories, analytical departures, and coalitional building as central organizing strategies. By emphasizing the commonalities among subordinated groups such as Japanese Americans, she was also able to build coalitions with other oppressed groups.

The hegemonic domain also devalues Islamic knowledge and elevates Christonormativity (Ferber 2012). Islamic knowledge may be seen to pose a threat to Western societies, often assumed as intending to conquer or dominate, or as incompatible with Western values and pluralistic societies. Some Muslim women organizers resist this perception of Islamic knowledge by affirming its pursuit of social justice activism. Sali describes a grassroots campaign in the United States that she and fellow Muslim activists organized statewide that drew on Islamic thought to generate critical consciousness among Muslims as well as to strengthen coalitional organizing around criminal justice sentencing disparity issues:

I was a part of Project MUSA . . . to get out the vote for Proposition 47 which reduced felonies to misdemeanors [for drug charges]. And the reason why we called the project MUSA is because in the story of Prophet Musa, he accidentally kills someone and Allah gives him a second chance. And that’s very similar to Proposition 47 in that we’re giving people a second chance. We were taking the “have you ever committed a felony” question off of job applications so that people who have gone to prison for nonviolent crimes can come out of prison and still get jobs.

In this case, Sali’s Islamic framework organizes coalitions on issues that are seen as outside the typical agenda of mainstream Muslim organizations.

Muslim women activists construct alternative, counterhegemonic knowledge by raising awareness of their own social location as Muslim women. In an interview, Sana, an organizer in London, mentioned “we can only be victims of sexism, but never racism.” In this case, Sana was referencing the limited conception of Muslim women as worthy victims to be “saved” by the West from Muslim men’s misogyny. However, this hegemonic discourse limits Muslim women’s positionality in addressing the racism they routinely experienced within British society. Without wanting to lose sight of how they experienced both forms of oppression—sexism and racism—a collective of Muslim women student activists started a campaign in the United Kingdom that focused on organizing a gendered Islamophobia tour, which visited several university campuses. This was particularly strategic to explore how structural forms of gendered Islamophobia affected them differently than they did Muslim men. They also used these speaking panel tours to create alternative knowledges and insurgent sites to mobilize the women who attended the events. Moreover, it highlighted how Muslim women collectively organized to confront the gendered Islamophobia they often experience individually within public spaces and institutions. Because Muslim women have a distinct “angle of vision” within the matrix of gendered Islamophobia, they often draw on intersectional strategies to build counterhegemonic knowledge through their resistance, strategies, and organizing practices.

Interpersonal Domain: Resisting Everyday Gendered Islamophobia

An essential component of the interpersonal domain of power within the matrix of gendered Islamophobia are potential and actual threats of violence, which the majority of Muslim women discussed in the interviews. These threats were often exacerbated when incidents of violence against Muslim women made national media headlines. Aamal highlights the growing threat of Islamophobia after President Trump’s election: “Feeling safe is challenging because I do wear a hijab . . . even though there were hidden Islamophobes before, they are able to come out now. They feel safe being outwardly Islamophobic because of our President and administration.” Similarly, Amira mentions, “My mom has dealt with people at the courthouse telling her that she can’t wear her hijab. I mean, there’s always been Islamophobia. It existed before 2016. It’s continuing after 2016. The only difference is that now people are unapologetically Islamophobic.” In response, some Muslim women adopted a resistance strategy known as “unapologetically Muslim” in order to counter the increasing Islamophobia.

The sociopolitical context in the United Kingdom also produced a more pronounced gendered Islamophobic climate. Ayan explains:

Today, well obviously in the U.K., with Brexit, gendered Islamophobia clearly targets women. I’m a hijab wearer, so I’m very conscious of not just being a black woman, but like somebody who is also wearing the hijab. Like standing out in an area especially if I’m not familiar with that particular area. You know on a weekly basis you hear a story on social media or the papers of a Muslim woman being attacked.

Ayan draws the connection between the political climate and her vulnerability as someone who both is Black and wears the hijab. She is made more susceptible to violence within the public sphere because of the intersections of these visible identities.

In another interview, Zaida was discussing a specific form of gendered Islamophobic harassment she experiences wearing the niqab:

I schedule my day in a way where I don’t go out during nighttime, because somebody might actually do something to me. And so, now that I wear the niqab, I do have to think about those things. Even when I’m driving, I have to drive a certain way, so people don’t get mad, you know, because in a niqab it looks worse even if you make a mistake. Even if it’s not on purpose people still get upset, and some people have road-rage and they might hurt you.

Zaida is referencing the killing of Nabra Hassanen, a Muslim teenager who was sexually assaulted and killed in June 2017 in what authorities ultimately classified as a “road rage” incident. This was controversial because her family, along with Muslim community members, and their supporters, believed it was a hate crime.

Video recordings and surveillance of Muslim activists and protests have become more commonplace and have the potential to go viral quickly, which only heightens the concerns of most Muslim women activists who lead and participate in public campaigns, marches, and protests. Zarin points out a national U.K. newspaper Daily Mail that regularly portrays Muslim activists in a negative light:

When Muslim women show talent, promise, and competency in really influential positions. . . . A lot of us really live with the paranoia that we can be on a Daily Mail front page or we could end up on a documentary . . . especially if you’re Muslim, and a woman, you’re held to a much higher standard. . . . And it’s that coming together of race, gender, class, and your Muslim-ness altogether, like 4 in 1. I feel that within the community, depending on what kind of Muslim woman you are, maybe that will shape the kind of support that you get. So, if you’re a hijab-wearing Muslim woman, then maybe you’re more likely to get a community response than if you don’t.

Muslim women activists face a unique set of challenges that emanate both from external and internal pressures. Their “talent” is undermined by the media. They may also be undermined within their own community if they do not conform to the ideal type of a Muslim woman, exacerbating gendered Islamophobia.

Another key aspect for Muslim women’s organizing within the individual domain of power centers on the everyday struggles of Muslim women’s collective challenges to sexism with Muslim communities. Sadiah notes her frustration:

We are a nonprofit organization that serves women in the Muslim community and we are always looking for resources. Nobody wants to invest in this work. I’m expected to do workshops, educate the community, hold space for survivors, challenge sexism for free. . . . I’ve literally had those barriers where I’m trying to convince a mosque like, “You need to have a workshop on sexual violence.”

Muslim women activists walk a tightrope in addressing these issues because their work can be co-opted to bolster gendered Islamophobia at the structural and disciplinary domain of power. They also face invisibility within, or lack of support from, the Muslim community. Turning a blind eye to within-community sexism undermines Muslim women’s collective efforts to dismantle a core aspect of gendered Islamophobia, which is the persistent notion that Muslims are more sexist than the general public. Noor discusses how gendered Islamophobia conditions the community response to Muslim women when they focus on issues impacting women such as domestic violence, divorce, education, and compulsory hijab.

There’s this self-defense mechanism that happens [in the Muslim community] when you’re constantly attacked in this racist way [by society] that makes you want to double down on all the harmful aspects and just say “well that’s just our culture.” It is always seen as being “white washed” or “self-hating” when women try to challenge some of these things within our community.

Many of the activists mentioned how exhausting it is to navigate this constant pressure. They realize that gendered Islamophobia is only strengthened when Muslim men refuse to acknowledge work on these important issues that disproportionately impact Muslim women.

Nadia discusses how the narrow representation of Muslim women contributes to these ongoing daily challenges for Muslim women:

I think one thing that definitely needs to be challenged is that Muslim women are not monolithic when it comes to race, ethnicity, identity, and how we dress. It cannot continue to be perceived as such inside the Muslim community and outside of the Muslim community. I feel like black Muslim women’s voices are just continually marginalized, both within the Muslim community and outside, because we just don’t look Muslim enough. Queer Muslim voices, even more so than the first two. Trans Muslims as well.

In Nadia’s view, resistance to the monolithic representation of Muslims is an important part of dismantling gendered Islamophobia within both dominant society and the Muslim community. As a Black Muslim, she sees this also as an internalization within the Muslim community whereby South Asian and Arab, straight, and cisgender women’s voices are privileged over Black and LGBTQ Muslims.

One of the first events I observed after arriving in the United Kingdom was a national gathering of young activists mobilizing to address racism in London. A panel highlighted the “hands off my hijab” campaign, which was challenging a proposed ban on hijab for young girls. The Chief Inspector of Schools, Amanda Spielman, had recently suggested primary schools consider banning the hijab. Shortly thereafter, the head of St. Stephen’s School, Neena Lall, banned the hijab. It was amid this media firestorm that the speaker at the pulpit (who was a hijab-wearing Muslim woman) argued passionately that the State should not be able to dictate what women wear. She argued that it was an authoritarian position to impose, regulate, and control Muslim women. The increase in hate crimes and harassment toward “visible” Muslim women was also a concern. Hostility toward Muslim women’s hijab might only engender a more pronounced Islamophobic climate. In this case, the structural domain can reinforce and perpetuate other forms of violence and oppression targeted at Muslim women within the individual domain. These domains of power are dynamic and operate as mutually constitutive forces that interact and reinforce gendered Islamophobia.

Conclusion

In this article, I have centered Muslim women’s activism and resistance as a site in which to investigate gendered Islamophobia’s complex and multifaceted impact in the United States and United Kingdom. These findings identify overlapping configurations of power that specifically impact Muslim women’s lives through the structural, disciplinary, hegemonic, and interpersonal domains. As an analytical framework, the matrix of gendered Islamophobia furthers our understanding of how Islamophobia operates across multiple domains of power within society. In contrast to reductionist accounts of Islamophobia that analyze Islamophobia as a universalized, unvariegated social force impacting all Muslims in similar ways (ultimately privileging Muslim men’s experiences and contributing to the erasure of Muslim women), the matrix of gendered Islamophobia locates Islamophobia within shifting axes of oppression.

Many of the forms of inequality that permeate Muslim women organizers’ responses to gendered Islamophobia must be contextualized with diverse positionalities. Women’s intersectional experiences with racialization or immigration, and whether they wore hijab or niqab, affected their strategies of resistance and subordination. Collective contestation of the structural and disciplinary domain often involves organizing counterhegemonic narratives that challenge the basis of unequal institutional policies that impact Muslims. The “Students not Suspects” campaign in the United Kingdom challenged the normalization of students as worthy of state surveillance, and built a counterhegemonic narrative to contest the disciplinary domain. These examples illustrate how gendered Islamophobia can crisscross domains of power, but so can resistance.

Although this research focused on women’s experiences of Islamophobia, gender influences and structures men’s experiences of Islamophobia as well. The United States’ exclusive targeting of Muslim men and boys after 9/11 via the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System program is perhaps one of the most powerful examples of gendered Islamophobia within the structural domain. The state has a vested interest in using gender to construct security threats and terrorist profiles, which perpetuate gendered Islamophobia within the counterterrorism security apparatus.

The double bind of women activists addressing Muslim men’s sexism can come at the cost of what appears to legitimate the subjugation of Muslim communities due to their “backwards cultures.” The projection of sexism and heterosexism as unique to Muslim communities has become the basis of state intervention in Muslim communities, providing ideological fodder for the perception that Muslims are unable to assimilate and hold values incompatible with Western liberal democracy. The intensification of gendered Islamophobia results from an assumed and exaggerated hypersexism attributed to Muslim men, while whites (Christians) remain unmarked in the sexism in their communities.

Contrary to dominant controlling processes and images that deny Muslim women’s resistance and agency, this research reveals a dialectical relationship between Muslim women’s oppression and resistance. While the Muslim women interviewed often faced marginalization, their involvement in collective activism countered that disempowerment. Muslim women activists’ collective subjugation exists simultaneous with contestation and resistance to gendered Islamophobia (albeit in various ways, depending on their individual social locations). Their resistance involved collective remaking of alternative ideas, politics, discourses, and organizing practices.