Walking the Orientalism Tightrope: How Muslim Americans Construct their Gender Ideologies

Researcher Positionality

The first author is an Arab, Muslim cis woman who does not veil, but has an identifiably Muslim name. Respondents were more candid and less defensive of their beliefs and their Muslim communities than they might have been with a non-Muslim interviewer. Respondents who felt critical of fellow Muslims or of Islam shared these beliefs rather openly, perhaps because they read the interviewer as secular, while still placing caveats around what they might say in public. Respondents who felt aligned with what they saw as Islamic doctrine assumed she shared those beliefs as a Muslim as well. The second author is a queer, white, Jewish woman. She did not conduct any of the interviews but undertook all of the interview coding and the first wave of analysis. Both authors collaborated on subsequent waves of analysis and writing, following an iterative, inductive process. We recognize, of course, that our sociological inquiries and interpretations are influenced by our own experiences and are embedded in a broader social world (Collins 2009, 2019; Sweet 2020).

Group 1: Loyalist Complementarians

Hannan, a 32-year-old, Arab American woman, felt unprepared to juggle a career and a family because she grew up without any examples of women doing so. Rather than seeing this as a direct result of her upbringing in a practicing Muslim community, Hannan saw it as a deviation from the tradition, citing the way Muslim women had combined these roles throughout history.

Hannan, like many other Muslims, can be understood as having a complementarian gender ideology. For complementarians, men and women have inherently different social roles that are based in biology, supported by Islamic doctrine, and modeled in Islamic history. These differences in roles are not hierarchically related to one another. Rather, they allow for women’s agency and are inherently equitable.

Hannan critiqued Western feminism as erasing women’s unique skills and differences, and in doing so, implicitly treating women’s skills as less important than those of men. By treating women’s supposedly inherent skills, such as caregiving, as equally important to men’s professional roles, complementarians saw their framework as elevating women’s status, particularly compared with non-Muslim communities. Moreover, complementarians emphasized that these distinct roles do not entail hierarchy, rejecting the idea that men have a greater right to decision making in heterosexual households.

For Loyalist Complementarians, gender roles did not necessitate inequality or patriarchy. Jauher, a 29-year-old South Asian man, explained:

From my interpretation of Islam, I would say they talk about equality. Men and women are always equal. There are certain things which belong—certain rights belong to men, but there are certain rights which belong to women also. When you come together and you combine . . . [men’s] lists and [women’s] lists, I think men and women are equal in status. There are definitely things a man cannot impart to a child whereas women can. Again, there are things which belong to women; there are things which belong to men. But both are equal in nature. Both are equal.

Islam puts forth a gendered division of labor that treats women’s labor as equally important to men’s labor. Because these roles are complementary to and dependent on one another, they are inherently equitable. Jauher emphasized the importance of gender equality both in nature and in status—suggesting an essentialized individual and social ontology of gender. Still, Jauher and others took this gender equity as being fundamentally opposed to patriarchy.

Complementarians—men and women alike—recognized that there are instances of hierarchy, patriarchy, and misogyny in Muslim communities. However, they attributed inequality to misinterpretation of Islam and to “cultural” elements that corrupt otherwise equitable gender dynamics. “Culture” is a catch-all term for ethnic and national particularities that are separable from Islamic doctrine (Ali 2018; Guhin 2021; Howe 2018; Karim 2008). Lamees, a 31-year-old Black woman, discussed how gender inequality in Muslim communities comes from male dominance, and strays from a purer and more equitable Islamic past:

I feel like we’re deviating from the prophetic example and only focusing on the things that [men] want. So, I think that’s happening where they’re thinking, “Oh, they just take care of the babies. They cook, they clean, and they’re my tool for relieving myself from my desire” or whatever . . . Where they forget women have desires too, right? Men have responsibility—emotional responsibility. And so I think that because the rules and the rulings are made by men, they focus on their needs and they’re forgetting about those and their responsibilities and the needs of women. So, I feel like the culture comes into play a whole lot and I feel like that is causing the message—the importance of both genders—to be lost.

To Lamees, gender equality became distorted when women’s roles were understood as responsive to men’s desire, rather than as agentive in their own right. The “rules and rulings” Lamees referenced were not of the faith, but rather reflected the ethnic particularity of the rulers as well as their own desires as men. By reframing separate gender roles as hierarchical, rather than equitable, the underlying message (as modeled by Prophet Muhammad) of gender equality became lost. Men and women do not occupy the same social spaces—insofar as there are essentialist differences between men and women, which are reflected in their separate roles. Still, the truest, most Islamic version of these complementarian gender roles is free from hierarchy, gendered restrictions, and male domination.

Complementarians were acutely aware that these instances of patriarchy and hierarchy, which they understood to be cultural rather than religious, corroborated a negative impression of Islam held by many in the American public. Arham, a 43-year-old South Asian man, articulated his frustrations with the Orientalist gaze:

You know, in Surah An-Nisa, and other things, there’s no other religion in this world that is arguably more pro-women. All these stupid restrictions are from stupid culture . . . All the cultural restrictions and oppression is all frickin’ cultural. And this is what I try to argue with my non-Muslim friends, what the media shows, that Muslim women are prohibited in this and that. You are a better species. ⁹ God has given you . . . the capacity, the stamina, and many other things, in addition to that. So, all the restrictions that are made by male dominant societies is cultural, in my opinion. That’s culture, or Pakistani culture, or whatever culture it is.

Arham’s discussion of Islam as an inherently feminist religion was not conducted in a vacuum. Rather, he presented his non-Muslim friends and the media as two foils against whom he argues. Implicit in his argument was a critique of media portrayals of Islam as being fundamentally backwards and patriarchal—a critique that was reflected in his non-Muslim friends’ understanding of gender dynamics in Muslim communities. For Loyalist Complementarians to get across the Orientalism tightrope, they needed to defend Islam’s complementarian gender politics and explain away instances of gender inequality. They did so by articulating a distinction between religion and culture. The former empowers women, enabling them to maximize their strengths for personal and social advancement, whereas the latter imposes restrictions on them for men’s gain.

Group 2: Patriarchal Reactionaries

Islam both justified and necessitated a patriarchal structure for Saleem, a 36-year-old Black man.

If people have a big problem with patriarchy existing in Islam, they use a fancy term like “male hegemony,” that type of thing. It’s a euphemism for misogyny and all those types of things . . . Islam by definition even in terms of lineage, genealogy, it’s patriarchal. Why? Because the first human being Allah created was a man; that’s why our law refers to us in the Quran as “banu Adam” [children of Adam]. We’re known as the children of Adam for a reason. Why? Because the first human parent was a male. The first human being was a male. Patriarchy most definitely has a place in Islam.

Islam both justified and necessitated a patriarchal structure for Saleem. When he spoke about such patriarchy, however, Saleem took care to contrast it with external critiques of “misogyny and all those types of things.” By characterizing ostensibly secular critiques of Muslim patriarchy as being reliant on “fancy terms” such as male hegemony, Saleem gestured toward an imagined division between a patriarchal Islam and an external critique.

Saleem was a typical example of a Patriarchal Reactionary. For this group, patriarchal structures were inherently Islamic, and hinged on both gendered divisions of labor and on an explicitly hierarchical power dynamic. The problems among Muslim men and women are introduced by attempts to dilute these patriarchal structures through egalitarian notions that are both un-Islamic and unnatural. Patriarchal Reactionaries understood attempts at equality as fundamentally bad for women, leading to discord and dissolution of the family unit. Moreover, they saw attempts at egalitarian reform as rooted in Western intervention perpetuated by outsiders and/or by misguided Muslims.

Like Loyalist Complementarians, Patriarchal Reactionaries rooted their gender ideologies in their readings of Islamic texts. Take Waheed, a 39-year-old South Asian man, who discussed his ideal household division of labor by first referencing a story about Prophet Muhammad:

Ali and Fatima went to him and asked him “How should we divide our duties?” ¹⁰ He said: “Ali, your job is to take care of your affairs outside the house. Fatima, your duty is to take care of the affairs inside the house.” Now, that’s a general paradigm: a man should be responsible as a primary earner, fixing the car, mowing the lawn, all the outside stuff, and the woman . . . She can’t work. If you have a family, if you have kids, meals have to be cooked, the house has to be cleaned. Somehow it has to happen, it can’t just magically happen. If a guy’s doing what he is supposed to do, which is being out of the house and working, he can’t do everything. And then, within that, the man can help. He is not supposed to be expected to be the primary guy, cause he’s not supposed to be sitting at home. If he is, there’s a problem. He should be out. This is not something I heard from scholars, this is just an analogy I thought of myself. In decision-making, I look at it like two people in a car: if I’m driving with my wife, I have the steering wheel.

Waheed framed patriarchy as having textual justification that can be integrated into contemporary life. Such patriarchy, according to Patriarchal Reactionaries, is good for women—insofar as it has some flexibility within it. While women are responsible for making sure the cooking and cleaning gets done and, as such, cannot work, men may still “help” around the house. Still, rigid power dynamics were baked into Waheed’s gender paradigm. Men are the primary decision makers, steering the relationship and household decisions.

Yet this patriarchal approach was discussed alongside resistance to it. For Patriarchal Reactionaries, attempts at gender equality are aberrant, un-Islamic, and are ultimately attributed to external influences. Waheed, who ended up divorcing his wife after disagreements about the household division of labor, articulated this through his discussion of his ex-wife’s upbringing: “She saw this female-dominated household . . . so she thought that was the norm. [That was] the biggest problem I had with her. If that wasn’t there, I think we’d be together.” Ammar, a 43-year-old Arab man, similarly attributed women’s breaks from Islam to external forces, saying that technology has “brought society into the house.” He explained:

My wife’s second cousin ran away from the house. She doesn’t want to wear the hijab. She doesn’t want to be Muslim. Whatever. The father was always working. The mother was always on the iPhone, chatting, and just . . . the money was coming in. And then, al dunya [the secular world]. So what did she learn? She learned it from the environment. That’s it.

For both Waheed and Ammar, the things that cause conflict and push women away from Islam—and their hierarchical households—came from households in which women were decision makers. These households symbolized a Western, consumerist set of ideals represented at once by the iPhone and the money “coming in” as well as by feminist intervention. The cousin’s mother may have opened the door to egalitarianism through her use of the iPhone, but it was the secular world that was to blame for the daughter’s rejection of gender hierarchy. Deviation from a male-led household created opportunities for the secular, non-Muslim world to further corrupt Ammar’s relative. In describing this conflict, he reinforced the idea that patriarchal Islam and secular Western culture are antagonistic toward one another, particularly when it comes to gendered values. The external world pushes a set of values that draw women and men out of their natural and Islamically prescribed roles, thereby threatening both the Muslim family and individual Muslims’ characters.

Patriarchal Reactionaries did not necessarily contradict the tenets of the Orientalist gaze; they just rejected its moral high ground. For this group, the patriarchy in Islam is worth embracing, because it facilitates social cohesion and harmonious households, and protects against the incursions of a morally decadent consumer culture. Like some other Muslims critical of Western norms—such as the women’s mosque movement in Egypt (Mahmood 2004)—these respondents saw gendered restrictions and patriarchal structures as a form of embodied resistance.

Group 3: Critical Egalitarians

Omar is a 40-year-old man born to a Syrian immigrant dad and an Irish mom who converted to Islam; his parents met in the United States. Early in Omar’s childhood, the family moved to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) following a lucrative employment opportunity for his father. They grew up relatively religious, praying regularly, fasting Ramadan, and refraining from pork and alcohol. When Omar was in his early teens, the family moved back to the United States. Omar said they stopped visiting the UAE because his mother and sister did not like being there. When asked why, he simply cited the “cultural and religious-based misogyny.” Omar described himself as a feminist, though he articulated feminism as incompatible with Islam and Muslim communities. Across his life, Omar grew frustrated with “the state of the Muslim world and how it treats women.” He distanced himself from the faith, a process he termed a “sort of liberalization.”

The source of the patriarchy in the Middle East and in American Muslim communities was clear for Omar. Unlike Loyalist Complementarians, he felt no need to distinguish between culture and religion. Nor did he think, like some complementarians, that instances of gender oppression among Muslims were a result of a misinterpretation of the texts or a privileging of ethnic or national culture over religious edicts. Culture and religion simultaneously contributed to the mistreatment of women, and the state of gender relations among Muslims was indistinguishable from Muslim teachings. While he associated patriarchy with Islam and the “Muslim world,” Omar made no observations about patriarchy in the United States. His mother and sister’s experiences in the UAE were set against a backdrop of a United States presumably free of gender-based oppression. Critical Egalitarians were exclusively critical of Islam, Muslims, and Muslim societies. They did not espouse gender-based critiques of secular or Western societies, implicitly or explicitly accepting the assumption that Western societies are fundamentally egalitarian.

Another respondent, Rimsha, a 35-year-old South Asian woman, was trying to have children with her Christian husband. They hoped to raise the kids in both faiths but were also aware that this may come with complications. She joked: “Or maybe we have to write that kid’s book. ‘Dad is Christian. Mom has to walk through a separate door that says, ‘Sisters,’ and this is why.’” For Rimsha, Christianity required no explanation, its gender ideology being presumably neutral and egalitarian. “Mom,” however, uniquely faced gender segregation that requires explanation for future children, which Rimsha cited as a potential hurdle to raising them Muslim. The joke suggested that patriarchy is exclusively a Muslim problem—one Rimsha’s children would only experience vis-à-vis their Muslim heritage.

When Ahmed, a 45-year-old Afghani American man, was asked if he attends the mosque, he said: “I wasn’t terribly involved, also because I was starting to get involved with more of the political, the feminist, the humanist.” These identities—feminist and humanist versus Muslim—were contrasted, as Ahmed suggested that he pursued the former at the cost of Muslim community involvement. Throughout the conversation, Ahmed compared himself with other Muslim men, affirming over and over that he was “liberal, feminist, and humanist.” Ahmed’s disenchantment with the Muslim community was specifically gendered. He watched his childhood mosque and college MSA grow increasingly conservative, as evidenced by the rise in the number of women choosing to veil.

What was most surprising was women that I knew voluntarily started wearing the hijab. We didn’t have the hijab growing up, I didn’t see the hijab on a single woman growing up; not one. And more and more women were wearing it all of a sudden . . . I was just like “what on earth.”

For Ahmed, veiling signaled a conservative shift in values, one associated with gender-traditional life course developments. He was shocked to see women in his community not only veil but also pursue early marriage.

You know it’s like here is this person who seemingly is so open minded and intellectual, wants to grow out of the mold, and all of a sudden you hear that she’s engaged. And you never meet this person, the person she’s engaged to. And they all of a sudden dissociate from you, and some of them manage to graduate [from college], some of them don’t manage to graduate, and some of them you hear are divorced.

Ahmed contrasted being “open minded and intellectual” with wearing the hijab or getting engaged at a young age. As his friends started to get married, the women disengaged from him, presumably to avoid a mixed-gender friendship. Of the women who got married, only “some of them manage[d] to graduate.” Ahmed juxtaposed religious and conservative life choices with secular achievement and, indeed, the liberal, humanist values that a college education represents.

Yet Ahmed tried to balance a critique of the hijab as signifying conservative and religious values with a refusal to overtly malign it, reacting strongly when asked whether his wife wore the hijab:

No, no, noooo; it’s something I have an aversion to actually. I strongly believe it’s just as wrong to tell a woman to take it off as it is to put it on, except for my daughter and wife [laughs]. You’re not wearing it [laughs]. So, and they’re fine with that, that’s what they prefer.

Ahmed nodded to the notion that banning the hijab is a form of repression, signaling his divergence from Islamophobic policies that target women’s right to veil in the public sphere. Yet Ahmed was clear that he would not allow his wife or child to wear a hijab. He fundamentally framed the hijab as a bad choice that people (unrelated to him) should be free to make. Ahmed doubly employed a rights-based framework and a strategy of privacy. Although he refused to publicly defame the hijab, and was willing to defend it as a choice, he retained a critique of it as a form of gender oppression.

Critical Egalitarians did not question the theological bases of gendered restrictions or edicts. Ahmed and others of this group assert the belief that hierarchical relationships between women and men are part and parcel of Islamic teachings. Although they assessed the results differently, Critical Egalitarians and Patriarchal Reactionaries shared an interpretation of Islam’s orientation toward gender: that women should be subordinate to men, and that gender-based social roles are dictated by God. But while Patriarchal Reactionaries believed that these are morally positive teachings which are appropriate to the natural social order, Critical Egalitarians articulated these beliefs as outdated, embarrassing, and unfit for modern life.

However, disdain for Islam’s supposedly patriarchal beliefs posed a political dilemma for Critical Egalitarians, who were reluctant to align with Orientalist views of their communities. Take Shireen, who grew up in an abusive household. Her father justified his tendency toward control by referencing Muslim doctrine. Although she was religious as a child, Shireen—a 38-year-old Arab woman—began to feel alienated from the gendered elements of Muslim belief when she reached adolescence. As she got older, the rest of her beliefs disintegrated as well. “I am not a religious person at all,” she said. “I don’t like organized religion.” Much of Shireen’s criticism of Islam revolved around what she sees as the inherently patriarchal elements of the religion. But Shireen avoided a straightforward disavowal of Islam, largely on political grounds:

It’s really hard. I don’t wanna say Orientalist stuff right now, but I just find Islam to be very oppressive, at least for me. I just link a lot of abuse with Islam . . . I don’t want to in any way play on the stereotypes around Islam. It’s a very fine balance, I think, of talking about Islam and women, and the oppression, and just the sexism in Islam, and not wanting people like Bill Maher being like “Oh yeah, our views of Islam, you totally solidified them.”

Shireen struggled to reconcile her perception of “sexism in Islam” with her reluctance to give a win to Orientalists—an ambivalence shared by all the participants in this category. Respondents like Shireen seemed to worry that pointing to gender inequality in their experiences and in their communities would place them in the wrong camp. Thus, they kept their critiques private and internal—a strategy Reformist Egalitarians employed as well.

Despite his strong critique of the hijab above, Ahmed chose not to engage with non-Muslims who asked him about Muslim political life, and instead kept his critiques private:

There were lots of people with closed-minded views, and asking really ignorant questions . . . I think that was one thing that I hated. When people wanted me to educate them, it wasn’t necessarily my job. And it wasn’t necessarily something I had time for. It was just surprising that people couldn’t figure it out for themselves, even though the information—the Internet was there at that point. The information was all there, but people couldn’t be bothered to research it on their own, and they would make very bad interpretations on very little knowledge.

Ahmed resented being asked to respond to “really ignorant questions” as if it was his responsibility to speak for all Muslims or educate non-Muslims. Because he felt that these non-Muslims would make “very bad interpretations” of Muslims’ behavior, even as nuanced information was accessible, he chose to keep his own evaluation of Muslim communal life to himself.

Critical Egalitarians arguably had the hardest time navigating the Orientalist gaze. They found themselves agreeing with critiques of patriarchy in Islam, but were loath to align themselves with it. Their strategies in return ranged from disavowal of Orientalism—as Shireen did, above—to rendering their critiques private, like Ahmed, refusing to translate them into social policy or sharing them only with other people of Muslim origin.

Group 4: Reformist Egalitarians

Kamal, a 30-year-old Arab man, is a practicing Muslim who described himself as a feminist. He recalled that he attended a Friday sermon where the imam talked about how women were traded as goods in pre-Islamic Arabia. Islam, the speaker said and Kamal agreed, elevated the status of women. For Kamal, this spoke to Islam’s revolutionary potential vis-à-vis the patriarchy, which has since lapsed. “It was revolutionary then, but not now in 2016.” Whereas Islam brought women out of being traded as goods in its earliest days, its interventions toward equality have stagnated in a more modern patriarchal landscape. “We have to carry that [revolutionary potential]—trying to evolve and adapt to the times and not just say ‘things were set in stone years ago, this is how it is.’” Kamal gestured toward members of his community who are reluctant to embrace a revolutionary interpretation of Islam, and he affirmed his belief that Islam both should and can be reformed toward gender equality.

Kamal was what we call a Reformist Egalitarian. This group of respondents, like Loyalist Complementarians and Critical Egalitarians, also identified patriarchal tendencies within Islam and within Muslim communities. However, they saw these tendencies as neither unique nor inherent to Islam. Muslim patriarchy was a local form of a universal tendency to police women’s bodies and behavior. Moreover, Reformist Egalitarians saw patriarchy as a context-driven problem within Muslim communities, suggesting that interpretations of the faith were capable of evolving toward more egalitarian ideals.

Afshan, a 36-year-old South Asian woman, complained of the gender inequalities in her mosque but saw them as functions of an entrenched and regressive leadership. She spent her teen years active in a mosque her parents helped start in their Midwestern hometown. When she returned as an adult, she found herself at odds with mosque leadership, which continued to alienate women.

There was a committee there that refused to open up the partition [between women and men]. I questioned them in front of everybody. I was like “Why do you feel like, as four men, that it’s okay for you to make that decision without consulting any of us . . . I just want you to know that I find your ways oppressive. I think you have oppressed a lot of people in this community by making those choices.” Afterwards, he went up to my dad right away. He was like “I can’t believe your daughter accused me of being an oppressor.”

Throughout her interview, Afshan framed encounters with the patriarchy at the mosque as specific instances of men’s power over resources. Unlike respondents from the Critical Egalitarian group, she did not see those instances as reflective of Muslim teachings, and her relentless activism against these forces reflects an optimism that things could change with the right interventions. This type of optimism was starkly missing from the narratives of Critical Egalitarians, who saw gender segregation and unequal resources as key features of Muslim life, from which they could withdraw and distinguish themselves. Afshan continued: “They were not ready—when I would say things like ‘Women are not being treated well in the community,’ they could not stand that.” Describing her community as “not ready,” Afshan evoked a progress narrative. Things are moving in the direction of change, even as her mosque stalled in its move toward equality. The problem of misogyny is temporally contingent rather than fixed.

Reformist Egalitarians saw Islam as capacious and Muslims as plural in their understandings of gender ideology. Iman, a 42-year-old Arab divorcee, understood the end of her marriage as a result of these differing interpretations. Her husband wanted a wife that would cook, clean, and care for the home even while maintaining paid employment. At first Iman managed all this, but soon fell ill with cancer. Even during her illness, her husband was unwilling to pick up household slack. Despite both being religious, they understood religion differently.

My bar for myself is that religion should make me a better person in the world . . . Religion is about personal betterment, and ethical exploration, and primarily kindness . . . My ex-husband didn’t come at religion that way, that wasn’t what it was for him. For him it was, controlling parts of himself. Like, the rules and regulations of religions spoke more to him. And, you know, there are good things that have come out of that for him as well. I’ve just learned that if two people are saying they love religion and that’s a core value for them, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the same core value . . . So I think that that really changes what I’m looking for when I say that I’m looking for a Muslim partner. Like aligning on core values. Like I don’t take that for granted anymore: that you’re religious and I’m religious, so we’re both going to value these things. It’s not true. Coming out of my marriage, [I want] somebody who sees me as fully human, and not being limited by gender within a relationship is really important to me.

For Iman’s ex-husband, being religious meant fulfilling the social roles and rules granted from above—rules that are ultimately gendered. For her, being religious meant being kind and “fully human.” She was careful to speak of her husband’s brand of religiosity in remarkably neutral terms. Iman never suggested that he was wrong in his interpretations, and even lauded the benefits his approach had granted him. While Critical Egalitarians rejected future mates who might be religious, on the assumption that this religiosity would necessarily entail patriarchal impulses, Iman sought a religious partner who shared her feminist ideals. Thus, she evoked a view of Muslim life as one with multiple approaches and orientations both to faith and to gender. If Islam and Muslims were not monolithic, they need neither be condemned nor fully embraced. Patriarchy was neither inherent to Islam nor unique to it.

Reformist Egalitarians refused the notion that patriarchy is unique to Islam by speaking of Muslim patriarchal tendencies alongside other forms of patriarchy. Leenah, a 36-year-old Arab woman, who organizes an explicitly feminist Muslim space, explains:

I see oppression in Muslim teachings and communities sometimes, yeah, but I also see oppression in the American mainstream. Why do you think women are so obsessed with being skinny and getting Brazilian Butt Lifts and being half naked all the time and wearing obviously uncomfortable clothing and being obsessed with their weight and being obsessed with getting boob jobs and never aging? That’s just a different form of the patriarchy controlling what you think, you know? Or how women talk about makeup—oh, it’s art. Okay, so you spend three hours a day every day on makeup? Because you’re an artist? Like no, come on, dude. I’m not saying that can’t be valid, but most women, they’re not doing that, they’re doing it because they want to present a certain face to the world, because pretty women get treated better.

For Leenah, the problem was not Islam, but the patriarchy. And the patriarchy was everywhere, including in Muslim communities and Muslim teachings. Her diatribe against consumer-driven gender expectations reflected her belief that gender is being policed both inside the mosque and outside of it. Referring to these pressures as “a different form of the patriarchy,” Leenah refused to let the non-Muslim mainstream off the hook. Unlike Critical Egalitarians, she did not see non-Muslims as inherently egalitarian, and therefore refused to designate Islam as uniquely patriarchal.

Yet, like many critical egalitarians, Leenah was also hesitant to criticize Muslim spaces among non-Muslims. She describes feeling alienated from “white feminist” spaces, and when non-Muslims critiqued Islam as being gender oppressive, she struggled to navigate both her dissatisfaction with the patriarchal tendencies that she saw in Muslim spaces and her frustration with non-Muslims’ critiques, which she saw as lacking context.

It’s this really complicated dance of like, yeah, I really disagree with a lot of this [gender inequality,] but then hearing other people say what they have to say about it, and then feeling defensive at the same time . . . Like, I can say these things about it, but you can’t say those things about it, you don’t know what you’re talking about.

Ultimately Leenah chose to avoid white feminist spaces entirely, saying that she “didn’t feel comfortable.” Rather than feeling pressured to respond to critiques of Islam from non-Muslims who lacked valuable context and imposed an Orientalist gaze that left her feeling defensive, Leenah kept her views private in these contexts, choosing instead to organize for gender equality alongside other Muslims.

Whereas Patriarchal Reactionaries condemned the Orientalist gaze for demanding a misguided gender equality, Leenah and other Reformist Egalitarians condemned it for neutralizing patriarchy in non-Muslim contexts. Reformist Egalitarians mirror Abu-Lughod’s (2002) critique of the Orientalist gaze as sanitizing American society from its own forms of gender oppression, thereby taking both Muslim and non-Muslim manifestations of patriarchy to task.