Unveiling the West
Why the West Is Obsessed with the Muslim Woman
For decades, through overt and subliminal messaging, the West has succeeded, to some degree, in equating the Muslim woman with the perfect embodiment of oppression: oppressed by her religion, oppressed by her faith, oppressed by misogyny, oppressed by patriarchy, and everything in between.
The central argument is that Islam as a religion oppresses and victimizes women. The proposed solution, then, is that the Muslim woman must be “rescued” by the West and its ideals.
“I am here to liberate Muslim women, I am here to liberate them from Islam.”
~ Lord Cromer, the British Consul-General to Egypt
This line of thought raises several questions: How, exactly, does Islam oppress women? Why does the West specifically choose to scapegoat Islam as a religion hostile to women? Is the oppression of women peculiar only to Muslim women? Are there no Christian women who are oppressed? Are there no Christian women who are victims of domestic violence? Are there no Christian men who fail to treat women with kindness and respect? Are there no women of other faiths across the world who face varying degrees of hardship?
Is the issue of women and oppression a matter of religion alone, or has the West chosen to oversimplify a far more complex issue? Shouldn’t this matter be addressed holistically, rather than by scapegoating a specific religion?
What exactly is it about Islam that the West finds so intolerable? Is it because Islam upholds a moral code - one that stands as a stumbling block to the Western idea of women’s liberation, an idea that has ushered in nothing but moral decay within Western civilization, the stench of which is felt across the globe?
The West can continue to parrot its slogans about women’s liberation, but anyone with a clear and perceptive mind can see the flaws in both its ideology and its practice. It doesn’t take a genius to recognize the moral and social collapse of the so-called civilized West.
But the West is determined, now more than ever, to export its moral decay to every corner of the world under the guise of “women’s liberation” and “rescuing” oppressed women.
In the same breath, the West has no problem with dropping bombs on the very girls and women it claims it wants to “rescue” from oppression, granting them, instead, the gift of brutal death. The girls and women of Gaza are a clear and vivid example, still fresh in the memory of the world.
While the West claims to be the saviour of women, the enforcer of women’s rights, and their liberator, in practice it is often the perpetrator of violence, death, and destruction. And its victims are overwhelmingly women, children, babies, newborns, and even the unborn.
A civilization founded on the massacre, pillaging, and oppression of other people has nothing exemplary to say about liberation. But the audacity of the West is astonishing, as it continues to pose as the champion of women’s liberation.
The West and its so-called civilization sees the typical Muslim woman as a fortress. And in order to infiltrate this fortress, using “women’s liberation” as a Trojan horse, they must first strip the Muslim woman of her modesty and agency, making her feel like a victim: victimized by her own faith and thus in need of “liberation,” just as the French celebrated the supposed “liberation” of Algerian women by forcibly unveiling them publicly in 1958.
“Unveiling this woman is revealing her beauty; it is baring her secret, breaking her resistance, making her available for adventure. Hiding the face is also disguising a secret; it is also creating a world of mystery, of the hidden. In a confused way, the European experiences his relation with the Algerian woman at a highly complex level. There is in it the will to bring this woman within his reach, to make her a possible object of possession. This woman who sees without being seen frustrates the colonizer. There is no reciprocity. She does not yield herself, does not give herself, does not offer herself.”
~ Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism
The West has no issue with women in strip clubs, for that is held up as the perfect expression of a liberated woman - a woman with no shame, no dignity, no agency; a woman exchanging her dignity for dollars; an object to be exhibited and exploited, performing for the pleasure of men.
The West has no problem dehumanizing its women by turning them into walking mannequins to showcase clothes and call it “fashion.” Entire industries are built on the subjugation and exploitation of women in the West. And yet, somehow, it is the Muslim woman who must “break free” from patriarchy because it prevents her from roaming the streets half-naked, stripping in clubs for money, or being used as an exhibition to sell undergarments.
The West sees the Muslim woman as something to be conquered, dominated, and owned - like a piece of colonial souvenir. And it maddens them that, despite their relentless efforts, the Muslim woman continues to wear the hijab, firmly committed to preserving her modesty and decency.
This is why, every now and then, we hear about Western countries like France, among others, banning the hijab or niqab: because this simple piece of clothing stands in the way of their colonial sense of entitlement. The Muslim woman refuses to display herself for their gaze, and that refusal frustrates them.
Has it ever occurred to you that Western “civilized” men are fully dressed in three-piece suits, while women are often clad in skimpy clothing? While men walk around with their chests covered under layers of fabric, women are expected to reveal their décolletage because she is part of the aesthetic - her value reduced to her visual utility. Her physical appearance becomes the focal point, overshadowing her inherent dignity. If that is not the case, if she is not reduced to her visual utility, then why don’t women wear three-piece suits or something equally modest, just like the men? Aren’t women in the West fighting for equality? Shouldn’t equal modesty in dressing be a top priority to fight for?
In the end, the real issue is not the Muslim woman’s “oppression” that matters to the West but her resistance. It is her refusal to be molded, displayed, or consumed by a worldview that reduces women to ornaments while calling it “liberation.” It is her refusal to fall for the diabolical lie that says the more skin she shows the world, the more “liberated” she is because it’s “revolutionary.”
If a non-Muslim Western woman chants “My body, my choice,” she is applauded. If a Muslim woman says the same regarding her hijab, she is oppressed by her religion. The glaring hypocrisy is legendary.
By the definition of the West, a woman who cannot be conquered, stripped (literally or metaphorically) of her identity and agency, or shaped into another accessory of Western consumer culture is an “oppressed woman.”
The insistence of the Muslim woman on defining her dignity on her own terms, grounded in faith, modesty, and moral clarity is precisely what infuriates the West.
The Muslim woman stands firm as a reminder that liberation does not come from abandoning one’s values (and one’s clothes), but from holding onto them with conviction. And no amount of propaganda, bans, or moral posturing will ever change that fundamental truth.
The Muslim woman is, and will remain, a fortress unconquered by the predatory and filthy fingers of the perverted ideas of Western women’s liberation.
Imam Muhyidiyn
It can very easily be argued that the modern west objectifies women and this and that, but to say that's all the West has done for women is just a straw man.
And the West is not special in it's objectification of women. "Islamic" societies pre colonialism had kings with harems containing thousands of slave women. And because in classical shariah, the hijab is only mandatory for free women, not slaves(all the sunni Madhabs say so), these women were also as you so eloquently put it "an object to be exhibited and exploited, performing for the pleasure of men."
This is why "immodest" dances like the Egyptian belly dance didn't go extinct even after Muslims conquered Egypt. After slavery ended in the Islamic world, most women stopped wearing hijab altogether untill the Islamic revivalist movement kicked in in the 1970s.
Also, not all Muslim women have historically worn the hijab. In countries like Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, if anything, women started dressing more modestly after colonialism due to Western norms around modesty. Bengali Muslim women for example only started wearing blouses with their sarees after British colonialism had set in.
And yes, the West is comfortable with women selling their bodies by dancing naked at strip clubs but its also fine with women covered in formal attire working at a University as a professor or being the CEO of a big company(Yes, Western women don't wear thongs all day, most of them aren't strippers and they do wear three piece suits.). Muslim societies on the other hand lack both.