Excerpt from: The Muslim (M)other
If womanhood as it is socially constructed involves a very particular and loud projection of beauty and sexuality, then many Muslim women simply aren’t perceived as being ‘women’.
Hello and Salam alaykum friends,
This week, we’re sharing an excerpt from
’s book ‘The Muslim (M)other’. I previously mentioned how much I admire Mariya’s writing as well as her mind! Editing her pieces during my time at Amaliah brought me so much joy; I always left the screen feeling mentally stimulated but also inspired to action.I had the privilege of being a panellist at her book launch event on Tuesday, hosted by Hafsah Dabiri, and it was an incredibly rewarding experience. It was inspiring to witness the powerful conversations sparked by the excerpts that were read aloud. I loved hearing Muslim women in attendance express how deeply they felt seen and represented by Mariya’s work.
About The Muslim (M)other:
The Muslim mum is the most fertile political symbol of our times – heralded as both the solution and cause to many of the issues that erroneously come to define Muslim communities in our now globalised world. Muslim mums who are continuously spoken down to, at, or for, and very rarely conversed with in a language that sees and understands us beneath the suffocating extraneous layers of media sensationalism and political discourse.
In the first of its kind, The Muslim (M)other looks at the blessed and fraught experience of mothering when Muslim in contemporary political times. Amidst the textures of an accelerating digital age, ubiquitous Islamophobia and an increasingly commercialised cultural climate that impacts us in ways obvious and untold.
Whether it’s based on YouTube’s retro-hijab-tutorial era or more recent TikTok soft-girl or girlbossing your way through life, or the other various aestheticised social media trends, Muslim women have been programmed still to act and perceive ourselves in ways that will benefit male desire. This conflating of female independence and liberation with beauty and desirability is all the more complicated for Muslim women because in a world that equates women’s worth to their visual acquiescence and optical availability, we will always fall short of ‘womanhood’ itself. Muslim women simply do not fit the conceptual bracket of femininity as it is under stood by a wider system that reduces it to shallow characteristics. If womanhood as it is socially constructed involves a very particular and loud projection of beauty and sexuality, then many Muslim women simply aren’t perceived as being ‘women’.
Modesty, and the act of being “unseen” is an affront to modern standards of femininity. And we know historically that there are cultural connotations to how Muslim women resisted visual colonisation through this radical act of covering. What happens to the Muslim female psyche, as women who have a natural affinity to our femininity, is that we often subconsciously migrate towards culturally accepted standards of femininity to fulfil that innate need to be deemed and to deem ourselves ‘feminine’. The visual norms we currently inhabit mean that being seen to want to be beautiful - investing in the idea that being so visibly conformist is being worthy, to commit yourself to a visual standard which puts a worth on trying to achieve desirability - is a social signal to femininity as it is culturally understood.
It’s being part of the Club of Woman™ as “woman” is culturally coded. For Muslim women, entry into this club not only grants them entry into womanhood, but human hood too. The Muslim identity is continually dehumanised, alienised and aberrated, and to visibly and symbolically denounce our claim to desire beauty means we are further down the rungs of a standard which ranks humanity according to superficial traits. For Muslim women to try to claw back some sense of being acknowledged, seen, humanised, we are forced to climb this ladder of acceptability through a visual code which rewards visual acts of submission.
Beautification and the act of seeking to be desirable is one way to tell the world we are human, it’s one way of gleaning a sense of belonging. This is why, though the tool of beauty is used to subdue women across all races and creeds, for Muslim woman in particular, it is far more punishing. As beauty, or our visible endeavour towards it, is presented as a gateway to far more than just being desirable. It’s a means by which we are seen as human.
I hope you enjoyed Mariya’s piece as much as we did, and you’re inspired to pick up her book. If you found it beneficial, share with friends, colleagues and anyone else who may also benefit from it.
Wishing you a blessed, restorative and fulfilling weekend ahead!
Love and duas,
Suad from Qalb Writers Collective
 | A guest post by
|