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By Diary Of A Muslimah
In the 1870’s, French administrators trying to strengthen France’s colonial rule over parts of the Muslim world recommended that French men marry Arab women. A supporter of this policy stated, “It is through women that we can get hold of the soul of a people”.
The colonialists realized that within Muslim societies, women are the center of the family, the backbone of communities, and the nurturers of children. If you capture their hearts and their minds, you capture the spirit of present and future Muslim generations, creating advocates for your beliefs, and supporters of your rule. Western rulers therefore sought to get hold of the soul of the Muslim woman by shaping her tastes according to their values; convincing her to view her Islamic history through their eyes; and molding her hopes and aspirations through their dreams. And over successive generations, it is the media that functioned as one of their greatest tools in achieving this aim. For it served as a mirror to that soul; not by providing a true reflection of the Muslim woman’s status in her Deen – for if it had, it would have shown her as embracing a system which exemplified protection of her dignity and well being, one that elevated her status within societies, and pioneered the political, economic, educational and legal rights she enjoyed, centuries ahead of Western civilizations today.
No! The secular media concealed this truthful reflection of the position of women in the Shariah. Instead, it constructed a distorted ugly image of her identity as a Muslim woman and her mistreatment under Islam, based upon lies and myths – that she was imprisoned, enslaved, consigned to second-class status, and the subject of violence. The words ‘victim’ and ‘veiled’ became synonymous; and the covered Muslim woman came to represent to many the visible symbol of Islam’s oppression of women.
This false image led to many Muslim women becoming ashamed of their Islamic culture, despising their Islamic history, and fearing the return of Islamic rule, while also being enticed by the secular, liberal lifestyle, culture and system, viewing it as the path to dignified lives. All this aided secular governments, in the East and West to pursue their agenda of weakening the attachment of Muslims to their Islamic beliefs and to remove Islam from public life by manufacturing consent amongst their public for hijab and niqab bans and other oppressive policies against Muslims, as well as to invade Muslim lands for political interests – all in the name of saving Muslim women from their so-called ‘oppressive’ Islamic culture.
These inherited stereotypes and false cultural imaginaries of Muslim women and their status in Islam cannot go unchallenged. Such lies should not be the dominant voice in the media discourses on women and Shariah. They must be dismantled and discarded. To do this requires for us to first recognize the main sources from which the media fiction regarding the Shariah’s subjugation of women arise.
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