Letter to Amira Jarmakani

Dear Amira Jarmakani, 
I am reading your brilliant text as I, a young Muslim woman, attempt to make sense of the chaos that is my personal identity and its inextricable connection to state violence, anti-Muslim rhetoric, and the concept of the “perpetual foreigner.” I am most interested in the framing you create of the existence of Muslim women within the false binary of liberation and oppression. I have always found myself uncertain where my place is within Islam as a Muslim woman because of the existence of this very binary. This binary that is manipulated by governments to justify state-sanctioned violence abroad serves to create a “civilizing” mission, as it continues the narrative that the freedom of women is determined by the amount of clothing on a woman’s skin, which is a form of objectification. Especially in justifications for unjust foreign policy, I have seen the Muslim woman essentialized, placed within the confines of the Western gaze. She is often treated as an object to be exoticized and “freed” as a spectacle for the West. We saw this in 2001 with the War in Afghanistan, and we have seen this further replicated in today’s discourse on foreign policy. The rhetoric of the salvation of women as a justification for war is still used today. In 2017, national security adviser McMaster showed President Trump pictures of Afghan women in miniskirts in Kabul in the 1970s as a reason to continue the 16-year-long war in Afghanistan. These “nostalgic” images of a time when Afghan society was “westernizing” before the Taliban emphasizes the idea that women’s freedom is associated with a lack of clothing. Clothing should not be the only representation of freedom. In fact, at this time, only a small percentage of Afghan elite dressed like this, and literacy rates were around 18%. I have seen this “mythology of the veil” manifested in bans of the headscarf in France and Quebec, as a narrow interpretation of Muslim women’s liberation through a lack of clothing. Policies like these ignore personal autonomy. The identity of a Muslim woman has been dangerously essentialized even in attempted acts of solidarity and allyship. Today, a Muslim woman is seen as someone who wears a hijab, and who despite being seen as a “perpetual foreigner” is patriotic. You write, “counternarratives run the risk of legitimating the problematic assumptions of the very discourses they resist.” I saw this in the American flag hijab of the Women’s March that left me feeling detached. I would love to know more about what you think about how to effectively manifest “the politics of invisibility” within today’s chaotic discourse.
In solidarity,

Amber Rahman

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