“Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.” — Arundhati Roy

Author’s Note

I wrote this essay in the quiet, haunted aftermath of watching the Netflix documentary on Osama Bin Laden. A documentary that, like so many Western narratives before it, collapses the complexity of Muslim identity into one archetype: terrorist, extremist, threat.

This essay is my analysis of the emotional and political weight of being Muslim in a world that has been conditioned to see us only through the lens of violence or victimhood. It’s a reflection on how these narratives have shaped my body, memory, and belonging. How I, and so many others — whether practising Muslims or not — have been made to carry the burden of suspicion and silence.

This essay is also an act of reclamation, of voice, narrative, and nuance.
Because we are not your binaries, we are watching too. And we are still here.

In the imperial imagination, the figure of the Muslim is a cipher: at once unknowable and overdetermined, perpetually trapped between caricatures of hyper-violence and silent subjugation. The Muslim man is feared, surveilled, and criminalized. His beard a threat, his silence suspicious. The Muslim woman is mourned, unveiled, and objectified. Her niqab rendered a symbol of backwardness, her autonomy rendered invisible. This binary — of the “terrorist man” and the “veiled woman” — is not accidental. It is the product of a global racial order deeply rooted in colonialism, Orientalism, and what Junaid Rana calls terror capitalism.

In Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora, Rana argues that Muslims have been racialized not merely through religion, but through global systems of labour, war, and migration. The post-9/11 era did not introduce the idea of the Muslim as a threat; it merely amplified and institutionalized it. The War on Terror constructed Muslims — especially the working-class Pakistani and the Arab migrant — as inherently suspect, dangerous. Through legal categories (enemy combatant, illegal immigrant, even the term “alien”), carceral regimes (Guantanamo Bay, no-fly lists), and digital surveillance, the Muslim body was transformed into a site of constant scrutiny.

But the “terrorist” is not simply a legal category, it is a fantasy. A projection. A racial myth wrapped in policy. The logic of counterterrorism does not seek to understand root causes; it seeks to preserve the moral superiority of the West. The very idea of “radicalization” suggests that Muslim violence emerges from a deviation from an assumed universal norm, rather than from the material realities of occupation, drone warfare, racism, and statelessness. The Muslim man is framed not as a political subject reacting to structural violence, but as an unpredictable animal, a threat whose motives are unknowable.

This dehumanization is mirrored, and indeed reinforced, by the simultaneous construction of the Muslim woman as a figure who must be saved. Borrowing from Sherene Razack, Rana explains, “For example, in the context of the War on Terror, Muslim women are cast as burqa-clad, isolated, and suffering under the violent patriarchy of Islam and thus reliant on colonial narratives of rescue […] imposing a sexual economy that claims white men must save Muslim women from Muslim Men.”

Lila Abu-Lughod’s Do Muslim Women Need Saving? is a critical intervention into this dynamic. Abu-Lughod exposes the ways in which Muslim women have been positioned as passive victims in need of rescue by white men and Western feminism. The focus on the veil, she argues, is not about gender justice as much as it is about asserting civilizational dominance. The obsession with unveiling Muslim women is an act of symbolic conquest and rescue, not liberation and freedom from oppression.

And the focus on the veil erases the socio-political conditions that shape women’s lives — such as war, occupation, and poverty — and replaces them with moral panic about modesty.

The niqab, hijab, and burqa have long been focal points of Western anxiety. From colonial Algeria, where the French violently policed Muslim women’s dress, to modern-day France’s niqab bans, the veil has been a battleground for empire. As Frantz Fanon explained in A Dying Colonialism, the colonial administration took over the veil and made it a symbol of resistance. Fanon understood that veiling and unveiling were political acts: never neutral, always in relation to the colonizer’s gaze.

The Muslim woman who chooses to wear the niqab out of spiritual devotion, personal autonomy, or cultural tradition is illegible to the Western liberal gaze. Her veil is assumed to be a cage, never a sanctuary. Her voice, if it defends the veil, is ignored or invalidated. She becomes a silhouette onto which Western values are projected. She becomes a screen, not a subject.

Share

In the contemporary West, the niqab is cast as an affront to liberal values. Laws in Quebec, France, and Belgium have banned face coverings in public spaces under the guise of “secularism,” but these laws disproportionately target Muslim women. As Jasmine Zine explains, within the Canadian imagination Muslim women are seen as victims of a more pathological kind of patriarchal violence than Canadian women — as she explains, “the act of a woman covering her head and face is seen not only as undesirable but also as outright threatening to settled notions of self, community, and nation.” Ironically, the very same societies that claim to champion individual freedom and bodily autonomy see no contradiction in legislating what Muslim women can and cannot wear.

This reveals the heart of the issue: it was never about the veil. It was always about control, and control has been at the heart of imperialism.

Gayatri Spivak’s canonical essay Can the Subaltern Speak? offers a useful frame here. She critiques how Western discourse often constructs the colonized woman as a subject who must be spoken for. Her silence is not seen as complex, or contextual but rather as evidence of oppression. Muslim women are thus rendered voiceless, even as many speak loudly and clearly about their own lives, beliefs, and politics. Their refusal to conform to Western norms is not seen as a choice, but as proof of their subjugation and possibly even their distaste — or the echoing distaste of their radical male counterparts’— for Western culture and its emphasis on so-called progressivism.

This dynamic is most clearly seen in how “liberated” Muslim women are elevated in the Western public sphere. Figures like Malala Yousafzai, though deeply admirable, are often presented through a narrow lens: the good Muslim woman who was saved from the bad Muslim men by the benevolent West. Her story is reframed as a parable, erasing the geopolitical and economic conditions — including the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan — that created the very Taliban violence she survived.

Meanwhile, Muslim men are rarely allowed the same redemption arc. They are not Malala’s father, who supported her education. They are not grieving sons, fathers, or husbands. Their humanity is stripped from them (as are their clothes and dignity) and they are insurgents, threats, and shadows. And, apparently, they are all the same.

Because while Malala is given a Nobel Prize, Muslim men are detained — and tortured — indefinitely in black sites like Guantanamo Bay.

Consider the detainees, many of whom were never charged with a crime, held for years in conditions that violated international law. These men, like Mohamedou Ould Slahi (whose memoir Guantanamo Diary was adapted into a film), were subject to torture, isolation, and indefinite detention. Yet their suffering received little empathy from the public. His story, like so many others, barely registered in public consciousness. Why? Because they were already imagined as guilty. Because the Muslim man, once cast as a terrorist, ceases to be human. The Muslim man is not allowed to be vulnerable. He cannot be a victim. He can only be a threat.

This double bind — that Muslim men are terrifying and Muslim women are tragic — sustains the moral logic of empire. It allows bombs to fall in the name of women’s rights. It allows immigration bans to be framed as national, “homeland” security. It allows both left and right to agree: these people are not like us, why are they here? This homogenization reflects the same erasure the West imposes on brown people by referring to them under umbrella terms, such as “Moslems” and “South Asians.”

And this homogenous racialization operates on multiple levels. Jasbir Puar’s concept of “homonationalism” in Terrorist Assemblages is key to understanding how even progressive discourses can be co-opted into Islamophobia. Puar shows how LGBTQ+ rights are sometimes weaponized by Western states to demonize Muslim cultures as inherently backward or homophobic, thereby justifying intervention and exclusion. The “queer Muslim” is welcomed but only if she denounces her community. The “feminist Muslim” is celebrated but only if she rejects her faith.

Thus, the “good” Muslim is the assimilated one. The one who proves her humanity by mimicking Western norms.