Muslim women protest religious induced total body atire

The latest antics of Femen at a French Muslim conference allegedly discussing wife-beating and proper womanly pursuits are a case in point. Running on stage in front of the two shocked male speakers after tearing off the abayas they had worn as a disguise, they stripped to the waist with slogans such as “I am my own prophet” and “no one subjugates me” scrawled across their naked torsos. They then shouted at the crowd until they were forcibly removed by security.

What is most troubling about this event is not the outrageously condescending attitude of Femen, nor the reported appalling sexism of the some of the Muslims involved: it is that these two voices are once again propped up as the only two in the conversation. It is as if one can only be either a Muslim who loves misogyny as a religious duty, or an orientalist feminist who hates Islam.

Forcing the discourse into such a binary is not only myopic, but factually incorrect. I’ve researched the way Muslim women fight sexism within the Muslim community, and to the shock of many non-Muslims, my research showed that far from being a recent practice borrowed from the west, Muslim women had been standing up for themselves since the advent of Islam.

Aisha, the prophet’s wife, lacerated her male contemporaries with, “You make women worse than animals?!” for believing (wrongly) their prayers were nullified if a woman walked in front of them during worship. It was a woman who challenged, and beat, the second Caliph in a debate in the mosque about women’s financial rights in marriage. And today, lawyers like Asifa Qureshi use blisteringly strong sharia arguments to fight against rulings that punish rape victims in Pakistan and call for the stoning of women in Nigeria.