In 2009, Azar Nafisi — the Iranian-American author of Reading Lolita in Tehran — published an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times arguing that Muslim women needed to be saved from Islam. The framing was not unusual. It has been a recurring theme in Western political discourse for at least two decades: the Muslim woman as passive victim, her faith as her cage, liberation as something that comes from outside.
Muslim women scholars, activists, and ordinary believers have been pushing back against this framing for equally long. Their objection is not that there are no problems — there are, and many of them are serious. The objection is to the analysis: the flattening of 1.8 billion people into a single victim narrative, the conflation of culture with theology, the erasure of Muslim women’s own voices, scholarship, and resistance.
The Category Error at the Heart of Western Coverage
The most fundamental problem with Western coverage of Muslim women is the conflation of patriarchal cultural practice with Islamic teaching. These are not the same thing, and the difference matters enormously.
Female genital cutting, for example, is practiced in some Muslim-majority communities — but it is not mandated by Islam and is absent from most of the Muslim world. It is a cultural practice with pre-Islamic roots in specific regions of Africa and the Middle East. Similarly, honor killings, forced marriages, and restrictions on women’s movement that appear in some Muslim contexts are not derived from the Quran or hadith — they are tribal and clan practices that exist in both Muslim and non-Muslim communities in the same regions.
This distinction is not pedantry. It matters because identifying the source of a problem correctly is necessary to addressing it. If the problem is patriarchal tribal culture, the solution is not to attack religion — it is to address the specific cultural practices and the social structures that enforce them. And it matters because Muslim women who are challenging these practices frequently do so from within their faith, not against it.
What Islamic Scholarship Actually Says
The Quranic text, when read without the accretion of centuries of male commentary, is considerably more egalitarian than the patriarchal traditions that have attached themselves to it. This is the argument of scholars like Amina Wadud, whose 1992 book Quran and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective is one of the most important works in contemporary Islamic theology.
Wadud’s method is straightforward: she reads the Quran carefully, in Arabic, in context, asking what it actually says rather than what it has been interpreted to say. Her findings are not what Western critics of Islam expect. The Quran, she argues, does not establish a hierarchy of gender. It establishes a spiritual equality between men and women, and the verses that have been used to justify women’s subordination have been systematically misread, taken out of context, or overridden by hadiths of questionable authenticity.
Fatima Mernissi, the Moroccan sociologist who died in 2015, made a related but distinct argument in The Veil and the Male Elite (1987). Mernissi was not a textual theologian but a sociologist and historian, and she brought those tools to bear on the question of which hadiths — sayings attributed to the Prophet — have been used to restrict women’s lives. Her finding was that some of the most restrictive hadith were transmitted through narrators with documented misogynist views, and that the historical context of early Islamic society was, in some respects, more egalitarian toward women than later tradition suggested.
This is not revisionism for political convenience. It is standard historical-critical scholarship applied to Islamic sources — the same methods that Christian and Jewish scholars have been applying to their own texts for over a century.
The Diversity That the Single Narrative Erases
Muslim women are not a monolith. They live across 57 majority-Muslim countries plus substantial minorities in Europe, North America, and Asia, in conditions of extraordinary variety. The Muslim woman in Dubai has a different life than the Muslim woman in rural Bangladesh, who has a different life than the Muslim woman in suburban New Jersey, who has a different life than the Muslim woman in Senegal or Indonesia.
Indonesia is the world’s largest Muslim-majority country, with approximately 225 million Muslim inhabitants. Indonesian Islamic practice has historically been notably different from the Gulf Arab form that dominates Western imagination: syncretic, locally rooted, and characterized by significant female religious authority. The Nahdlatul Ulama, one of the world’s largest Islamic organizations, has supported women’s religious education and leadership for decades.
In Iran, where the Islamic Republic has imposed severe restrictions on women since 1979, women have constituted the majority of university students for years and have been at the forefront of resistance. The Mahsa Amini protests of 2022-2023, which began over compulsory hijab, were not protests against Islam — many of the women protesting were believers. They were protests against state coercion in the name of religion.
In the United States and United Kingdom, Muslim women are among the best-educated religious groups by many measures. American Muslim women have higher rates of college education than American women generally. Black American Muslim women, whose communities have roots in both immigrant Islam and indigenous Black American Muslim movements, have developed distinct theological and political traditions.
Muslim Feminists: A Long Tradition
The idea that feminism and Islam are incompatible is contradicted by the existence of a robust, sophisticated Muslim feminist intellectual tradition that stretches back well over a century.
Huda Sha’arawi, the Egyptian activist who removed her veil publicly in 1923, was not rejecting Islam — she was rejecting a patriarchal interpretation of it. She went on to found the Egyptian Feminist Union and remained a practicing Muslim throughout her life. Malak Hifni Nasif, writing in Egypt in the early 20th century, argued for women’s education and reform from within an Islamic framework.
Contemporary Muslim feminists include figures like Asma Barlas, whose Believing Women in Islam (2002) is a careful theological argument for gender egalitarianism in Islamic thought; Kecia Ali, whose work on Islamic sexual ethics has transformed the field; and Ziba Mir-Hosseini, the Iranian-British scholar whose research on Islamic law and gender has influenced reformist movements across the Muslim world.
These women are not performing for Western audiences. They are doing rigorous scholarly work for Muslim communities and for the integrity of their own tradition. When they encounter resistance — and they do — it comes primarily from within Muslim institutions, not from outside.
What the West’s Fixation Costs
The relentless Western focus on Muslim women as victims has costs that are rarely acknowledged. It makes it easier to justify military interventions in Muslim-majority countries in the name of women’s liberation — a framing that was prominent in the justification for the Afghanistan war and that did not survive contact with reality. It provides cover for domestic Islamophobia framed as concern for women. And it actively undermines Muslim feminists by positioning Western secular feminism as the only legitimate form, making it easier for conservative Muslim institutions to dismiss reformers as Western puppets.
Scholar Saba Mahmood, in her 2005 book Politics of Piety, made an important argument that has reoriented how many feminists think about Muslim women’s religious practice. Mahmood, who studied the women’s mosque movement in Egypt, found that women’s participation in conservative Islamic practice was not simply the product of false consciousness or coercion. It was, for many of them, a chosen path toward a form of ethical selfhood that had meaning within a framework the women themselves endorsed. This does not mean there is nothing to criticize. It means that the framework through which critique is offered needs to be more sophisticated than it usually is.
Agency Looks Many Ways
Muslim women who wear hijab by choice, Muslim women who fight against compelled hijab, Muslim women who lead prayers, Muslim women who are conservative in their practice, Muslim women who are secular, Muslim women who are mystics, Muslim women who are activists, Muslim women who are scholars, Muslim women who are none of these — all of these are exercising agency. Agency is not a single set of choices. It is the capacity to make choices, whatever those choices are.
The goal of taking Muslim women seriously — genuinely seriously — is not to celebrate everything or excuse anything. It is to actually listen, to distinguish between what Islamic teaching says and what cultural patriarchy does, and to support the work that Muslim women themselves are doing to shape their own communities and traditions. That work is already happening, in Arabic, Urdu, Bahasa Indonesia, Farsi, and English, in seminaries and universities and mosques and living rooms.
It deserves an audience equal to its intelligence.
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