Islamic religiosity, Islamophobia and gendered harms

This paper challenges normative assumptions in mainstream Western political and media discourse as well as some academia, which presumes a causative relationship between Islamic religiosity and gendered familial harms. Focusing on the two examples most frequently invoked in such discourse – ‘female genital mutilation’ and ‘forced marriage’ – I argue that prevailing political discourse relies on an orientalist framing in which the West lays claim to gender equality and posits Othered minorities as problematically patriarchal and misogynistic. Using ethnographic and interview data collected with UK-based Muslim migrant women of Somali heritage, the paper analyses pathways to increased religiosity and draws attention to the hitherto largely unacknowledged role played by religiosity in anti-FGM campaigning. I show how this empowering religious turn entailed unforeseen risks including inadvertently reinforcing the positioning of ‘the Muslim woman’ in political discourse as repressed, which in turn fed into discriminatory policies. Contrary to political discourse and some academia, participants identified exposure to UK cultural misogyny and structural inequality rather than Islamic religiosity as a common trigger for forced marriage, and perceived it to be the ‘compulsory coupledom’ and seclusion-focused architecture of UK lifestyle that engendered – and allowed to go unchecked – gendered violence within the home. This reverse gaze perspective allows for a unique examination of the role of Western gendered inequalities and harms as experienced by refugee Muslim women.