Muslim women are simultaneously attacked as threats and pitied as victims

Evidence

“Some media often depict a stereotypical binary representation of Muslim women either as oppressed or as dangerous and do not consider Muslim women as active agents,” according to the ENAR report. “In all countries, most news stories related to Muslim women concern violations of women’s rights, which contributes to constructing negative stereotypes and does not consider Muslim women as a diverse and heterogeneous group.” — Arsalan Iftikhar, Fear of a Muslim Planet_ Global…, 407 (#expands, via linked claim)

But the decision to wear the hijab was entirely hers, similar to all of the Muslim women I interviewed for this book. Yet she too was aware that after she decided to wear the hijab, her experiences changed. Zara told me that after 9/11, the mosque she regularly attended put up a barb wire fence in front of the windows because bricks and rocks had been thrown at these windows. Like mosques, Muslim women who wear the hijab symbolize the threat of Islam in America, and so their bodies are also subjected to violence and harassment. — , Selod, Saher - Forever Suspect_…, 506 (#expands, via linked claim)

One of the difficulties involved in discussing the threats that Muslims face today is the tendency of those having the conversations to change the subject. For example, there are very few conversations about Islam today which do not ultimately end up touching upon the type of clothing that many Muslim women choose to wear. Instead of focusing on Donald Trump’s Muslim travel bans, or the meteoric rise of right-wing white supremacist neo-Nazi groups in virtually every industrialized nation, many Westerners still cannot lower their obsessive gaze from female Muslim religious attire. — Arsalan Iftikhar, Fear of a Muslim Planet_ Global…, 356 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim
• XREF: connects to: Western media depicts Muslim women solely as passive victims stripped of agency — Green, Todd H, The Fear of Islam_ An Introduction to…, 510; Gothic Muslim villains transferred feminine evil onto their female victims; The perceived threats posed by female Muslim converts challenge false stereotypes about oppressed Muslim women and create fear for nationalists by challenging Western societal norms of objectification of women. Objectification of women means the West hyper-sexualizing female bodies for mass consumption. (+6 more)

Related

• Media coverage of Muslim women collapses them into an oppressed-or-dangerous binary (similarity 0.90)
• The perceived threats posed by female Muslim converts challenge false stereotypes about oppressed Muslim women and create fear for nationalists by challenging Western societal norms of… (similarity 0.90)
• Western discourse displaces Muslim threats onto obsessing over women’s clothing (similarity 0.90)
• Western media depicts Muslim women solely as passive victims stripped of agency (similarity 0.88)
• The oppressor stereotype itself oppresses hijab-wearing women. (similarity 0.88)
• Western women’s post-feminist agency is constructed against the figure of the oppressed Muslim woman. (similarity 0.88)
• Hijab-wearers and mosques both symbolize Islam’s threat and face violence (similarity 0.87)
• Gendered Islamophobia imposes the most distorted stereotypes on veiled Muslim women. (similarity 0.85)
• The hijab functions as Islam’s most provocative symbol in Western public discourse. (similarity 0.85)
• The War on Terror targets a religiously defined region, making hijab-wearing women stateless foreigners (similarity 0.84)
• The ‘oppressed Muslim woman’ stereotype itself functions as oppression (similarity 0.84)
• Rising Islamophobia drove many Muslim women to adopt the hijab in protest. (similarity 0.84)
• Muslim women are disproportionately targeted because hijabs make them most visibly Muslim (similarity 0.84)
• Hijab-wearing women’s bodies are treated as symbols of Islam’s threat and targeted accordingly. (similarity 0.84)
• Hijab-wearing American women are seen as both oppressed and dangerous (similarity 0.84)

Broader Connections

• Media coverage of Muslim women collapses them into an oppressed-or-dangerous binary #expands (0.65) — Arsalan Iftikhar, Fear of a Muslim Planet_ Global…, 407
• Hijab-wearers and mosques both symbolize Islam’s threat and face violence #expands (0.50) — , Selod, Saher - Forever Suspect_…, 506
• Western discourse displaces Muslim threats onto obsessing over women’s clothing #expands (0.45) — Arsalan Iftikhar, Fear of a Muslim Planet_ Global…, 356
• The perceived threats posed by female Muslim converts challenge false stereotypes about oppressed Muslim women and create fear for nationalists by challenging Western societal norms of… #complicates (0.40)
• Masculine Islamophobia frames Muslim men as imminent threats of violence #contradicts (0.35)