The Western image of the Muslim woman as oppressed victim is historically recent

Evidence

Women often play a particular role in Muslim misery memoirs as carriers of cultural baggage and the focus of Western sympathy. The Muslim woman becomes the object of discourses by both modern secularists (including some feminists) and Islamic conservatives and fundamentalists: her body, the confines of her life, and her mode of dress being read for what they supposedly yield about the essential qualities of the cultures in which the she lives. In that sense, she becomes a stereotype, a fixed and unchanging signifier of timeless modes of life. However, as critics such as Mohja Kahf have noted, in the Western gaze the signifying power of the image of the Muslim woman has shifted through the ages, from its roots in pagan and Old Testament paradigms of the threatening female to the powerful queen or noblewoman of the Middle Ages and then, with the rise of European Romanticism and the project of colonialism, to the familiar figure of the oppressed female, incarcerated by tyrannical Muslim men in the harem or behind the veil. It is this latter figure, whose contemporary manifestation is the Iranian woman smothered by her chador or the shrinking, burka-clad Afghani woman, who still provides the clarion call for neocolonial interventionist adventures today. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 208

Categorization

• XREF: This maps to the already-crafted piece on moral panics over immodest dress — the constructed, period-bound image of the veiled woman is homologous.
• DEFINE: Kahf’s history gives the reader a diachronic tool for exposing the contemporary ‘oppressed woman’ figure as a construct rather than a timeless truth.
• SHARE: Would delight someone working on feminist representations or on how Muslim women are mobilized rhetorically in intervention debates.