Gendered Islamophobia: When Identity, Religion, and Gender Collide

Gendered Islamophobia combines racism, sexism, and anti-Muslim hatred. It affects how Muslim women and gender-diverse Muslims are perceived, treated, and targeted around the world. For the global Indian and Brown community, this oppression is a daily reality in India and throughout the diaspora. Understanding gendered Islamophobia is crucial for anyone who cares about justice, representation, and safety for Muslims and other Brown minorities worldwide.

What Is Gendered Islamophobia?

Gendered Islamophobia is a kind of anti-Muslim racism that is directed against Muslim women, as well as gender-diverse individuals, by stereotypes regarding their bodies, clothes, sexuality, and their seeming oppression. It works by the concept that Muslim men are violent and Muslim women are submissive, creating a narrative that they need to be rescued by their own communities.

This reasoning enables the states and societies to police the dressing, movement, sexuality, and family of Muslim women in the guise of liberation, but in reality, it strengthens patriarchy and white or majority rule. Through this, gendered Islamophobia effectively uses the ideological tool to facilitate surveillance, discriminatory legislation, and social exclusion of Muslim communities.

Islamophobia In India and The Global South

Gendered Islamophobia in India is strongly interwoven with Hindutva nationalism, which creates the image of Muslims as a demographic, cultural, and sexual danger. Discourses of not only love jihad, but phobias concerning Muslim fertility and the morality of interfaith relations are all based on gendered fantasies of hyper-sexual Muslim men and victimized Muslim women.

Studies of Hindutva politics have demonstrated how anti-conversion laws, vigilante violence, and residential, educational, and workplace segregation have been justified using campaigns to save Muslim women. The Indian civil society reports on the discrimination against Muslim women, who are not only lynched but also harassed due to wearing the hijab in schools, colleges, and workplaces.

This is important to global Indians because Hindutva gendered Islamophobia does not remain confined to national borders but moves via networks of diaspora, via digital arenas, via transnational political organisation, to the extent that it impacts Muslims and other Brown communities in the UK, the US, Canada, the Gulf, and elsewhere.

Islamophobia In Law, Media, and Diaspora

Gendered Islamophobia is typically expressed through the veil debate (also known as the niqab or burqa debate) waged as a fight between the rights of women and of backward religion. Europe and North American court cases and legislative bans have subjected veiled Muslim women to victimization and security threats, eliminating their voices and choices.

Gendered Islamophobia is practiced externally amongst the Indian diaspora through racism in the white dominated society and internally by imported narratives of Hindutva and Islamophobia. South Asian hijab-clad students of Western universities report microaggression, bullying, and inquiries concerning their assimilation of Western standards, through gendered Islamophobia.

The digital platforms are now important locations where gendered Islamophobia is spread, as AI-generated sexualised images and memes depict Muslim women and girls as ridiculed, shamed, and threatened. To the international Indian communities, these cyber assaults break solidarity, legitimize misogyny, and strengthen a regime of good assimilated Browns and backward visibly Muslim women.

Why Islamophobia Matters To Global Indians

To the larger global Indian and Brown community, gendered Islamophobia is not really a Muslim problem, but a reflection of the general play of power in terms of caste, class, gender, and religion. When saving women narratives are deployed by states and societies to stigmatise whole communities, the identical methods may and are frequently used to turn them against Dalit, Adivasi, Christian, Sikh, and migrant communities.

Gendered Islamophobia, in turn, becomes challenging to be a part of a greater project of South Asian solidarity, in which Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, and others must face the role colonialism, nationalism, and patriarchy have played in defining their relationships with each other. This also applies to global Indians who raise their children in foreign countries, who are taught in turn to see and fight overt hate, as well as softer, more liberal, gendered Islamophobic tones of diversity in the media, in education, and in corporate diversity programmes.

The way to solve gendered Islamophobia is by focusing the leadership on Muslim women, particularly those belonging to the working-class, Dalit, queer, and refugee groups who are subjected to various types of marginalisation. This work can be supported by legal mechanisms, including the international human rights frameworks, but they have to be based on the community-led strategy instead of the top-down saviourism.

Conclusion: A Shared Responsibility

Gendered Islamophobia reveals the extent of entanglement of gender, religion, race, and power in determining the lives of Muslims and women in particular and gender-diverse individuals in diaspora in India and elsewhere. To the global Indian community, addressing this reality is at the heart of any serious dedication to justice, democracy, and the overall prosperity in the world, where the Brown bodies are put under consistent scrutiny.

Global Indians can break down gendered Islamophobia by giving attention to the experiences of Muslim women, by refusing saviourism, and through forming cross-community solidarities, as well as their own movements against racism, casteism, and patriarchy in any community where they are found.

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