The body of a Muslim woman, a body fixed in the Western imaginary as confined, mutilated, and sometimes murdered in the name of culture, serves to reinforce the threat that the Muslim man is said to pose to the West, and is used to justify the extraordinary measures of violence and surveillance required to discipline him and Muslim communities. Against the hyper-visibility of the Muslim woman´s body (customs officers, shop clerks, and restaurant workers now all presume to know how Muslim women are oppressed by their terrible men), it is virtually impossible to name and confront the violence that Muslim women (like all groups of women) experience at the hands of their men and families without providing ideological fuel to the war on terror.
Sherene Razack (via egyptianprincess)
