Western media's scrutiny of Muslim women is ferocious. The tropes are well defined: oppressed, submissive, weak and covered in black, the Muslim woman is in need of saving. Those Muslim women who claim agency over their own actions are explained as "brainwashed". The stories of Muslim women successes are those who have "escaped" from Muslims and Islam, the ex-Muslims. And as a treat, there is occasionally an exoticised Muslim beauty queen feeding into a deep seated orientalist fantasy.
The focus is relentless. Creating counter-imagery to break through the fixed roster of characters available to Muslim women feels like using a watering can to extinguish a volcano. Every image, every article, every spokeswoman makes a small but important difference.
This week in the US, a new video was released called Mipsterz. It is a bright, edgy and funky video of “Muslim hipsters”, featuring three women celebrating their Muslim womanhood. They strike cool poses, skateboard, climb trees, and just hang out with attitude. It is set to Jay-Z’s Somewhere in America. Somewhere in America, some hijabi women are having fun, revelling in their own identity, confident in projecting their imagery as they see it, owning their own bodies.
But elsewhere, the film is creating a storm. Muslim women are challenging the drive to “normalise” them into the mainstream world of cool and fashion.
This is an important and interesting cultural moment. Hijab-wearing women co-opt – or possibly are being co-opted into – mainstream culture. The film is striking, beautiful and edgy, the very epitome of “cool”. The tension under which Muslim women live to challenge stereotypes of being oppressed, submissive and backwards makes the drive understandable to create “normal” imagery of Muslim women being just like everyone else. In that sense, the video is celebratory and humanising.
But there is something that makes me uncomfortable: the idea of hijab or modest dressing is a proposal that the images of women can and should be different from the mainstream. The idea of modest dress is not to be a replica of current imagery with a headscarf popped on top. Critiques of the beauty, fashion and music industry portrayals of women focus on the stereotypical sexualisation of women, seeing them as nothing more than bodies for our eyes to feast on.
While the women in this film are covered, and beautifully so, I’m forced to ask the question: does this take us from one set of stereotypes straight into another? In the drive to “normalise” the way Muslim women look by prevailing (western) standards, we’ve missed the opportunity to break out of the binary choice imposed upon us. We need to break free.
The ideas, representation and content inspired by Muslim values ought to offer something wildly different than a simple relabelling of existing content styles. Why use a Jay-Z track with dirty lyrics? Why not create music that offers a new perspective rooted in a modern Muslim culture?
If Muslim values are supposed to be about the person, then give us glimpses of the women engaged in activities, throw up words on the screen, show them as whole people. We only get one awesome but fleeting image of one of the women as a fencer.
We need our creatives, pioneers and visionaries to be inspired by Muslim values to create a new wave of socially conscious content. It’s not enough to be on a par with existing global content. We need a new paradigm.
Shelina Zahra Janmohamed is the author of Love in a Headscarf and blogs at www.spirit21.co.uk
