Sunera Thobani: If gender has been a key signifier of the civilizational superiority of the west, the threat to the nation said to be posed by this religio-racial enemy was also imagined as gendered. It was not only fanatic and hypermasculine Muslim men who were constituted as terrorizing the nation with their inborn propensity to blow up buildings and planes, and indeed, even their own bodies, Muslim women were also constituted as posing a very particular kind of threat. As Mamdani, and others, have noted, Muslims in the post 9/11 period have been defined as being either good or bad Muslims.
[…] From this point of view, ‘bad Muslims’ were clearly responsible for terrorism.
[…] The good Muslims are the assimilated ones; they berate other Muslims for their cultural backwardness and, most particularly, they berate the women for revealing such backwardness by wearing the headscarf, the chador, or the veil. These good Muslims are styled (and style themselves) as the anti-hijabis. They acquiesce to American imperial interests, vociferously defend these, and know their proper place as supplicants to the west. They are appropriately grateful for having been allowed to partake in its civilizational project, and they want to aid the west in its quest to liberate their co-religionists, especially the women, around the world.
However, significant media coverage was also given to the bad Muslim woman, the one who dares to defy western gender norms, who refuses to condemn her religion and its adherents. This is the woman who is not imperilled, but who imperils the west by her embrace of Islam, or by her resistance to occupation and imperialist aggression. She is the ‘Black widow’ of Chechnya , the suicide bomber of Palestine, the ‘Doctor Germ’ and ‘Mrs Anthrax’ of Iraq.
This Muslim woman is not to be rescued: she is unrepentent. The worst of these women, as depicted in the photograph discussed at the beginning of this chapter, are the ones who refuse to unveil themselves. They are labelled as fanatical and oblivious to male domination. Their embrace of Islam is seen as an affront to the freedoms enjoyed by western women. Such an embrace of Islam is only tolerable to the nation of civilized subjects if it is accompanied with the simultaneous, but more ardent, embrace of superior western values and norms. More here.