What a strange place Europe is becoming. Qur’an burnings on one end and abaya bans on the other. All the lip service these countries pay to remembering their heinous pasts, and yet their current actions show that they haven’t learnt a thing. And for all those championing these acts of oppression, I remind you that Europe has a long history of violence that usually starts with one minority group but quickly spreads to anyone who doesn’t fit their narrow brief of acceptability.

I’m especially flabbergasted at women championing the abaya ban, claiming that it stops cliques and divisions, and is a bastion of equality. Those same women who fight vehemently for women to show their nipples on social media sites and champion so-called body positivity, so long as the bodies in question chooses to be naked and not covered. And crucially, as long as the women are white and European.

French feminists who were particularly vocal about the rights of women and girls in Afghanistan and Iran to be allowed to wear whatever they wanted and have access to education late last year when those countries were forcing women to wear hijab and excluding them from educational institutions based on their attire, have been incredibly silent when their home country decides to implement exactly the same rules? Should the women of France not have the same rights and opportunities? Or is this yet another example of some French feminists showing their true colours? White feminism has never believed all women are equal and are happy to jump into bed with powerful men to push their agendas forward. If anything, the only culture they fight to preserve is whiteness and its dominance over others. Free yourselves from the shackles of your own oppressors, us Muslim Women don’t need your allyship.

Feminists on the French Right have been attacking Muslim women since the early 2000s. Groups such as Ni putes, ni soumises (Neither Whores, Nor Submissives) claimed that Islamic extremism was rife in poor immigrant suburbs, and Muslim women were forced to wear the hijab, feeding into the Islamophobic sentiment that was widespread in France at the time. With no tangible evidence or statistics to substantiate their claims, they were received by Prime Minister Jean Pierre Raffarin and their message incorporated into the official celebrations of Bastille Day 2003 in Paris. Furthermore,  Fadela Amara, president of Ni putes, ni soumises at the time was appointed to the government of Nicolas Sarkozy! Whilst feminists on the left and NGO’s protested this Islamophobic and racist perception of immigrant communities, many feminists in France continued to ignore the intersectional nature of feminism especially when it came to race and Islamophobia.

France claims its founding principles to be Liberté, égalité, fraternité: Liberty consists of being able to do anything that does not harm others: thus, the exercise of the natural rights of every man or woman has no bounds other than those that guarantee other members of society the enjoyment of these same rights. Equality, on the other hand, was defined by the Declaration in terms of judicial equality and merit-based entry to government (art. 6): [The law] must be the same for all, whether it protects or punishes. All citizens, being equal in its eyes, shall be equally eligible to all high offices, public positions and employments, according to their ability, and without other distinction than that of their virtues and talents. Fraternity is of course brotherhood. From its inception however, the phrase has never been wholly adopted by it’s citizens nor its leaders. From Napoleon to Marshal Pétain, it has had to be altered to suit Frances true relationship with equality and liberty. French women, for example, were only give the right to vote in 1945. It was one of the last countries in Europe and the world to do so, given that many of the countries that followed had been colonised and not self-governed. Freedom and equality have never been principles France has been comfortable with.

From the onset of Islam, women and men were given equal rights, although with different responsibilities. Muslim women have always been allowed to vote, to work and to inherit. (The rules of Islam are not the same as the rules in ‘Muslim’ countries, many of which have been colonised and have adopted western patriarchal systems following their colonisation). Moreover, it was a Muslim woman, Fatima al-Fihri, who founded the world’s first University in Morocco in 859. The second was in Egypt in 970, and both were open to men and women. The University of Paris was established in 1160 and women were only allowed to attend in 1880!! Denying Muslim women a right to education because of the way they CHOOSE to dress is in fact incredibly in line with French governance and their Subjugation, Inequality and Hostility towards women.

The thing I struggle with as a Muslim woman is this. Muslims are told that we don’t integrate, or that we don’t try, yet at every juncture we are also told that we are not welcome because of the way we dress, because of our prayers, or because of something else entirely arbitrary which has no impact on our performance, but on how we are perceived i.e. the prejudice of others. In France women are told they can’t work in certain places if they wear a headscarf! Imagine if a woman was told she couldn’t wear trousers or a skirt in the office. How is banning a headscarf any different? On this point, from the 1800’s it was illegal for women to wear trousers in Paris without a police permit. Although the law wasn’t obeyed in recent years, it was only officially removed in 2013!

If a young woman at a school suddenly decides she identifies as male, the school would no doubt adapt to accommodate her/him. If we can accept gender to be a social construct can we really not accept that Muslim women like to wear hijab and abayas? We are not asking anything from anyone else, and are still able to partake in all aspects of learning and work. Yet when we show up in the clothes we CHOOSE to wear we are increasingly under attack because it doesn’t conform to the uniform set by western beauty and fashion standards, predominantly owned by white men, making money off women’s bodies. Honestly, who is really oppressed, the women who are confident enough to step out without needing the validation of men or others, or those trapped in the vicious cycle of consumerism, capitalism and the increasingly fickle confinements of the fashion industry? (I won’t go into the consequences these have on women’s mental and physical health, the stats are all there!). When a celebrity steps out with unshaved armpits we applaud her bravely and comment on how far feminism has come, yet Muslim women are left to fend for themselves when they decide they want to wear hijab or an abaya! We are certainly not expecting policies to change to accommodate us, nor are we asking for others to dress the way we choose to, we simply just want to exist without the constant threat of attacks.

Let’s not pretend this recent attack on Muslim women is about preserving culture. It’s about controlling women’s bodies. It’s a dangerous precedent and a slippery slope into the rights of all women. We can see this all over the globe with the rise of the far-right, often aided by white women, both as voters (the huge percentage of white women who supported Trump) and leaders. It’s also blatantly Islamophobic.