Late last month, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) signed into law a bill making it clear that schools and school regulators cannot restrict religious apparel — in particular, the hijab — for individuals competing in school athletics competitions, that this infringes on constitutionally protected religious expression. A Republican state legislator introduced the bill after learning about Noor Alexander Abukaram, a Toledo high school student who ran a track meet in 2019 — and was then disqualified by a referee for wearing her hijab. Noor’s experience struck a nerve among Muslims in the United States, including a reaction from Olympian Ibtihaj Muhammad.
Nor was the incident particularly unusual. In 2008, the Philadelphia police force sanctioned officer Kimberlie Webb for wearing a hijab with her uniform. In 2015, Abercrombie & Fitch in Tulsa denied a job to Samantha Elauf because her hijab did not fit their “look” — although the company lost at the Supreme Court. Most such incidents, of course, don’t make national news. Muslim women’s clothing choices, particularly around the hijab, have become a gauge of the rise in Islamophobia within the United States.
How do Muslim women respond?
How do Muslim women handle having their appearance politicized and sanctioned? To understand how marginalized citizens internalize a shifting racial climate like Islamophobia, it helps to explore individual perceptions of discrimination. Toward that end, I examined how Muslim women across the country have grappled with Islamophobia. Specifically, I fielded a survey of 1,000 Muslims nationwide from April to June 2019 in an online panel poll implemented by Qualtrics, utilizing demographics of race, gender, age and socioeconomic status from a 2017 Pew study to find a group nationally representative of the profile of Muslims in the United States. The Pew Study of Muslims offers the most comprehensive profile of Muslims and is often used as the benchmark of what a national profile of Muslims looks like. I coupled that with 40 in-depth interviews with Muslims in four different regions of the country.
On average, Muslim women felt that discrimination is a larger problem than did Muslim men. When asked whether discrimination against Muslims is a major problem, 62.4 percent of Muslim women answered yes, while 37.6 percent of Muslim men did. That’s nearly a 25 percent gap, a difference that remains statistically significant even when controlling for additional factors such as age, income, ideology and other socio-demographic factors.
In my qualitative interviews, Muslim women cited several discriminatory experiences. Within the Midwest, women cited Abukaram’s experience. In North Carolina, women mentioned the three young people — a student and two graduates at UNC-Chapel Hill — killed by their neighbor. One respondent commented, “You know, the killer did not know they were Muslim and did not bother them until they met Deah’s wife. She wore hijab … and I feel like that’s what made them vulnerable.” Another said that after the killings, she was afraid to wear the hijab outdoors. She avoided being out in public alone, for fear of being targeted.
Several people mentioned the hijab when discussing discrimination. Another woman I interviewed said, “The first thing people notice about me is my hijab. So that makes them focus in on it that, and they make a lot of assumptions.” Among women who wear the hijab, 41 percent believed that discrimination against Muslims is a major problem, while only 12 percent of women who do not wear the hijab did. Being visibly Muslim apparently increases perceptions — and perhaps experiences — of discrimination.
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I also measured respondents’ sense of what social scientists call “political efficacy,” or whether individuals feel that they can personally change the political system (which we call “internal efficacy”) or that the government will respond to their needs (“external efficacy”). Both shape whether people get politically engaged in activities such as voting. Muslim women felt lower levels of internal and external political efficacy than did Muslim men. For external efficacy, 28 percent of men believe that government officials care about what people like them think, while only 10 percent of women agreed. Similarly, for internal efficacy, 28 percent of men believed that people like them can affect what the government does, while only 16 percent of women agreed.
Finally, using a statistical tool called linear regression analysis, I checked to see whether the gender gap would persist if we accounted for socio-demographic factors. I found that the more a respondent believed discrimination to be a problem, the less likely they were to trust that government would respond to their concerns.
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Gendered Islamophobia
The gendered divide highlights the state of Islamophobia for Muslim women. Within the United States, since the 9/11 attacks, Muslims have widely reported enduring increased anti-Muslim sentiments and treatment. Even in the past few years, in schools across the country, girls wearing the hijab have been targeted by fellow classmates and teachers, sometimes even having their hijabs ripped off.
Political scientists Nazita Lajevardi and Marisa Abrajano found that Americans’ animus toward Muslims can be linked to negative depictions of Muslims in the media. My research with Khaled Beydoun, forthcoming in California Law Review, reveals that Islamophobia is gendered by nature, with significant legal implications. We find that both government and American culture assign Muslim women cultural stereotypes — with legal consequences — that are the opposite of those assigned to Muslim men. Muslim womanhood is linked with ideas of submissiveness and subordination; as a result, many observers want to liberate Muslim women from Muslim men, who are caricatured as violent and oppressive.
The stakes for Muslim women in the United States are high. In 2020, the United States accepted more than 80,000 Afghan asylum seekers fleeing impending Taliban rule in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, a predominantly Muslim-majority population, many women wear the hijab and will encounter challenges — not just the ordinary challenges of being immigrants in a foreign culture, but also the challenge of being visibly marked as Muslim immigrants.
Policymakers who wish to develop culturally competent strategies to welcome Afghan women and help them launch new lives in the country may wish to better understand how gendered Islamophobia will affect them.
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Nura Sediqe (@nuraphd) is a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs and an assistant professor of political science at Michigan State University.