Women often play a particular role in Muslim misery memoirs as carriers of cultural baggage and the focus of Western sympathy. The Muslim woman becomes the object of discourses by both modern secularists (including some feminists) and Islamic conservatives and fundamentalists: her body, the confines of her life, and her mode of dress being read for what they supposedly yield about the essential qualities of the cultures in which the she lives. In that sense, she becomes a stereotype, a fixed and unchanging signifier of timeless modes of life.

XREF: Connects to postcolonial critiques of the 'oppressed Muslim woman' trope, such as Lila Abu-Lughod's 'Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?' and Chandra Mohanty's 'Under Western Eyes.'

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 208