While sexually repressed Europe was fascinated and titillated by Muslim marriage customs even during medieval times, there was no systematic discussion of women and Islam until the nineteenth century. Commenting on Europe's nineteenth-century obsession with Muslim women, one scholar stated that there "is no subject connected with Islam which Europeans have thought more important than the condition of Muslim women." The dominant narrative that emerged was one that presented Muslim women as severely subjugated, oppressed, and little more than slaves. Just as the Muslim despots tyrannized their subjects, it was argued, they also tyrannized their wives and daughters. As various scholars have shown, in reality the European men who wrote about the plight of Muslim women had little access to these women to verify their assumptions. Coterminous accounts by Western women of the Muslim women they encountered reveal a more complex reality. Nevertheless, this narrative of the oppressed brown woman serviced the colonial enterprise. Western men could now ride off in their jodhpurs and pith helmets to rescue them.

XREF: Echoes Gayatri Spivak's 'white men saving brown women from brown men' thesis and postcolonial critiques of orientalism.

Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politi…, loc. 164