Mohja Kahf has argued in her study of representations of Muslim women in Western literature from the twelfth to the nineteenth century that rather than the image of the Muslim being a feature of all such literature, the particular representation of Muslim women as oppressed is in fact a product of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In previous centuries, other and very different depictions of Muslim women can be found, and the transformation of those images, as Kahf argues, is connected to developments in European societies rather than changing roles of actual Muslim women in their own societies in the same time periods.

XREF: Challenges the common assumption that Western literature has always depicted Muslim women as oppressed; connects to Edward Said's Orientalism as a related critique of Western representation.

Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ Th…, loc. 505