The law, driven by the belief that Muslim women were being “imprisoned” behind a “screen” by their husbands or fathers, simultaneously perpetuated two entwined gender stereotypes: that Muslim women are weak and subordinate, and that Muslim men are violent and oppressive. This gendered Islamophobia reified the longstanding imperialist narrative that Muslim men were bent on war and tyranny, and that Muslim women—the immediate victims of this violence—needed saving. Writing in the California Law Review, Nura Sediqe and I unveil this gendered Islamophobia as a “relational dialectic that fluidly produces and reproduces how societal and state actors position Muslim masculinity as oppositional and antagonistic to Muslim womanhood; ascribe unique political meaning to Muslim male and female bodies, and normative value to identity markers associated with their respective gender expression; and enforce law distinctly across gender lines, particularly within the areas of religious exercise, counterterror policing, and immigration—legal realms where Islamophobia is pervasive and pronounced.”

DEFINE: Introduces the concept of 'gendered Islamophobia' as a relational dialectic that alters legal treatment across religious exercise, policing, and immigration.

Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamopho…, loc. 712