Islamic religiosity,Islamophobia and gendered harms

Abstract

This paper challenges normative assumptions in mainstream Western political and media discourse as well as some academia, which presumes a causative relationship between Islamic religiosity and gendered familial harms. Focusing on the two examples most frequently invoked in such discourse – ‘female genital mutilation’ and ‘forced marriage’ – I argue that prevailing political discourse relies on an orientalist framing in which the West lays claim to gender equality and posits Othered minorities as problematically patriarchal and misogynistic. Using ethnographic and interview data collected with UK-based Muslim migrant women of Somali heritage, the paper analyses pathways to increased religiosity and draws attention to the hitherto largely unacknowledged role played by religiosity in anti-FGM campaigning. I show how this empowering religious turn entailed unforeseen risks including inadvertently reinforcing the positioning of ‘the Muslim woman’ in political discourse as repressed, which in turn fed into discriminatory policies. Contrary to political discourse and some academia, participants identified exposure to UK cultural misogyny and structural inequality rather than Islamic religiosity as a common trigger for forced marriage, and perceived it to be the ‘compulsory coupledom’ and seclusion-focused architecture of UK lifestyle that engendered – and allowed to go unchecked – gendered violence within the home. This reverse gaze perspective allows for a unique examination of the role of Western gendered inequalities and harms as experienced by refugee Muslim women.

Introduction

Islam and Islamic religiosity are routinely presented in Western media and political discourse as an existential threat to a ‘Western’ way of life (Ahmed and Matthes 2017; Brubaker 2012; Jackson 2018). This discursive, institutional Islamophobia is a very gendered phenomenon (Abu-Lughod, 2013; Dauvergne 2020). In the UK, a government-initiated ‘Review into Opportunity and Integration’ (Casey, 2016:5) identified the ‘growth in regressive religious and cultural ideologies’ among Muslim communities as putting women at risk of harm, while Boris Johnson (2018), then Foreign Secretary, compared Muslim women who chose to wear the burka to ‘letter boxes’, claiming that such dress was ‘oppressive and ridiculous … weird and bullying’. In hegemonic political discourse and some academia, the claimed problem of Muslim ‘social and cultural isolation’ (Casey, 2016:80) is blamed on Islam itself, a discourse which silences gendered harms and inequalities prevalent in Western societies. ¹ How gender and family are ‘done’ (with reference to Morgan, 2011) within Muslim families is deemed to be of political and national significance because, as Casey (2016:5) phrased it, their ‘cultural and religious practices […] run contrary to British values’.

This paper explores the ways in which UK-based Muslim migrant women of Somali heritage understand and experience gendered harms and thus contributes to the small but growing literature which challenges normative and political assumptions about Islamic religiosity. People of Somali heritage, particularly women, have been at the forefront of a marked increase in Islamic religiosity in the UK and across Europe (Inge 2017; Liberatore 2017; Carver, 2021). As such, they are a highly pertinent and yet understudied group to draw data from on this topic. The women I spent time with saw Islam as a source of female empowerment rather than giving rise to gendered harms. They actively and successfully employed Islamic praxis to challenge harmful gendered practices which they saw as emanating from Somali and UK sexist cultures. While they found both Islamic doctrine and UK law and policy powerful tools with which to fight for an end to the Somali cultural tradition of infibulation or ‘FGM’ (‘Female Genital Mutilation’), ² they identified exposure to UK-based gendered harms and structural inequalities rather than Islamic religiosity as a common trigger for forced marriage, and perceived it to be the ‘compulsory coupledom’ and seclusion-focused architecture of UK lifestyle that engendered – and allowed to go unchecked – gendered violence within the home. These findings challenge prevailing political and academic assumptions which rely on an orientalist framing in which the West lays claim to gender equality and posits Othered minorities as problematically patriarchal and misogynistic.

The paper begins by describing the rise of gendered Islamophobia in the UK context followed by a review of the salient academic literature. After detailing the methodology, I then analyse the participants’ pathways to increased religiosity and how they utilised their religious knowledge to challenge gendered harms and bring about change. The paper draws attention to the – typically unrecognised and unacknowledged – role played by increased religiosity among Somali women in the anti-FGM campaign. Through my analysis, I show how this seemingly empowering reliance on religiosity entailed unforeseen risks including inadvertently reinforcing the positioning of ‘the Muslim woman’ in political discourse as repressed, which in turn fed into discriminatory policies. I then explore participants’ personal accounts of coerced marriage and collective experiences of gender harms in the UK. Viewing the topic of forced/coerced marriage through the experiences of deeply religious refugee Muslim women, allows for a reverse gaze perspective which challenges and eschews the dominant political ethnoreligious framing (Brubaker, 2004) and redirects attention to the ongoing operation of institutional sexism and structural inequality in mainstream British society.

Gender, religiosity and Islamophobia in the UK context

During the 1990s, gendered forms of violence and harm came to international prominence reflected in the UN Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women of 1993 and the Beijing Platform for Change of 1995. In the UK, this agenda was given momentum by the New Labour victory in 1997 resulting in a marked shift in rhetoric and policy (Matczak et al., 2011). The Blair government mainstreamed liberal feminism and enacted legislation to tackle gendered harms (Childs 2000), including the Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003, Sexual Offences Act 2003, Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act 2004, and Forced Marriage (Civil Protection) Act 2007. Given New Labour’s rejection of the more explicit racism that had coloured the language and politics of the previous Conversative administrations, campaigners seeking to tackle gender violence against minoritized women were initially hopeful that this feminist agenda might be embedded in an ethics of anti-racism. Politicians and policies, however, were unable to overcome the latent imperialism within liberal feminism (Anitha 2008; Gill and Mitra-Khan 2012; Carver et al., 2023) and, post-9/11 and the UK riots of 2001, politicians actively embraced a discourse of ‘saving brown women from brown men’, often explicitly invoking feminist concerns in order to curry support for racialised policies (Abu-Lughod et al., 2023; Bhattacharyya 2008; Abu-Lughod, 2013). This impetus – the advocacy and promotion of women’s right to be free of gendered violence in a context of White privilege and coloniality – was deepened under the Conservative-led governments (2010–2024) which followed (Chambers et al., 2019; Ishkanian 2014).

Such discourse has occurred in conjunction with a backlash against multiculturalism and an increase in racial prejudice against Muslims (Jones and Unsworth 2022; Modood 2017). Some argue that this phenomenon is best conceived as ‘anti-Muslim hate’ (for a discussion of this standpoint see Meer 2014; Sealy 2021), rather than Islamophobia which is defined as prejudice or hate focusing on ‘religious or cultural practices rather than inherent ethnic or racial characteristics’ (Alexander 2017:13). Jones and Unsworth (2024:7) argue that there are two distinct but overlapping varieties of Islamophobia: racial and religious. Based on empirical evidence, they suggest that the latter, typically middle-class variety, ‘acts as the ‘acceptable face’ of anti-Muslim prejudice’ and often goes unchallenged. It works, Ghumkhor (2023) argues, to problematise Muslims as Muslims, and Islam as a religion as incompatible with so-called Western values and culture. Thus, while street-level Islamophobia is condemned in political discourse, biased hostility towards Islamic praxis remains widely acceptable (Jones and Unsworth 2022, 2024; Kozaric 2024) – a ‘dinner table prejudice’ as coined by Baroness Sayeda Warsi – and a feature of the speeches of several powerful and mainstream UK politicians including notably former Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage MP, leader of Reform UK.

This politically acceptable Islamophobic discourse delineates between good and bad Muslims (Mamdani 2002) through articulating a hierarchal differentiation around degree of religiosity (Kundnani 2014; Meer 2014) with the treatment of women as litmus test. ‘Good Muslims’ are considered civilisable and ‘tolerated’ as citizens (Carver et al., 2022). They practice their faith but are not perceived to be bound by its strictures. Their (religiously inspired) devotion to family life is praised and glorified rather than condemned (Grillo 2011). ‘Bad Muslims’, on the other hand, subject their children to ‘female genital mutilation’ and ‘forced marriage’, and insist their wives and daughters are hidden away or covered up. They are labelled ‘extremists’ – as in they take their religion to extremes – or even more directly, ‘Islamists’ and, if ‘home grown’, then considered as ‘failed citizens’. Observing the frequent recourse to (Islamic) ‘extremism’ in lieu of ‘terrorism’ in political discourse, Onursal and Kirkpatrick (2021:1094) argue this linguistic move has ‘coincided with social practices of informal criminalization targeting non-violent extremism as if it were terrorism’. Islamophobic political discourse arguably legitimizes street-level hate crime (Durrani 2020; Kozaric 2024), and certainly infuses policy and legislation aimed at protecting minoritized women (Razack 2004; Gill and Mitra-Khan 2012; Carver et al., 2023).

For example, the discursive framing of ‘Islam as the problem’ (Boris Johnson, then Mayor of London, 2005) is embedded in the Casey (2016) ‘Review into Opportunity and Integration’. The report identifies as ‘British’, the values of ‘respect for the rule of law, democracy, equality and tolerance’ and sets them against the vices – repeatedly invoking a gendered trio of ‘female genital mutilation, forced marriage and so-called ‘honour’ based crime’ – of migrant and/or Islamic Others (Casey 2016:8). A racialised enlightenment narrative of progress (from darkness to civilisation) is present throughout. White British communities ‘in areas of industrial decline’ are described as having been ‘left behind’ (2016:13) metaphorically, structurally and literally by ‘white flight’ (2016:80); Muslim communities residing in these same deprived areas are however, not left behind but ‘[held] back’ by ‘cultural and religious practices’ (2016:5). Rather than stagnating like their White or ‘good Muslim’ counterparts, religious Muslims are portrayed as degenerating or ‘regressing’. The responsibility for this perceived ‘regression’ is Islam itself; Islamic religiosity is putting women at risk of harm and causing ‘social and economic isolation (Casey, 2016:5). This discourse was repeatedly rearticulated by Nigel Farage, leader of Reform UK, pre- and post the general election in 2024 (Adu 2024; MRN 2024).

Academic challenges to political discourse

Often this political discourse is reflected within academia or led by it: the American political scientist Huntington (1996) famously predicted the future in culturalist terms, as a ‘Clash of Civilisations’ between Western ideology and Islam, an idea that was picked up by the populist right in the United States as well as across Europe and used to incite anti-migrant and anti-Muslim feeling from a liberalist, often (quasi) feminist and/or pro-LGBT + stance (Abu-Lughod et al., 2023; Brubaker 2017; Farris 2017; Puar 2007). Empirical qualitative research with Muslim migrants living in the West, however, typically challenges this homogenising, simplistic diagnosis. While there is broad consensus that racism, eurocentrism and xenophobia are structural elements in discursive Islamophobia (Jones and Unsworth 2024; Sealy 2021), its gendered nature is often ignored entirely in academic theorizing or acknowledged only as an aspect of experiences of harm wherein Muslim women are understood to be on the receiving end of street-level Islamophobia more often than men due to their increased visibility as Muslims – what Hamzeh (2012) has termed ‘hijabophobia’. Several authors, however, have convincingly posited that gender is not only implicated in Islamophobic hate crime, but is a constitutive element of discursive Islamophobia (Alimahomed-Wilson 2020; Bhattacharyya 2008; Abu-Lughod, 2013; Ghumkhor 2023; Mahmood 2005). These scholars argue that Western political Islamophobia is premised on ‘a gendered binary of victimhood and oppression’ (Beydoun and Sediqe 2023:469). The politically acceptable, religiosity-framed, dinner table Islamophobia, ‘places the Muslim woman at the intersection of Muslim male violence and western saviour campaigns, denying her agency and purporting that freedom can only be attained through its laws, intervention, or war’ (Beydoun and Sediqe 2023:480). In such discourse, sexism becomes ‘the exclusive domain of the racialized other’ (Farris 2017:78), and Muslim women’s status as victims of Western patriarchal and structural racism is overshadowed by their essentialisation as victims of their (patriarchal) religion (Alimahomed-Wilson 2020). Crawley (2022:355) draws attention to the complicity of White feminist scholarship in essentialising refugee women – particularly Muslim refugee women – who ‘are typically understood and represented through a neo-imperial frame as disempowered, helpless ‘victims’, or as ‘Exotic Others’ who need to be rescued from their ‘backward’ cultures.’ For Somali Muslim refugee migrants, a further intersectional factor comes through being identified not only as ‘Black’ in the UK context (a label which brings with it political and societal discrimination and prejudice) but also ‘Somali’, and thus linked to a state which is held up in the media as the epitome of failure and lawlessness (cf. Carver et al., 2022).

A recent stream of empirical work applies and expands this theorising through analyses of Western Muslim women’s resistance to the hegemonic discourse, often through small-scale qualitative research. These studies bring Muslim women’s voices to the fore and provide a strong counternarrative to the assumptions regarding gender, agency and religiosity in Islamophobic political discourse. Some have focused on how Muslim women respond to and negotiate everyday Islamophobia (Alimahomed-Wilson 2020; Keddie 2018; Khokhar 2022; Zempi 2020), while others focus on pathways to increased religiosity which, in the UK, has been spearheaded by women of Somali heritage (Al-Sharmani 2015; Inge 2017; Liberatore 2017). Collectively, these authors paint a nuanced and complicated picture: first, they find that it is often young women (rather than men or the older generation) who are the driving force behind increased religiosity in the West, typically leading and encouraging their parents, partners and friends to join them in practicing Islam more ‘purely’ and without ‘cultural’ baggage; second, they draw attention to the backdrop to this increased religiosity, including Saudi financing of Islamic study and the global rise of Salafism and with it the call to ijtihad (independent learning), as well as the intersectional impact of Western racism and anti-migrant feeling at both street- and policy-level; third, they suggest this religiosity enables and empowers women albeit within a limited and limiting patriarchal framework.

Liberatore (2017), for example, followed young Somali women as they ‘mosque-hopped’ their way around London, actively rejecting what they perceived to be the cultural, unthinking practice of Islam of the older generation. Rather than commit to following or sticking with one particular Mosque or teacher, they positioned themselves as fully agentic over their faith and its practice, deliberately exposing themselves to multiple differing interpretations and emphasising the individual, personal aspect to their journey towards increased religiosity. This positioning is reflective of Salafist teaching which preaches that responsibility for researching and determining religious practice lies with the individual: ‘she cannot simply pick the most convenient opinion, or follow her favourite scholar blindly. Upon investigation of the various scholarly opinions, she must favour the ruling that seems best supported by the Qu’ran and sunna’ (Inge 2017:17). Both Liberatore and Inge observe that despite this strong narrative of self-motivated, independent learning, it does not and cannot take place in a vacuum. What has been termed ‘petro-Islam’ or the Saudi funding of Islamic learning has provided opportunities for religious study and encouraged that study in particular directions (Mernissi 2003). But while this context is well covered by scholars, the securitization framing through which it has been studied has led to a presumption of increased Muslim religiosity as ‘extremism’, itself presumptively linked to gender violence. Inge (2017:11) argues that instead Salafism in the UK should be understood as ‘quietist’ and predominantly involving the non-violent ‘purification’ of Islamic praxis.

These authors concur that the backdrop which is most routinely ignored or overlooked in political and academic debates on gendered violence suffered by Muslim women in the West, is Western gendered inequalities and harm – although this is seldom elaborated even by these authors – and its intersection with racism against Muslims and migrants. In Australia, for example, Keddie (2018) observed in passing that it was the threat of gendered Islamophobia rather than patriarchal Islamic values, that lay behind her parent participants’ instructions to their daughters to be demure in public. Likewise, Carver et al. (2023:366) found that fear of policy intended to prevent female circumcision was leading parents to encourage ‘girl-children to behave according to (UK) old-fashioned gender norms, by being ‘good’, quiet and impeccably well-behaved’ and thereby reinscribing limiting gendered stereotypes. In one of the few studies to provide empirical data on how refugee policy can foreclose opportunities for women, Shanneik and Vahle (2023) examine the rise of middle-class Syrian refugee women living in Germany opting for transnational arranged marriages and having to persuade their parents to search out suitable suitors, spurred in part by the forced isolation and restricted mobility imposed upon them during the asylum process. Shanneik and Vahle (2023:125) argue that ‘with the focus on the refugee as the ‘other,’ inadequate attention is paid to the political, socioreligious, and economic circumstances’ of the host country and that women’s agency is better conceptualised as an ‘outcome of relationships and a product of social performance’.

Contrary to political discourse many Muslim women see Islamic religiosity as a powerful tool for gender equality within a different-but-equal philosophical framework (Mahmood 2005; Mernissi 2003). As such, these studies problematize the standard political narrative which depicts Islamic religiosity as a threat to Muslim women. This paper builds on this work through analysis of empirical data on increased religiosity among a group of Muslim migrant women.

Methodology

Over the course of 18 months, I spent time with and undertook in depth interviews with Somali women living in the city of Bristol in Southwest England. We hung out in the play areas of local parks, at the school gates, whilst watching or waiting for our respective children during extra-curricular activities, and in each other’s homes. I met participants through: attending a weekly Somali mother-and-baby group; sitting in the common room at local adult education centres (at their invitation) and striking up conversation with Somali students during breaks between English language classes; and attending a women-only weekly drop-in day of activities for refugees. I also observed and participated in multiple local workshops, training sessions and conferences pertaining to ‘forced marriage’ and ‘FGM’, as well as a series of peer-curated sessions for refugees, the majority of whom were Muslim and from the Horn of Africa, on ‘parenting in the UK’. Out of a total of 44 interviews, 30 were with Somali women migrants (average age 38) who were settled in the UK. Most were or had been married and most had children. I spent time regularly with ten of these women, who came from different socio-economic and geographical backgrounds, over the data collection period and beyond. Ethical considerations were paramount at all stages of the research process and instrumental to the mode of analysis and representation of data; a combination of narrative analysis and ethnopoetics. The data collection, analysis, and positionality are discussed in detail elsewhere (Carver, 2021). As with any qualitative research, the data does not lend itself to generalisability: the findings have limitations in that they cannot and do not speak for all Muslim women, nor indeed for all Somali women migrants. The ethnography was undertaken from a constructionist perspective which holds that meaning is jointly produced through interaction in which embodiment, context and place are always active components. Further, there is no intention to underplay the difficulties many women – and indeed men – have in asserting agency within coercive cultural and/or religious contexts. Rather, the aim is to draw attention to the ways in which the UK cultural context and Islamophobic discourse in political framings contribute to (re)producing gendered harms for migrant women and to challenge the normative hegemonic discourse in the UK which attributes gender violence in minoritised families as causatively linked to Islamic religiosity.

Embracing Islam and driving change

Most of the many Somali women who I met and interacted with during my fieldwork wore outward displays of their faith when in public spaces including hijab and jilbab, and all of those whom I had conversations with of any depth, affirmed that religion was very important to them. ³ Many explained their commitment to Islam in two parts: first, as cultural, something they were born into; and second, as personal, which is to say transformed, renewed and deepened through their own learning or ijtihad.

Cilmi was typical of many of the women who described their religious affiliation as originally ‘cultural’ something akin to ethnicity which they were ‘just born in’, but which transformed into a deep personal conviction following life-altering events. For Cilmi, it was the breakdown of her marriage which spurred her towards learning more about Islam. For Luul, it was the war in Somalia: ‘we came to the conclusion that it was the curse for, for our life […] we suffer a lot in terms of civil war, and all those, you know, horrible things that happened to Somali culture and Somali people, we very much came to a conclusion, we weren’t behaving in an Islamic way, and I was determined as a, as a, as a young (.) woman, you know, to– to follow the way of Prophet Muhammed’. For Obah, it came about during the final leg of her escape to safety. Having spent 2 years moving from country to country with her mother and younger siblings in search of somewhere they could stay longer than 3 months, the family finally decided to send 18-year-old Obah on her own to the UK to claim asylum: ‘This moment (.) I was like alone, that’s it. I [had] never travelled (.) alone. Straight away, it make me grounded, my religion. You know, inside me, “Do that, don’t do that, ok, you gonna be ok.” You know↑ God, God looking after you.’ For Asiyah, it was Western Islamophobia. Asiyah felt Muslims around the world became more religious with the fallout from 9/11, and that this was heightened for those living in the West: ‘you know what I’ve noticed is that erm, the more there’s bombing or there’s something going on somewhere, the more it affects the people around us↑ They see us totally different, and the more people do that, the more you become (.) closer to religion.’ For Nafisa, who came to the UK as a young child, it was a once-in-a-lifetime visit to Somalia/land when she was a young adult: ‘although I, you know, I (.) abided by a lot of the, you know the fundamental Islamic rules, I didn’t really understand any of it, and I -hhh only started to becoming more aware of it once I was in Somalia, and when I came back I started learning.’ Collectively these accounts show a wide-ranging set of pathways to increased religiosity which concur with other accounts in the literature (Abdi 2007; Berns-McGown 1999; Liberatore 2017).

Despite the wide variety of catalysts, all the accounts had in common a reconnection with Islam as young adult women, and all said that their learning was personal. When I asked Halimo where she had learned about Islam, she said ‘from myself. Myself, I did myself study. I have Qu’ran, and explanation and I also took um, go some classes. I know a lot of things now, but before I didn’t.’ Nafisa told me that after her visit to Somaliland she was inspired to join the Islamic Society at University, ‘and I started reading and I became more religious from there’, and then attended a week-long Islamic conference which ‘opened my world, and my understanding of Islam.’ Many only started to wear Islamic attire after this personal journey, something which they experienced not as imposed upon them as part of a regressive religion or cultural patriarchy, but something they chose to do to develop religious qualities. Luul equated the mini-skirts and sexualised dress of 1970s Mogadishu with showing off and ill-placed pride, while Nafisa explained to me that for the first few months after her decision to wear hijab she hated it, finding it awkward and annoying, but she persisted because of her desire to become more modest. Previously, she said, she had been quite vain, checking her appearance in shop windows as she walked down the street, worrying about how physically attractive she was to others; after several months of wearing hijab she became less concerned about her appearance or others’ opinions of her looks and felt that it had helped her to connect more readily with people on a character rather than appearance basis. This construction of being Muslim reflects the influence of Salafi teaching in which a pious self is fashioned through embodied habituation (Inge 2017; Liberatore 2017; Mahmood 2005). Liberatore (2017) argues that the emphasis given by these women to their own agency – the emphasis that is on their increased religiosity being a personal, individuated journey – should not be simply accepted at face value, but rather understood as a rhetorical position which references a particular pious turn. Such narratives, she (2016:60) argues, are not and cannot be separated from ‘authorizing discourses, Islamic structures of authority, or networks of pious friendships’. These structures and networks are not silenced in these accounts (Halimo mentioned attending classes; Nafisa made reference to her university Islamic Society), rather they are de-emphasised in favour of emphasising the individual’s own personal journey regarding both motivation and the process of acquiring knowledge. This narrative framing is itself reflective of Salafism (Inge 2017).

Nonetheless, the significance of this agentic framing should not be underplayed and was itself empowering, instilling in these women a confidence they felt they had previously lacked. In moments of doubt, they explained, guidance was readily available, and there was a process by which decisions about ‘the right thing’ to do, could be reached. Their ijtihad gave them the confidence and knowledge to challenge elders and/or men who otherwise were want to close down conversations about women’s lives by saying something was or wasn’t haram. These women all saw Islam as an empowering tool for women and they employed Islamic praxis in their everyday lives to challenge sexism and gendered harms.

Several had become involved in campaigns to end female circumcision both in Africa and the UK. They used their newly acquired deep knowledge of Islamic praxis to challenge peers who argued that circumcision was necessary, telling them it was culturally rather than religiously mandated, quoting a range of specific ahadith and explaining the debates over each hadith’s strengths and weaknesses (Carver, 2021). Their ability to display their religious learning aided them considerably in this campaign and they felt that religion was a far more persuasive tool with which to change attitudes about female circumcision among their peers than UK legislative prohibition (which was enhanced in 2015) or the health discourse. While many did – now – associate health problems with the long-term consequences of infibulation, they felt that the focus on health in anti-FGM campaigns encouraged a shift towards medicalisation and/or change in type of circumcision (away from infibulation) rather than abandonment of the practice (something supported by findings in Somaliland, cf. Lunde and Sagbakken 2014). The criminalisation approach, on the other hand, was received with mixed feelings. Some were relieved that their concerns and campaigns (which had been going on for many years before being picked up at government level) were finally being heard and at the very top level. But many also felt uneasy, unsure of how such a heavy-handed tool might be used and whether it would encourage people to hide the practice thereby making it more difficult to prevent.

It was not, however, only their newly acquired religious scriptural knowledge that enabled them to challenge prevailing cultural beliefs around female circumcision – equally powerful was their embodiment of ideals pertaining to Islamic femininity. They visibly performed modesty and humbleness through Islamic dress, and practiced patience and understanding through being non-judgemental. They saw themselves as living demonstrations that purity of spirit and body could be attained through Islamic praxis and that it was all the more deserving and rewarding through this means rather than when imposed upon girls by way of a physical cicatrice at an age when they could not understand the intention. These women offered and performed an alternate way of fulfilling gendered ideologies associated with both Islam and Somali cultural practice that was (morally, religiously) superior to infibulation and, seemingly, came without risks.

There were associated risks, however, albeit ones that were hard to initially spot. As well as bringing about change in attitudes towards female circumcision among their peers (cf. FORWARD 2017), the very fact of their faith and their gender – as representatives of ‘Muslim women’ – provided some with a political platform to engage with policymakers, but this position of potential power was tempered by the fact that it was provided on account of the ‘widespread perception that Muslim women are particularly oppressed, under-represented in public life or subject to violence’ (Lewicki and O’Toole 2017:159). The very framing that makes ‘public authorities in the UK seek to include them as “representatives”’ (Lewicki and O’Toole 2017:159), thus simultaneously enforces their position in political discourse as oppressed on account of their faith. The women used the opportunity of this platform to assert repeatedly that ‘FGM’ was a cultural rather than religious practice. Within mainstream discourse this more politically palatable reframing was readily accepted, such that in some (racist) commentary ‘Somali’ (rather than ‘Muslim’) became a byword for ‘barbaric’ (Carver et al., 2022; 2023), although many commentators invoke both cultural and religious values (cf. Casey 2016). Furthermore, in accepting this platform and articulating this culture-not-religion standpoint, the women inadvertently lent legitimacy to the UK authorities who, riding the wave of this legitimacy, embedded racialised and stigmatising measures into legislation and policy (Carver et al., 2023; Pantazis et al., 2025). With reference to Foucault (1976), their role in resisting power inadvertently rearticulated an Othering framework.

A further complication lay in the fact that using a conservative religious authority to challenge gender norms had limits. Several of the women explicitly stated that the ‘true’ or ‘authentic’ practice of Islam espoused an ‘equal but different’ philosophy when it came to gender roles. Many others indicated a belief in this through the stories that they shared. Obah told me ‘It’s not in the Qu’ran oh it says the woman must clean– No. The society (.) make her. Because our Prophet, alayhi al-salam, he was helping his wife. You know, he sewed his clothes, he’s cleaning. Cooking even.’ In a similar vein, Hawa told me ‘I believe that a woman should be independent. And it’s not haram in our religion, because you know the Prophet Muhammed, Peace be Upon Him, he married Khadija who was a wealthy [business] woman.’ Or as Halimo put it:

As Halimo recognised, empowerment did come through knowledge, and knowledge of the Qu’ran had resulted in real and deep change in these women’s self-confidence and their ability to challenge behaviour they felt was unIslamic. However, this empowerment could only go so far if men – and UK society more broadly – remained uneducated about or reluctant to acknowledge women’s rights within Islam. Thus knowledge of scripture and embodied performances of Islamic qualities associated with femininity such as modesty provided ammunition to successfully challenge and redesignate practices like female circumcision as ‘cultural’ rather than ‘religious’, accompanied as it was by the support and weight of national legislation. But this literalist turn to scripture was less helpful when it came to other gendered inequalities such as preventing men from marrying a second wife. The women reluctantly recognised this as an Islamic right, albeit one that they were unhappy about and uncomfortable with (Carver, 2021). Furthermore, in trying to bring about change to what they saw as male cultural gendered behaviour such as failure to share housework duties, knowledge of scripture could only take them so far.

While the anti-FGM campaign and the role of local Somali women in galvanising the national movement has been relatively well documented (Lewicki and O’Toole 2017; Carver et al., 2023), the relevance of faith and religiosity – in particular knowledge and embodiment of Islamic praxis – in this campaign is seldom acknowledged. The religious turn and personal ijtihad provided these women with a deep-rooted confidence regarding their own self-worth, and, when coupled with the weight of the law as with the anti-FGM campaign, proved to be a robust way to reject and abandon harmful cultural practices. However, this reliance on religious conservatism reinforced some gendered inequalities and inadvertently reinforced the positioning of The Muslim Woman and/or The Somali Woman in political discourse as repressed and therefore contributed to legitimising over-zealous government responses (cf. Pantazis et al., 2025).

Coerced marriage and compulsory coupledom

In instances of forced or coerced marriage, however, there was no such concurrence between mainstream political discourse and the women’s ijtihad. In the personal accounts that were shared with me, coerced marriage was deeply enmeshed with the UK’s reception of refugees and understood as driven by a desire to protect women from what participants perceived to be UK cultural misogyny and structural inequality. For participants the coercive element was unrelated to Islamic religiosity. This was not a framing supported by or echoed within political or media discourse, in which the UK is positioned as a place of liberation and emancipation for migrant, particularly Muslim, women, and, when they experience gendered familial violence, interprets this as a ‘regressive’, religiously-motivated reaction to the gender equality inherent in ‘Western’ society. While only a few women gave accounts of coerced marriage, the framing of their experiences resonated with many participants, who spoke about UK culture and living arrangements as engendering intimate partner violence and overburdening women with responsibilities and thereby limiting rather than enhancing opportunity.

Astur told me that she arrived in the UK in the 1990s as a teenager with her mother. They claimed asylum and were housed in a deprived area above a fast-food outlet and across the street from a lap-dancing club, where their introduction to the ‘British values’ and ‘British culture’ into which they were expected ‘to integrate’, comprised of drug dealing, sex work, rats and alcoholism. There was a shortage of school places, so Astur spent much of the first year at home with her mother. When she did get a place at college, she could understand little and was bullied for the year she attended. A single parent, Astur’s mother was terrified that her daughter would fall victim to what she saw as the social – gendered – norms of the UK as displayed in her neighbourhood. She insisted (despite strong protests from Astur) on her marrying a man (from the UK) she had never met as soon as she left school at 18. ‘Mum said, “No, no, no, no, no, no. You have to get married because otherwise…” [gesturing to the view from the window in her retelling of the story]. So, it’s arranged marriage.’

When Caaisho’s older sister met her husband through friends on the estate where they were housed the family celebrated her marriage. The marriage was unhappy, however, and her sister was subject to abuse. Caaisho explained that if they were still in Somalia/land, her father would have talked with the husband’s father, pulled in powerful elders and ultimately physically gone to the house where her sister lived and demanded her return. Alone in the UK, he looked instead to the authorities for help, but was told that the decision to complain or leave the marriage must come from Caaisho’s sister herself. Caaisho said this was unthinkable: if her sister abandoned the marriage of her own volition, it would be deeply shameful. Determined that Caaisho would not suffer the same fate, her parents spent considerable time finding and vetting ‘the safest man in the world’ for Caaisho, who said she had no choice but to accept this arranged match with an American Somali. Some 10 years later, Caaisho was still married to a respectable man who didn’t abuse drugs or alcohol, was not violent and had a steady job. Caaisho herself exhibited many signs of depression. ‘I am someone who will never know what it is to love a man,’ she told me sadly.

Burhan told me she was pressured into marrying her deceased sister’s husband (all living in the UK) because her mother was so afraid of losing contact with her grandchildren. Unable to care for his children and maintain his work as a taxi-driver, Burhan’s brother-in-law told the family that he had no choice but to send his children to Somalia/land to be cared for by their paternal grandparents. Burhan’s mother – already caring for another daughter’s four children – came up with a solution: Burhan would marry him and take her sister’s place. Told after the agreement had been made, Burhan said she hated the idea but knew for her mother’s sake, she must comply.

These marriages provide support for Shanneik and Vahle’s (2023) argument that agency is relational and contextual, something actively silenced by orientalist and neocolonialist political discourse on Muslim women which positions them as a priori victims of gender violence. They also are indicative that the framing of forced marriage typically presented in political, media and campaign discourse which associates it with ‘transnational’ and ‘foreign’ or ‘Islamic’ gender violence (Carver, 2023; Julios, 2023), is problematic and that this limited political stereotype on what a forced marriage entails results in instances of coercive marriages struggling to be articulated (Gangoli et al., 2011). Political – and often academic – discourse on ‘forced marriage’ suggests that encountering the norms of Western gendered freedoms, particularly female sexual liberation, is a key trigger for repressive gendered harms among migrant groups. In its default locating of the problem of gendered harms within the belief system or culture of the Other, this discourse fails to consider how ‘Western female sexual liberation’ is experienced by migrants or the contextual conditions of structural inequality entailed in refugee reception. The sex work that Astur and her mother saw from their window did little to showcase the opportunities of female empowerment or the dividends of sexual liberation in the workplace. While there is undoubtedly cultural difference at play in how victims can/should be supported out of abusive partnerships, the trigger to Caisho’s coerced marriage demonstrates the complex and intersecting layers of relationality and context rather than ‘regression’ or ‘Islamic religiosity’. Likewise, Burhan’s story resonated with many who felt ‘held back’ not by their faith or culture but by the economic pressures which penalise single parents coupled with the lack of affordable childcare for low-income households. This mothering penalty was felt particularly harshly by those who came from pre-war middle-class families in Somaliland (Carver, 2021).

Over the course of the fieldwork, participants regularly shared with me and each other their experiences of racist gendered abuse: for them non-Muslims and White people more broadly could not be relied upon to show respect and tolerance to them as Muslim women. They expressed their shock at the openness with which criminal acts were pursued on the streets where they lived and the seeming absence of law enforcement. The secondary schools in the area were well known for their poor academic outcomes and behavioural problems including what participants described as institutional racism and routine sexual harassment which went unsanctioned. Furthermore their experience as women in the West was not particularly liberating: for many, structural issues including lack of affordable childcare, lack of opportunities to further education, and the loss of economic opportunity for their husbands as well as themselves were more instrumental in holding them back than patriarchal gender relations (Carver, 2021). ‘In this country’, Anab told me with reference to her workload, ‘the woman is also the man'.

Many, in fact, saw British societal norms as engendering gender violence within the home. They critiqued the ideal of the nuclear family as a self-contained unit and suggested the Western set-up encouraged couple disputes.

While Casey (2016) depicted Muslim women as ‘isolated’ on account of religiosity; these women’s counter-narratives presented the concept of the nuclear family – and the architecture and housing designed for nuclear-family living – as isolating, requiring husband and wife to depend almost entirely on each other emotionally, socially, and financially. The kind of couple relationship lauded by Giddens (1992) based on ‘opening out to each other, enjoying each other’s unique qualities and sustaining trust through mutual disclosure’ (Jamieson, 1999:477), was perceived to be suffocating and insular, segregating the couple as a unit from emotional and social ties with others. Several participants suggested a causative link between this structural isolation of husband and wife and the prevalence of intimate partner violence in the UK (Carver, 2021).

Political discourse deflects responsibility for gendered violence on to the Islamic Other and away from British structural inequalities: forced marriage is presented either as a tradition that Muslim migrants have brought with them and thus as pertaining to those who have failed to integrate/modernize, or as a sign of increased religiosity which is understood as inherently ‘regressive’ (Casey 2016). But the instances of coercion in this study emphasize the role played by UK structural inequalities, UK-based cultural misogyny and the context of UK policy regarding the reception of refugees.

Conclusion

In UK political discourse and some academia, the claimed problem of Muslim ‘social and cultural isolation’ (Casey 2016:80) is blamed on Islam itself. The presumption behind this discourse is the rather simplified understanding, as articulated by Beck-Gernsheim (2007:282) that ‘equality [between the sexes] is the dominant norm in Western society’ whereas unequal patriarchal gender relations are the rule in Muslim societies (Bhattacharyya 2008; Mernissi 2003). Many Muslim societies do uphold and institutionalize unequal gender relations (as do many non-Muslim societies), and participants did not refrain from criticizing the harmful gender relations which governed the lives of many in Somalia, but for them, this stemmed from culture rather than religion (Carver, 2021). For women in this study, heightened knowledge of Islamic scripture had provided them with a deep-rooted self-confidence and gave them the courage and wherewithal to successfully challenge some harmful gendered practices, most notably through the anti-FGM campaign. The role of Islamic religiosity among ethnic Somali women in driving this change in the UK is not usually recognised or acknowledged. However, as a tool of empowerment to challenge gender harms, Islamic religiosity was limited.

Participants also saw the practice of ‘forced marriage’ in the UK as unrelated to Islam and Islamic religiosity. In the stories told to me, it was British structural inequalities and gendered harms that triggered parents to coerce children into marriages. When politicians talk about migrants having a ‘duty to integrate’ (Blair, 2006) or criticize them for ‘failing to integrate’ (Boris Johnson quoted in Zeffman 2019), ‘integration’ is presented as unquestionably ‘a good thing’ (Fox and Mogilnicka 2019). But refugees and migrants are not typically housed in areas where the so-called ‘British values’ of the ‘rule of law’, ‘equality’, ‘mutual respect, tolerance and understanding of different faiths and beliefs’ (Casey, 2016:66) are particularly evident. The claimed ‘dominant norm’ of equality may not often be experienced or even seen in the areas where many migrants, particularly asylum-seekers and refugees, are pushed to settle, and experiences of living as ‘emancipated women’ in the West for many is one of inequality in which women carry an unequal burden and are forced into social, financial and emotional dependence on their husbands. The orientalist framing of gender violence in Western political discourse as a facet of Islam and Islamic religiosity, obscures the role played by structural inequalities, hostile immigration policy and nationalist rhetoric.