People love symbols. They love to pin meaning onto things, like butterflies under glass. And for some reason, the hijab always ends up as everyone’s favourite specimen, fluttering between oppression and empowerment, submission and resistance, tradition and rebellion.
Hear me when I say: The hijab is not a metaphor. It’s not your symbol. It’s not your thesis. It’s not a quiet protest or a cry for help.
It’s cloth. And it’s mine.
Western feminism has always had a visibility problem. Not in the sense of spotlight but in the sense of sight. Let me explain; its lens is often painfully narrow, and when it lands on Muslim women, it tends to blur. What Western feminism often wants is a storyline it already understands. A woman breaking free. A veil cast off. A triumphant unveiling! (Cue the applause.) But what it struggles to grasp is that not every act of self-definition looks like a strip down. Not every liberation story ends in nudity or defiance.
Instead of interrogating power, many Western feminists collapse into a single assumption: that choice only looks like them. That freedom is synonymous with uncovering. That covering must mean coercion. It’s a colonial hangover dressed in ‘empowering’ language. The same old gaze, just with a tote bag that says “Girlboss.” And so, they flatten us. They turn the hijab into a metaphor for subjugation, and the women who wear it into passive, voiceless subjects who need saving.
It’s not solidarity when it starts with erasure. I wear the hijab. Some days joyfully, some days lazily, always intentionally. It’s not a costume I throw on to perform religion. It’s also not a cage I’m trapped inside. The West’s obsession with decoding it, finding the “real” meaning, is exhausting. There is no single meaning. There are as many reasons to wear it as there are women who do. But in the dominant discourse, complexity doesn’t get airtime. Certainty does, and people like certainty – it’s dependable.
Which is why “progressive” conversations often start with assumptions and end with condescension. They don’t sit with contradiction; they edit it out. Halima Aden broke barriers by being the first visibly Muslim woman in major fashion campaigns, and yet every headline about her framed her as either brave or brainwashed, never just “whole”. When she stepped away from the industry to realign with her values, Western media tried to turn it into a parable. But her life is not your parable. Her hijab wasn’t a marketing tool. It was never meant to fit your framework of feminism.
Living as a Black Muslim woman means I’m used to being seen through a double fog. Raced, gendered, veiled, decoded before I say a word. People assume I must either be hyper-devout or completely oppressed. And Western feminism, for all its talk of choice and voice, often fails to listen to either. Do you want to support Muslim women? Start by asking better questions. Start by confronting your own frameworks. Don’t mistake visibility for freedom, and don’t confuse your discomfort with our dignity.
The hijab doesn’t need to stand in for all Muslim women. It doesn’t need to be the shorthand for a sermon. And it certainly doesn’t need to be a metaphor for struggle, resistance, or moral clarity.
Sometimes it’s just what I wear.
Sometimes it’s what I wrestle with.
But it’s always mine.
