Locating Islam in the Language of Sexual Violence

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Samah Choudhury

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This chapter explores how race, gender, and Islam are imagined in relation to each other and to sexual violence (SV) in places where Muslims live as a minority population. I draw attention to how sexual violence as an idea invokes specific gendered and racialized assumptions about Islam, namely that Muslim men seek to limit the bodily autonomy of women and are commonly violent abusers. Through the writing of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, I show how the topic of SV specifically is elevated to the status of polemic – not an argument in favor of understanding social exertions of power and control, but as a nativist argument against immigration and asylum. Islam takes on the countenance of a physical space that can now transform the so-called west into an extension of Lila Abu-Lughod’s “IslamLand.” In doing so, Muslims are seen not as physically “part” of Euroamerican societies despite them living there. This notion obscures the majoritarian society’s own respective histories and cultures of sexual violence, a problem that can in turn only be made self-legible through likeness to Islam. These sentiments and their ubiquity force Muslim activists and survivors to respond with a multi-lensed approach that nuances the gendered and racialized dimensions of their SV experiences but is inconsistently received and acknowledged.