Between Hoors and Whores: Spiritual Abuse and Online Sexual Exploitation of the Muslim Girl Child

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Maryyum Mehmood

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In 2015, 15-year-old Shamima Begum fled her family home in London, United
Kingdom, having been groomed online to travel to Syria with the promise of becoming an ISIS fighter’s wife. In April 2022, 14-year-old Dua Zehra Kazmi ran away from Karachi, Pakistan, to elope with a man who had been grooming her on an online gaming platform. To the undiscerning eye, these cases seem to have little in common. When viewed together they offer a crucial perspective into how religion is weaponised to exacerbate the sexual exploitation of the Muslim girl child. In both majority-Muslim and marginalised Muslim spaces, girls are often exposed to sexual violence in the most mundane manner, through the normalisation of misogyny, lack of sex education and glorification of purity culture, offering them the binary choice between the life a perfect hoor or sullied whore. Whether through gendered Islamophobia or patriarchal mores, the banality of sexual violence perpetrated against the Muslim girl is rarely discussed, let alone condemned. By showcasing these two cases of child sexual exploitation abetted by spiritual abuse, this chapter challenges the widespread disempowerment of the Muslim girl by offering an alternative in the form of social justice premised on radical self-love.