The headline about an Iranian woman who was flogged by the Iranian authority for defying hijab law appeared on my iPhone newsfeed on Sunday, January 7th. More than 18 news agencies including Euro News, Reuters, The Telegraph, Yahoo News, Jakarta Star, and Jerusalem Post, among many other news outlets, appeared on my iPhone screen, reporting the same story with slightly different headlines.
Curious about the story, I opened my Google News app and searched for Hijab stories. I found out that another Muslim woman in Kent, MI, filed a federal lawsuit against the Kent County Sheriff’s Office for being forced to take off her hijab during booking and processing. There were only three local news agencies that reported the story.
Every time I pitched a story about Muslim women’s power and success, I never cleared to file the story, never!
Western news media, including the U.S. news agencies, tend to report on Muslim women exclusively on issues related to women’s rights and gender discrimination, when their rights are violated. But they report on non-Muslim women when their rights are respected, according to Islamophobia and Media Portrayal of Muslim Women studies in 2017. Although the study was conducted a few years ago, the attitude toward Muslim women hasn’t changed.
Non-Muslim women receive positive coverage on issues that show the complexity of their social and political status. However, Muslim women only receive coverage on gender discrimination and women’s rights violations, according to the same study.
I couldn’t agree more with those statements when I think back to my experience as a news reporter covering foreign news in Iran, Turkey, and the Middle East. Every time I pitched stories to my editors about women taxi drivers in southern Iran who were driving female customers to different locations, and then expanding their business into the region; or a story on a successful Turkish woman who designed clothes for a few Hollywood superstars; or a Kuwaiti Muslim women who was cooking for the royal family in Spain … my pitches were always denied. “Go back to Tehran and report on the legislation that is passing on hijab,” was the answer I received the last time I pitched in Tehran to my international news network.
Muslim women make news when their rights are violated. Non-Muslim women make news when their rights are respected.
And now, I read the story about the woman arrested on the streets of Tehran, I could sympathize with her and the 74 flogs she received on her back for defying Islamic laws. I understand her pain because I am an Iranian woman who lived under the threat of an unjust society. However, I wondered why more than 18 news agencies including the Associated Press, Euro News, Reuters, and BBC wrote about this story, covering it generously, while the story of Jannah Hagues, the 23-year-old Muslim woman in Detroit, MI, who is demanding her right to be respected by a court in the U.S., is overlooked.
“Popular media outlets portray Middle Eastern and Muslim societies uniquely or particularly misogynistic, especially compared to Western countries,” according to Deepa Kumar, professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University, in her paper Islamophobia: A Bipartisan Project. Such views “deny Muslim women’s agency and reduce their lives to a totalizing oppression,” adds Rochelle Terman, author of the study: Islamophobia and Media Portrayal of Muslim Women.
The Western media, the U.S. media in particular, choose to write about women in countries with poor records of women’s rights like Iran or Saudi Arabia in a greater quantity, compared to women in Malaysia or Tunisia, who are known for their good standing on women’s rights issues within Muslim nations, according to the same study.
So, no wonder the Western media chooses to amplify the act of a Muslim country against its female citizens, but when it comes to writing about a democratic regime that denies the self-expression of its female citizens, we are silent.
I wonder why there is such hypocrisy in covering women around the world. Are women from Muslim nations less worthy, or less complicated, than women in the Western societies that the media reduces them to “their body” and how they look behind hijab?
I gave up hope of seeing Western Media’s fair treatment of Muslim women. That’s not going to happen.
I think it is up to Muslim women to stand up for their rights and to show their power and agency. Hague is a brave Muslim American who doesn’t bend to U.S. hegemony and bigotry. I think Muslim women are fighters.
I still stand with the women of Iran for bravely defying mandatory hijab, and I salute the bravery of Muslim women who demand that their rights be respected.
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