‘Sexual misery’ or ‘happy British Muslims’?: Contemporary depictions of Muslim sexuality

Abstract

We begin this article with a close look at some contemporary pictures of sexual life in the Muslim world that have been painted in certain sections of the Western media, asking how and why these pictures matter. Across a range of mainstream print media from the New York Times to the Daily Mail, and across reported events from several countries, can be found pictures of 'sexual misery'. These 'frame' Muslim men as tyrannical, Muslim women as downtrodden or exploited, and the wider world of Islam as culpable. Crucially, this is not the whole story. We then consider how these negative representations are being challenged and how they can be challenged further. In doing so, we will not simply set pictures of sexual misery against their binary opposites, namely pictures abounding in the promise of sexual happiness. Instead, we search for a more complex picture, one that unsettles stereotypes about the sexual lives of Muslims without simply idealising its subjects. This takes us to the journalism, life writing and creative non-fiction of Shelina Zahra Janmohamed and the fiction of Ayisha Malik and Amjeed Kabil. We read this long-form work critically, attending to manifest advances in depictions of the relationships of Muslim-identified individuals over the last decade or so, while also remaining alert to lacunae and limitations in the individual representations. More broadly, we hope to signal our intention to avoid both Islamophobia and Islamophilia in scrutinising literary texts.

Donald Trump, the anti-Muslim far right and the new conservative revolution

“…The latter include sexual attitudes and practices. British Pakistanismen in particular have been portrayed in mainstream media as perpetrators of child sexual exploitation and abuse (Jay 2014;Britton 2018;Chambers et al 2019) and forced marriages (Wikan 2002;Phillips 2012). These are just a few examples of the sexualized negativity that pervades mainstream representations of British Pakistanis.…”

Semiotics of rape in Pakistan: What’s missing in the digital illustrations?

“…to examine the representation of Lazarus rape case in Australia, and noted that use of various lexical features, structuring devices, and quoting strategies served to divert attention from the suffering of the female victim to that of the accused. Chambers et al (2018) noted that in famous magazines, the sexual identities of immigrant Asian, Muslim, and Pakistani men have been associated, in certain articles, with rape, abuse, and exploitation, while women have been represented as sexually repressed. Mendes et al (2019) did a critical discourse analysis of the personal accounts of the experiences of sexual violence, dynamics of victim blaming, and absence of details while recounting those experiences on Twitter and Tumbler by the victims.…”

“…Debates must extend to binaries such as state and men, women and toxic women, male victims and male perpetrators, femininity and toxic femininity, and victims and survivors, etc., because rape is not merely an issue of female victimhood. More authentic and diverse representations may also help avoid the static discursive figuration of men and women belonging to certain cultures, such as Pakistan as highlighted in the existing research (Chambers et al, 2018; Riaz, 2019; Riaz and Rafi, 2019), to the rest of the world.…”

Halal dating: Changing relationship attitudes and experiences among young British Muslims

“…By recognising the agency which some young Muslims are expressing in their sexual relationships, it may also be possible to challenge erroneous and unflattering beliefs about Muslims, which are widespread in mainstream British society (Smith-Hefner 2005). In particular, this article challenges the belief that young Muslims in Western countries have little control over their relationships, and that they are not able to make their own choices about potential partners by dating them (Chambers, Phillips, Ali, Hopkins and Pande 2018).…”