Seite - 105 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Band 02/01

Images of the Muslim Woman | 105www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/1, 91–110 Muslim organisation represented their views, and 75 per cent held that there was more diversity and disagreement within the Muslim population than other people re- alised.51 Yet by then the money, resources, and support these Islamist organisations had received from the British government, in addition to those flowing from the Gulf States, had helped them create a plethora of educational, religious, and charitable institutions. They had the tools to spread their own vision of political Islam among the members of their communities. Most importantly, they helped create what I call “closed communities”, like the one in which Leila lives, patriarchal power structures that exercise social control over their members and intimidate those who reject their designated social rules. Leila wears a veil not because she wants to, but because she has to. She does not dare to come out as either a lesbian or an atheist because she knows that she will be made to pay dearly for such an act of rebellion against the way a proper Muslim woman is supposed to behave. I am quite certain that Taylor did not know where his ideas would take him. He said it was possible that the rights of individuals would be restricted by the state’s aim of safeguarding collective goals, but he did not expect that people would either invent a community or violate its members’ fundamental human rights. Sadly, this is exactly the outcome of his theoretical approach, which ignores the political and social con- texts of what it describes and therefore fails to take account of the mechanisms and institutions that either sustain or alter an identity and its cultural traits. TIME FOR A PARADIGM SHIFT Context matters! Context matters in highlighting how a single Muslim identity has been constructed. It is context that shows how complex and diverse Leila’s identity is, and why she wears a headscarf even though she is an atheist. Yet the essentialist paradigm seems to ignore this very context with all its accompanying power and pa- triarchal structures, political and social factors, and roles played by both the state and fundamentalist Islam in constructing a homogeneous Muslim identity and with it the Muslim Woman and her dress code. The diversity of reasons why women wear the veil does not negate nor eliminate the essential role played by fundamentalist Islam – defined here as a “political move- ment of the extreme right, which manipulates religion in order to achieve its political aims”52 – in mainstreaming the idea that the veil is part of Islamic religious identity and in constructing the Muslim Woman and her obligation and/or right to wear the veil, as we only started to hear in the late 1970s. In countries where Islamists are in power, the veil is imposed by force, regardless of whether the woman wants to wear it. This 51 Mirza/Senthikumaran/Ja’far 2007, 6. 52 Marieme Hèlie-Lucas’s definition, quoted in Bennoune 2013, 14.