Summary: The seventh episode of the Feminism Under Corona series follows a conversation with Mariam Khan, writer and editor of the book "It's not about the Burqa" (2019). This first-person anthology of essays of seventeen Muslim women's stories gives rise to a collective voice where differences are as important as similarities in creating a community of their own within the spectrum of feminism and world-making. Reading this book is like being anonymously invited to meet another community of feminists. But not in order to talk to or discuss with them, but mainly to listen and to unlearn. One way of presenting It's not about the Burqa is the final statement by its editor, Mariam Khan, in the introduction: “We are not asking for permission anymore. We are taking up space. We’ve listed a lot of people talking about who Muslim women are without actually hearing Muslim women. So now, we are speaking. And now, it's your turn to listen.”As Mariam Khan herself says, seventeen texts are only seventeen voices within the myriad of ways Muslim women think and act around the world. When feminism is concerned only with a few women, then it ceases to be liberating and becomes a tool of oppression for a large number of women. One of the many clichés that Mariam Khan and all the authors of the book dismantle is the moral superiority of the secular West over religious cultures. Islam as a religion that empowers women is a constant affirmation in the book, which the authors demonstrate with historical facts and practices.The conversation with Mariam Khan took place at the end of October 2020. She was in London and Sonia Fernández Pan in Berlin. With the arrival of autumn and the glaring increase of infections and deaths, most European governments have imposed a second lockdown. The state of vigilance and mutual accountability that has emerged during the pandemic is however not new to Muslim women in Western Societies. The Western Gaze is a form of violence that police their bodies and exoticizes them, misrepresenting Muslim women as submissive and equal to each other whereas the reality is very much different. Now that we all have to wear a mask in public for reasons of health and mutual care, a necessary question that reappears is: Why are some reasons more legitimate than others to cover or uncover faces or bodies? "It's not about the Burqa" is a book that brings up the present and past of Muslim women in the British context, but also their future. The fight for women’s right is to fight for all women’s right and all their different communities. Making it real may be complicated, but understanding it is the first step that has to be taken.
