The summer after she graduated from West High, Dalia Mogahed made a “feminist declaration of independence” — she started wearing a hijab.
“I felt like girls my age were often told they were as valuable as they were attractive to men,” Mogahed says. “I wanted a different path and wanted to declare independence from that kind of oppression.”
Nevertheless, some of her feminist friends in Madison didn’t see it that way.
“Behind my back they said, ‘Why is she oppressing herself?’ I thought that was really interesting, this idea that by covering my body and my hair, I was oppressing myself, as if my power simply and only came from my ability to be attractive,” Mogahed says.
“Oppression is the taking away of power,” she adds. “By saying that a woman is oppressed when she’s covered, we’re saying that her power comes from her body and her hair and exterior, instead of her mind. Because my mind isn’t covered. I’m able to speak, my agency is still there, it’s just that I’ve privatized my appearance.”
Mogahed, a former advisor to President Barack Obama, says it’s a myth that Islam is anti-woman, but she acknowledges that misogyny is a problem everywhere.
“While there’s certainly so much work to do in regards to women’s rights in the world, including in Muslim majority societies, Muslims are not unique in this regard,” she says. In addition to facing misogyny, Muslim women are also much more likely to face religious and racial discrimination, which many Westerners tend to overlook, Mogahed says.
Mogahed is returning to her hometown to give a lecture, “Demystifying Muslims and Islam,” at the UW-Madison Union South at 1:30 p.m. on Oct. 7. After graduating from West, Mogahed earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from UW-Madison. She later earned an MBA from Pitt University and is now director of research at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding in Washington, D.C.
Another persistent stereotype she sees about Muslims is that they’re prone to violence — including terrorism. But her research has found that while Muslims are more often likely to oppose military actions, they’re also more likely to be victims of violence.
The past 20 years have seen spikes in anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States. However, Mogahed says these spikes usually occur at times that might surprise non-Muslims.
“Right after 9/11, sentiment was better than it was right before, believe it or not,” Mogahed says. But that attitude slowly began to shift in the lead up to the Iraq War, which was justified in part by terrorist attacks.
Anti-Muslim sentiment also increased around the presidential elections.
“Where it does not spike, counterintuitively, is after the Boston bombing or even after the Pulse shooting,” she says, referring to the deadly attacks at the Boston marathon and a Florida nightclub, respectively. “The spikes [in Islamophobia] happen because of the rhetoric of our leaders.”The election of Donald Trump as president also led to heightened Islamophobia — but not among all people, she adds.
“Because so many people are anti-Trump for completely different reasons, he’s actually having a positive impact on how Democrats feel about Muslims,” Mogahed says. “Democrats are more positive toward Muslims than they’ve ever been in our history. Republicans have never been more negative.
“Trump’s negative rhetoric is so overt, so nakedly bigoted … that being anti-Muslim among some people has become really distasteful.”
