How discrimination affects Muslim women living in Spain
Written by Aya Laabadli
Photo by Ifrah Akhter on Unsplash
“I feel like an outsider in the country that I was born and raised in.” Shaimae is a 22-year-old Muslim woman living in Spain who recently graduated in history and philology. When she posted a video on TikTok celebrating her academic achievements, she received thousands of Islamophobic comments. The most common criticism she and many other Muslim women face daily is the question: “Why don’t they integrate more into our culture?” It is a question that shows a profound societal divide and a lack of empathy.
Shaimae’s Islamic faith and the feeling of belonging to the ummah, the Muslim community, is what led her to wear the hijab on the day she enrolled in the second year of ESO (Spanish secondary school)when she turned 14. “For me, the hijab represents freedom,” she says. However, her decision was not without trepidation. She feared that her classmates would distance themselves from her, and that her teachers and the people around her would treat her differently. She even started to overthink the potential impact on her academic and professional future. But all these fears are not unjustified. The discussion regarding Muslim women in Spain revolves most of the time around the use of the hijab and their modest lifestyle. The lives of Muslim women are defined by their religion and are constantly scrutinised.
“They don’t see us as individual human beings with our own opinions and freedom to choose how we want to live our lives,” Shaimae complains. “They believe we are all one ignorant group who has been brainwashed to follow a certain faith, and that is enough for them to see us as a public enemy.”
In Spain’s mainstream media and politics, the term “Muslim world” has been popularised to encompass a wide array of countries, languages and vastly different cultures spanning multiple continents. However, using such generalisations like “Muslim world” or “women in Islam” implies that all Muslim women come from the same background and share identical beliefs. This overlooks the diversity and intricate sociological dynamics within Muslim societies, as well as the varied socioeconomic and historical contexts of each.
With the rise of far-right movements in Spain and across Europe, these Islamophobic sentiments have grown stronger. This surge has led to inflammatory rhetoric from politicians and media figures, targeting the choices of Muslim women. A significant segment of the Spanish population that shares these far-right ideals has also increasingly demonstrated open hostility and discrimination towards them. Santiago Abascal, leader of the political party Vox, embraces the rejection of the Muslim veil and encourages the discrimination of people whose faith is Islam: “We will not allow that [the hijab] in Spain, we will not allow the importation of any culture that denigrates women. […] Those who come to live with us will have to respect our laws, our culture.”
Beyond the social and psychological consequences that these ideas about Muslim women may cause, this also results in negative implications for their professional opportunities and working conditions. An experiment, detailed in an article by Oxford Academic, investigated the discrimination faced by Muslim women in Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain. It found that about a quarter of the population in both Spain and Germany thought that Muslim women should not be allowed to wear any religious clothing. Researchers also submitted identical CVs, differing only in whether the applicant’s photo showed a woman wearing a hijab or not — only 35% of hijabi women obtained a response from employers in the Netherlands, while this rate increased to 70% among the CVs in which the applicant appeared without a hijab.
Due to a controversy on the national Spanish TV channel (RTVE) regarding whether the hijab is a sign of oppression or not, Ghufran Khir Allah, a Muslim sociologist, explained the significance of the Islamic hijab and did so in a passionate debate by invoking the freedom advocated by the Quran, as well as the Spanish Constitution, which guarantees both religious freedom and the right to one’s own image. “To understand a cultural symbol, one must approach it within the culture to which that symbol belongs,” she explained, pointing out that the biggest mistake in intercultural communications is when experts take a symbol and analyse it from the mental framework in which they process the world, because “there they lose the true meaning of the cultural symbol.”
In Shaimae’s testimonies, the statistics and all the other research, we find a common desire among Muslim women for society to listen to them and take an interest in their problems, decisions, and ways of living. It would seem that the lack of empathy generates more discord and confrontation than the debate over the veil itself. For achieving the gender equality that Spain is fighting for, listening to the experiences and needs of muslim women is an unskippable step.
This story was produced as part of ‘How to write for impact’, a mentorship programme created by NADJA Media for members of Politics4Her, a feminist youth-led digital platform advocating for the inclusive participation of young women in leadership. To find out more email hello@nadja.co
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