Link: https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/world-must-stop-trying-rescue-muslim-women

For centuries, patriarchal societies presumed the authority to regulate women’s bodies in the name of morality. Today, states regulate Muslim women’s bodies in the name of freedom. The vocabulary has changed; the entitlement has survived.

The deeper problem is that the entire discussion rests upon an imaginary figure: the Muslim woman. She does not exist.

There are Muslim women - hundreds of millions of them, living across radically different societies, classes, political systems and historical experiences. A woman in Kabul is not a woman in Jakarta. A woman in Tehran is not a woman in Istanbul. A farmer in rural Morocco is not a lawyer in London.

Yet these radically different lives are repeatedly compressed into a single explanatory formula: Muslim woman, hijab, oppression. Reality is considerably less convenient.

The problem is religion

No religion is not the root problem here, you are quite seriously missing the point.

A woman in a miniskirt may be making a choice. A woman in a bikini may be expressing herself. A woman who surgically alters her face or tattoos her body is exercising bodily autonomy.

Strawman. Huge amounts of feminist discourse in western feminism is about women being pressured to sexualize themselves (or avoid sexualizing themselves) due to patriarchy.

Nobody holds up magaface as an example of women's lib. We all live under patriarchy.

There have been Muslim societies in which governments compelled women to cover themselves, and others in which governments compelled them to uncover. There have been states that excluded women from education and public life in the name of religion, and states that excluded them from universities and employment because they insisted on wearing religious dress.

History is particularly troublesome for the simple oppression narrative.

Take Iran. The Islamic Republic’s compulsory hijab is well known and rightly criticised as coercive. Less often remembered is the earlier history of state-enforced unveiling under Reza Shah, whose 1936 Kashf-e hijab policy banned traditional veiling and subjected women who wished to remain covered to state coercion.

Yes, social and political regulation of women's bodies is bad. If you would be shamed for abandoning your religion and slutting it up that is bad, if you would like to cover yourself in the absense of social pressure to do so that is fine.

This article is a nothingburger. It's just "oppression bad" and "it's complicated" with a few strawmen thrown in.

Who is it for?

Do you think Islamophobia is a nothingburger?

Doesn't follow squirrely

What do you mean? Islamophobia is quite clearly on the rise.

Ok, I'll bite. When Islamic countries condemn women to death for choosing body autonomy over religious law, that's a problem, right?

Islamaphobia may very well be on the rise (and no offense but I was born and raised before 9/11 so it's been here a fairly long time even before that), but by the same token, that doesn't mean that we stop calling out condemning people to death for daring to go to school, learn to drive, or chosing not to wear Hijab. If they choose to? I'm all for it. Would fight for their right to do so. I believe in religious freedom (the freedom to choose to practice a religion). I don't believe that this should extend to killing people or jailing them for things like being too modest or not modest enough.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/non sequitur