This Is What Radical Self-Acceptance Means to Me
As a young Muslim American woman who’s finally achieved radical self-acceptance, I have spent my life in observation. Despite the vastness of our community and its ever-growing population, I rarely feel as though others like myself share my thoughts and opinions on the issues that truly affect our youth.
We all share a similar agony, crippled within a Western gaze that homogenizes us into perpetual foreigners and breeds an increasingly prevalent form of racism isolating us from society, though this similarity drastically differs given our gendered experiences. I also find that most of us exist as ‘Muslim Americans’ —- an identity ravaged with conflict and contradiction — within a spectrum of Whiteness, navigating life according to some arbitrary standard of accepted otherness rather than true religious doctrine.
Many of us look to Westernism to offer balance to the overwhelmingly rule-based version of Islam taught to us by our parents, though seeking such solutions will only indulge us in a culture predicated on our community’s destruction.
For young Muslim American girls, this often manifests into issues of personal worth informed by competing cultural ideas of desirability. In one respect, we grow up in communities and consume media in which proximity to Whiteness is a direct path to winning the adoration of our peers, securing romantic prospects, and generally being able to wield our beauty to achieve love, acceptance, and success.
In another respect, this proximity to Whiteness is upheld but also further complicated by Islamic notions of female virtue and family cultural practices. One may argue that aligning oneself with the gaze of the Muslim American family is innately subversive. However, this is without a critical understanding of how Western militarism directly shapes power within desirability politics, in which the veiled Muslim woman is the source of sexual fetish and humiliation — a standard that eventually manifests even in our most intimate circles.
Such an interpretation would also fail to account for how the Muslim American family internalizes Whiteness as a guiding lens through which they approach religious education and gender roles, often mistakenly perpetuating Judeo-Christian ideals.
By failing to orient Islam in the context of colonial history and an ever-threatening Western influence, our youth are left trying to make sense of religious doctrine within an idea of Muslims steeped in deception. For Muslim girls raised in the U.S., this leaves us at a crossroads: expected to appease both White and Muslim American notions of desirability.
As a young girl, I often indulged in Whiteness, though instead of concealing or softening my Muslim identity, I presented myself with immense pride in who I am.
As a young girl, I often indulged in Whiteness, though instead of concealing or softening my Muslim identity, I presented myself with immense pride in who I am. While other Muslims hid who they were out of fear of social rejection, I brazenly wore my Muslim identity, possessing a sense of moral righteousness in my efforts to subvert White expectations of Muslim women.
However, what I thought was a genuine feeling of security in who I am was no more than a reaction to everything around me–a performance of identity that didn’t even reflect my actual personality. Realizing this false emotional journey, I remained painfully self-aware yet simultaneously stuck in a never-ending process of socialization.
I still cringe at the fact that my outrightness unintentionally fulfilled a White imagination of diversity and tokenism that celebrates all races, religions, and ethnicities without any acknowledgment of prevailing power imbalances between the oppressed and oppressor.
While by no means an expert on decolonization, I now actively try to question everything from what I wear to how I think within a larger attempt to navigate life outside of a White gaze. As I’ve embarked on this journey, I’ve noticed several parallels between myself and other Muslim American girls struggling to do the same.
Not only do we deal with the debilitating pressure of being beautiful from the moment we become conscious, as is shared by all women, but we face multiple opposing ideas of what femininity truly entails. Looking back at my early adolescence, I wonder how I remained detached from such pressures — that is, until I inevitably became all too aware of them like my peers.
Despite the fact that Islam emancipates women from the need to be beautiful according to any and all standards existing outside of Allah SWT’s wishes, we are urged by our families and local Muslim communities to maintain our physical modesty while simultaneously receiving messages from Western “modernism” to bare our bodies–both for male consumption.
In Islam, physical modesty is clearly outlined as a protective measure against the dangers of nazar and vanity for both men and women.
In Islam, physical modesty is clearly outlined as a protective measure against the dangers of nazar and vanity for both men and women. However, Muslim girls are often raised to lead their lives with the singular objective of marriage–reinforcing the cycle of female imprisonment that Islam successfully deconstructs.
This phenomenon is perfectly encapsulated by hijab; whether or not a Muslim woman decides to veil herself, she can expect her body to be a topic of constant debate, particularly among those required to avert their eyes. This results in a ceaseless back-and-forth between whose conception of beauty to appease, each being a losing battle.
Due to the unavoidable nature of anti-Muslim rhetoric in our current context, most young Muslim Americans possess an understanding of how culture can negatively impact one’s personal relationship with Islam, whether that be because of harm perpetuated by the Muslim or Non-Muslim world.
What is not as common is an awareness of how the teachings of the Muslim American family can be antithetical to Islamic principles. And that when conflated, such teachings lead young Muslim Americans astray through no fault of Islam itself.
What is not as common is an awareness of how the teachings of the Muslim American family can be antithetical to Islamic principles. And that when conflated, such teachings lead young Muslim Americans astray through no fault of Islam itself. In my own life, I have witnessed (and continue to witness) how the version of Islam taught to me can vary drastically from the word of Allah SWT.
Upon reaching the cusp of adulthood, many young Muslim Americans continue learning about Islam outside the confines of their families. While we are required to seek out religious knowledge, this journey for myself and other Muslim Americans is more so fueled by a desire to believe that Islam is more than an instrument for preserving our parents’ cultural traditions.
As a product of religious trauma in combination with the aforementioned paralysis experienced being Muslim in the Western gaze, young Muslim Americans will ultimately endure varying degrees of reluctance toward Islam at some point in their lives. Without seeking out Islam for what it is, a faultless guide often corrupted by worldly interests, such reluctance can compel one to completely sever themself from their Muslim identity altogether.
How can we possibly live our lives with modesty, in constant struggle with our nafs, but in sincere pursuit of beauty as it is defined by Allah SWT, if we continue to worship the word of our greatest oppressors?
In essence, the glorification of White standards of beauty, sexuality, and desire manufactures an obsession with the White body, which, as it continues to live, breathe, and reproduce its own virtues, exists in tandem with the destruction of the Muslim way of life. How can we possibly live our lives with modesty, in constant struggle with our nafs, but in sincere pursuit of beauty as it is defined by Allah SWT, if we continue to worship the word of our greatest oppressors?
All Muslim Americans are guilty of vying for approval from White America, though this is particularly insidious within the politics of desire, wherein Muslim American women fall victim to a voyeuristic ‘unveiling’ and Muslim American men are sought out as hypersexual brutes.
Whether we believe we have outgrown such desire or deny ever having it, we often minimize how falling for any and every white body only distances the love we have for our own. For those of us who grew up in areas with a smaller Muslim presence, this threat wields itself into our collective consciousness even further.
Seeking legitimacy, whether through romantic pursuits of White people or the need to appease White imaginations of multiculturalism (albeit while possessing massive amounts of wealth and social capital), will not satiate our appetite for Whiteness. If anything, it reinforces an existing narrative about Islam that directly capitalizes off of our self-hatred.
We keep our people at a distance and separate ourselves from our community in an effort to feel “normal” but this pursuit only reproduces a specific colonial violence wishing to uphold an antiquated hierarchy between East and West. As a writer, I find that many Muslim American creatives fuss and whine about the lack of Muslim American representation in the creative fields while consistently failing to seek out art from the Muslim world.
We use our vast breadth of knowledge on Western-centered media to become well-versed in the “intellectual richness” of White culture all while harnessing a similarly oversimplified understanding of our community to further alienate our people and isolate ourselves from them.
In an effort to become “cultured,” we read a lot of books and develop many poignant opinions on art, film, and music, yet refuse to use our intellect to reorient contemporary Muslim issues in the political context in which they demand to be understood.
My advice, taken from the language of modern American politics, is to be unabashedly radical — to strive for Islam, and its notions of beauty, love, acceptance, and desire, with a conscious rejection of anything else.
Radical self-acceptance is not the feckless life advice you receive from your White yoga instructor from Santa Clara but the active decision to question your sense of self as a product of a violent history hell-bent on warping your worldview from the inside out.
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