Western Media And The Weaponisation Of Muslim Women

Reporting from the wastelands of U.S. imperialism, Western journalists often perform what Eve Tuck calls “moves to innocence”: maneuvers that erase imperialism’s fundamental role in creating these ruins. They invoke liberal discourses—feminism, democracy, free speech, human rights—to whitewash Western war crimes and conflicts. The benighted Arab/Muslim woman—always portrayed as oppressed, dehumanised, helpless, and voiceless—has long been a common media trope. Calls for her liberation are exploited by journalists to justify death and destruction, including that of the woman herself.

An excerpt titled ‘An Inconvenient Woman” from independent photojournalist Asim Rafiqui’s upcoming self-published book False Prophets: Western Media and the Betrayal of its Myths’, which will be released in April 2026.

On October 13, 2013, Malala Yousafzai, a 15-year-old Pakistani schoolgirl, was received at the White House by President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle Obama. Malala, perhaps even to her surprise, had by then become an international cause célèbre and rocketed to international celebrity after Taliban shooters attacked a girls' school in Swat, Pakistan, and injured her. She became a global spokesperson for girls' education and, equally, for the liberal West's self-proclaimed struggle against the tyranny of religious obscurantism. For a US and Pakistani military and political establishment mired in a seemingly pointless and unresolvable conflict on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border regions, Malala offered the 'human rights' cover to a war that was becoming one of the US's most protracted and intractable. The use of brown women to cover US imperial wars in the region wasn't anything new. Laura Bush–treading a long tradition of colonial claims of "freeing brown women from brown men” as justifications for colonial repressions and killing–had argued that the "fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women.”

The attack on Malala captured the political and media's imagination because it encapsulated in one stroke the humanitarian and feminist message of the US "war on terror." Girls' educational rights fitted well with militant Western imperialism's self-image as a civilisational and progressive force in the region. It helped the Pakistani political and military establishment garland itself as a liberal force while ensuring that its historical record of near-complete neglect of and indifference towards public education for girls and boys in Pakistan remained unquestioned. On her visit to the USA, she was feted and received by many influential political figures, activists, socialites, and celebrities. She appeared as a guest on The Daily Show–the ultimate measure of her acceptance into the American popular imagination. The European Union honoured her with the Sakharov Human Rights Prize. She spoke at Harvard University. She later shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Kailash Satyarthi, an Indian campaigner against the exploitation of children. “We were awe-struck by her courage,” President Obama stated during his meeting with her at the White House, “and filled with hope knowing this is only the beginning of her extraordinary efforts to make the world a better place.

That same year, another young Pakistani girl arrived in the USA. She, too, came from a US geography of war and was a victim of violence. However, she received far less interest and media attention. There were no late-night television appearances or lunches at the White House—no seminars at Harvard for her to speak her piece. At significant risk to herself and her family, nine-year-old Nabila Rehman travelled from Waziristan to the US to testify about the killing of her grandmother by a US drone strike in Northern Waziristan. Mamana Bibi, Nabila’s 68-year-old grandmother, was killed in an American drone strike on October 24, 2012.

Along with six other children, Nabila was with her grandmother that fateful afternoon, playing and working in the fields, when the drone missiles struck nearby, instantly killing Mamana Bibi. Nabila’s younger brother, Zubair, and younger sister, Asma, were both badly injured in the attack. Nabila herself sustained severe shrapnel and burns across her body. On October 30, 2013, Nabila entered the chambers of the US Congress to speak directly to those responsible for the decisions that continue to maim and destroy so many lives across Pakistan’s North Western frontier with Afghanistan. But the chamber was empty. Only five of the 100 Senators and 435 House of Representatives members of Congress bothered to attend an event that must have been one of the most critical, most unusual experiences of this little girl’s life. She, too, was a young Pakistani girl with a message of peace, acting with courage and hope; she was not a voice the US wanted to hear, nor interested in “liberating.”

Perhaps it was because, in 2013, the ground truth was quite clear. In Afghanistan and Pakistan’s tribal frontier regions, “the rate at which civilians are being killed has picked up, and the numbers of women and children among the civilian dead have risen dramatically.” Or that the “pace of civilian death seems only to be gaining momentum as if in some morbid race to the finish.” Ironically, as Nabila sat in the empty Congressional chamber, President Obama attended a meeting with weapons manufacturers, security technology corporations and CEOs of banks that had willfully indulged in fraud and theft but were now about to receive a massive bailout.

Malala Yousafzai and Nabila Rehman were products of the same imperial geography and political imaginaries in the US. They were incorporated into the calculus of US imperial interests to serve as a cover and a distraction. Their relevance and irrelevance as women of concern hinged on their roles within the US imperial drama. They were, and remain, regardless of the fame of one and the marginality of the other, actors in the stage play called the “War on Terror.” Their uses are what Hortense J. Spillers described as "a theft of the body–a willful and violent severing of the captive body from its motive will, its active desire." It is a capture that erases a person's "private and particular space" where "biological, sexual, social, cultural, linguistic, ritualistic, and psychological fortunes join." Instead, it completely disrupts and erases this space, imposing "externally imposed meanings and uses" on the captured body. The woman is just one of the many screens exploited to help construct US innocence.

Colonial feminism–one of colonialism’s earliest obsessions and justifications–reared its head in the nineteenth century. It achieves widespread resonance in the Western imagination because of the West’s inherent sense of its cultural and intellectual superiority–what Edward W. Said labelled “Orientalism.” It was one of several justifications for an empire, helping veil its instrumental and political goals, as well as its violent, repressive truths. The theft of Muslim/Arab women’s bodies and exploitation as justifications for colonial conquest has a long pedigree. We find these bodies utilised by the British in India, the French in Algeria, colonial administrations in Egypt, and elsewhere. Modern-day US imperialism’s exploitation of Muslim/Arab women’s bodies is undoubtedly no exception. It continues a Western tradition of using progressive and liberal discourses to justify and veil colonial wars, occupations, resource theft, and white settler communities.

As Pramod K. Nayar has argued, Europe’s colonial civilising mission dovetailed different forms of domination and control. It relied on the rhetoric of “reform, rescue, and more material progress.” Women were essential to the project. “The rescue of allegedly subjugated native women,” Nayar points out, “treated social reform of the barbaric races as a bounden duty and saw the moral progress of the natives as intimately connected to their material progress.”

Elsewhere, the French explained their colonial practices and the brutal violence and expropriation of bodies and resources they entailed through humanitarian discourses. Albert Sarraut, the French colonial minister in the Congo from 1920 to 1924, had justified constructing the Congo-Océan railway as serving ‘human solidarity and not as the straightforward colonial exploitation project that it was. “It is for the good of everyone that we act,” Sarraut argued in a speech in 1923, “and primarily, for the good even of those that appear dispossessed.”

The Arab/Muslim woman has long been one of the main sites for practising progressive imperialism, drawing the concern of Western patriarchy and compelling its men to act to "save them." Women's bodies have been stolen in the service of US imperial wars, and this theft is evidenced best and most unapologetically on the pages of mainstream publications. In 2010, as doubts and questions were being raised about the continuing US military occupation of Afghanistan, Time magazine published a cover portrait of a young Afghan woman whose face had been brutally mutilated and was left with a "jagged bridge of scarred flesh and bone" where her husband had cut off her nose. "We do not run this story," Richard Stengel, the then editor of the magazine, disingenuously explained, "or show this image either in support of the US war effort or in opposition to it. We do it to illuminate what is actually happening on the ground.” Time magazine reduced Aisha's personal history, life, memories, ambitions, desires, relations, social connections, and culture, making her useful in US imperialism's civilisational narrative. "Aisha posed for the picture," Stengel continued, "and says she wants the world to see the effect a Taliban resurgence would have on the women of Afghanistan, many of whom have flourished in the past few years." Manufacturing a sovereign subject who stands outside power, interests, influence, and coercion, Time offered us a ready-made woman "empowered" by US power. A liberal, "woke" politics was weaponised, and women's bodies became ammunition.

Sara Ahmed points out how progressive imperialism and its discourses remain a form of domination and power, ensuring that the European/Western subjects “remain in a position of the one who is active/heroic/giving to the others. If the others do not receive this gift happily, they become ungrateful or mean.” Stengel speaks for Aisha and places her where his progressive imperialism needs to put her: as an object of Western salvation and protection. Her agency, voice, individuality, and visibility are entirely determined and defined by her place and the possibilities of her role in a story she did not write, nor can she change. She is visible for as long as she is valuable.

It wasn’t a coincidence that Time magazine published this cover story just days before WikiLeaks released the Afghan War Diaries, which documented extensive evidence of war crimes, military corruption, and the overall failure of the war. Aisha is trapped inside the cage of war. She will cease to exist should she dare to veer away from the script. It is what happened to Malalai Joya, an Afghan woman who lost her status as the right kind of Afghan when she started to speak out against the American occupation of Afghanistan, the violence and suffering it was inflicting on the people, and the criminality of the American puppet regime under the warlords and war criminals of the Northern Alliance. In a write-up about her in Time magazine, Ayaan Hirsi Ali–a Muslim woman who had discovered the gold at the end of the neoconservative rainbow–patronisingly hoped that Joya “comes to see the US and NATO forces in her country as her allies…[and that]…the road to freedom is long and arduous and needs every hand.” In Hirsi Ali's words, we can hear how “secular redemptive politics” carries with it the “readiness to cause pain to those who are to be saved by being humanised.”

Today, many from the global south–including the media–are involved in this expropriation and capture of women's bodies as the media, intellectuals, artists, writers, and feminists in "the global south have actively contributed to the articulation of new forms and new agents of imperialist feminism." Nation-states have entered the game, particularly the most authoritarian, militarised, and repressive. Stories about 'liberated' and 'modern' women from repressive and dictatorial regimes who happen to be US allies have received broad attention in the mainstream US press.

Using women as "window dressing" is a lesson that was quickly learned and put to use, and when it came to US allies, these stories were eagerly published. The use of women is not about the women. It isn't in the service of a liberal ideal, either. It is always about imperialism and producing among the citizens of imperial metropolises a conviction that what "redeems [imperial violence] is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea—something you can set up, bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to.”