The Othered Woman: How White Feminism Harms Muslim Women, by Shahed Ezaydi

The Othered Woman: How White Feminism Harms Muslim Women, by Shahed Ezaydi (Pluto, 20 March 2026)

Reviewed by Dylan Evans

There is a particular kind of book that does not merely enter an existing debate but quietly rearranges its terms, making it difficult—after reading—to return to the conversation as it was before. The Othered Woman: How White Feminism Harms Muslim Women by Shahed Ezaydi is such a book. It does not shout, posture, or indulge in rhetorical excess. Instead, it performs a more unsettling operation: it exposes the conceptual scaffolding that has long sustained a certain kind of feminist common sense, and in doing so reveals how deeply that common sense is entangled with structures of exclusion, misrecognition, and power.

At the heart of Ezaydi’s argument is a deceptively simple claim: that what is commonly called “white feminism” is not merely a limited or partial feminism, but a system that actively produces Muslim women as a problem to be interpreted, managed, and—above all—spoken for. This is not a story of forgetfulness, of voices accidentally left out. It is a story of structured inclusion on unequal terms, in which Muslim women are rendered hyper-visible as symbols while remaining curiously absent as subjects. They appear everywhere in the discourse, but almost never as authors of it.

One of the most striking conceptual moves in the book is Ezaydi’s insistence on the relationship between whiteness and innocence. Drawing on the work of theorists such as Terese Jonsson, she shows that white feminism sustains itself not simply by advancing particular claims, but by cultivating a moral self-image. White feminists, she suggests, are deeply invested in being understood—and in understanding themselves—as good. This is not a trivial observation. Innocence, in this context, functions as a kind of political currency. It allows critique to be deflected before it can take hold, because any challenge to the framework can be reinterpreted as a misunderstanding of good intentions rather than an exposure of structural harm.

Once you see this mechanism, it becomes difficult to unsee. The familiar responses—“I didn’t know,” “I have a Muslim friend,” “that’s not what I meant”—begin to look less like genuine engagements and more like rituals of self-exoneration, ways of restoring a moral equilibrium in which the speaker remains untainted. The system, in other words, is not simply defended; it is continuously cleansed. Innocence is not the absence of guilt, but the active production of it as a condition of possibility for the continued centering of white women within feminist movements.

If innocence is one pillar of Ezaydi’s analysis, the other is her adoption of a sharply defined concept of Islamophobia. Rather than treating Islamophobia as a diffuse prejudice or a vague cultural bias, she draws on Lola Olufemi’s pathbreaking analysis in Feminism Interrupted (2020) to frame it as the social and political assumption that Muslims are predisposed to violence. This is a decisive shift. It relocates the discussion from the level of attitudes to the level of underlying premises. Islamophobia is not just what people feel; it is what they take for granted before any explicit judgment is made.

This definition proves extraordinarily generative. It explains why so many tropes about Muslim women—oppressed, voiceless, submissive—cohere so easily, and why they persist even in ostensibly sympathetic or feminist contexts. If Islam is presumed to be inherently violent, then the Muslim woman is immediately legible as either its victim or its accomplice. She is either crushed by a coercive system or implicated in its reproduction. In neither case is she granted full interpretive authority over her own life. The framework does the interpretive work in advance.

What emerges from this analysis is a picture of white feminism as operating within what might be called a security imaginary. The Muslim woman is not simply another woman situated within a different cultural or religious tradition; she is positioned within a field already saturated by ideas of threat, extremism, and danger. This helps explain the curious elasticity of feminist concern in this domain. Questions about clothing, marriage, or religious practice slide almost imperceptibly into questions about radicalisation, social cohesion, and national security. The discourse is never purely about gender. It is always already entangled with a broader political logic.

Ezaydi is particularly effective in showing how this logic produces a series of distortions. One of the most pervasive is what she calls the “single-issue oppression” framework, in which Muslim women’s lives are reduced to their relationship with Islam. Racism, class inequality, state violence, and economic hardship recede into the background, while religion is elevated as the sole explanatory factor. The result is a kind of analytical tunnel vision. Everything is traced back to Islam, even when the more immediate causes lie elsewhere. A woman facing workplace discrimination, housing precarity, or racial abuse is reinterpreted through a lens that insists on seeing her primarily as a victim of her faith.

This narrowing of focus is not merely an intellectual error; it has material consequences. By attributing Muslim women’s difficulties to culture or religion, attention is diverted away from the structural conditions—poverty, border regimes, surveillance policies—that shape their lives in the present. The critique is displaced from the institutions of the West to the traditions of the Other. In this sense, white feminism does not simply misunderstand Muslim women; it participates in the reproduction of the very structures that harm them, even as it claims to advocate on their behalf.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the politics of the veil. Ezaydi offers a careful and nuanced account of how Muslim women’s clothing has become a site of intense symbolic investment. Within a white feminist framework, the veil is almost always read as a sign of oppression, its removal as a moment of liberation. This binary is so deeply entrenched that the possibility of choice is effectively erased. A woman who chooses to wear the hijab does not register as exercising agency; she is understood as internalising or submitting to a coercive norm.

What Ezaydi exposes here is not simply a disagreement about interpretation, but a deeper imposition of a particular model of womanhood. Liberation is defined in advance, according to a set of Western norms—sexual expression, visibility, autonomy conceived in individualistic terms—and then universalised. Women who do not conform to this model are not seen as making different choices, but as failing to achieve the correct form of freedom. The effect is to transform feminism from a project of emancipation into a mechanism of standardisation.

And yet, for all its critical force, The Othered Woman is not a bleak or purely diagnostic text. One of its strengths is that it continually returns to the voices and experiences of Muslim women themselves, refusing to leave them in the position of objects of analysis. The final sections of the book gesture towards a different kind of feminist politics—one that is genuinely intersectional, attentive to structural conditions, and willing to relinquish the comfort of innocence in favour of a more demanding engagement with power.

What makes Ezaydi’s book so compelling, in the end, is not simply the arguments it advances, but the clarity with which it reveals the quiet machinery underlying a great deal of contemporary feminist discourse. It shows how assumptions about innocence and violence, virtue and threat, are woven into the fabric of that discourse in ways that are rarely acknowledged. And it does so without collapsing into cynicism or abandoning the possibility of solidarity. On the contrary, it insists that solidarity, if it is to mean anything at all, must begin with a willingness to question the frameworks through which we claim to understand one another.

This is a book that deserves to be widely read, not only within feminist circles but far beyond them. It is, quite simply, an intervention that makes complacency harder to sustain. And once read, it leaves behind a lingering question, one that is as uncomfortable as it is necessary: who, exactly, is being centred—and at whose expense?

To purchase “The Othered Woman”: https://www.plutobooks.com/product/the-othered-woman/ 

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