Polished Power: Volume II: Muslim Women Beyond Political Performance
OP-ED | Polished Power
By: Nora Alzahid
In global public discourse, Muslim women are frequently treated as symbols rather than actors. Their visibility is interrogated, their clothing politicized, and their private choices repurposed as evidence in civilizational debates. What is discussed is rarely autonomy itself, but how legible that autonomy appears to external audiences.
The public presence of figures such as Zohran Mamdani and New York’s first lady, Rama Duwaji, offers a quieter counterpoint to this framing. Duwaji, an artist with an established creative practice, does not reorganize her professional life around her husband’s political trajectory, nor does she perform resistance to validate an external gaze. Her work continues on its own terms. She is visible without being consumable. This distinction matters.
Rather than seeking to correct stereotypes through argument, such figures unsettle them through existence. Their lives resist ideological capture not because they are exceptional, but because they refuse to be translated into familiar scripts of victimhood or rebellion. They retain authorship over work, faith, partnership, and style without explanation or apology.
This dynamic is not new.
Historical encounters between European observers and Muslim societies during the Ottoman period reveal a similar disruption of assumed hierarchies. Women who gained access to private domestic spaces, often through diplomatic or elite social networks, documented encounters with Muslim women exercising legal and economic autonomy at a time when such rights were restricted in Europe. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, among the most cited, remarked on the legal personhood of Ottoman Muslim women after marriage, their control over property, and their ability to appear independently before courts, conditions that contrasted sharply with the English doctrine of coverture, which absorbed a married woman’s legal identity into that of her husband.
These accounts were not anomalies. Ottoman Sharia court records confirm that Muslim women routinely owned and inherited property, initiated lawsuits against husbands and business partners, and established waqf endowments that funded schools, hospitals, and public infrastructure. A woman’s income was legally her own; Islamic law did not grant husbands authority over a wife’s wages or assets. These rights were enforceable, recorded, and exercised across centuries, even as social norms and lived experiences varied by class, geography, and historical moment.
Such realities complicated European assumptions about progress and modernity. Over time, however, they were selectively forgotten. Western feminist narratives became increasingly insular, while Muslim women were reframed as late arrivals to rights movements rather than participants in distinct legal traditions of autonomy. The result was a flattened global story in which freedom appeared to flow in only one direction.
What we are witnessing today is not a reversal of that story, but its reappearance.
The growing visibility of Muslim women who refuse both victimhood and ideological reduction signals a return to a rights framework grounded in law rather than performance. In contemporary discourse, empowerment is often conflated with alignment: the adoption of specific aesthetics, vocabularies, and symbolic gestures that signal liberation without necessarily securing material or legal agency. Concern for women’s rights is expressed through optics, while questions of property ownership and legal standing receive far less attention.
This distinction between performative liberation and substantive rights is critical.
Policy and Public-Diplomacy Recommendations
- Shift from optics to institutions
Public diplomacy frameworks should prioritize legal, economic, and institutional indicators of women’s rights, property ownership, wage equality, and legal standing over visibility-based metrics.
- Stop instrumentalizing Muslim women
Engagement strategies should treat Muslim women as actors with diverse, self-defined priorities, not as symbolic evidence for ideological positions.
- Reintegrate legal history into gender narratives
Diplomatic and educational platforms should acknowledge Islamic legal traditions that historically secured women’s economic and legal autonomy, correcting selective historical amnesia.