It's Not About the Burqa by Mariam Khan

Author:Mariam Khan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Eight Notifications

Salma Haidrani

It’s 7 a.m. and my phone keeps pinging. It’s a sharp trill, indecently loud. Bleary-eyed, I grab it. One eye on the screen, it’s too late to think I should have hit airplane mode before I fell asleep. I feel like I’m suffocating the moment I view my Twitter notifications. There are eight. Blue, shiny and unopened.

I might be in my bed but I certainly don’t feel safe.

I roll over and throw the phone across the room.

Here we go again.

I’m scared of my phone. Actually, that’s not strictly true. I’m not scared of the cat-shaped case, with blue and white diamonds encrusted on it. The best bit? It saves me time rummaging in my black handbag. When I take a photo, it’s often the first thing that people notice. But I am scared of the sounds my phone makes. Where I used to spend languorous lunchtimes scrolling through memes, and where there was once a sliver of excitement the moment I pressed on the blue bird icon, I now dread the number of notifications that might await me.

It wasn’t always like this, but since I started writing articles about Muslim women in early January 2016, the number of messages I receive has increased – it seems like everyone has an opinion about Muslim women. The first article I wrote was for Broadly, VICE’s women’s interest channel, and it was a feature on the UK’s first halal sex shop. The sex shop was the brainchild of a Nottingham-based businessman who wanted to offer Muslim customers the opportunity to purchase (among other items) gelatin-free lube, vibrators and kegel balls. The catch? There wouldn’t be a bacon-flavoured sex toy in sight.1

Humorous as it might have seemed on the surface, I was hoping to shed light on the limited opportunities for Muslim women in the UK to explore their sexuality when most mainstream sex shops – which often have sexually explicit store fronts – could be intimidating for them. I hoped that readers would recognize just how far the UK’s first halal sex shop, which offered a nudity-free buying experience, could serve to empower Muslim women.

I was the first person in the UK to profile the halal sex shop in depth, and a sense of pride spread through my body when I saw the published article on my screen. So imagine my shock when I returned after lunchtime and logged back onto Twitter: there were many more than eight notifications waiting for me.

Most of them had nothing to do with the article itself. A few didn’t even care to read the full piece, posting comments along the lines of ‘How can the sex toys be classed as halal? Are they blessed?!’ A few times, I reminded them to re-read the article but quickly realized it was all falling on deaf ears. I couldn’t quite believe my article could elicit that much outrage from complete strangers.

I blocked several people and tried to push the messages out of my mind but they swam back to the surface.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.