Islam's Trojan horse: battling perceptions of Muslim women in The 99

Abstract

The September 11 attacks intensified media and scholarly attention on Muslim women, occasioning controversial debates and discussions ranging from curious questions about Muslim women’s lives to eager clarifications on their status in Islamic societies. While numerous responses contributed to clearing space for the inclusion of Muslim women’s issues in international fora, these well-meaning efforts ended up reinforcing pre-9/11 beliefs about their oppression and subordination in Islamic societies, and ironically narrowed the dialectic of feminism in Islam to a struggle between women and religious fundamentalism. It was to widen this dialectic, among other things, and to expand the normative boundaries of feminist critique of Islam that Naif Al-Mutawa responded with his comic book The 99 by presenting Muslim women as superheroes. However, as this paper will argue, it is not in the unilateral representation of women as villain-bashing superheroes in direct contrast to their portrayal as defenseless victims of violence but to unravel the complex dimensions of feminisms in Islam that also include women’s weaknesses, struggles and problems, that The 99 visualizes a timely response to the ongoing polemic on Islam and Islamic feminism, in particular.