As Islamophobia grows throughout the Western world, Muslim women are the most at risk of physical and mental abuse.

In any minority women tend to bear the brunt of hate, but due to some Muslim women dress codes such as the hijab, Islamophobes are able to target their victims with far greater ease.

Mariam Veiszadeh created the site Islamophobia Register Australia to report incidents of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim sentiments

Statistics show that Islamophobic attacks are at an all-time high, increasing fear for the safety of Muslim women.

In the USA, the Council on American-Islamic Relations recorded over 70 attacks on mosques in 2015, the highest number yet.

During the first ten months of 2015, in London the Metropolitan Police reported a 47% increase in Islamophobic attacks.

In the week following the Paris terror attacks, British organisation Tell MAMA, which monitors Islamophobic abuse, recorded 115 new cases alone.

“We’re overwhelmed by the scale of the problem we’re dealing with,” Tell MAMA founder Fiyaz Mughal told online publication Broadly.

“Visible Muslim women encounter the most violence and harassment at a street level,” said Mughal.

“There’s a definite gender issue here at work when it comes to anti-Muslim hate.”

With 80% of the Islamophobic attacks after Paris being against women, Mughal explains that the reasons for this are mainly practical.

“There’s a visibility factor. It’s easy to identify Muslim women who dress in Islamic dress. And also there’s the fact that they are less likely to fight back.”

Recently in Melbourne there have been incidents of Muslim women having their scarves pulled off them, having hot coffee thrown at them and a woman being punched in the face in October of last year.

In September last year the online site ‘Islamophobia Register Australia’ was created to ‘report incidents of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim sentiments in Australia’.

Site organiser, Mariam Veiszadeh, is an advocate for Australian Muslims and a lawyer.

“It’s incredibly worrying that the vast majority of reports being submitted to the Register are of verbal and physical abuse directed at Australian Muslim women,” said Veiszadeh.

She said that women wearing the visible symbols of their faith were increasingly the recipients of racist and Islamophobic public attacks.

In August of last year Nasirin, a Muslim woman from Melbourne, organised an awareness forum on Islamophobia in Coburg after her own experiences and hearing stories of other Muslim women being attacked.

“From a victim’s point of view, Islamophobia is racism,” Nasrin said to a crowd of 200 people at the forum.

“People can say Islam is not a race … but from a victim’s point of view this kind of abuse … affects our lives, how we go on with our daily lives.”

Shortly after the Martin Place deadly siege in December 2014, Nasrin was attacked twice and was ‘shaken inside’.

“I was returning from work on the train — a lady started pushing me with her bag and she started yelling at me and telling me to go back to the Middle East. I didn’t come from the Middle East,” said the Bangladeshi mother of three whom came to Australia in 1991.

Nasrin, who wears a black veil that covers half of her face, said that every single day she would sit next to the emergency button on the train due to constant fear of being attacked again.

Nasrin’s concern for “the media and politicians’ publicity of the highly publicised raid cases” coincides with the statistics of increased Islamophobia after the Paris attacks.

“If you look at those raid cases, as soon as they are on the television, the news, that’s when the Muslim women start to get attacked,” said Nasrin.

“I’m not a scary person. I’m very friendly and if you have any questions, come to this type of event, ask the question and learn that we are just normal people like you.

“There’s nothing to be scared of, we can be friends.”

Ruby Brown
AMES Australia Staff Writer