Many recent incidents point towards Muslim women being harassed on the streets and on online spaces such as Twitter by fellow Muslim men. Many Muslim Women activists like Irena Akbar from Lucknow, the journalist Fatima Khan, and Nabiya Khan from Delhi, who were praised for their courage and bravery in the protests against Citizenship Amendment Act, were berated and excessively trolled when they spoke up against street vigilantism. This includes a group of men who would mishandle and threaten Muslim women, shove cameras in their faces, snatch away their phones, and make their videos viral on social media.
The women would be name-called for allegedly having been on the street with men of other communities, be it someone from college or the workplace. In the absence of any conversation or context, simply existing in the same space as the men would be enough to label and police them. Many on Twitter supported such self-proclaimed Muslim vigilante mobs for beating up men and teaching women a lesson. Mob justice was openly glorified and presented as Islamic through a twisted logic.
If concerns about un-Islamic values and way of life must be expressed and fingers pointed, then they should be directed towards the whole community rather than a few random women. Such rage should be channelled to work consistently at the community level or with organizations known for promoting Islamic values by identifying socio-political barriers, rather than delivering vigilante justice on the streets. Such genuine long-term Islamically informed efforts help individuals reform themselves into practising Muslims through a variety of means such as ijtemas/ taleems, tarbiyah and street dawah. Alas, mob justice is never about such deep social concerns, reforming individuals, or implementing Islamic practices.
A closer look at these recorded videos, see men justify these actions due to the alleged threat of ‘Bhagwa Love Trap’.
As one definition on Twitter goes- “Bhagwa Love Trap is a well-planned and secret campaign run by Hindutva Organisations that train Hindu youths to lure and trap Muslim girls into marriage” Whether the above stated is a real or an imaginary phenomenon or a conspiracy theory is irrelevant. Misleading statements claim thousands of Muslim women have fallen into the Bhagwa love trap, falling flat as there is absolutely no data on such events. Recently, AltNews shared that a viral letter, which was seen as proof of RSS’s plot to trap Muslim women, was declared fake. At its best, they are videos of couples hanging out in parks and corners – a truly Indian phenomenon all of us have awkwardly witnessed growing up.
Interchange the words Hindus for Muslims, and voila, you get Love Jihad. The extremists from either community feed off each other’s mutual distrust. In most such circumstances, the Hindu majority community has more potential to inflict harm through such propaganda than the minority community, in this case, the Muslims. The narrative of Love Jihad finds itself in the ruling parties’ BJP’s manifestos, speeches of politicians, and financial and administrative support through movies like The Kerala Story. It can and continues to influence state policy on interfaith marriages. It has also put a few Muslim men behind bars on unproven charges of forced religious conversion.
However, the narrative of the Bhagwa Love Trap, although equally problematic, can go no further than momentarily ruffling up fellow Muslim women and Hindu men found together and posing more significant restrictions on Muslim women’s mobility.
The consequences of such rumours taking society’s grip are genuine. Nothing justifies a scenario where a large, disorganized crowd of people take the law into their hands and aggressively impose judgement and punishment on a suspect. Such unverified rumours create mutual distrust in society, making Hindus and Muslims view each other with suspicion and hatred. These prejudices eventually become deep-rooted, and a small trigger might potentially cause lynchings or communal riots. To believe that two communities are at the same time planning and executing a coveted plot to determine who can convert more women is as ridiculous as it sounds. The idea that our women must be saved from their men by beating and threatening them can no longer work. Multiple studies show that women in our society need safe spaces to feel heard and understood rather than be a subject of constant suspicion.
Moreover, the whole narrative of ‘our’ women and ‘their’ women eventually portray women as chattels for transactions in both communities. Women are boxed and categorized as lesser beings who cannot think for themselves and can be easily manipulated. Instead of empowering women to engage with the real world with confidence and Islamic values, it plays on the assumption that women are gullible, they know little of the outside world, and men must continuously monitor and control them. Such a weaponization of the fears of concerned Muslim parents enables and sanctions undue restrictions on Muslim women, such as limiting their access to education, life opportunities, and their ability to learn, reflect and understand.
Another interesting pattern is that Muslim women speaking up against the harassment of Muslim women are being labelled and put in a box – “The closet liberal feminist women who support inter-faith marriages”. The black-and-white worldview and the restricting gaze leave no scope for women outside these boxes.
Many Muslim women and I refuse to be labelled and slandered as such. Speaking up against mob justice doesn’t make us neither opposers nor supporters of all shades of inter-faith marriages. The issue of interfaith marriages is amply clear, and we abide by the Islamic law and the position of classical scholars on it. However, we will continue speaking against the problematic documented incidents targeting Muslim women on the streets and on social media by Muslim men scapegoating Islam to justify their ignorance. Such vile actions are devoid of Prophetic manners and wisdom. Those who do them neither have the requisite understanding of Prophetic hikmat (wisdom) on encouraging good and forbidding evil. The advocates of such vigilantism do not seem to possess the skill set to grasp the potential consequence of their retaliatory actions.
Harassing a few random men and women on the streets and making their videos without their consent does not come from a space of love for the deen (faith) or care for Muslim women. It reflects a desire to insult, shame, inflict trauma and punish. It assumes guilt, encourages vandalism, and pushes Muslims and non-muslims, who have little connection with Islam, away from deen. The root cause of unIslamic values and actions in both Muslim men and women are much more deeply rooted, and there is no easy way out of Islamic parenting, which requires much of our resources and time.
At the same time, I call out sincere Muslim men to be vocal and loud in their support of other Muslim women who are being dishonoured through such unruly behaviour in online and offline spaces. The believers are like one body in their mutual kindness, compassion, and sympathy. When one of the limbs suffers, the whole body responds to it with wakefulness and fever. We all will be accountable for our words and our silences. To quote an ayah of the Quran, when people suspected our mother of the believer Aisha RA of indecency, Allah SWT himself stood up for her in Surah An-Noor
May Allah enable us to be the best Muslims that we can be. May the believing men and the believing women be guardians of each other. Ameen.
Muslim men specially sunni now make allah into clown they can now attack anyone in the name of bhagwa love traap or blasphemy. They will even beat allah or prophet Muhammad if they try to convince them this this are worng