Unbound launches Ezaydi's investigation into white feminism and Islamophobia

Unbound has launched a crowdfunding campaign for The Othered Woman: How White Feminism Harms Muslim Women by writer and journalist Shahed Ezaydi.

The debut promises an analysis of myths that white feminism holds regarding Muslim women, including single-issue oppression, liberation politics and the inherent misogyny of Muslim men.

"White liberal feminism has long treated Muslim women as both invisible — by actively excluding them from women’s liberation movements — and hypervisible, with the near-obsession of liberating or ‘saving’ them," the synopsis reads. "Both harm Muslim women. Although more people are waking up to the problematic nature of white feminism, it very rarely stretches to the conversations around just how closely intertwined white feminism and Islamophobia are.

"As part of her investigation, Shahed discovers that many Muslim women are rejecting the notion of a white Western feminism, and instead are fighting for their liberation in their own way."

Ezaydi was previously the deputy editor of Aurelia Magazine, a publication that platforms the thoughts and feelings of marginalised genders. She has also written for major publications such as HuffPost, Vice, Glamour, Stylist, and gal-dem. She has previously explored feminism and Islamophobia in her writing and is now delving further into the relationship between them.

"I’m completely overjoyed to be working with Unbound on my first book, The Othered Woman," she said. "As a young Muslim woman, I grew up internalising so much of the Islamophobia around me that I used to believe people when they called my own religion ‘backwards’ and ‘woman hating’. And this was something I then saw in the classroom, where Muslim women were nowhere to be seen in my classes or in my books. The Othered Woman is the kind of book I wish I had access to when I first started learning about feminist thinking."

Commissioning editor Aliya Gulamani said: "Shahed is a world-class talent, with a flair for writing about topics at the heart of our society. I’m absolutely thrilled to commission her debut book, The Othered Woman: How White Feminism Harms Muslim Women. From liberation politics to single-issue oppression, Shahed’s nuanced investigation of gendered Islamophobia brings an essential perspective to intersectional feminist literature."