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Bodies in Revolt: Longing, Liberation, and the Politics of Being in Muslim Worlds

This piece was originally published in the May 2025 issue of Pandora Curated.



Very often, while engaging in feminist discourse, we forget to contextualise “the other woman.” The binary of gendered socialization and roles does not merely shape one’s identity. Women are shaped and constructed by culture, history, politics and art. When discussing freedom, it is pertinent to ask: What are the different kinds of freedom that other women seek? Consequently, we must recognise that the social, political and historical parameters for freedom differ according to what one seeks freedom from.


Illustration of three pensive women with green and blue faces, overlaid with keyhole and padlock graphics, symbolizing themes of identity, control, and liberation. The background features repeated key shapes in varying shades of blue. This conceptual artwork visually represents themes from "Bodies in Revolt: Longing, Liberation, and the Politics of Being in Muslim Worlds."
Illustration by Anviksha Bhardwaj

We must also understand that social memory plays a crucial role in shaping one’s concept of liberation and justice. Lila Abu-Lughod, in her paper Do Muslim Women Need Saving?, reiterates that we need to develop “a serious appreciation of differences among women in the world—as products of different histories, expressions of different circumstances, and manifestations of differently structured desires.”


But what does it mean to “save” someone? And who gets to decide what they need saving from? One needs to explore how the discourse around “saving” Muslim women, in particular, often comes from a colonial, culturally superior gaze that strips them of their agency. Instead, by using the distinct lens of radical films like Joyland and Seed of the Sacred Fig, we see how gender, sexuality, artistic expression and resistance take shape in very specific cultural and political realities. These stories ask us to see desire not as a symptom of victimhood, but as a powerful force for selfhood. Following Lila Abu-Lughod’s call for cultural specificity and historical awareness, it can safely be asserted that liberation must come from within, defined by the people living it, not imposed from the outside.


Every society that emerged free from the shackles of colonialism has, ever since, been stuck in a conundrum: how must it transition to a modern vision of statehood while not losing the tradition or native culture that has been followed and almost replaced until then? This negotiation between the inevitable emergence of the modern and the need to preserve culture has been reflected in the different ideas advocated in Muslim societies. 


Jeff Kenney writes, “By the mid-twentieth century, Muslims had, with different levels of enthusiasm and insight, embraced nationalism, Islamism, Arabism, socialism, Communism, capitalism and democracy. According to their respective advocates, all possessed the capacity to bring Muslims into the modern world, and all were compatible with, if not the embodiment of, Islamic teachings.” The incorporation of these ideological changes helps substantiate the argument that Muslim worlds are adapting to and negotiating with the modern world and their religion even today. 


This liminal space between tradition and modernity finds the site for its articulation in the female body, a primary focus of both Joyland and Seed of the Sacred Fig. They ask, who is the ‘modern woman’ and who is the protector of culture, often portrayed as the ‘good woman’? As is often the case, this deals with the idea of how women navigate their position in reclaiming public spaces and their self-assertion with regards to making the ‘personal into the political’. 


Saim Sadiq in Joyland masters the depiction of desires and their politics in the song sequence of the ‘Biba’. While there is much to unpack from the film, this one sequence offers plenty of material to analyse the political dynamics of existing within Muslim societies.


The utterly contrasting but sensuously intersecting lives of Mumtaz and Biba collide in this song sequence where Biba seizes her opportunity to take to the stage to perform for the first time, under the watchful gaze of men in the erotic dance theatre. Concurrently, we see Mumtaz visiting an amusement park with her sister-in-law, where she experiences the arousal of her desire when a man accidentally bumps into her while walking past, though she never chooses to act on her desire. 


Mumtaz goes on a ride, and the audience witnesses the expression of absolute leisure and joy in Mumtaz and her companion as they seem to fly while praying out loud to Allah, wishing their sins be washed away. The sequence introduces us to the nuances of expressing female and male desires and how they play out in public spaces. The men who are the audience in the erotic dance theatre have all the free will to openly gaze and act on their desire in a public space without much ostracism. But this is the only way Biba can access a public space without being violated for her trans identity, while Mumtaz treasures the opportunity to venture out while still maintaining the aura of what a good woman is in a public space.


Women’s ability to just exist in a public space is thus determined by how they can justify a purpose for being. As the authors of ‘Why Loiter?’ write, “The public woman is not so much a direct threat to ‘good’ women as much as an illustration of what might happen to good women should they break the rules. Namely, if they break the rules, they are no longer deemed worthy of ‘protection’ from society.” 


The men in Joyland constantly strive to protect the women of the household, which results in the continuous repression of female desire. Significantly, however, desire here is not just limited to sexual desire, but also encompasses the desire for leisure, the desire to access public spaces, the desire to be financially independent, the desire to claim agency and the desire to just exist without having to explain oneself. Women can only be when they prove themselves as good wives, or ‘good women’ under the protection of a man. The film helps us understand the peculiar nuances in the definitions of masculinities and femininities in a Muslim society. The patriarchy of this society cannot be saved by the notion of the ‘white man’s burden’.


Joyland’s highlight of joy can be understood through the lens of Audre Lorde’s work on ‘The Uses of Erotic’. Lorde writes, “an important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy. In the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea.” Similarly, the women in Joyland connect to themselves through reclaiming their right to desire and explore the erotic by feeling it, and not just dreaming of desire as a forbidden fruit. 


Mohammad Rasoulof’s thriller, Seed of the Sacred Fig, helps understand this argument further. The film depicts the 2022 Iranian protests in response to the death of Mahsa Amini under police custody, who was arrested by Iran’s morality police for not wearing a hijab in public. The most harrowing scenes of the film are where Rasaoulof has used footage from real life of the crackdown on the protests and state repression of the protests. 


The film sheds light on the desire for women to exist in both public and private spaces by claiming their agency. Their expression of desire finds solace in their right to protest. They do not seek help; they pursue their right to stand up for themselves. Such an expression of desire is dissent. One does not have to be an atheist or renounce one’s religion to be free of oppression; their dissent is thus aimed at the fundamentalist state. The background to the film is Rasoulof’s independent revolution against the state of Iran. His artistic integrity has been tested by censorship and legal action against him. But this is an example of how artistic storytelling disrupts the binary notions of oppression and liberation.


In her article, Lila Abu-Lughod highlights the need to be sensitive and aware of wanting to ‘save’ Muslim women. Everybody seeks justice, and it is quite fair to want justice for everyone as well, but we need to keep in mind that different people want justice in different ways since ideas, ideologies, and visions differ according to one’s beliefs and contexts. 


Like Abu-Lughod writes, “the question is why knowing about the 'culture' of the region, and particularly its religious beliefs and treatment of women, was more urgent than exploring the history of the development of repressive regimes in the region and the U.S. role in this history. Such cultural framing, it seemed to me, prevented the serious exploration of the roots and nature of human suffering in this part of the world. Instead of political and historical explanations, experts were being asked to give religio-cultural ones.” This led to the creation of the narrative of division between the East and West instead of forging global interconnections. The rampant usage of the ‘us vs. Muslims’ view frames the appropriation of one part of the world, which is modern and liberal, where First Ladies give speeches, while the other side of the world is portrayed as regressive and backwards, with women hidden away in burqas.


To understand this argument further, “Projects of saving other women depend on and reinforce a sense of superiority by Westerners, a form of arrogance that deserves to be challenged. All one needs to do to appreciate the patronizing quality of the rhetoric of saving women is to imagine using it today in the United States about disadvantaged groups such as African American women or working-class women. We now understand them as suffering from structural violence. We have become politicized about race and class, but not culture.”


The way we think about our own culture and the political and social implications of it is something only we may understand as a whole. To “assume” what someone else is facing and trying to relate it to what we imagine the context to be is unacceptable. We need solidarity in this world, we need people who will lend a helping hand to anyone in need, we need people to understand the legacies of structural violence and oppression, but that needs to be limited to the boundaries of what one can know and not about what one assumes to be the problem. We cannot reject the need for cross-cultural solidarity but must rather bring a shift in how solidarity is imagined and practiced. 


One cannot appropriate oppression and justice. Liberation for women is about being able to take up agency for oneself, trying to save someone else in the garb of a superiority complex only delegitimizes their agency. We need to stand up for people, but the intention and cause for it requires utmost literacy and understanding about what or whom one is seeking justice for.




Edited by the Curated Editorial Team


Asvika (she/her) is a student of Political Science at OP Jindal Global University, and a Copyeditor at Political Pandora. Her research interests lie in anthropology, culture, grassroots politics and the intersection between literature and politics.

 


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Keywords: Freedom For Muslim Women, Feminist Analysis Of Joyland, Gender In Muslim Societies, Artistic Protest In Iran, Muslim Women Liberation, Intersectional Feminism Middle East, Trans Rights In Islam, Female Desire Representation, Gender Politics In Cinema, Postcolonial Feminist Theory, Cultural Specificity Feminism, Reclaiming Public Spaces, Female Agency And Desire, Islam And Modernity, Decolonising Feminist Discourse

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