An excerpt from ‘In The Body of a Woman: Essays on Law, Gender and Society’, by Aaliya Waziri.
My mother is a writer and a literary historian. She bakes the best sourdough bread and loves going for walks in the rain. She is called “Apa” by almost everyone and is obsessed with red shoes. In early January 2022, she was supposedly sold off on an auction of Muslim women hosted on GitHub.
The incident was an online mock auction of prominent Muslim women in India. No daughter thinks she may have to write on such a topic someday and yet there I was. When I was first approached to write on this, people expected me to be horrified or at least enraged. To be honest, I was neither. I was numb.
Looking at the pictures of my mother’s face as she was being auctioned off, ostensibly to work as a maid in people’s homes with the “philanthropic” purpose of providing “employment” to Muslim women, all I could think was that the process of “othering” is now no longer visceral. It exists in the form of documented proof.
But this incident is more than just deliberate harassment. It wants us to believe that denial of basic dignity to Muslim women is as “normal” to those behind this app as the act of breathing. It is this “normalisation” that deserves close scrutiny, and not mere condemnation. British writer and activist, Laura Bates, describes this as: “One of the saddest things about silencing of women through shame, normalisation, dismissal, disbelief and blame is that it is has become so common that it is used as a controlling tool by abusers themselves.”
26/04/2023