‘People hate you because of the way you dress’: Understanding the invisible experiences of veiled British Muslim women victims of Islamophobia

Chakraborti and Zempi (2012) argued for the need to increase awareness of the gendered facets of Islamophobia in order to shed light on and improve understanding of the overlooked and negated ‘invisible’ victimisation of veiled Muslim women in the public spaces of contemporary western society. In seeking to shed light and improve understanding about this process, this article sets out the findings from a project that interviewed 20 veiled British Muslim women who had been victims of Islamophobia and had reported their experience to the British government-funded service Tell MAMA (measuring anti-Muslim attacks). Reflecting on what is contemporarily known about Islamophobia, and in particular what is known about Islamophobia’s relationship with gender, this article sets out the thematically considered empirical findings from the project in order to better understand why Islamophobic incidents against veiled Muslim women are ‘neither seen nor heard’. In doing so, the article considers the ways in which the visibility and invisibility of veiled Muslim women function in order to reduce and essentialise veiled Muslim women through the symbolism of the veil, thereby becoming seen as the physical embodiment of all that is considered to be problematic and threatening about Muslims and Islam per se.