By Jared Bell
What sparked me to write this article was the persistent and reductive narrative that resurfaced following the recent U.S.–Israel bombing of Iran. Predictably, media coverage and social media posts quickly recycled the familiar trope: that Muslim women need to be rescued, rescued from their religion, their culture, and their men. Added to this was the dangerous suggestion that yet another Western-style military intervention could somehow usher in regime change and liberation for Iranian women, a narrative disturbingly reminiscent of the justifications used for interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. While the Islamic Republic of Iran is undeniably repressive, particularly in its treatment of women, as seen in the heartbreaking case of Mahsa Amini, this framing tells only part of the story.
Despite real restrictions, Iranian women are far from powerless. In fact, they are among the most educated in the region, and in many cases, more educated than Iranian men. According to UNESCO and World Bank data, Iranian women have made up over 60 percent of university students in recent years, with female enrollment peaking at 70–75 percent in the early 2010s. Today, women account for the majority of graduates in medicine, engineering, and other STEM fields, and female youth literacy exceeds 98 percent. These are not signs of a population waiting to be saved, they are signs of a society where women, despite legal and cultural restrictions, have carved out powerful spaces for agency, knowledge, and resistance. Iranian women have been at the forefront of political protests, student movements, and intellectual life for decades. They do not need Western armies to “liberate” them. What they need is global solidarity that respects their voice and autonomy, not airstrikes framed as feminist interventions.
This rescue narrative not only ignores such realities, it distorts them. It flattens the lives of Muslim women into a single, static story of oppression, erasing their agency, their accomplishments, and their resistance. And worse, it often becomes a moral pretext for foreign policy decisions made in the name of liberation, but carried out through violence.
I do not deny that misogyny persists across much of the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. From the denial of education to forced marriage and even political repression, the struggle for gender equality is far from over. But what is troubling is how the West has appropriated these struggles, not to uplift Muslim women, but to weaponize their pain as proof of Islam’s supposed backwardness. And yet, I equally cannot pretend that misogyny has somehow disappeared in the West. It simply wears different clothes, structural inequities in healthcare, underrepresentation in leadership, epidemic levels of gender-based violence, and the ongoing commodification of women’s bodies. Militarists in the West may speak the language of liberation, but its own house remains deeply unequal.
However, when Muslim women truly do need the solidarity of the world, when their rights and lives are under siege, the moral outrage is often subdued, delayed, or altogether absent. This is especially true when their suffering occurs outside the catalogued abuses attributed to their own so-called “patriarchal societies.” When violence against Muslim women is committed by state actors, allies, or so-called liberal democracies, the response is rarely one of urgent solidarity. Instead, it’s qualified, cautious, and far too often, silent.
I reflect on this as the international community recently commemorated the 30th anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide. There, thousands of Muslim women were systematically raped by Bosnian Serb forces, a campaign of genocidal sexual violence designed to terrorize, humiliate, and, as some scholars argue, ethnically erase the Bosniak population. These women buried their sons, husbands, fathers, and brothers, even as the world watched and failed to intervene. Silence wasn’t just complicity, it was policy.
But we needn’t go back decades to find such patterns. Consider today: according to UN Women, more than 28,000 women and girls have been killed in Gaza since the war began in October 2023 (with one dying roughly every hour). Thousands more now stand on the cusp of starvation; over 557,000 women face severe food insecurity, and pregnant and breastfeeding women are among the hardest hit.
Other examples abound. Take the plight of the Rohingya in Myanmar, one of the most egregious campaigns of ethnic cleansing in recent history. Despite widespread reports of mass rape, forced displacement, and the deliberate targeting of women and children, the crisis never commanded the sustained media attention or policy response it deserved. In 2022, the United States officially recognized the atrocities committed against the Rohingya as genocide. Yet even this designation has not translated into consistent international pressure, accountability, or robust protection for the women still suffering in refugee camps and detention centers.
Another glaring example is the plight of Uyghur women in China. Reports of forced sterilizations, sexual abuse, and mass internment have circulated for years. Chinese government documents from 2019 show that authorities targeted 14–34 percent of married Uyghur women for sterilization in two counties, with rates reaching 80 percent in some rural areas. A fax leaked in September 2020 to CNN from Xinjiang authorities revealed that the region’s birth rate plummeted by 32.7 percent in just one year, falling from 15.88 births per 1,000 people in 2017 to 10.69 in 2018. Though these atrocities are well-documented, they have failed to elicit sustained global condemnation or meaningful sanctions. The world still trades with China and sources goods from factories linked to Uyghur forced labor, remaining complicit even as Muslim women’s bodies are used as tools of political control through policies of coercive birth prevention and systemic abuse.
When Muslim women suffer under so-called “backward” patriarchal societies, outrage often triggers swift policy responses and widespread condemnation. But when the violence is inflicted by allies, liberal democracies, or nations we trade with, the response becomes muted, qualified, and politically convenient. Either way, the inconsistency reveals a troubling truth: the lack of outrage speaks to the insincerity of claims about “rescuing” Muslim women. Because if Western human rights leaders and feminist voices truly cared, the plight of Muslim women would matter regardless of who inflicts the violence. Selective empathy is not solidarity, it is strategy. And if your outrage depends on who’s doing the violence and oppression, then it was never about women, it was always about asserting cultural superiority. Which is insincere and empty.
Jared O. Bell is a former U.S. diplomat and scholar of human rights and transitional justice, dedicated to advancing global equity and systemic reform.
This article was sent to peacevoiceeditors on July 27, 2025 by Tom Hastings on behalf of Jared Bell.