Western mainstream media reveals the use of gendered patterns to portray Muslim and Arab women, aiming to communicate the exoticism, irrationality, despotism, and backwardness of the Islamic religion and Middle Eastern societies. Such portrayals are narrated through a Western-centric perspective; a way to frame other cultures and beliefs that enhances an inherent difference between “us” and “them.” This editorial practice reinforces stereotypes of Islam as the “threatening Other” and depicts Muslim women as “the Other of the Other.”

Orientalism, as explained by Edward Said in his book Orientalism, is the mechanism of fabrication of the Orient, or “a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient’s special place in European Western experience.” It is constructed upon the Western cultural representation of the Orient that contains an ethnocentric vision of the world, regarding the East as a fundamentally inferior culture compared to the Western tradition.

The media’s attention to representations of Muslims and Arabs has largely centered on women, particularly highlighting the veil, hijab, and burqa as highly politicized symbols of oppression. The media often features news on issues and happenings in the Middle East with photos of Muslim and Arab women and girls. These women are hardly ever directly connected to the message and content of such news. This implies that these images serve purposes beyond simply illustrating the experiences of Muslim women to a Western audience. Hence, in the West, Arab and Muslim women have not only been categorized by gender, their bodies have also become symbols representing identity and distinction. The typical portrayal of Arab and Muslim women is the stereotypical one: the passive emblem of a collectivist society.

During the War on Terror, gendered orientalist narratives have been used to justify military intervention. The world has been divided between the “civilized” West and the “barbaric” East. Afghan and Iraqi women are presented as helpless victims under oppressive regimes. After U.S. intervention, however, the same women were depicted as liberated—lifting their veils and attending school—symbolizing the success of Western values. The coverage of Muslim women functions as a narrative tool to validate military and political action, framing the West as the rational savior and the East as the site of chaos and dysfunction.

Another representation that differs from the typical one of Arab and Muslim women as passive victims trapped in tragic circumstances is the portrayal of women as active political agents—political agents who are nevertheless misguided by authoritarian regimes and male influences and have therefore aligned themselves on the wrong side of the conflict. “Jihadi Brides” is the term used in many newspaper headlines to describe women who have chosen to marry violent fighters and have become involved in terrorist organizations; women who have been indoctrinated into believing extremist ideologies and led to commit horrific acts of terror in the name of the Islamic religion. Pictures of women holding rifles during protests or preparing for suicide bombings reinforce stereotypes and convey the idea of political abnormality and dysfunction associated with the Middle East and Islam; where women are subjugated by brutal and oppressive men and lack the mental capability required to make the right choice and understand which side of the conflict is the true legitimate one.

In Western media, Arab and Muslim women become reduced to static figures of helplessness or threats, lacking individual agency; victims whose abnormal life in a repressive society is depicted to highlight violence and terror. The veil presents a symbol of a misogynistic society, where women are silent and invisible. These images are not included to inform but to imply judgment serving to project cultural values and political standpoints that align with dominant Western ideologies. Whether depicted as passive victims or radicals, Muslim and Arab women are used to stir public indignation, affirm ideological superiority, and justify Western intervention not to advocate for their rights, but to affirm Western dominance and justify intervention. These depictions must be challenged in order to move towards peace between East and West.