The Forgotten Vanguard: Muslim Women, Faith, and the Left’s Lost Compass
A call for political movements to rediscover the historical bond between faith and freedom.
Introduction
In cities from Chicago to Gaza, Muslim American women are leading the frontline of liberation movements.
Yet within the American left — and across the global progressive landscape — their leadership is still treated as peripheral, their religious agency as suspect.
Decades after pledging intersectionality, core institutions continue to replicate the same exclusions they claim to fight.
If the international community is serious about building movements capable of confronting empire and injustice, it must confront this internal failure now—or risk losing the very forces capable of carrying liberation forward.
The Crisis Inside the Movement
Documenting protests across Chicago, Washington, D.C., and New York and analyzing global protest dynamics through open-source intelligence and security partnerships, I have witnessed firsthand how Muslim American women have become primary leaders of Palestinian solidarity and internationalist movements.
Despite their leadership, core leftist organizations have largely failed to integrate them, even expressing nationalism with an incoherent message lacking unification.
The focus of American leftist spaces continues to collapse inward, centered on domestic electoral struggles and personalities like Donald Trump.
At a major protest rally in Chicago, chants redirected a speech about Gaza toward Trump — a moment that symbolizes a broader truth: internationalist struggles are consistently marginalized beneath electoral priorities.
Structural Contradictions and Historical Amnesia
This narrowing focus reveals a deeper ideological fault line.
Secularism, and often implicit atheism, functions as an unspoken gatekeeper within leftist organizing.
Religious expressions of liberation are treated with suspicion rather than solidarity.
This is historically incoherent. Nearly every significant Western liberation movement — from the French Revolution to abolitionism to the Civil Rights Movement — has been inseparable from religious conviction.
“Secular-liberal assumptions about the human subject, and its agency, remain inextricably tied to particular conceptions of freedom, which may not be shared by those they seek to ‘liberate.’” — Saba Mahmood¹
Similarly, Lila Abu-Lughod critiques the tendency to "save" Muslim women rather than recognize their political agency:
“Projects of saving other women depend on and reinforce a sense of superiority by Westerners, a form of arrogance that deserves to be challenged.” — Lila Abu-Lughod²
Excluding Muslim American women based on religious expression is not progress — it is historical amnesia.
Recurring Patterns of Exclusion
The sidelining of Muslim women repeats a familiar pattern:
The same dynamics Black women faced when feminist and leftist movements failed to integrate their full political realities.
As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor noted:
“The failure of feminist movements to grapple with race and class as interlocking systems of oppression left Black women marginalized within both feminist and Black liberation movements.” — Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor³
And as Kimberlé Crenshaw argued:
“Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated.” — Kimberlé Crenshaw⁴
Today, Muslim American women encounter the same structural sidelining — only now it is cloaked in secular assumptions about liberation.
Visibility Without Power
The elections of Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib show symbolic progress.
Yet their experiences reveal the limits of inclusion:
Visibility without structural power.
Both have faced relentless bipartisan scrutiny, particularly for their positions on Israel and U.S. foreign policy.
Meanwhile, grassroots Palestinian movements, especially those led by Muslim women, remain siloed from broader domestic organizing efforts — weakening both.
The Global Cost of Exclusion
The stakes are larger than American protest politics.
If Muslim American women are marginalized here, it signals to Muslim-majority societies that religious women are incompatible with political leadership.
Authoritarian regimes and extremist groups exploit this narrative.
When the American left excludes Muslim women, it weakens not only domestic movements but global efforts to expand women’s rights and liberation inside Muslim societies.
The credibility of the global left is on the line.
Reconciliation or Irrelevance
The American left — and the global progressive movement — must choose:
Will they continue to enforce secular homogeneity, marginalizing religiously grounded liberation?
Or will they recover the historical alliance between faith and freedom that built many major movements for justice?
International organizations, universities, advocacy networks, and local activist communities must confront their internal contradictions now — before irrelevance becomes inevitable.
In the words of Frederick Douglass:
“If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” — Frederick Douglass⁶
The first struggle must be within.
Footnotes
¹ Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Princeton University Press, 2005.
² Lila Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving?, Harvard University Press, 2013.
³ Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, ed., How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, Haymarket Books, 2017.
⁴ Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1244.
⁵ Asad Haider, Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump, Verso, 2018.
⁶ Frederick Douglass, “West India Emancipation,” speech, Canandaigua, New York, August 3, 1857.