This was written by Arwa Aburawa.

Regular readers of Muslimah Media Watch may remember last year’s article criticizing the coverage of Muslim women in Marie Claire. Guest contributor Asma Uddin pointed out that the magazine’s coverage showed Muslim women as “sequestered, brainwashed, and victimized, if by no one else than their own, naive, unknowing selves.” She went on to assess four articles from the U.S. edition of the magazine that illustrated this, which you can read here.

This is where a confession comes in. When I was younger, I used to read Marie Claire, and I have vague memories of enjoying flicking through its pages—even getting excited at its coverage of Muslim women. For my masters in International Journalism, I wanted to look at the representation of Muslim women in the media, and I focused my research on the coverage of Muslim women in women’s magazines and Marie Claire in particular.

I analyzed ten years’ worth of U.K.-edition Marie Claire magazines (minus 35 magazines which were missing from the archives) to measure the amount of times Muslim women were covered. Then I used content analysis (essentially codes or themes that are counted in the articles) to assess whether Muslim women were represented as powerless victims or empowered women.

The results I found were surprising. My research found that Muslim women were covered in around 44% of all the magazines I searched: roughly, one article per magazine was deemed as representation in that issue. Most of that coverage was on Muslim women from developing countries such as Afghanistan (a whopping 11 articles) rather than those from Britain (only 4 articles), but overall Muslim women were well-represented.

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