Despite the extensive literature from secular, Western feminism, the material body has been strangely marginalised. Yet, the reproductive capacity of women has been cruelly exploited in rape camps throughout history during warfare, designed to destroy biological continuity. There are multiple examples of this, as diverse as Japan’s state-endorsed use of comfort women held in stations during its occupation of China in World War II; the use of sexualised violence by the Indonesian security forces as a form of land-grabbing in West Papua to dilute indigenous land rights; the mass rape of women in Bosnia to destroy religious identity and Muslim continuity; and modern-day Uyghurs in China where reports have shown that inside the country’s re-education camps, women have been systematically raped and sexually abused (Ochab, 2021). Rape has, moreover, become a weapon of war against asylum seekers in new border conflicts, across the world and including on the borders of western Europe (Fernandez, 2023).

Post-democratic times have seen the rise of the global right – personified in populist leaders in North America, Latin America and Europe – which has created a revitalisation of neo-liberalism. Such developments have made life more precarious, and a democratic deficit has arisen out of greater precarity and securitisation, which has targeted vulnerable citizens and forms of embodiment considered unacceptable and subjected to excessive regulation (Sabsay, 2020). In contemporary secular Europe, it is the Muslim body that has become a site for vilification in a time of heightened national security and securitisation, which has turned the bearded man and the veiled woman into suspect bodies. Controversies about veiling have traversed secular Europe, drawing attention to the vulnerability of Muslim women. Curiously, the politics of the veil has led to an unimagined alliance between security politics, human rights and Western liberal feminists whose opposition to the veil has led to complicity with reactionary populism – including the far right such as Marine Le Pen. The re-orientalisation of the Muslim woman’s body has led human rights and feminism to ally themselves with securitisation and populism, and ultimately, objection to covering is rooted in the perception of sexual availability and therefore reproduction. These unlikely connections mean that human rights, instead of protecting Muslim women’s bodily integrity, have succeeded in increasing their vulnerability.