A German woman with blonde hair and blue eyes walking beside me – just her presence seemed to transform me into a different person on the streets of Iraq. I received friendly yet respectful looks from drivers, vendors, and esteemed researchers, where usually I received belittlement, disrespect or, at best, a full-fledged ignoring of my presence. It was as if my being was uplifted, even eased, by the fact that a white female companion covered me with the aura of her untouchable purity. They are valuable, worth a lot, and men in the Middle East recognise it.
In the many years I have worked in and on the Middle East as a political scientist, my work has been challenging, to say the least. Access to the field is difficult and comes with risks – not just to me, a Kurdish woman born in Germany, traveling to places like the Kurdistan Region in Iraq, but also potentially to my family by association with my often critical work researching democratisation, the fight against Islamist terror, and gender issues in Kurdistan.
More mundane factors also affect my day-to-day interactions as a Middle East expert: concerns about security, how I dress, or how I am recognised in society as a visibly Kurdish woman choosing to live alone without a husband. Although I grew up between Germany and Kurdistan, with access to a cultural and linguistic toolkit to handle various situations, I constantly feel like I am a moment away from escalation. That Middle Eastern society, that place where I’ve witnessed and experienced violence, is where I understand how a single spark, an injured male ego, or an envious relative can lead to serious trouble.
It is a professional environment where childhood and family trauma serve as sources of information but also as triggers for retraumatisation. Knowing that I have access to spaces others cannot, I try to use this for research and ultimately to improve situations, yet I am also doomed to relive the same trauma repeatedly.
Is my dress appropriate for this occasion?
Does the taxi driver notice where I am from?
Is the security guard passing information about me to law enforcement?
Is the delivery driver sharing my address with others because I received my food in a sleeveless shirt, with a smile that was maybe too big, too inviting?
How friendly should I be to my boss to avoid hurting his ego but also to prevent him from thinking I am prey?
In many instances where I navigated these very challenging environments, I often looked at one demographic with awe: white female expats. Whether in the Middle East or back home in media companies and institutions across Europe and North America, I could not help but be amazed at how differently their journeys unfold, and how much support they receive from the demographic that made my life the hardest: Middle Eastern men.
There is an ongoing trend of white women converting to Islam and engaging with Middle Eastern culture on social media. While the ‘tradwife’ trend has been widely discussed in media analysis and gender studies, less attention has been given to its connection with Muslim and converted ‘tradwife’ communities. In Germany, especially, there is a sentiment of post-COVID isolation, a need for community, and a desire for simple answers to complex problems. White women have quickly adopted this trend, blending the valuable asset of white fragility with a deep-rooted German desire for things that are original, essentialist, and romanticist in the purest sense.
A young female German even went so far as to say that she is in Afghanistan and actively dating Taliban men, rambling about the perks of Muslim dating. The former boxer and DJ Hanna Hansen also embodies this aesthetic, having converted to Islam and wearing a wide black Abaya, discussing modesty and, importantly, the war in Gaza. They can both count on online support: hundreds of people of Muslim origin, especially men, flock to and congratulate them for how happy they look, for their bravery, and how they finally ‘show the truth’.
The average Middle Eastern woman could only dream about the esteem that white skin and blue eyes trigger in the hearts of their compatriots. The white woman, in turn, can now not only claim a privileged status in this new community, but also touch upon claims of being discriminated against. Especially for Germans – who could never find a healthy way to deal with their Nazi past – it signifies a welcome exit ticket from being the oppressor, right into the position of the oppressed.
This obsession with the male Muslim gaze is something that can even be woven into some anti-racist and feminist fabrics. During the protest against violence toward women on 25 November 2024 in Berlin, a loud crowd of men joined the protest, shouting about Palestine. While others criticised their presence, especially since the groups that mobilised them categorically deny gender-based violence during the 7 October attacks, pictures later surfaced from the march showing white women wearing Hamas shirts. One chilling close-up showed a smiling woman proudly displaying the logo on her T shirt. Whenever criticism was voiced, it was always these voices who responded by saying that such criticism was racist; even voicing concern about toxic masculinity among Middle Eastern men is considered racist. The embrace of a demographic that openly supports regressive regimes seems to be the latest trend in the white female quest for ever greater dominance over other women.
In a less obvious way, this type of white female gaze has become a part of journalism and research, too. When women around the world looked on in pure fear at the events in Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, CNN journalist Clarissa Ward couldn’t wait to put on her nicest black hijab and abaya to pose in front of Taliban fighters. ‘On the streets of Kabul today – feel we are witnessing history,’ she tweeted, smiling innocently. Yes, we were witnessing history – but would she comment on a catastrophe of this magnitude as coldly and detachedly if it occurred at the hands of Western powers?
As Afghanistan under Taliban rule enters its fourth year, and media coverage and public outrage over the deprivation of education for women and children remain niche topics, it becomes clear that the normative distance from this historic event was deliberately maintained. Needless to say, the CNN Chief International Correspondent’s title picture still features an image of her wearing an Abaya next to another one of her sitting in a ruin wearing a Tank Top. The carelessness, the ease with which she can switch codes and countries, is her badge of ultimate privilege. This became even more clear as Ward became part of another historic moment, the toppling of Assad, and held the arm of an allegedly recently freed prisoner who just happened to see the light of day for the first time during a CNN broadcast. Subsequent revelations put a quite different complexion on the story. Again: white female journalistic sensationalism was more important than reality.
White female journalists covering Iran often gracefully follow hijab rules, which thousands of women in Iran openly defy every day, acting as if the hijab is a symbol of authenticity on the field. While in the past, the Twitter profile picture with a helmet and bulletproof vest signified courage for white international reporters, now the image of a white woman mingling ‘authentically’ with societies that are arguably some of the most hostile environments for women is a new prestigious symbol.
It does not stay on a symbolic level, though, and much of the reporting on Israel, Palestine, as well as Iran, Kurdistan, and Syria, is completely influenced by a worldview which depicts the Muslim world as a monolithic block oppressed by the West, while all other Middle Eastern groups that do not neatly fit this category, as their oppression stems mostly from named Muslim hegemonial groups, are somehow portrayed as superior or conspiratorial. In Eva Illouz’s July 2025 Fathom article, she sharply pointed out that we are facing a new form of orientalism:
This asymmetry between the leftist treatment of Muslims and Jews betrays a double form of discrimination: It views Islam as in need of protection, despite its territorial reach and religious power, revealing an Orientalist condescension (protecting Islam differs from protecting from real and present discrimination the Muslim minorities who live in Western countries). And it cancels the minority status of Jews, because they are implicitly associated with power and domination.
Since the fall of Bashar al-Assad and the rise to power of Ahmad al-Sharaa in December 2024, we have witnessed in Syria the practical establishment of an Al-Qaeda-aligned government – to the severe detriment of Syria’s minority communities, including Kurds, Druze, Christians, and Alawites. In this context, we now see a familiar reflex resurfacing in full force. Journalists such as Kristin Helberg, who spent years in Assad’s Syria during the 2000s and once approvingly described it as a socialist and secular state, even as Assad ruled through brutal repression, now portray the attacks on minorities by Sharaa’s forces as mere skirmishes rooted in diverging interests, rather than acknowledging the fundamentally genocidal aims of the Islamist regime. The similarity: then and now, people like Helberg see the value of their work not in critical reporting on events but in debunking what they see as western stereotypes about the Middle East. While many western stereotypes do exist, basing your entire journalistic narrative on this fundamentally reactionary approach becomes especially dangerous today, when it is crucial to discuss what actors like al-Shaara, Hamas, or the Islamic Republic of Iran are doing to people in the region.
Similarly, German reporter Sophia Maier, who interviewed Hamas officials in June 2024, proudly shares a photograph with Ali Baraka from Lebanon in front of the Hamas flag on Instagram and, claiming to have received threats for the interview, went on to share a Der Spiegel article entitled, with striking triviality, ‘How the Robbery of a Vegetable Truck Escalated into War’. She praised it in her Instagram Story as a refreshing counterpoint to what she called ‘Ideology-driven machinery on social media’, while ignoring the grim reality: Druze people being executed on camera for no other reason than their identity.
In the 2000s neoconservative framework of George W. Bush’s wars on Afghanistan and Iraq it was more ‘en vogue’ to talk about how the strange wild people of the Orient could be democratised. Conversely, the new orientalist gaze seeks to win the applause of an increasingly anxious population at home, overfed with information and scared of war, that tells them that things are not as bad as they seem, and that their ignorance of the conditions under which women, queers, or minorities in the Middle East live, can even be pointed out as a reasonable non-interventionist stance.
More than once, I have seen Kurdish female fighters of the YPJ, who did not wear headscarves and fought against ISIS, face mistrust from western intellectuals and feminists influenced by postcolonial ideas, and who seem to believe that suffering in the global south as well as medieval displays of covered women should be accepted as ‘it’s not Middle Eastern men’s fault’ or ‘it’s not for us to judge’. Pictures of YPJ forces freeing the mostly Arab women of Manbij in 2016 from ISIS, hugging them, and helping them remove their black garments and headscarves, deeply challenged these people’s beliefs that universalist feminist values could be discarded as outdated. The same people shiver and mutter whenever forced to take a stance on female victims of 7 October, to humanise the Israeli woman, or to see her as a vulnerable human being.
The new racism, much like its close cousin white feminism, no longer announces itself through crude hierarchies or overt declarations of superiority. It does not say, ‘Group X is inferior, therefore I may do Y’. Instead, it expresses itself through a kind of casual detachment, a performance of weightless moral authority. It manifests in the image of someone gliding unbothered through streets soaked in the blood of others – not as a witness, not even as a tourist, but as a self-anointed presence. The blood was spilled for reasons both local and layered: political, historical, deeply domestic. But these are not matters the new moral actor wishes to touch. She is not there to understand, let alone to improve, but to appear. To dance on the volcano, to pose among the ruins, to flatter her own sense of virtue.
This new iteration of supremacy is not racial in the traditional sense, but moral. It feeds off a western saviourist impulse that convinces itself it is doing good, when in fact it seeks only to recentre the west: not as coloniser this time, but as confessor; supremacy rebranded as atonement. The urgent is separated from its cause. Suffering is abstracted into a consumable form, while the structures that create and maintain that suffering are left untouched, often even legitimised. It gleefully points to Israelis , saying ‘see, you are not better than us Germans,’ or to struggling Kurds in Syria saying ‘see, we told you not to work with America’.
Under the guise of humility, the western subject repeats the very logics of dominance it claims to reject. Instead of dismantling power, it selectively obeys new ones, particularly local hegemonies that allow power to remain embedded, protected by a narrative of western submission. This becomes the cleverest inversion: the structurally dominant now frames herself as the vulnerable – vulnerable to the world’s pain, injustice, and suffering, but only insofar as it preserves its moral authority. She does not resist oppression, she narrates it, carefully curated, filtered through moral exhaustion, and designed for audiences that reward guilt more than change.
And maybe that is the fundamental reason why every bit of research, every field trip, every engagement in my own spaces is so much tougher for me than for these women: because I honestly enter it with questions that I would ask myself if ultimately I had to live under the circumstances and conditions that I normalise. Yes, some political and military actors are there to stay in the Middle East and one has to deal with them. But when uttering sentences like ‘Al-Sharaa is a technocrat’ or ‘territorial integrity before all,’ I remember the days of nation-building in Iraq when the American patchwork rug left behind, stitched together with all of these half-compromises and seemingly unchangeable realities, became the fertile soil for Shiite militias and even ISIS. This school of thought says things like ‘clearly the NATO mission in Afghanistan did not succeed, told you so,’ while they do not have to think about the real life consequences for the people that live there. It can put a full stop behind the sentence that history is being written, because the return flight to the cozy media headquarter offices is booked and ready. People like me could not end the train of thought there. Because I dare to imagine a Middle East beyond reactionism in which the establishment and defence of universal and modern values is not a matter of neoconservative war-mongering.
The white female gaze does not care about these matters, though. The battle for almost vulgarly first wave feminist virtues is too old school for them; they are almost bored; they are in the Middle Eastern discourse for other reasons. It is a form of parasitic presence. It does not intervene meaningfully, nor does it intend to leave. It remains precisely because its staying feeds a market of crisis, a permanent state of unresolved tension from which visibility, legitimacy, and even employment are derived. And so, moral superiority replaces racial superiority, but the effect is hauntingly familiar. The silencing of those for whom the urgency is not abstract, but faced daily. The stage is once again occupied, this time in the name of good.
