The ugly business of beauty contests

No matter how you try to rationalise them, beauty contests objectify all women, writes Shelina Zahra Janmohamed

Miss Michigan Rima Fakih is crowned Miss USA 2010. (Steve Marcus / Reuters)

Please do not adjust your screens, this is not 1951, the year the first Miss World contest was held. It was a chance to promote the newly invented bikini, and was part of a world where a woman’s role was to look pretty and smile sweetly.

Whatever pageant organisers or participants might say, such competitions are not about offering a platform for their voices or offering “beauty for a purpose” (one of Miss World’s challenges). And they’re not just a bit of fun while taking a break from becoming the astronaut who created the first cyborg while simultaneously conducting a heart transplant and feeding orphaned puppies.

Beauty contests boil down to conducting an evaluation and ranking women by how they look.

By 1970, the Miss World competition was already being disrupted by women’s liberation protesters. Now, fortunately, beauty pageants have received the disdain that they deserve for walking women around stage in their underwear, as though they were camels for sale in an auction.

Unless the woman is Muslim, in which case being a Muslim beauty queen is a wonderful thing, and a real role model for freedom and women’s rights.

An Italian model of Moroccan origin, Ahlam Al Birnis, hopes to become first “Muslim Miss Italy”. Or at least that’s what the headlines say. However, Al Birnis doesn’t want to be defined by her family’s Muslim origin, or the fact that she’s of Moroccan descent. She doesn’t speak Arabic, says with seeming pride that she can’t cook Moroccan food, and adds: “Religion should have nothing to do with a beauty contest.”

There’s an eyebrow-furrowing insistence that she and others be defined as Muslim beauty queens, even when they don’t self-describe as practising Muslim. So is this label added on because the world feels titillated by Muslim women in pageants? Or because beauty queen is the kind of role model that Muslim women need to be liberated, even while we are busy trying to stop women’s objectification? It seems the only way the world can rest easy that Muslim women are free is if they take their clothes off.

Rima Fakih won the title Miss USA, and it was cause for celebration that a Muslim woman had been deemed beautiful enough to win. But she wasn’t in it to promote herself as a Muslim or further Islam. A Muslim model in the UK, Shanna Bukhari, gathered headlines describing her as Muslim beauty queen or the first Miss Muslim UK but again she wasn’t interested in her faith as a defining factor. Asli Bayram, who was crowned Miss Germany and is now an actress, was described as a Muslim beauty queen despite the fact she tells her own story through the lens of responding to racism not whether she is Muslim or not.

I agree that religion should have nothing to do with beauty contests. I say that nobody should have anything to do with beauty contests. I’d like to think that all women can go about their business without defining their role by how they are ranked as eye-sweets.

So when I see a pageant as a means of measuring Muslim women’s liberation I get doubly cross – women’s success should not be defined by how they look. And while we’re getting past it for western women, Muslim women must be accorded the same respect. We should not reduce any woman’s liberation to whether they remove their clothes or not, Muslim or otherwise.

Shelina Zahra Janmohamed is the author of Love in a Headscarf and blogs at www. spirit21.co.uk