Against Western Beauty Standards: A Revert Muslimah's Reclaiming of Modesty
By Srishti Lakhara, New Age Islam
22 January 2026
I was holding a slice of pizza, mid-bite, when it happened. The cafe was loud, I was attending the birthday celebration of an acquaintance. Birthday laughter, clinking cutlery, warm yellow lights bouncing off glass. Everyone was present. Everyone was in. And suddenly, I wasn’t. As though time had slowed only for me. My jaw froze, pizza hovering between hunger and habit. My body was there, performing normalcy, but I had stepped outside of it. Quite literally.
Now, before one can speak of experience, one must first name the phenomenon. From my therapy sessions later on, I understood, I was experiencing depersonalisation. Clinically, Depersonalisation is a dissociative state characterised by a persistent or transient sense of detachment from one’s own self. The individual may feel estranged from their body, emotions, or actions, as though observing themselves from an external vantage point. It is often accompanied by derealisation, wherein the external world appears artificial, flattened, or distant. Importantly, insight is preserved. The person knows that the experience is subjective and not a distortion of reality itself. It emerges when the nervous system is overwhelmed, by emotional intensity, interpersonal threat, identity conflict, or internal fragmentation. Since I am an individual with Borderline Personality Disorder, dissociation frequently functions as an adaptive mechanism for me, when affect becomes unmanageable, my psyche creates distance to maintain survival.
From an existential lens, depersonalisation represents a rupture in the continuity of selfhood. And from an Islamic metaphysical perspective, it can be understood as a moment in which the nafs loses orientation, not annihilated, but unanchored. The Qur’an names this condition not through diagnostic language, but through moral and spiritual vocabulary: heedlessness (ghaflah), dispersion of the heart, forgetfulness of one’s ultimate return.
Importantly, depersonalisation is not psychosis, not loss of insight, and not a spiritual failure. Reality testing remains intact. You know what is happening, you simply don’t feel present within it.
A pause in time
I remember thinking when all this happened. Is this how people live? Consuming, laughing, posing, wanting to be wanted? The world felt artificial, staged like a set built on borrowed desires. That was derealisation. And I was unreal within it, that was depersonalisation. When I came home, the silence was heavy but honest. Dissociation doesn’t leave you empty, it leaves you questioning. And that night, I didn’t spiral. I introspected. Not Who am I? But who do I want to become closer to Allah? It had been almost five years since my conversion to Islam, and a quiet restlessness began to surface. I was praying five times a day, observing hijab, and sincerely trying to live by what a “good” Muslim is expected to do. On the surface, I was practising correctly. Yet inwardly, I felt a question forming, what more is being asked of me? It was then that I became aware of how deeply beauty standards still occupied my inner life. Despite outward adherence, I remained mentally entangled in appearance, visibility, and being perceived. That realisation felt uncomfortable, but honest. I began to see that my struggle was not with faith, but with the residual frameworks through which I understood my body and worth.
In that party I observed myself from a distance, as though consciousness had unfastened from flesh. This was not fear. It was estranged. I was not merely detached from my body. I was detached from the logic of the scene itself. I watched people eat, speak, smile, perform belonging and it struck me with unsettling clarity that none of it felt real. Desire circulated freely, but meaning did not. The moment felt scripted, derivative, borrowed from a thousand similar evenings. I wondered, with startling calm, Is this the life I am trying to remain present for? And that night, the question was not What is wrong with me? It was What am I orienting my life toward?
In that moment, it became clear that coming closer to Allah would not require adding more rituals, but relinquishing attachments. Addressing my relationship with beauty, how much power it held over my sense of self felt like the next step in that inward journey. Choosing the niqab, then, did not emerge as an abrupt decision, but as a natural progression: a way of loosening the grip of external standards and reorienting my selfhood toward something more enduring.
Bibi Fatimah (رضي الله عنها) and her role in my modest journey
In the course of my journey, I found myself returning again and again to the figure of Bibi Fatimah (رضي الله عنها)—not as an abstract ideal, but as a lived example of womanhood that felt strikingly absent from contemporary conversations about empowerment. She is revered in Islamic tradition as the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, yet her significance extends far beyond lineage. What drew me to her was not spectacle, but restraint.
Bibi Fatimah (رضي الله عنها) did not pursue visibility. She did not seek public acclaim, intellectual dominance, or social authority in the ways modern frameworks often valorise. Her strength was expressed through constancy, devotion, moral clarity, and an intentional withdrawal from unnecessary exposure. She lived a life marked by dignity rather than display, substance rather than performance. This, perhaps, explains why she is rarely upheld as an empowering figure within Western feminist discourse.
Western Beauty Standards and the Burden of Being Seen
I had spent years negotiating my worth through mirrors shaped by Western beauty standards. For women like me, South Asian, Revert Muslim, formerly liberal, intellectually trained, the pressure is double-edged. You are told you must be visible to be valid, desirable to be free, soft enough to be wanted but loud enough to be respected. Modesty, then, is framed as regression. Niqab as erasure. Covering as submission. But no one asks: submission to whom? Western beauty standards are not neutral. They are colonial, commercial, racialised. They reward proximity to whiteness and punish deviation. They teach women that their bodies are public property, to be evaluated, consumed, commented upon.
And I was tired. Tired of being seen but not known. Tired of being desired but not held.Tired of negotiating my worth through someone else’s gaze.
Why I Chose the Niqab — As a Woman Who Once Called Herself Liberal
1. I Wanted Allah’s Gaze to Be Louder Than the World’s
I noticed how much mental energy was devoted to appearance, how I looked, how I was perceived, how I was read. Even in worship, a subtle awareness of the external gaze lingered. Niqab disrupted that hierarchy. When the world stopped seeing my face, Allah’s gaze became central again. Worship shifted from performance to presence. I became more aware of my inner state than my outer impression.
Islam teaches that the most formative gaze is not human but divine. Yet practically, the human gaze often becomes louder. Niqab recalibrated that imbalance. It reduced the sensory feedback loop between my body and the world. Without constant visual exposure, I became more attentive to intention (niyyah), sincerity (ikhlāṣ), and inward states.
Psychologically, this shift matters. Attention is finite. Where attention goes, identity follows. By quietening the world’s gaze, niqab redirected attention inward and upward. I became less concerned with how I was seen and more concerned with how I was standing, before Allah.
2. I Was Exhausted by the Politics of My Body
My body had never simply been my body. It was a site of ideological projection. At different times, it was meant to signify liberation, oppression, modernity, rebellion, progress. Each framework claimed concern for women, yet none truly allowed women to withdraw consent from being constantly interpreted. The niqab was a refusal to participate.
Not in society but in the endless discourse around my body. It removed my physical form from ideological traffic. People could no longer easily locate me within their narratives. This ambiguity unsettled them and that discomfort revealed how entitled the world feels to women’s visibility.
From an Islamic perspective, the body is an amanah, a trust. It is neither public property nor personal commodity. Covering became an act of returning that trust to its rightful framework: accountability to Allah rather than availability to society.
3. I Wanted Identity, Not Performance
Modern liberal identity often requires performance.
You must demonstrate confidence. You must signal empowerment. You must appear unbothered, autonomous, desirable. Strength becomes aesthetic. Authenticity becomes curated. Even resistance is stylised.
Islam does not ask for performance. It asks for truthfulness. The niqab disrupted my participation in identity theatre. Without facial expressions as tools of negotiation, without appearance as social currency, I was freed from constantly proving who I was. My identity no longer needed to be legible to strangers.
Psychologically, this is significant. Performance fragments the self. One becomes split between who one is and who one must appear to be. Niqab allowed those fragments to collapse into something more coherent.
4. Modesty Became an Act of Psychological Safety
For someone with Borderline Personality Disorder, the world can feel permeable. Emotional boundaries are easily breached. External stimuli especially interpersonal attention can overwhelm the nervous system. The self becomes porous.
The niqab functioned as a regulating boundary. It reduced overstimulation. It limited unsolicited emotional and visual engagement. It created a sense of containment. I could move through public spaces without absorbing projections, assumptions, or desires that were never mine to carry. In trauma-informed psychology, safety precedes integration. One cannot heal while constantly exposed. Islam intuitively understands this: modesty protects not only morality, but mental equilibrium.
What the Niqab Ultimately Gave Me
It gave me interiority in a world obsessed with surfaces. It gave me stillness in a culture addicted to spectacle. It gave me coherence where I once felt fragmented.
Depersonalisation had shown me what it felt like to lose myself. The niqab showed me how to come home. Not to disappearance. But to presence. Not to silence. But to grounding. Not to fear. But to Allah.
This journey did not begin with empowerment. It began with rupture.
Depersonalisation arrived as a moment of unravelling. a disorienting experience in which the self-briefly stepped outside itself. Clinically, it was a dissociative response, a nervous system seeking safety in distance. But experientially, it felt like a deeper interruption: a pause that made it impossible to continue living on autopilot. In that moment of detachment, the familiar structures that had shaped my identity visibility, desirability, social belonging lost their authority. Choosing the niqab was not an escape from the world, but a return to myself. It restored a sense of agency that had little to do with visibility and everything to do with consent. For the first time, my body felt like a place I inhabited rather than a surface I managed. This shift brought a kind of empowerment rarely spoken about: the empowerment of inwardness, of psychological safety, of being rooted rather than exposed. This is the kind of empowerment every woman deserves to encounter not necessarily through the same choices, but through the same freedom to pause, to question, and to choose alignment over performance. Women deserve to know what it feels like to exist without constant negotiation of their worth, without the pressure to be legible, desirable, or palatable. They deserve access to identities that feel grounding rather than exhausting.
What emerged was not disappearance, but presence. And perhaps that is the most human form of empowerment there is: to come back to oneself intentionally, consciously, and on one’s own terms.
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Srishti Lakhara is an Indian revert with a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology. Her work explores the intersection of faith and psychology, focusing on trauma, resilience, grief, and holistic healing.
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