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There is no feminism that does not understand Muslim women. There is no anti-racism that does not understand Arab men. There is no anti-ableism that does not understand the Global South.

A feminism that ignores Muslim women or claims to liberate them without listening to them reproduces colonial logics that have always sought to define freedom for them by erasing their voices and experiences. Too often trapped in simplistic stereotypes, they are seen either as passive victims of a cruel and archaic patriarchy or as dangers to be fought against in the name of modernity. It never takes into account their own political struggles, survival strategies, or their refusal to conform to white, secular, and Western norms. Refusing to include this diversity perpetuates symbolic violence that cuts into bodies and minds, a violence rooted in the coloniality of power and knowledge. Whether veiled or not, cis, trans, queer, racialized, Muslim women have always invented subversive forms of resistance often invisibilized or co-opted by dominant currents. Feminism that forgets or reduces them perpetuates the systems of oppression it claims to fight.

Dominant anti-racism often constructs Arab men as figures to be rejected. It never sees them in their full human, emotional, and political complexity. They are trapped in binary and stigmatizing roles. They are either sexist oppressors who need to be reeducated or terrorist threats to be neutralized. These narratives justify the violence of a state that manufactures Arab masculinities through police controls, social exclusions, racial profiling, and state Islamophobia. They make invisible the vulnerabilities, struggles, and diverse subjectivities of these men. They also obscure their economic precarity, the devastating effects of racism on their mental health, and their capacity to create solidarities. Anti-racism that does not deconstruct these representations only reinforces the colonial hierarchy of races and genders, producing internal fractures within popular struggles. To be radical, anti-racism must interrogate the political and social construction of Arab masculinities, fight against repressive policies, and recognize that these men suffer a double violence, racial and patriarchal, resulting in systematic marginalisation.

Anti-ableism cannot be reduced to a critique of bodily norms in white Western societies. In the Global South, disability is often the direct consequence of systemic violences. Neocolonial wars, famines caused by austerity and resource extraction policies, imperialist bombings, and destruction of health and social infrastructures all contribute. Maimed, poisoned, abandonned bodies are the visible results of this global violence that classifies some lives as disposable or useless. These violences simultaneously construct the comfort and protection of wealthy societies, where so-called ableist norms can be questioned from a relative privilege. Our way of life largely depends on the exploitation of the Global South, whether through labour, resource extraction, or outsourced pollution. Ignoring this global dimension produces an anti-ableism disconnected from the material realities that shape disability in much of the world. To be coherent, anti-ableism must be thought in alliance with decolonial and anti-capitalist struggles, examining how global systems produce and maintain bodily, social, and political inequalities.