'Zalim Hindu' Porn: How AI is Mass Producing Pornographic Images of Muslim Women
AI image generators have led to a flood of semi-pornographic images of Muslim women, mostly from pro-Hindutva pages.
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Trigger Warning: This article has references to sexual violence and sexually explicit content.
"I have been receiving pornographic images of Hijabi women in my Twitter DM ever since my follower count began growing. The people who send these messages threaten me that they can also morph my images if they want. Now AI tools have become so advanced, so the messages containing such images have also increased," says Nabiya Khan, an activist and poet based in Delhi.
Nabiya Khan was one among many prominent Muslim women activists and journalists whose names and photos were put up for "mock auction" by alleged Hindutva supporters on an app called "Sulli Deals" on GitHub in 2021.
The emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered image generation tools in the recent past, has led to a massive proliferation of pages posting semi-pornographic images of Muslim women on the internet.
Such pages have been around for some time now on platforms like Facebook and Instagram, posting memes and crudely photoshopped images containing such fantasies. However, AI tools have made these images more sophisticated and easy to produce, thereby helping increase the volume of such content manifold.
In this piece, we will examine the underlying themes in these images and try to decode the mentality driving their popularity.
Burqa as a Fetish and a Code
Most of the AI images used are titillating in nature and show a visibly Muslim woman in intimate poses with one or multiple visibly Hindu men. The 'Muslimness' of the women invariably is communicated through a burqa or a hijab and the 'Hinduness' of the men is often depicted through items like Rudraksh beads, Kalava on the wrist, Tilak or ash on the head and/or body, Hindu symbols as tattoos and saffron clothing which includes items like scarves and bandanas.
The centrality of burqa and hijab in these fantasies can be seen from the fact that the term 'Hijabi' appears frequently in the names of these pages as well as in the posts and hashtags used by them.
A post in Hindi that was frequently shared across many such pages said, "Muslim women are sexually frustrated and they don a burqa to hide this".
The Quint had a detailed conversation with writer Annie Zaidi, who helped us decode many of these themes.
Referring to the symbolism of the burqa and hijab, Zaidi said, "The garment has become a code for Muslim women. When they show a woman wearing a burqa, it doesn't just mean burqa-wearing women. It is a code for the entire Muslim community".
"There is a unique depravity in this thinking," Khan says.
Zaidi says that the burqa also may represent what the men want to do with women in their lives.
"You see this woman, she is covered up and she belongs to this other man who is a Muslim. This other man and this woman seem to be getting along, and you don't like that because you hate the man. So you are building this fantasy in your head of you possessing that woman to humiliate the man. But embedded in that fantasy is your possession of women per se".
A Fantasy of Domination and Humiliation
In these images, the Hindu men are invariably shown as being unrealistically muscular and in a dominating or even threatening position. On the other hand, the Muslim woman is often shown as submissive and often intimidated.
For instance, the profile picture of one of the Instagram pages we analysed, shows a Hindu man grabbing a Muslim woman from behind in a threatening manner.
In some images, the men are also disproportionately larger, a common theme in "domination fetish" pornography.
Then, in a few places, multiple Hindu men are seen surrounding a Muslim woman, as a form of collective domination.
Zaidi argues that this "Sexual possession" becomes "symbolic of the domination of the whole community".
Nabiya Khan concurs. Delving into her own experience of being targeted through the Sulli Deals app, she says, "It wasn't an attack on Nabiya the person. It was an attack on Nabiya, a Muslim, like the Muslim woman in the AI images. Their aim is to humiliate Indian Muslims as a whole".
Elaborating on this mentality, Zaidi says, "They see Muslim women as something to be taken, something to be possessed, or otherwise just humiliated as an indirect attack on the whole community. It has happened in the past, but it has never been legitimised in these ways, for instance by using AI to do all this," she says.
A recurring theme in these pages is the obsession with what they believe is the superiority of the "Uncut (uncircumcised) Hindu penis".
In fact, many of the pages have names with the word "uncut". We could count over 50 such 'uncut' pages on Instagram that post semi-pornographic images of Muslim women.
Solicitation and Claims of 'Grooming'
A majority of pages we analysed frequently put out posts soliciting "Muslim girls and housewives" seeking "sexual satisfaction".
However, many of the pages also carry posts and comments complaining about catfish accounts pretending to be Muslim women therefore we cannot say whether any women genuinely reach out to them or not. Many pages have made video chats compulsory as a proof of identity.
Some of the pages claim that they can facilitate "sexual meetings" between Muslim women and Hindu men. For instance, the page below put up a post inviting "men in Odisha" to "hook-up" with an 18-year-old Muslim girl.
The pages also periodically post area specific invitations, most commonly in cities in Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh.
A few of the pages also claim to be involved in what is known as "Bhagwa Love Trap" that is the alleged grooming of Muslim girls aimed at converting them to Hinduism.
One page put up an Instagram story about "Bhagwa love trap" on "aalim ladki" - that is a claim that a girl who is a religious scholar has been groomed into converting. However, this claim isn't verified.
Another Instagram page titled 'Kafir the Destroyer' claims that it is aimed at converting "pious mullis". "Once you visit my profile than no chance to goback. U totally corrupt ur imaan (sic)".
According to Zaidi, "Taking away someone's identity or removing someone's religious symbols, is a way of disempowering a community".
A conversation on Quora also provides an insight into this mentality.
Now, there is no way we can verify whether this person is indeed married to a Muslim or whether he is projecting his fantasy as reality. But it is clear that he considers it some kind of an achievement for a Hindu man to be married to a Muslim woman and for the woman to no longer be a Muslim as a consequence of that.
'Zalim Pandit' and The Caste Angle
Another important aspect is that some of these pages emphasise the caste identity of the Hindu male involved in the images and memes - some have titles like 'Zalim Pandit', 'Zalim Brahman' or 'Zalim Thakur'. We found at least 60 pages on Instagram with names that are versions of "Zalim Pandit" or "Zalim Brahman" dedicated to posting explicit images of Muslim women.
In some of the memes it is emphasised that the Hindu man violating the Muslim woman is "Panditji". Another page claims that "only a Pandit can satisfy the sexual urges of Muslim women".
We didn't come across such pages where any OBC or Dalit caste identity is emphasised. Nor did we find any pages invoking a regional identity where such images are being used. Many of the pages titled "Zalim Thakur" do have pornographic content but only a small fraction of these are targeted at Muslim women and they mostly contain general explicit and misogynyst images.
Zaidi says she doesn't find this surprising.
"If you take Dalits, how do you show their identity in such images? They have not been allowed to assert any power for thousands of years. The only way for them is to fold their identity into the majority identity. You exist not as a distinct identity but lower down in a larger identity," she adds.
The Prospect of Violence
The non-AI images posted by such pages are often more explicit than AI generated ones as some of them even go to the extent of showing sexual violence against Muslim women by Hindu men. The images used in such cases are often from Western pornographic memes or from Western porn movies but a Tilak or Om symbol added on the man and a Hijab on the woman using photoshop. In many cases, crudely made cartoons are also used.
While there may be no explicit sexual assault in these images, violence is still inherent in them. Such images, whether AI generated or photoshopped, are not the same as a couple posting intimate pictures consensually or even the posting of a porn clip for that matter.
We must remember that the AI images don't represent any real life couple or even porn actors, they represent the fantasies of the men creating, posting and consuming these images. It represents what they want to do to Muslim women and that Muslim women have no consent in the matter.
It is this aspect that makes these images inherently violent.
The advocacy of targeted violence against Muslim women isn't a recent phenomenon. VD Savarkar in 'Six Glorious Epochs', argued that Hindu rulers like Chhatrapati Shivaji and Chimmaji Appa should have used rape and molestation against Muslim women as an "act of revenge" against Muslim rulers.
The language used in the poem from 2002 is similar to the imagery in the semi-pornographic pages of today.
"We have untied the penises that were tied till now
We have widened the tight vaginas of the bibis."
More recently, we saw how Hindutva organisations felicitated the men who were convicted for the rape of Bilkis Bano after their release.
Hindutva organisations also marched in support of the men accused of raping a Muslim minor in Jammu and Kashmir's Kathua in 2018.
There have also been speeches in Hindutva functions in Uttar Pradesh where speakers advocated digging up the graves of Muslim women and raping them.
Social media and online platforms have provided new avenues for pushing and normalising this mentality of rape as a communal punishment - be it the "Burqewaali layenge" genre of Bhojpuri songs, Sulli Deals and Bulli Bai, or these AI genrated images of Muslim women.
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