At the prestigious La Sorbonne University in France, a veiled Muslim female was sitting in class when her geography professor asked her, “Are you planning on keeping your thing on throughout all my classes?” He added, “I’m here to help you integrate into professional life, and that [headscarf] is going to cause you problems.” When the Muslim student refused to remove her headscarf, the professor asked her to “go to another class” (Aboulkeir, sec. 2-4). As this example suggests, a simple piece of clothing referred to as the hijab, predominantly worn by Muslim women and girls, has stigmatized all Muslim women and is perceived as a threat to freedom and gender equality, particularly across western nations. This religious veil has come to bear the symbol of oppression, fundamentalism, terrorism, coercion, and the invisibility of Muslim women in their societies (Sadar, sec.1). The 2004 and 2010 French laws banning Muslim women and girls from veiling in public spaces, including schools, has received mixed responses. Nicholas Sarkozy, the former French president, claimed this ban to be “necessary” in order to preserve “traditional French culture of a laïque society,” which is the separation between church and state (Ahmad 4). Furthermore, the French government supports the views of western liberal feminists such as Élisabeth Badinter, who claims the ban is a “liberation” to women who have been pressured to veil (Ahmad 20). However, non-western and Muslim feminists assert that such laws are oppressive, as women are being coerced into some “liberation” that they never sought in the first place (Mumeni 4).

In this paper, I will argue that not only are western perceptions of the veil fundamentally distorted, but that such discriminative bans in France and other nations are anti-feminist, neocolonialist, and a denial of self-expression. It is impossible to ignore the women who still live in patriarchal cultures where the veil might reveal oppression, fundamentalism, and coercion. However, at the same time, we must also recognize the independent Muslim women who are promoting a new version of feminism with the veil. By veiling themselves, they take control of their bodies, embrace their faith, and resist the pressure of western, capitalistic norms.

Though veiling is commonly associated with Islam, the practice actually predates Islam and was practiced by numerous Mediterranean civilizations. For instance, the Assyrians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, and Zoroastrians required upper-class women to veil themselves as a sign of “high status and respectability” (Awad, sec. 1).  In these ancient civilizations, veiling was meant to differentiate between “respectable” women and those who were “publicly available” such as slaves, prostitutes, and lower caste women. Furthermore, harsh penalties were implemented if lower class women were ever seen veiling.  (Ahmed 36). During these times, the veil symbolized a woman’s exclusive lifestyle, her privilege, dignity, and at the same time a particular type of femininity that was forbidden to lower-class women.

However, veiling became more prevalent amongst Muslim women as Muslim empires conquered the various ancient civilizations and adopted their cultural practices (Ahmed 36). “Because Islam identified with the monotheistic religions of the conquered empires, the practice was adopted as an appropriate expression of Qur’anic ideals regarding modesty and piety” (Ahmed 36). The ideals of class and dignity that were associated with the veil throughout ancient civilizations became something Muslims gradually used to denote modesty and piety. Eventually veiling was adopted by Muslim women throughout the Middle East, spread among urban populations, and became customary in Islam (Ahmed 36).

Nevertheless, there has been an ongoing debate throughout the Islamic community on whether Muslim women should veil themselves and to what extent. Some believe that the hijab was specifically instructed by the Quran and Allah as a symbol of modesty in order for women to preserve their beauty and adornment (Murphy, sec. 23). On the other hand, some Muslims argue “that it is not a strict religious requirement” but merely a strong suggestion that is open to individual interpretation (Murphy, sec. 42). While Islam does encourage women to dress modestly, that principle applies to both sexes, but does not necessarily entail the veiling of women (Murphy, sec. 42). Yasmin Alibahi-Brown, a Muslim columnist, summarized that nowhere in the Quran is there a “necessity for Muslim women to wear a headscarf or any other piece of clothing” (Brown, par. 8). Brown believes that, in the Quran, the veil is mostly used “metaphorically to describe barriers between good and bad, believers and non-believers” (Brown, par. 7). Similarly, Fatima Mernissi a Muslim feminist, argues in her book The Veil and the Male Elite that the veil “was to be God’s answer to a community with boorish manners and to separate the space between two men, not between a man and a woman” (Mernissi 85). Moreover, Mernissi explains the hijab as representative of a spiritual obstacle that prevents one from seeing God (Mernissi 95). However, she never describes the hijab as something physically worn by a woman.

Asra Nomani and Hala Arafa, both Muslim reporters, further elaborate on Mernissi’s idea by examining the use of the word hijab throughout the Quran. “The word hijab or a derivative appears only eight time in the Quran as an obstacle, wall of separation (7:46), a curtain (33:53), hidden (38:32), a wall of separation, hiding, prevented or denied access to God (83:15)” (Nomani and Arafa, sec. 3).  However, both writers explicitly argue how the hijab never connotes any act of piety” (Nomani and Arafa, sec. 3). As we will come to see, these scholarly interpretations, while related to some women’s experiences of veiling, don’t fully map on to the realities faced by Muslim women who veil. Rather, there are a number of dispositions to wearing the veil among women in the Arab world.

Compared to the oversimplified, and inaccurate meanings that tend to be attributed to the veil, the veil is interpreted very differently among Muslim women, and has varied connotations depending on one’s personal convictions, and values. Muslim women such as Saida Kada, the head of the Organization for French Muslim Women in France, wears the hijab as a religious statement and as progressive path in her faith with important links to her spirituality” (qtd. in Taber, sec. 3). Similarly, Alidost, a Muslim blogger, chooses to wear the hijab not only to symbolize her faith and obedience to God but also her womanhood (Alidost, l. 60). Alidost believes the “hijab is a threat to consumerism”; thus, wearing it sends the message to women to stop being vain and materialistic but to focus on the health of their souls (Alidost, l. 77). For Alidost, the hijab therefore has religious and social meanings. Contrarily to Alidost, Muslim women such as Dr. Ismail, who lives in Australia, wears the hijab for cultural and fashion purposes (qtd. in Vyer, sec. 1). In an article posted on ABC News, Dr. Ismail describes how she has been wearing her hijabs for years: “I’m so comfortable wearing them that I can’t imagine myself without them. I wear it for cultural reasons, but there are many women who wear it for religious reasons” (qtd. in Vyer, sec.1).

Other non-hijabi Muslim women, such as the German Islamic scholar Lamya Kaddor, believes Muslim women can “be modest and behave honorably with and without a veil or head-scarf” (Kaddor, par. 2). Many devoted Muslim women feel that they either have not reached that level of dedication in their faith to bear the spiritual responsibility of wearing the hijab or, like Kaddor, believe that they don’t need to prove anything to society with an outward symbol of faithfulness. As Rasmieyh Abdelnabi, a 27-year-old Muslim woman who grew up attending an Islamic school in Chicago explained, “When you put the scarf on, you have to understand that you are representing a community, and that is huge. That’s a huge responsibility. And I don’t know if it’s for everyone” (qtd. in Khalid, sec. 2). At the same time, Muslim women such as Abdelnabi also choose not to veil because they don’t want unnecessary attention drawn unto them. “‘I’m the kind of person who likes to walk into a room and be unnoticed,’” Abdelnabi says. “‘When you wear the hijab and you walk into a room, everyone notices you; everyone stares at you; everyone makes assumptions about you’”(qtd. in Khalid, sec. 2). To these women, Islam is in the heart, and is a personal relationship with God; it does not necessarily need to be public to be proven.

On the other hand, there are also American Muslim women, such as Nomani and Arafa, who see differently. These women passionately condemn the “false religious interpretations” of the hijab because of its distortion of actual Qur’anic teachings, its support of political Islam, and its sexist and paternalistic message (sec. 4). They continue:

To the west, however, Muslim women are still seen as oppressed victims, entrapped by their religion and controlled by men. The veil serves as a clichéd symbol of “Muslim oppression, tyranny and zealotry” which has led to discriminatory laws against Muslim women and girls over the years (Murphy, sec. 5). Multiple instances of Muslim schoolgirls and women being expelled from French public schools or their jobs after refusing to remove their headscarves, caused an uproar throughout France between 2003 and 2010. The French government then enacted laws which banned all public school students from wearing any “conspicuous religions symbols and prohibits the concealing of one’s face in public areas” (Aboulkeir, sec. 5-6). These laws that were meant to defuse tensions only exacerbated them by criminalizing the choice of Muslim women to veil.  The French government claims that the bans passed in 2004 and 2010 are an “unapologetic effort to keep religious expression private, and to uphold the country’s republican secular identity” (“Why the French”, par. 3). However, such bans which are principally directed towards Muslim women, have deeper implications firmly rooted in distorted western stereotypes. Nicholas Sarkozy, and former minister of education, Francois Bayrou, sought to unveil Muslim female students in order to remove the “inordinate pressure” to veil, and encourage a society based on “living together” (Ahmad 18). However, these measures rest on the inaccurate assumptions that all girls wear veils against their will, and that veiling precludes integration (Ahmad 18).

Chimamanda Adichie, a prominent Nigerian writer, when arguing against homophobic arguments in Africa said something that aptly relates to the hijab debate. “We may not understand homosexuality; we may find it personally abhorrent but our response cannot be to criminalize it. A crime is a crime for a reason. A crime has victims. A crime harms society. On what basis is homosexuality a crime?” (qtd. in Ross, par. 2) The same idea applies to the banning of the hijab. Regardless of how uncomfortable one may feel about Muslim women wearing the hijab, it is not in any form a crime. A Muslim woman’s religious practice is not creating victims or threatening anyone’s safety in a society. Banning a form of religious expression for a group that makes up a significant amount of France’s population not only further isolated this community, but contravenes the principles of equality, liberty, and fraternity that the French strive to uphold. Such laws do not foster good social relations but encourage intolerance and separatism. Furthermore, those who fail to understand the complexities linked to the hijab as previously highlighted should simply stay out the hijab debate.

French government officials also attach their arguments to western liberal feminists’ ideals, denouncing the veil as damaging and oppressive to women (Daly 294). According to French politicians such as Nicholas Sarkozy, Bernard Stasi, and Ivan Riouful, the veil is not only “a symbol of female subservience and debasement, but it stands for the alienation of women and does not promote gender equality” (Daly 294). On this view, bans on the hijab supposedly are a “liberation to women” and showcase France’s solidarity with Muslim women worldwide who are oppressed by the hijab (Daly 294). Western liberal feminist, Anne Zelensky, believes the veiling of Muslim women is “detrimental to the feminist movement path to emancipation” (Mumeni 3). According to Zelensky, the veil “symbolizes the place of women in Islam, which is in the shade: it is a symbol of a woman’s relegation and her submission to men” (Mumeni 3). Juliette Minces, a French writer and feminist, also believes that the veil stands for “Islam’s belief that women are inferior, sexually dangerous and in need of protection” (Mumeni 3). To western feminists, veiling cannot possibly be the personal choice of a woman but can only be from the coercion of her backward community, patriarchal religion, and oppressive male counterparts. As British-Muslim feminist writer, Natasha Walter summarized:

Muslim women, however, do not need an intervention, and the countless paths to emancipation are not only those rooted in western feminist ideals. A woman pressured by her society to be thin, reveal her body, and look a certain way is as oppressed as the woman who is coerced to completely cover herself. In both cases, these women have internalized patriarchal norms to the point of self-oppression. Yes, it is impossible to ignore the women who still live in patriarchal Muslim societies in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq who are “flogged, tortured or killed for not complying to cover their heads and bodies when outside their homes” (Brown, par. 14). Nevertheless, we must also acknowledge the millions of other Muslim women who have a choice.

The oppression of Muslim women has less to do with the Islamic faith and more to do with the particular culture and society they live in. As Fatima Mernissi exposes in her work, Muslim male elites in certain areas have distorted and manipulated sacred texts in an effort to isolate women and maintain male privilege (Mernissi 7). In nations such as Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, the teachings in the Quran and the Hadith have been deliberately misinterpreted and manipulated to seclude and oppress women (Mernissi 7). For instance, some see the niquab and burqua as “oppressive cultural traditions rather than Islamic ritual or rule” (Murprhy, sec. 41). An important point however, is that the hijab must be understood in these cases as a mechanism of state control rather than an instrument of religious oppression. Some may object that the state and religion are the same in places like Saudi Arabia and Iran, but I would argue, with Mernissi, that these states have ignored Qur’anic guidelines in order to advance the state’s control of women’s bodies.

While we cannot ignore the Muslim women who may feel oppressed by the veil, it is equally important to acknowledge that not all Muslim women feel this way. Muslim countries such as Turkey and Tunisia do not require women to veil themselves; they leave it up to the woman to decide (Stacey, par. 1).  The Quran, the prophet Mohammed, and Allah himself do not force women to veil and do not condone men forcing women to veil themselves (“Women’s Dress Code,” sec. 2). Instead, these decisions are to be based on one’s religious dedication and faith (“Women’s Dress Code,” sec. 2). Not only is Islam a religion that preaches peace and equality between the sexes; it is a religion in which women are encouraged to be proactive throughout their communities and to seek as many economic, political, and academic opportunities as their male counterparts (Bala 3145-3146). A woman is meant to be cherished, embraced, and preserved according to the Quran, not hidden or oppressed (Bala 3145-3146). The veil, according to the Quran, is not meant to keep a woman in bondage.

In addition to Natasha Walter’s argument, non-western and Muslim feminists further assert that western stereotypes of the veil, and the 2004/2010 French bans are forms of reverse oppression, anti-feminism, and a denial of self-expression. The idea of controlling a woman’s attire and penalizing her for wearing what she chooses to wear is as oppressive as a Muslim man coercing a Muslim woman into wearing the veil in public. As Ajay Chaudhary, author of The Simulacra of Morality: Islamic Veiling Religious Politics and the Limits of Liberalism noted “the concept of forcibly unveiling women as an expression of those women’s liberty invokes the idea of forcing people to be free. It is self-defeating” (Chaudhary 358). Similarly, Myriam Hunter-Henin, a senior lecturer of law at the University College of London criticized the coercive nature of the French laws as being anti-feminist: “Penalizing women who veil themselves does not liberate them, fighting the veil with these measures may go against the feminist tradition of claiming equal rights” (Hunter-Henin 627). The vast majority of Muslim women who veil themselves have done so on their own terms (Sadar, sec. 1). For example, Malala Yousafzai, an 18-year-old Muslim Nobel Peace Prize recipient and activist, was asked by Diane Sawyer in an interview whether she believed in veiling and she responded, “Yes this is my culture, this is my own choice. It’s not been implemented on me” (Crime, scr. 35:19). For Malala, and many Muslim women and girls, the veil is an integral part of their identity and spirituality. Malala is a particularly powerful example because she used to live in Afghanistan, a highly patriarchal society where women are flogged for not veiling themselves. Yet, she risked her life by choosing not to veil herself in specific instances because she believed this decision was her choice (“Unbreakable,” scr. 10:15). Today, however, she proudly dons a veil, on her own terms of religious dedication. Other arguments for veiling by Muslim feminists include an “unspoken expression that they do not want to be judged by their beauty but to be valued for their character” (Abedi, sec. 4). As Nadiya Takolia, a Muslim columnist at the Guardian protested, “this is not about protection from men’s lusts or necessarily about religious dedication. It is me telling the world that my femininity is not available for public consumption. I am taking control of it, and I don’t want to be part of a system that reduces and demeans women” (Takolia, sec. 11).

From its earliest inception, feminism has been centered around the principle of equality and giving women more opportunities. As Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the earliest feminist philosophers, advocated, “I speak for the improvement and emancipation of the whole sex” (Powell, par. 3). Feminism should be about giving women the freedom to choose their distinct paths towards emancipations. For some that is uncovering; for others that is covering fully. No woman or girl should be stifled or condemned for the choices she makes, just as Wollstonecraft promoted. If western feminists and governments claim to support these ideals, they cannot reasonably stop women from making deliberate choices about their attire simply because these choices trouble liberal western values.

The practical reality, furthermore, is that unveiling laws do not liberate Muslim women and girls, but oppress, alienate, and imprison them further. The various girls who were expelled for wearing veils in schools are not only humiliated but miss out on their right to an education. The women who veil themselves will not feel comfortable leaving their houses for fear of being fined or reprimanded in some way (Mumeni 4). These discriminatory laws lead to increasingly isolated veiled Muslim women, which is even more oppressive, and actually anti-feminist” (Mumeni 4).

Alice Walker’s theory of womanism applies here. Womanism originated from black women in America, who felt excluded and alienated by American feminism in the 1980s. Today, however, womanism outstretches to all women of minority demographics who feel that western feminism fails to capture the complexity and fullness of their different cultures and struggles (“Womanism,” par. 1-3).  In this view, western feminists exemplify a form of neocolonialism as western cultural pressures are being deployed to the Arab community in order to enforce new cultural norms upon Muslim women. To a degree, westerners are trying to impose a cultural change throughout the Islamic community as they persistently seek to westernize Muslim women into rejecting the veil. Thus, womanism comes in as a counter-discourse, acknowledges the diversity amongst all women, and provides a platform for a variety of women to voice their individual experiences and their different conceptions of feminism. By veiling themselves, women can literally and symbolically reject the sexualization of female bodies by covering themselves, and can actually gain a sense of self-respect without adhering to western norms of beauty (Sadar, sec. 4). Muslim women promote a new version of feminism where a woman embraces her freedom to choose not only her own form of dress, but also to shape its meanings, whatever they may be without societal or cultural pressures (Sadar, sec. 4). These are facts that are hardly ever considered in the west. As Malala Yousafzai, affirmed “I believe it’s a woman’s right to decide what she wants to wear and if a woman can go to the beach and wear nothing, then why can’t she also wear everything?” (“Don’t think,” sec. 4).

The veil is a symbol of female empowerment and emancipation as it represents the choices that millions of Muslim women have individually made to either embrace their spirituality or to fully own their femininity. It is paramount that the west respects these choices so they can stop categorizing and victimizing every Muslim woman. The distorted stereotypes negatively reflect on the west, who are presumably “advanced,” and promote the misunderstanding of Muslim women, which ultimately undermines the feminist and womanist causes.

Today we live in a diverse world where we will not necessarily understand the intricacies of each other’s religious beliefs, but we must to learn to allow for those differences. When attacks such as 9/11, the 13 November Paris terror attacks, the Mali attacks or the recent Turkey attacks occur it is easy to resort to condemning Islam and all of its adherents. However, it is in such cases where tolerance should be paramount while denouncing the acts of the select few. With the surge of Syrian refugees fleeing to the west due to such attacks, it is distorted stereotypes such as the ones associated to the veil that preclude Muslim migrants from fleeing persecution in their home countries. We cannot condemn terrorists’ organizations for being discriminative, uncompassionate, and opponents of diversity while resorting to the same prejudices when called to moral action.