Veiled Imagery

The other day I was at Borders, in the Middle East section, which was interestingly, adjacent to the religion section. I was doing what I normally do, looking for a good read while waiting for someone–of course, never to buy the ridiculously expensive books they have to offer. I picked up a book called ‘Princess Sultana’s Daughters’ which had a cover of a woman wearing a niqab and staring out with distressing eyes. Now I’ve come across this type of book before, a supposed insight into the corrupt and oppressive Saudi royal family. However, I noticed other books nearby, all with the same type of imagery: a veiled woman, enveloped in a dark background; her eyes a deep ocean of misery.

Some people might think this is a slight overreaction. So what if there were veiled women on the cover of a couple of books? In fact, in my utter disgust, I actually counted the books. From only two shelves I counted 11 books, all with an image of a veiled woman. Titles like “Princess: A True Story of Life Behind the Veil in Saudi Arabia’ and ‘Nine Parts: The Hidden World of Islamic Women” accompanied what I can’t help but call these grotesque images.

What leads me to call such images grotesque is the orientalist ideology that produces what they really are: distortions and stereotypes of an entire region and its people. With every book I picked up, she stares back at me: the orientalist exotic ‘Other’, silent, veiled and miserable.

The image of the veiled women has not been reconfigured too much in today’s Western discourse. The orientalist expectation of the oppressed, silent veiled woman continues today—only with a slight twist, she now is at times is deployed also to embody Western perceptions of an ‘Islamic threat ‘. These mass produced books and stereotypical images are an ideological weapon, to counter the so called ‘Islamic threat’, if not within the West, then abroad. Repeatedly the veiled woman, her eyes just visible through a slit, is selected as the symbol or signifier for the ‘Muslim enemy’. Two meanings are deduced from such imagery: Patriarchal oppression and the hidden sinister fundamentalist presence, lurking behind the figure of the woman who manipulates her. However, it is the patriarchal oppression that is depicted the most. In the past, it was paintings, photographs and literature of the ‘orient’, that produced the static orientalist female Other. Today, she exists not only in Western literature but in media, where she embodies every negative association that one has of Islam: the harem, polygamy, restricted sexuality, segregation, domesticity, and the overall irrationalism of Islam. She therefore is doubly marginalised: as a woman and as the subaltern Other who is the subsidiary inferior.

The veiled woman signifies these so-called ‘normative’ experiences and emphasises the ‘inferiority’ and ‘alien’ qualities of Islam and Muslims. The implication here being these women are the archetypical representatives of the Middle East and Muslim world. The power of such images legitimised empire in the past because it managed to construct a monolithic ‘orient’, reduced to an unchallenged and manageable stereotype which ensured the European ‘civilising mission’. Today, it also legitimises the modern imperialist project: The resource wars raging in the region, in the guise of ‘democratisation’ –a modern equivalent of the colonial civilizing mission (we see this in Afghanistan for instance); Western hegemony, and the marginalization and containment of Muslims living in the West, especially in the ‘post-911’ period.

So what is innocently depicted as the ‘oppressed’ women of the Muslim world in these books, are in fact political strategies to reinforce racist essentialised imagery of Islam which reduce the complexities of a heterogeneous world to euro-centric constructions. This perverted logic states all ‘Islamic’ (note: Not ‘Muslim’, because everything that is produced from these societies is Islamic, including its women) women are veiled, oppressed, obedient, silenced and living a truncated life. Conveniently, it can be deduced, she is waiting to be liberated.

-Sahar