Invisible Visibility

There are many images that come to mind when the Westerner thinks about the Middle East; camels, mosques, and oil are likely amongst those that come to mind, but it seems as though there are few images as powerful as the shrouded woman, often likened to phantasmal shadows against city- and desert-scape alike by “outsiders.” The women that occupy these burkas, scarves, veils, and other flowing robes are likewise shaped by the impressions Westerners glean from their attire: the silent, “blacked out,” invisible woman.

This perception is undoubtedly troublesome for the Western feminist. Raised on the concept of loving one’s voice—perhaps, in some cases, at the cost of others—with a very clear focus on liberation as the Western world defines it, the burka-ed Middle Eastern woman finds very little space in “our” brand of gendered emancipation. Indeed, the perceptions delivered in this week’s readings point to something very different from the Western feminist perception: that the burka/veil/scarf is more a symbol of cultural, personal, and political identity rather than a tool of silence. Indeed, the silencing is left to the Western feminist, who all too often projects the outward appearance of the burka onto the testimonies of the women who wear them, rending them either as victim or invisible within Western feminist doctrine.

In many accounts from the Othered Middle Eastern experience, one finds that the veil means much more than a piece of clothing. As Nor Faridah Abdul Manaf states, “the veil is my body,…my mind,…my cultural identity…who I am,” illustrating the multifaceted and layered meanings the veil takes on for Middle Eastern women beyond the simple “piece of cloth” that Manaf describes (Husain 246). Expanding far beyond the Western perception of oppression—though there are certainly Middle Eastern women who would identify with this position—the veil, for many, has become an intrinsic part of their personal identity. Z. Gabriel Arkles, a transgendered Muslim man, proclaimed that the veil was “the only article of ‘womens’’ clothing that [he has] missed wearing,” illustrating not only one of the most poignant of the many meanings the veil can take on, but the importance of the veil in the daily lives of Muslim individuals as a religious marker (Husain 249).

In considering the many different ways a piece of apparel can be culturally demonized and lauded, the veil/burka/scarf teaches an important lesson to Westerners: even when fighting for what “we” define as freedom, “we” have the potential to cling to ethnocentric understandings of another person’s way of life and understanding of themselves. In deeming the veil/scarf/burka as oppressive, “we” succeed in not only deforming what many consider the “true” meaning to be, but manipulate it for “our” own political and social conscience. It seems as though Western outcry about the burka has become a “personal” crusade on the part of “liberated” America, ensuring that all individuals of foreign countries can have access to the same rights and responsibilities North Americans hold (whether cultural definitions of “freedom” match or not). Our ethnocentrisms have “allowed” us to brush aside generations of imbued symbolism of the burka, allowing us to wage war against it as fervently as the terrorism we associate with it. Though there are certainly areas of the Middle East that are in dire need of political reform, who are we, as guardians of an often corrupt, broken, and highly oppressive democracy (which just can’t quite seem to separate Christian church and secular state), to cry “foul!” on a civilization we demonize and claim that we are (unofficially) at war with on a daily basis? Yet I digress. My point here is that room needs to be made in the Western feminist agenda for those we have deemed Other, even when this means understanding and accepting all cultural formulations of an aspect of said culture we may find opposing to our own conceptions and definitions of that which we—and certainly all individuals—hold most dear: freedom to self-express, self-identify, self-liberate.