Annie Husted

The Arab woman--someone who is notably defined by their culture and appearance, and identified by the ubiquitous images that attempt to depict their lives. In the United States, many people view an Arab woman to be noticeably different, especially due to their clothing and veils. But what many people fail to realize is that the light in which these women are cast do not always reveal the reality of their Arab womanhood. In “The Other Side of the Veil” by Caitlin Killian and in Amira Jarmakani’s chapter “The Cultural Mythology of Veils, Harems, and Belly Dancers in the U.S.” in her book Imagining Arab Womanhood, both authors focus on the difficulties Arab women face in trying to express their cultural and personal identity accurately in society. Whether it is rooted in the confusion people feel towards the wearing of Muslim veils or the depictions of Arab women through the media, the lives of these women are suppressed by societal ignorance. 

In Caitlin Killian’s article “The Other Side of the Veil,” Killian explores the reactions that are attached to young, arab women wearing traditional veils--something that she calls the “headscarf affair.” She specifically focuses on the ridicule that many young women have faced and the controversy of wearing these veils regions where this article of clothing is not typically worn--in her article, she focuses on young Arab women wearing veils to school in France. Killian conducted a study in which she interviewed 45 women to receive their opinions on whether or not veils should be permitted to wear to school. For Muslim women, wearing the traditional headscarf serves as a “vehicle for distinguishing between women and men and a means of controlling male sexual desire” (Killian 570). Killian also discusses how in Algeria, “the veil became a symbol of national identity and opposition to the West during the independence and nationalist movements” (570). The “headscarf affair” became a controversial issue because of the belief of the importance of the separation of church and state. This ultimately led to the differences in whether or not veils should be allowed to be worn in schools to become such a heated issue. François Bayrou, the minister of education in in 1994, even issued a “circular to regulate the use of religious symbols in school, banning ‘ostentatious religious symbols,’ including the veil, that were deemed indiscreet and inflammatory” (Le  Nouvel Observateur, 3 September 1994). Yet, in looking at the other perspective, “The majority of adolescents and preadolescents who veiled did so because of family pressure” (572). Thus, although many people viewed the veil to be an icon of religious pretentiousness, the young girls wearing them were merely obeying the rules of their families traditions. In Killians study, she noted the separation in opinions regarding whether or not these scarves should be worn. The people who believed that they should be allowed to be worn saw them as a symbol of personal and cultural identity, while the people who did not believe they should be allowed to be worn viewed them as an interference with the secularity of the school systems in today’s society. For an issue that seemed somewhat foreign to me as a White, European-American teenage girl, I feel strongly that young Arab women should be allowed to wear their scarves to school. Although the veils do serve as an brazen religious declaration, women who are brought up in cultures that define their femininity through the veil should be allowed to adhere to their Islamic fundamentalism without feeling ridiculed. I feel that in forbidding young Arab women to wear the traditional garments of their culture, that the cultures against this are subconsciously being both xenophobic and intolerant of ideological diversity. 

In second reading, Amira Jarmakani’s chapter out of her book Imagining Arab Womanhood, Jarmakani explores the way in which, “narratives of national security, globalization, and the war on terror manifest in the mythologies of the veil, the harem, and the belly dancer” (Jarmakani 141). She drives deeper in honing in on how Arab and Muslim womanhood is subsequently defined by images of nostalgic and non-progressive outlets. In her discussion of the veil, Jarmakani states, “The cultural mythology of the veil is compelling because of its citational quality--the U.S. association of the veil with barbaric, backward, regimes and, more recently, Islamic fundamentalism, has been sedimented through media coverage...” (144). In the U.S., the veil is denoted by the connotation of concealing an Arab women’s life of distress, whereas really, the veil is a strong cultural symbol of womanhood--a concept that, for example, was failed to be made clear in the National Geographic magazine cover of the “Afghan girl.” Similarly, Jarmakani discusses how the representation of the harem “operate[s] as signifiers that engage with popular perceptions of femininity, masculinity, and sexuality in relation to the Arab and Muslim worlds” (146). She explores how the ever-present fear of terrorism (specifically post 9/11) has made people view the garments worn by Arab individuals in a negative light. Jarmakani also argues that “the shifts and changes in contemporary representations of Arab and Muslim womanhood demonstrate a shifting U.S. relationship to empire and capitalism, while the citational quality of the images keeps them tied to the legacy of orientalism and colonialism” (149). In the media, movies like James Bond portray images of the harem to be associated with exotic sexuality of Arab women, and this sexuality is also seen in the rise in the belly dancing profession in the U.S. I think that reading this chapter really opened my eyes to the way the media has portrayed the lives of Arab women. Upon reflecting on this chapter, I definitely can see how Arab womanhood has been exploited through the media, and I think that the author makes an interesting point about how there is an evident “parallel between the way that figures of Arab and Muslim womanhood operate simultaneously as nostalgic emblems in both modernist and postmodernist frameworks” (178).