Behind The Veil

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Jazmin Gardner Middle Eastern Studies Jgg285@nyu.edu November 6, 2010 Behind the Veil If there is one thing I have learned as a woman, it is that people are quick to judge. If a woman wears glasses, she is more likely to be smart. If a woman wears tight clothes, she is more likely to be easy. And if a woman wears a veil, she is without a doubt, part of the most oppressed and confined group of women in the world. This is the perception of Muslim women that I have been exposed to for most of my life. The media presents to me all I have ever known of the Middle East; women covered in burqas, or wrapped up completely in their hijab. The veil, and women in general, has become a symbol for the inferiority of the Middle East. But, like a person can be wrong about a woman who wears glasses, the world as a whole can be very wrong about the real meaning of the veil, and about their perception of the women of Islam. Leila Ahmed’s The Discourse of the Veil explores the real source of women’s struggles in Islam versus the purely symbolic ones that the West concentrates its critique on. Since before the 17th century, the West has been forming opinion of the Middle East, depicting what makes it so different. Most of the ideas were focused on women, because they were the most visibly different to “western eyes.” Travelers and crusaders made uninformed assumptions about how women were dressed and how that reflected upon Muslim society. “The thesis of the new colonial discourse of Islam centered on women was that Islam was innately and immutably oppressive to women, that the veil and segregation epitomized that oppression, and that these customs were the fundamental reasons for the general and comprehensive backwardness of Islamic societies” (Ahmed 152). The idea that the veil is holding Islam back as a civilization was greatly encouraged by writer Amin, and

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