Opinions on how women from countries such as the Middle East should be allowed to dress are and have been forever present. Many people have opinions on situations which they do not know much about. Only women who actually participate in veiling know the exact reason on why they decide to veil. Maysan Haydar, an observant Muslim and a feminist, is the author of “Veiled Intentions: Don’t Judge a Muslim Girl by Her Covering” which appeared in Body Outlaws: Rewriting the Rules of Beauty and Body Image. Haydar’s text is written to try and convince people that just because someone veils does not mean that they are much different. She wants to promote that being yourself if great and wants people to redefine the way people view the veil. On the same page as Haydar is Lila Abu-Lughod, an American woman with Palestinian and Jewish ancestry and professor at Columbia University. Abu-Lughod is the author of “The Muslim Woman”, in this text she talks about how in the eyes of the Western civilization the women who veil are seen as oppressed. She writes to show how different we are from them and that we should accept the differences in the cultures. Haydar and Abu-Lughod both write to try show their audience that women who decide to veil are not oppressed but rather have as much freedom as those who do not veil but they do it in a very different way. Haydar’s text is more casual and written for a younger feminist audience and Abu-Lughod’s text is written in a more scholarly form directed towards educated older feminist. Throughout this text I will explore both Haydar’s and Abu-Lughod’s main claims and the evidence that they both provide in order to show us why we should accept the Muslim woman's decision to want to veil.
Oppression is what the Western civilization automatically thinks of when seeing a veiled woman. Both Haydar and Abu-Lughod take on the common belief by many people and show why they should not be seen as oppressed. Haydar talks about how by her deciding to being veiling at the age of twelve it gave her a sense of freedom rather than oppression. She states, “Much to my chagrin, many Americans see veiling as an oppressive tool forced on Muslim women by the men in our culture…”. Haydar does not believe that women who veil are oppressed because they have the option to veil or to not veil. In fact she goes to the extent of saying that what women in the Western culture decide to wear is “…more caging, more oppressive, and more painful…”. From Haydar’s point of view her wearing veil allows her to have more freedom than those women who do not wear veils and wear skinny jeans, make up, and do their hair. Abu-Lughod also takes on the same topic of oppression and talks about how political figures are able to convince the people of the West that women are oppressed and states “…images of veiled and oppressed women have been used to drum up support for intervention”. These women are being used as an excuse to invade their countries because the United States believes they need ‘saving’. The images that circulate around do not represent the women as who they really are. Abu-Lughod states,
“I certainly feel uncomfortable with my collection of media images because my twenty-five years of experience doing research in the Middle East, especially in Egypt, has taught me that images like these do not reflect the variety of styles of women’s dress in those countries and do nothing to convey the meaning of these differences.”
The media is very selective of the images they select to be shown to the public, they tend to only pick those in which women are fully covered with only their eyes showing so that we believe that they are oppressed. Abu-Lughod’s argument may be seen as stronger than Haydar’s argument because she actually did research in the Middle East and Haydar’s is just more her personal experience which weakens her argument.
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