Books-in-Brief: Rethinking Muslim Women and the Veil

IIIT Books-In-Brief Series is a valuable collection of the Institute’s key publications written in condensed form to give readers a core understanding of the main contents of the original.

The need to challenge the negative stereotype of the veil as oppressive is urgent. It is on many people’s minds and the debate on whether to wear or not to wear is becoming ever more heated as mainstream media equate it with Muslim backwardness and barbarity. This work focuses on the popular Western cultural view that the veil is oppressive for Muslim women and highlights the underlying patterns of power behind this con- structed image of the veil. It examines the colonial roots of this negative stereotype and successfully challenges the arguments of liberal feminists such as Mernissi to assert that in a culture of consumerism, the veil can be experienced as a liberation from the tyranny of the beauty myth and the thin ‘ideal’ of woman.