October 9, 2017 The Nation.^29
welfare regimes in the direction of the so-
called commodification of care [and]...the
feminization and racialization of specific
labor markets,” migrant women workers
were critical to the economy, and so they
became defined not as a liability but as
victims to be saved. Nationalists turned
to the language of secular feminism in
order to criticize the way in which these
women were oppressed by their cultural
and religious norms—as embodied by their
veils. Likewise, many European feminists
insisted that it was precisely “care” work
that would “save” Muslim women by pro-
viding them with wage-earning labor that
was inherently emancipatory.
There is an irony in this, as Farris ob-
serves. The European feminists’ insistence
that migrant women’s autonomy would be
furthered by the work of domestic ser-
vice defined as liberating the very house-
hold drudgery that these feminists had long
sought to escape. There is both a racist and
a sexist element to this, Farris says, because
“they reinforce the conditions for the repro-
duction at the societal level of Muslim and
non-Western migrant women’s segregation,
traditional gender roles, and the gender in-
justice they claim to be combating.”
V
eil, the highly personal meditation by
Rafia Zakaria, a journalist and philos-
opher of Pakistani origin, provides a
voice from the other side of the story
recounted by Chin and Farris—
a voice that is rarely listened to by the politi-
cians and feminists who associate unveiling
with the liberation of Muslim women.
In a series of chapters that reflect on
her own personal experience (wearing a
full-face veil at her traditional Muslim wed-
ding in Karachi; watching her grandmother
drape a veil around her face when men
got too close to her in the market; observ-
ing women at the Finsbury Park Mosque
in London), Zakaria explores the many
meanings of the veil as it is worn and ob-
served. Each chapter has a different theme,
among them submission, purity, rebellion,
feminism, and subversion. Zakaria’s style
is associative, not linear; no single line of
argument is developed. The aim is to appeal
to personal experience as a way of establish-
ing authority for her assertions, and also as a
way of evoking sympathy in the reader (who
is presumed to be Western).
Veils, Zakaria argues, offer a range of
subjective and objective meanings that de-
pend on the “particularities of person and
politics and context.” Indeed, one of the
many meanings of this piece of cloth is
that it can be a form of empowerment for
the women who choose to wear it. “Inde-
pendent of context, it does not have much
meaning,” but in specific settings (within
and outside the Muslim community), the
veil can have many positive ones: as a sign of
submission to one’s faith, or an individual’s
purity, or her desire for collective, com-
munal identification. It can also, Zakaria
argues, give a certain sense of pleasurable
power: that of seeing without being seen. Its
wearing can sometimes signal rebellion—
a challenge to the Western European “aes-
thetics of the public sphere”—and even a
certain strain of feminism, allowing women
to express their individual autonomy.
Zakaria’s approach also differs from Far-
ris’s and Chin’s in its scope. Chin has a
chapter on how veiled women became, in
the 1990s, evidence of Islam’s cultural in-
compatibility with the West, and Farris,
expanding on this, examines how, for Eu-
ropean nationalists and feminists, the veil
became a symbol of how Islam denies West-
ern liberalism’s ideal of sexual democracy.
Zakaria’s explanation is at once narrower
and more directed to the present. She is
less interested in the deep historical roots of
the immigrant question; instead, she frames
her argument within the context of the so-
called War on Terror that began in the early
2000s. This draws her readers’ attention to
the present political implications of the veil.
“The fully veiled Muslim woman,” Zakaria
explains, “once imagined as singularly exotic
and repressed, an emblem of the harem of
old, ripe with forbidden sexual possibility,
did not fit into [the] rhetoric of the War on
Terror. That War could no longer be based
simply on the demonization of the Muslim
man; it required an extension of suspicion to
the Muslim woman, particularly the Muslim
woman who was not willing to do away with
the veil.”
If Chin offers us history and Farris so-
ciological theory, Zakaria’s more personal,
philosophical approach is intended to con-
test the singular meaning that the veil has
acquired in much of the West. By exploring
the subjective experiences of the veil, we
begin to see how both wearing it and not
wearing it have profound psychic reso-
nances for those who make these choices,
as well as for those who regard it with hos-
tility or even just curiosity. In one notable
example, Zakaria writes of the desire of
white women in the days of empire to un-
veil “other” colonized women, a desire that
established their superiority as representa-
tives of a higher civilization. Or, referring
to the work of the Iranian-American artistShirin Neshat, Zakaria notes the startling
message conveyed in a photograph of a fully
veiled woman pointing a gun at the viewer:
“A veil is revealed then to be not just fabric
but a partition and a boundary.... To put the
veil back on, to retreat into feminine space,
is a wish for reclamation.”
These psychic resonances of the veil—
“desire,” “wish”—deserve more attention
in analyses of Islamophobia in general
and of the place of veiled women within
it in particular. But the representation of
Muslim women as sexually repressed is key
to understanding these resonances, and it
is underexamined by all of these authors,
including Zakaria. In the course of the 21st
century, sexual liberation (the individual’s
ability to sleep with whomever she chooses)
has come to be equated with gender equali-
ty and with freedom more generally, eclips-
ing all of the other measures of equality
that might be used. A certain form of sexual
desire (that experienced by the autonomous
individual of liberal political theory) is
presented as universal and natural, not as
a culturally produced artifact of the West.
This view of things elicits a visceral repug-
nance to the alleged perversions of Islam:
“We” project our experience of thwarted
desire onto “them.”
As a result, the stark contrast between
Islam and the West on the question of sexual
liberation confirms the West’s sense of its
own superiority in the matter of gender
equality, even as it conceals the vast dis-
crepancies in wealth and status. In this way,
the binary that many liberals, feminists, and
nationalists invoke—sexual freedom versus
sexual repression—translates discrimination
(based on economics, race, class, or reli-
gion) into a moral virtue that quarantines
the bad influences these immigrants bring
with them. It is not the poverty or exclusion
they experience in our societies that defines
“those people” as unacceptable, but rather
their retrograde beliefs and behaviors, espe-
cially around issues of sex. At the same time,
the belief that “our” system of gender rela-
tions is universal and natural while “theirs”
is perverse soothes the anxieties and uncer-
tainties that haunt the relations between the
sexes on “our” side.
In France, as I have suggested else-
where, the veiled woman is perceived as
deeply disquieting because her veil suggests
that sexuality presents a problem for social
relationships that must be addressed by de-
claring sex off-limits in public space. This is
a challenge for a republican political system
that, on the one hand, promises equality
for all and, on the other, has historically