Racializing the Veil
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Al-Saji's article really hits home in exposing how Western society has completely misunderstood and misrepresented the hijab. What frustrates me most in the reading is how they completely excluded Muslim women's voices from conversations about our own choices and practices. Like that French law in 2004 - they interviewed only two Muslim women before making huge decisions about our religious freedoms. How can you claim to "liberate" women while simultaneously silencing them?
What Al-Saji points out about Western feminism using the hijab as this "negative mirror" is so spot on. They've created this narrative where they get to be the "saviors" while completely ignoring our agency and the various personal, spiritual, and cultural meanings the hijab holds for us. The way she breaks down how this type of thinking actually reinforces both racism and sexism under the guise of "women's liberation" really exposes the hypocrisy.
The most powerful part of her argument is when she discusses how this Western view completely fails to understand that for many Muslim women, the hijab isn't a prison - it can actually be a means of creating identity and exercising agency. What's particularly frustrating is how this attitude affects our daily lives. When Western society frames the hijab solely as oppression, it makes it harder for us to be taken seriously in professional settings, to access education, or even to have basic conversations about our faith without being seen as victims or threats. They claim to want diversity, but only on their terms - only if we conform to their ideas of what liberation looks like.