"unveiling" the colonial project
-
The term "veil," according to Al-Saji, is entrenched in colonial and orientalist ideology that present veiling as inherently oppressive. Al-Saji argues that the French ban on hijab is not simply about France's secularist ideology, but about their belief in gender equality. The hijab is viewed as a symbol of Islamic gender oppression, which served to create the ban. "In this argument, the veil is equated with the oppression of women in Islam, both in other countries like Iran, Algeria and Afghanistan, but also in the French suburbs [banieues] themselves" (879). The hijab was not only seen as a religious symbol but also a symbol of patriarchal oppression. The hijab ban, for the French, is a method of freeing Muslim women from the shackles of their patriarchal system. The colonial gaze wishing to free Muslim women, "unveils" them, but this "unveiling" serves as a means of controlling the unknown (hijab, Islam, Muslim women, etc.) and also defining what the Other is in terms of colonial ideology. During French occupation of Algeria, removing the hijab was synonymous with destroying Algerian culture and therefore reshaping Algerian culture to fit the French image of culture. As Al-Saji states, "This representational apparatus is the lens through which the colonial observer sees the colonized society. But this lens is also a mirror. The representational apparatus of colonialism not only constitutes the image of the ‘native’ but posits this image in opposition to a certain self-perception of colonial society and against an implicit normalization of gender within that society" (883).