The veil as a battlefield for racist and imperialist power
"Aren't you pretty? Unveil yourself!" was not a message of freedom in Algeria, but the colonial power's weaponization of feminism to win a war. The pattern is analyzed in an indispensable new book.
In 2001, the invasion of Afghanistan was justified through Afghan women’s rights. The bombers carried feminism’s emblem. RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, which explicitly opposed the bombings and wanted to speak for itself, was erased from the story. They did not fit the image of the passive victim who needed to be rescued from the outside.
Decades later, we hear voices like that of Sweden’s Liberal Party leader Simona Mohamsson instead, confirming that the veil is the worst form of oppression and that a return to an authoritarian monarchy in Iran, against all reason, will liberate women, since the problem is said to be precisely the veil.
The thinker Frantz Fanon identified the pattern already in the 1950s. In his texts on Algeria, he showed how colonial power weaponized women’s liberation. The French army staged public ceremonies in which Algerian women were made to remove their veils before cameras and audiences, gestures meant to prove that they chose “freedom,” which was made synonymous with Frenchness.
Author Shahed Ezaydi reminds us how colonial power spread posters with messages such as N’ētes-vous donc pas jolie? Dévoilez-vous! (Aren’t you pretty? Unveil yourself!) to make it appear as though women were choosing freedom – over Islam.
