The burqa, the long and flowing dark cloth covering women of the Islamic faith, has become a symbol of oppression, of latent fear, of submission, of unimaginable abuse. Even I, a Muslim woman, cannot look at it without cringing, without wondering what really goes on in the homes of these covered women whose eyes are our only access point to the mystery within. Is there really a mystery underneath the imposing veil covering their physique from head to toe? Or are we the imposers – putting our understanding of how women should or should not be as the basis for our judgement of their culture and lifestyles?

Stereotypes, both positive and negative, can lead to an misrepresentation of a group to the observer, and ultimately have profound effects on interactions between individuals, often leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy of the stereotype.

Gillian Whitlock in her article, “The Skin of the Burqa: Recent Life Narratives from Afghanistant” elucidates how stereotypes of Muslim Women and the Burqa as oppressed and oppressive, respectively, may in fact lead to further perpetuation of mind-sets and practices that will impede the strides towards their empowerment. She details that the idea of the burqa as a cloth that is constraining and restrictive and its “unveiling” as an act of liberation, solidifies the belief that women who wear it are weak and need someone else to help them be free, as in the example used of a young Afghan girl being led on a stage and helped out of her burqa by Oprah Winfrey. “The resonances of this are troubling, for this almost inevitably affirms the presentation before Western eyes of the passive Third World woman, awaiting liberation, rather than an active agent in history.” Whitlock also explores the detriment posed by cover-images of autobiographies telling the stories of veiled Muslim women by its usage of images hinting at the beauty, the seductiveness behind the layer of cloth waiting to be revealed. This, she states, “is an edge, and an image, which confirms the paradigm: the promise that the veil can be pierced to reveal the compliant sexualized woman who is waiting, desiring, needing to be unveiled and taken.“

Perhaps we are all more ethnocentric than we’d like to admit. Our way is the best way, our perception is infallible. “In her classic essay “Under Western Eyes,”first published in 1984 (in response to a different historical juncture: the presidency of Ronald Reagan), Chandra Talpade Mohanty talks about the ongoing production of the monolithic, singular subject of the “Third World woman” in (Western) feminist thought.2 Outside history and unchanging, she remains a passive and powerless subject, unable to represent herself. The image of the veiled woman in particular is a powerful trope which both invokes this passive Third World subject, and enables and sustains the discursive self-presentation of Western women as secular, liberated, individual agents.”

A quick search of the burqa, while looking for a photo for this article, emphasized how sexuality has become the standard by which we judge ourselves and others. The burqa has become an object to shed, the women behind it, an object. We, who stand on our soapboxes and declared those who desired their women to be veiled, or women who want to be veiled, as backward, sexual-minded beings bent on the mission to declassify women as nothing but a sexual object are in fact objectifying and declassifying as well.

We do not regard women as any thing but weak, ogle-worthy, play-toys whose purpose here on earth is to satisfy the needs of men (visually and physically).

Help me to understand how this overly sexualized regard for women is a step ahead for women’s rights and a sign of respect for our kind?

In her article, Whitlock also points out how in Afghanistan, women use the burqa as a strategic way to carry out resistance against the regime that seeks to oppress them. Rather than letting the burqa become a message of said oppression by the Islamic extrimist Taliban government, they utilized it for their own empowerment, “smuggling messages, weapons, and publications” underneath the protective layers of attempts to quiet them. Footages of the horrors endured by the Afghan people under Taliban rule were videotaped by the veiled and the oppressed. “Copyrights on most of the images of Taliban atrocities belong to the Revolutionary Association of Afghan Women (RAWA), a feminist collective. They market some of these images to international media organizations. RAWA also markets mugs and mouse mats, posters and calendars from the website they established in 1997, www.rawa.org. The power of RAWA to participate in the exchange of images of Afghan women in their interests is an important issue. This is not just an example of textual resistance to politically incorrect images of women. It is about the production and circulation of alternative images as commodities, which then fund local strategies of feminist resistance to Islamic fundamentalism, such as literacy programs and RAWA schools and hospitals in Afghanistan, and the refugee communities in Pakistan.“

I recall seeing a veiled woman in Old Navy. From head to toe draped the formidable cloth of black. She was clutching something underneath her coverings. Protectively securing it against her, she just stood silent and still in front of the cashier, patiently awaiting her turn it seems. I tried not to stare, but I too wondered, like every one else what was underneath the layers of cloth. Stranger eyes glanced at her very suspiciously. My curiosity turned to sympathy as I began to feel her own discomfort. Her gaze caught mine, and we both smiled (her face wasn’t fully covered). Apparently she saw my growing bump. Her smile made me think that perhaps there was another reason for her stillness and protectiveness. A few second later, a satiated bundle of joy emerged from the many layers of black to the comfort of his mother’s shoulder. He was the bundle she was concealing from all of us, protecting securely as all mothers do. I became ashamed at my snap judgement of her, of allowing the fears and stereotypes creep and settle into my being. This lady was just like any other mother out there, trying to satiate the appetite of her growing child.

We have all been too caught up in the media perceptions of veiled women. Yes, many live in oppressive areas, but are they weak? Are they without any strengths? Do they need a hand-guided liberation?

Rather than making the veil, the burqa, as an object constricting the freedoms of the “weak, oppressed women within”, and as a barrier we need to cross in order to communicate effectively, we should think of the burqa “as a fluid and ambivalent garment – an interface of skin, flesh, and cloth which is a lived embodiment for Afghan (Muslim) women…as very idioms of agency…as examples of resillience...to understand it as part of embodiment, and an expression of boundaries of the body, the self, and belief understood differently from what you know“.

The burqa does not oppress or liberate unless we allow it too. As in the women of RAWA in Afghanistan, the Burqa was not looked at as a barrier to their cause, but an active agent to promote it. The more we regard it as weakening women, and women who wear it are weak, the more we perpetuate the stereotype against them, ultimately further impeding the struggle and fight against Islamic fundamentalism as women will eventually concede to this perception and resign themselves as weak, submissive, controlled beings.

The burqa has such an integral part in women’s liberation and it is only when we are able to step outside of our own stereotypes against it that we can begin to understand the burqa…