Digital Mind 🧠

🪵 The Threshold

Algerian women who had abandoned the veil re-donned it in response to forced unveiling

Properties2
tagsja-picks, factual_claims, singleton, xref, category/factual-claims
aliases@fanon_dying_1959, loc. 212, @kumar_islamophobia_2012, loc. 332, @selod_forever_2018, loc. 611

4 min read

Algerian women who had abandoned the veil re-donned it in response to forced unveiling

Evidence

Ignorant or feigning to be ignorant of these new forms of conduct, French colonialism, on the occasion of May 13th, reenacted its old campaign of Westernizing the Algerian woman. Servants under the threat of being fired, poor women dragged from their homes, prostitutes, were brought to the public square and symbolically unveiled to the cries of “Vive l’Algérie française!” Before this new offensive old reactions reappeared. Spontaneously and without being told, the Algerian women who had long since dropped the veil once again donned the haïk, thus affirming that it was not true that woman liberated herself at the invitation of France and of General de Gaulle. — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 212 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

For instance, students had to deal on a daily basis with an inefficient and overcrowded transportation system. For women, this was particularly difficult, as they were often harassed on crowded buses. The “Islamic” solution was to transport women in minibuses brought explicitly for this purpose. Once this alternative mode of transport became popular, however, the Islamists restricted this service to only those women who wore the veil. The privatization of transport was thus a way of responding “Islamically” to a social problem, and of placing women students in a situation where they had few choices but to adopt the veil. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 332 (#complicates, via linked claim)

This experience highlights the contradiction in the dominant notion that Muslim men force their wives or kids to wear the hijab. In this example, Reema’s husband desperately wanted to avoid any surveillance or negative interactions, so he tried to persuade his wife to remove her hijab. The fear that Muslim men felt from the state was real, and the attempt to control Reema’s dress reflected the stark difference in how men responded to their surveillance compared to women. Muslim men did not express the desire to transform the narrative of Muslims through their actions. Instead, they wanted to make invisible their religious identity. — , Selod, Saher - Forever Suspect_…, 611 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

  • XREF: connects to: Algerian women’s veiling practices changed without being part of the revolution’s program; Forced public unveiling drove Algerian women back to the veil in solidarity — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 212; Islamists exploited a transport problem to coerce women into wearing the veil — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 332 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

✉️

Backlinks