European observers read the veil as concealing beauty that should be forcibly exhibited

Evidence

For a European not directly involved in this work of conversion, what reactions are there to be recorded? … The dominant attitude appears to us to be a romantic exoticism, strongly tinged with sensuality. … And, to begin with, the veil hides a beauty. … A revealing reflection—among others—of this state of mind was communicated to us by a European visiting Algeria who, in the exercise of his profession (he was a lawyer), had had the opportunity of seeing a few Algerian women without the veil. These men, he said, speaking of the Algerians, are guilty of concealing so many strange beauties. It was his conclusion that a people with a cache of such prizes, of such perfections of nature, owes it to itself to show them, to exhibit them. If worst came to worst, he added, it ought to be possible to force them to do so. — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 147

Categorization

• XREF: Directly evidences the reading purpose: how the European minority in Algeria perceived and reacted to the colonized woman, revealing their assumptions about colonial bodies. — connects to: Circulating veiled-woman imagery deadens Westerners’ sense of Muslim women’s diversity — Arsalan Iftikhar, Fear of a Muslim Planet_ Global…, 394; French veil laws institutionalize entwined stereotypes of weak women and violent men; Local European bans often sought to suppress Muslim visibility in public space — Green, Todd H, The Fear of Islam_ An Introduction to…, 621 (+1 more)

Related

• Unveiled Algerian women unsettled European women by excelling at Western femininity (similarity 0.88)
• French unveiling campaigns aimed to demoralize Algerian men, not liberate women (similarity 0.86)
• The European’s impulse to unveil Algerian women is an act of possession (similarity 0.85)
• Algerian women who had abandoned the veil re-donned it in response to forced unveiling (similarity 0.85)
• Forced unveiling in colonial Algeria backfired by politicizing the veil (similarity 0.84)
• Removing the veil disrupts the Algerian woman’s body image and spatial sense. (similarity 0.84)
• Forced public unveiling drove Algerian women back to the veil in solidarity (similarity 0.83)
• European women felt economically and socially threatened by assimilated Algerian women (similarity 0.83)
• France’s 1958 forced unveiling drove Algerian women to adopt the veil as protest (similarity 0.83)
• Algerian women’s veiling practices changed without being part of the revolution’s program (similarity 0.83)
• Enforced unveiling converts the veil into a symbol of anticolonial resistance (similarity 0.82)
• European doctors in Algeria saw unveiled women as disappointingly ordinary (similarity 0.82)
• Moroccan women adopted black veils as a combat symbol of mourning, not tradition (similarity 0.82)
• The veil shifted from passive tradition into an active revolutionary instrument (similarity 0.82)
• Circulating veiled-woman imagery deadens Westerners’ sense of Muslim women’s diversity (similarity 0.82)

Broader Connections

• Algerian women who had abandoned the veil re-donned it in response to forced unveiling #responds-to (0.70)
• Circulating veiled-woman imagery deadens Westerners’ sense of Muslim women’s diversity #qualifies (0.50) — Arsalan Iftikhar, Fear of a Muslim Planet_ Global…, 394
• French veil laws institutionalize entwined stereotypes of weak women and violent men #complicates (0.40)
• Local European bans often sought to suppress Muslim visibility in public space #corroborates (0.35) — Green, Todd H, The Fear of Islam_ An Introduction to…, 621