Veiling the Truth: A Look at How the Hijab is used as a tool of Oppression and Resistance in Iran With Comparisons to Indonesia

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Introduction
As I sat in an airport one day, I noticed a family approaching the same waiting area as mine. This family was not the same as your ordinary family; the mother was completely covered, with only her eyes and hands showing. I immediately found myself wondering, being in America, the land of the free, did she choose to wear that or is it mandatory for her due to her religion. I also wondered if she knew that people were looking at her, possibly with the same question as my own.
Women have always been thought of as something that needed to be controlled in Muslim culture. Their bodies are a source of shame that must be covered during prayer and also in the public (Mir-Hosseini 2007: 3). Veiling, done by a hijab or chador, is when women either wear a headscarf to cover themselves or they wear a veil that covers their entire body, excluding her hands and eyes (Mir-Hosseini 2007: 1; Mir-Hosseini 2003: 41; Berger 1998: 93; Smith-Hefner 2007: 390-391; Brenner 1996: 674; El Guindi 1999: 6). Veiling is used as a tool for oppression. By having women veil themselves, it enforces the control by the male run and male dominated society (Mir-Hosseini 2007: 7). Also, the punishment for women appearing without a veil transitioned as the concept of veiling was addressed, transitioning from seventy-four lashes, to being arrested and held between ten days and two months for being “immodest” women and offending public morality, or fined 50,000 to 500,000 rials (Mir-Hosseini 2007: 8). The oppression of veiling is perpetuated through the thought that it is a woman’s religious duty to wear one, condemning foreigners and women in society if they refuse. Although it is a tool for oppression, there was resistance the oppression. In ...

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...eiled Woman: Irigaray, Specularity, and the Islamic Veil." In Diacritics 28.1. Pp. 93-119.

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1996 "Reconstructing Self and Society: Javanese Muslim Women and "The Veil.”” In American Ethnologist 23.4 (1996): 673-97.

El Guindi, Fadwa.
1999 Veil: Modesty, Privacy and Resistance. UK: Berg. Oxford

Najmabadi, Afsaneh
2000 “(Un)Veiling Feminism.” In Social Text. Pp. 29-54. Duke University Press.

Mir-Hosseini, Ziba.
2003 "The Conservative-Reformist Conflict Over Women's Rights in Iran." In International Journal of Politics, Culture & Society 16.1. Pp. 39-51.

Mir-Hosseini, Ziba.
2007 "The Politics and Hermeneutics of Hijab in Iran: From Confinement to Choice." In Muslim World Journal of Human Rights 4.1

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2007 "Javanese Women and the Veil in Post-Soeharto Indonesia." In The Journal of Asian Studies 66.02 Pp. 389-420.

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