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The Veil Unveiled: The Hijab in Modern Culture

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If you're curious about why women wear veils, while so many women of the world are, so to speak, unveiling to the point of nudity, then you might find this book interesting. The author examines the veil from a wide perspective that encompasses the historical, political, cultural, as well as religious domains, and in a variety of contexts that includes film, advertising, literary, and erotica. It is noted in the introduction that the veil's history dates back thousands of years to an Assyrian legal text, when veiling was restricted to respectable women and prohibited for prostitutes. In Assyrian, Greco-Roman, and Byzantine empires veiling was a mark of prestige and status. The author, Faegheh Shirazi, who is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, specializes in textiles and material cultures studies. She shows, through a series of a half dozen chapters, the immense versatility of meaning that the veil can have, depending on the context of its use. In Iranian cinema, for example, its use means adhering to the strictures of Islam, which forbids the erotic, whereas in Indian cinema it's meant to be titillating and erotic. In a chapter entitled "Veiled Images in American Erotica," cartoons from the pages of "Playboy," "Penthouse," and "Hustler" are examined. A chapter on advertising shows how the veil is used to sell automobiles, perfume, cigarettes, computers, and sanitary napkins, among dozens of other products. There are chapters covering military, political, and literary aspects as well as film. In Muslim cultures the veil is used to prevent "fitna," defined as the chaos caused by women's sexuality. If this is true, then the case might be made that a good part of the world is in total chaos. Regardless of your viewpoint, the book is thought provoking for anyone interested in human beings and culture.

pretty interesting read even when I disagreed with the conclusions like e-communication equals conquering of veiled women in the advertising section.

Covers advertising, american erotica, cinema, iranian politics...

worth reading

Faegheh Shirazi's "The Veil Unveiled" is a poor example of anthropological and sociological scholarship. The text is poorly written and the argument is disjointed, littered with an excess of facts and figures and broad generalizations. Shirazi, who is Muslim herself, is a textile historian as opposed to a scholar trained in the sociology of gender, which undoubtedly impairs her capacity to formulate a clear and critical analysis of the 'veil' and it's implications in contemporary society.

One of the major flaws of the book is in its title: "The hijab in modern culture." The title presumes that the book will discuss the various manifestations of the 'hijab' in terms of Islam and as an aspect of modern Islamic aesthetic and spiritual identity, and how it is manipulated within the Islamic World. Instead, one finds Shirazi jumping from erotic cartoons in which she asserts that Western men learn about Muslim women through erotica (she completely overlooks her own ethnic community's profuse number of cartoons criticizing chador in Iran from an expatriate viewpoint and political cartoons in mainstream American media). She also jumps to Hindi movies? While neglecting other veiling traditions such as bridal veils, nun's habits, and the 'veiling' with wigs of Orthodox Jewish women. Her argument is repetitive: when she loses sight of her analysis, she falls quickly back on "modesty" as the rationale and fulfilling state modesty mandates on women's dresscodes. This is especially the case in her chapter on women in the military.

She focuses almost exclusively on Iran and Western erotica, which leaves a huge void in the broader discussion and manifestations of the veil in other parts of the Muslim world. Instead, she fills these voids with unnecessary history, disjointed and biased opinions that make her work as an "academic" in the field of Middle Eastern Studies questionable in terms of validity.

The book is good for its images which promote further discussion, but its argument is maddening and unfounded. It is a book that excites people because of its titular premise: how the veil functions and is perceived and manipulated in modern culture. Unfortunately, the contents of the book both contradict the title as well as fall significantly short of fulfilling the thesis.