http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1931671,00.html
"....Today the veiled Muslim woman appears to symbolise the perceived Islamic threat, as nuns once epitomised the evils of popery. She seems a barbaric affront to hard-won values that are essential to our cultural identity: gender equality, freedom, transparency and openness. ... Muslims feel embattled at present, and at such times the bodies of women often symbolise the beleaguered community. Because of its complex history, Jack Straw and his supporters must realise that many Muslims now suspect such western interventions about the veil as having a hidden agenda. Instead of improving relations, they usually make matters worse. Lord Cromer made the originally marginal practice of veiling problematic in the first place. When women are forbidden to wear the veil, they hasten in ever greater numbers to put it on.
In Victorian Britain, nuns believed that until they could appear in public fully veiled, Catholics would never be accepted in this country. But Britain got over its visceral dread of popery. In the late 1960s, shortly before I left my order, we decided to give up the full habit. This decision expressed, among other things, our new confidence, but had it been forced upon us, our deeply ingrained fears of persecution would have revived.
But Muslims today do not feel similarly empowered. The unfolding tragedy of the Middle East has convinced some that the west is bent on the destruction of Islam. The demand that they abandon the veil will exacerbate these fears, and make some women cling more fiercely to the garment that now symbolises their resistance to oppression. "
On a similar note, I read the following article published in European Journal of Women's Studies (Vol. 13, No. 2, 103-117) that talks about the underlying patriarchal discourse involved in disciplining women's body.
Headscarves and Porno-Chic: Disciplining Girls' Bodies in the European Multicultural Society Linda Duits Liesbet van Zoonen
This article addresses girls' dress, which has become controversial, especially in contemporary multicultural Europe. Using the Dutch public debate about the headscarf, belly shirts, visible G-strings, and other forms of 'porno-chic', the authors show that these seemingly separate debates are held together by the regulation of female sexuality. Through their analysis of the headscarves and porno-chic debate, the authors argue that women's sexuality and girls' bodies in particular have become the metonymic location for many a contemporary social dilemma: of the multicultural society when it concerns the scarf, of feminism and public morality when it concerns porno-chic. They conclude that despite the widely different appearance of girls wearing headscarves or porno-chic, both groups of girls are submitted to the meta-narratives of dominant discourse: the state, school, public opinion, parents and other social institutions 'resignify' their everyday practices as inappropriate, and reprieve them from the power to define their own actions.
-- Sharif Islam http://www.sharifislam.com Research Programmer University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Library Systems Office 217-244-4688