Islam and the veil

Muslims and the media would have you believe the hijab, burqa and similar muslim garb are religious symbols. Here's an article that takes issue with that notion.

In her article “Veiling Resistance”, which appeared in the March 1999 edition of Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Professor El Guindi said, “Women’s Islamic dress, known as al-ziyy al-Islami, is an innovative construction that was first worn in the mid-1970s by activists. It does not represent a return to any traditional dress form and has no tangible precedent. There was no industry behind it-not one store in Egypt carried such an outfit. Based on an idealized Islamic vision gradually constructed for the Islamic community in the seventh century, it was made in the homes by the activists themselves.”

Egypt, Iran, and Turkey all took steps when that activist dress appeared to ban it because they understood it to be a militant challenge to the growing women’s rights movement in the Middle East and the moderate Islam that had been the norm. However, by the mid-1970s, the radical Islamic clothing became so commonplace that it began to compete with and replace western dress and native costume. Sometimes, as in Iran and Afghanistan, the entire form was clothed in the black chador or completely obliterated in the burqha. In Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Turkey, just the headscarf, which covered the head, forehead and chin, was adopted.

Wearing the scarf spread like wildfire among radicals because it flouted moderate Islamic authority. It is worn now as a purposeful insult to Western institutions. Muslims see it as an ersatz flag of conquest on Western soil. Every time you see one it is a proclamation of their triumph on your country's soil.

Which negates every attempt to compare the "veil" to other religious clothing.