So extreme is the concern with Muslim women today that veiled, and even unveiled, women are no longer thought of as individuals: collectively they have become the Muslimwoman. —Miriam Cooke1
The image on a 2010 Time magazine cover shows a young Afghan girl named Aisha Mohammadzai wearing a loose headscarf, her face visibly disfigured by her missing nose. The gaping wound where her nose was offers a grisly sight. The arresting image has immediacy in its message, underscoring Roland Barthes’ claim that the image communicates, “this is what happened there; having been there”,2 as it sears itself into the viewer’s mind announcing the violence and horror Aisha has witnessed and experienced.
Aisha is an 18-year-old Afghan girl from the province of Oruzgan . Time recounts that after being married at the age of 12, Aisha experienced six years of abuse at the hands of her in-laws. She eventually escaped. However, to make an example of her and prevent other girls from doing the same, the Taliban cut off her ears and nose. Recognising the distressing nature of the image, Time’s managing editor justified the decision to position Aisha as a window into what is happening in the country and to inform debate:
But bad things do happen to people, and it is part of our job to confront and explain them. In the end, I felt that the image is a window into the reality of what is happening — and what can happen — in a war that affects and involves all of us. I would rather confront readers with the Taliban’s treatment of women than ignore it. I would rather people know that reality as they make up their minds about what the U.S. and its allies should do in Afghanistan… We do not run this story or show this image either in support of the U.S. war effort or in opposition to it. We do it to illuminate what is actually happening on the ground.3
Time situates Aisha not only as an emblem of a country that disfigures women but also as a symbol of a nation that has been disfigured by war, fundamentalism and the burqa. “Reality” is conveyed through Aisha’s violated face . This is a violation that coalesces with the burqa’s violations against bodies of women under the excesses of culture. The burqa, as Belgian moral philosopher Etienne Vermeersch described it in 2011 while supporting its ban , “is a symbol of women’s oppression… It is worse than the swastika”.4 French philosopher André Glucksmann declared the veil was “stained with blood”5 and a “terrorist operation”.6 Over the last few years, the burqa has come to represent a formidable image of violence , civilisational difference , subordination, a “veil of terror”7 on the body, refusing to release an inch of it. Resembling the burqa’s erasing presence, Aisha’s missing nose functions as bodily erasure.
Previously, in 2002, the image of an un-covered face of an Afghan girl staring back at the reader, surrounded by women in blue burqas, was shown in The Age. Titled “Liberated Kabul”, the same themes of presence and absence, exposure and closure, veiled and unveiled appear. The girl’s face, the only visible face among the crowd, announces the Afghan woman through her unveiling . The veiled women surrounding her, it is inferred, have not yet been identified. Their desires remain unknown, unexplored and unhuman. The representation of the face, as Judith Butler detects in this image, conditions the process of humanisation.8 While humanisation occurs through a process of revelation, it also requires recognition by another. Like the women who remain unannounced beneath the veil, Aisha’s disfigured face is still to be recognised. She is not yet human. Aisha remains under a veil of violence . This is a violence that cuts and mutilates women’s bodies , a visible “SOS” violence fixing the viewer to the spectacle of her disfigured face , and a symbolic erasure which imposes a “universe of meaning”9 of what needs to be done: the mission yet to be completed.
Aisha’s face symbolises the continued threat of the Taliban, authorising the mission of Operation Enduring Freedom,10 and as Gayatri Spivak describes the underpinning principle of the project of gender and development: “white men saving brown women from brown men”.11 Aisha’s image is captioned with an urgent statement of this mission: “What happens if we leave Afghanistan”. This is not a question but an authorised statement—a universal moral code suggesting the wounds inflicted on the women of Afghanistan are raw and have yet to be healed. The face of the liberated girl from 2002 may also fall victim to the violence that surrounds her. Like the burqa, Freedom is precarious. Yet, it is potentially triumphant. Freedom, as Wendy Brown reminds, has become a compelling symbol of difference, that of conditions of coercion and that of action, representation and absence, domination and participation.12
The image of Aisha is framed neither as a case of domestic violence nor of gender-based violence and religious fundamentalism. It is framed through a much deeper imaginary—as the necessity to mobilise “protection”. The colonial violence of this imaginary and its exhortations, does not only infer in the compulsion to save Aisha from something , it is implied, as Abu-Lughod observes about the underlying pursuit to go to war for Muslim women , as saving her to something.13 What is the “something” to which Aisha is being saved? Rather than examining what she is being saved from, this book examines the drive, impulses and imaginary investment in this saviour fantasy . It contends that the political nature of the impulse to unveil is driven by deep psychic investment in the west.
My assumed gratitude for the safety in New Zealand and the unrelenting search by my peers and strangers for the meaning of the veil portends something much deeper, which threatens to destabilise psychic investments. To cover is to hide, to refuse something and to suggest one has secrets. What cannot be seen or known carries the allure of transgression. Its profound anxiety appears in the repetitive proclamations about my safety. Repetition is critical to this book in that it is a symptom that promises disclosure, of recovering something lost. Within the framework of the book, anxiety animates the west’s impulse to unveil the Muslim woman. Therefore, repetition is critical to this book in that it is a symptom that promises—a body “that does not blush” in its defiance with the world—recovering something lost through disclosure. I examine the veiled woman as a reoccurring symptom of the western imaginary . In so doing, I aim to provide an understanding of the complicated hold she has on the troubled psyche of the west . The intention of this book is therefore, not to understand the veil and its purpose for Muslim women. It is to think through the veil to understand what it means for the west.
The saviour fantasy is powered by an evolutionary continuum of progress that situates the west in what Butler describes as the “avatar of freedom”.14 This trajectory, where freedom is assumed to unfold through time, produces, among other things, the veil as a spectacle of anachronism and unfreedom (veiled ) and regression (veiling). If the perceived growing presence of the veil connotes the erosion of freedom , unveiling is viewed as progressing towards a state of freedom (unveiled ). The veiled and unveiled operate in wh...