Unveiled Sentiments: Gendered Islamophobia and Experiences of Veiling among Muslim Girls in a Canadian Islamic School

The practice of veiling has made Muslim women subject to dual oppressions—racism and Islamophobia—in society at large and patriarchal oppression and sexism from within their communities. Based on a narrative analysis of the politics of veiling in schools and society, the voices of young Muslim women attending a Canadian Islamic school speak to the contested notion of gender identity in Islam. The narratives situate their various articulations of Islamic womanhood in ways that both affirm and challenge traditional religious notions. At the same time they also are subject to Orientalist 1 1. Orientalism refers to a set of discursive relations and practices that structured colonial relations between Europe and its Muslim colonies. Through Orientalist discourses, “the Orient” comprising the Middle East and Asia was constructed as a barbaric, anachronistic space outside of the progress and civility of European modernity. These colonial narratives served ideologically to rationalize and justify European expansion and exploitation within Muslim lands as part of the “white man's burden” to civilize the savage races. Orientalism still maintains currency within the Western imagination and serves to legitimize more contemporary neo-imperialist practices and to maintain positional superiority of the West in relation to Islam and Muslim societies. representations of veiled and burqa clad women that represent them as oppressed and backward. Focusing on ethnographic accounts of veiling among Muslims girls who attended a gender-segregated Islamic high school in Toronto, this discussion allows a deeper understanding of how gendered religious identities are constructed in the schooling experiences of these Muslim youth.