ABSTRACT

This chapter examines why Muslim women have received the special attention by questioning certain propositions posed as truisms in the discourses surrounding hijab. Headcovering-prohibitive laws invariably do so in the name of women's rights and a range of liberationist ideologies. International human rights discourse has generally accepted the undesirableness of covered hair, and it has done so at a time when Muslims and Islam continue to be the global evils, shows that we are far from Derrida's imagined global community. Covering certain parts of a woman's body is acceptable, while socio-cultural and religious and legal systems demanding that women cover their hair are oppressive and unacceptable in secular democracies upholding values of gender equality. Women as a global collective identity have a reality that is silent because silenced, unheard because subjugated, lived in similar patterns because similarly oppressed by systems in nature male, and unseen because only the silenced women themselves can access this reality.