ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the wearing of modest Islamic dress remains untranslatable to the expressed political morality of transnational feminism. The story of Massu and positions like hers still manifest in narratives of women's development and global feminism. In the critical focus on Islam in contemporary social theory and literary criticism, Muslim women emerge as concept-figures pointing to the limits of multiple Enlightenment terms such as liberalism and freedom. During the Algerian War, the wearing of the haik was an act that sought indecipherability and opacity rather than full exposure in public space. This act remains untranslatable, the remainder of a cultural sign that is unassimilable to established secular norms. During political violence, the haik acts as armor by disguising the face and protecting the flesh. A quasi-phenomenological understanding of the veil foregrounds its role in a direct but also sensory experience of colonial rule without presupposing relationality or reciprocity.
