Veiled Muslim Women Not Victimized

Annie Leibovitz’s book, “Women,” contains photographs of women from all different walks of life. The sole image of an Arab-American is of a Dearborn, Mich. schoolteacher who, with the exception of her eyes, is covered entirely in black cloth.

An accompanying essay by Susan Sontag says, “We assume a world with a boundless appetite for images, in which people, women and men, are eager to surrender themselves to the camera. But it is worth recalling that there are parts of the world where to be photographed is something off-limits to women. In a few countries, where men have been mobilized for a veritable war against women, women scarcely appear at all. The imperial rights of the camera to gaze at, to record, to exhibit anyone, anything, are an exemplary feature of modern life, as is the emancipation of women.”

Jarmakani said that this image and Sontag’s message are indicative of the type of stereotyping that is so common in the United States.

“Her eyes, because they appear to be her only means of expression, therefore communicate that which a U.S. audience assumes it knows about her: she does not wish to be imprisoned behind the limiting veneer of the veil, but she accepts her fate with quiet and resigned strength,” Jarmakani said. “This type of knowledge about Middle Eastern culture, as Leila Ahmed [a professor of women’s studies and religion at Harvard Divinity School] points out, is derived from a long tradition of orientalist thought in U.S. culture.”

Jarmakani quoted Ahmed: “Just as Americans ‘know’ that Arabs are backward, they know also with the same flawless certainty that Muslim women are terribly oppressed and degraded, and they know this not because they know that women everywhere in the world are oppressed, but because they believe that specifically Islam monstrously oppresses women.”

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