Feminism and Veil Wearers

Introduction

God has created men and women equally. But variegated issues that exist in our society give unequal status to men and women. There are scores of instances that prove behavior of society which predict that women are inferior creature. Women always have been treated by society as an inferior being. Males have always dominated the society and have treated women as their subordinates. But, things have changed now. A woman of today's world knows her value. She is capable of doing anything to prove her mettle. The notion that women are slave to their men has been jettisoned now. With her studious effort and remarkable achievements women have achieved a status that demands respect and integrity. Feminism has achieved remarkable things and has greatly improved the quality of life for women challenging the primitive and archaic notions that we have held for too long that have abused and oppressed women for ages. Feminism has caused many changes in some Western societies, including women's suffrage, equal employment, the right to seek divorce, the right of women to control their own bodies and medical decisions (including the controversial subject of abortion ), among others. One of the most important aspects related to the women that can have a strong impact on the philosophy of the feminism is veil or hijab that Muslim women wear. The aim and objective of this paper is to talk about the one of the aspects of the feminism that is liberty and to compare the phenomenon of liberty with the veil wearers or veil wearing habit of woman.

Meaning of Veil

The meaning of the veil is to cover body in front of passers of the commandments of Islam. In other divine religions, including Zoroastrianism, Judaism and Christianity there are many variations of this sentence. In short it can be said that the veil is a kind of clothes that women use to cover their heads and part or all of the face. Some experts, including Soad Saleh, a professor of Islamic law at al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt, point out that the veil actually has its roots in the pre-Islamic culture of the Bedouins a nomadic Arab people with ancient roots in the deserts of the Middle East. Therefore, some critic's reason, the veil is not an essential part of Islam at all. Nevertheless, the veil has become a signifier of the kind of fundamentalist Islam that Western leaders have associated with terrorism in recent years. Anita Allen, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, writes that veiling "has become a threatening emblem of late twentieth century anti-Western Islamic politics."

Veil and Feminism

Feminist theorists have long explored the interrelations between the culture-specific constructions of gender and the more circumscribed inter-subjective negotiation of gender relations. As such, they see identity construction as a process of everyday practice that is characterized by ambiguity, contradiction, and struggle. Feminism is the theory that implies that men and women should be treated equally from all facets of life ...