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According to this model of sameness and difference, Arab American women wearing the veil may look different from American women, but persisting in their difference, they may see the veil as liberating, depending on the context in which they wear it.
The Veil, the Female Body, and Arab/Arab American Feminism
The Arab American women writers we meet here, especially Mohja Kahf and Leila Ahmed, challenge the common American feminist tendency to want to rescue Arab women from oppressive religion that imposes a certain code of dress. Many Westerners identify the veil with Muslim culture and women’s exclusion and exploitation, and yet they do not apply the same standards to conservative Christian and Jewish women who choose to cover their heads when entering their churches or synagogues. The veil represents only one of several women’s issues discussed in this book. Another controversial issue occurring in Arab American literature is the very pronounced revolutionary approach to the female body. As Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin point out in The Empire Writes Back, the body is considered a “central feature of the postcolonial, standing as it does metonymically for all the ‘visible’ signs of difference, and their varied forms of cultural and social inscriptions” (321). Indeed, the body, as reflected in the works studied in this book serves as a marker of cultural difference. Historically, Arab women, whose bodies have been cast in the realm of the sacrosanct and the untouchable, have been unable to express themselves and their bodies away from traditional essentialist representations assigned to them either by their respective native societies or by Western societies. The works under study here, however, represent endeavors by women to break the taboos attached to the female body and to speak the body’s silences. Addressing the issue of the female body with remarkable directness, these Arab American writers and artists explore its crucial role in the sexual, psychic, socioeconomic, and political life of their societies.