During the Colonial Period, when western nations were controlling or attempting to control Arab and Islamic countries (among others), the veil came to be used as a symbol of women’s oppression and Islamic “backwardness” that Western Colonial powers used as justification for colonization efforts, despite similar unequal treatment of women in Europe and the Islam’s long history of learning and exploration. Members of countries under colonial rule who benefited from the Colonial presence or had affinity for Colonial culture often became advocates for change that involved efforts to have women unveil or to banish the veil altogether. Both Egypt and Iran banned or least frowned upon the veil in the early and mid-19th century, and similar rules or cultural shifts were enacted in other Middle Eastern countries and territories.
Another product of European Colonialism was Orientalism, a Western construction of the “Orient” (Asia, India, Middle East and North Africa) based only partially on fact. Seen as exotic, and often backward, Orientalism spawned an Academic field of study as well as a genre of Art (and plenty of lingering misconceptions and ideas in modern Western thoughts and ideas regarding any land or people associated with the Orient). Orientalist artwork, especially painting, showed the veil and Oriental women’s bodies as sexualized, mysterious, erotic and exotic; the perception was often of women sequestered in the Haram, where Haram became a sexual place, with women existing only for their husband’s pleasure, and being painted by Orientalists for the pleasure of Western male gaze.
Modern Western views still tend to see the veil through a lens of oppression and backwardness. Thanks in part to mainstream media and the post 9/11 engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan, the veil has become strongly associated with the loss of women’s rights in these countries, and stories of rape and abuse by male members of society. Stories from countries like Iran, where going without the veil is illegal and can result in arrest, further exacerbate this association. Rarely do we hear positive stories of women living within Islamic countries to whom the veil is a positive symbol rather than a negative one.