n the past 20 years the image of a woman in hijab has changed from a religious symbol to a political weapon, used by both the “West“ and those in the Muslim “East“ to further their own claims and legitimacy. The hijab has turned into an entire discussion between cultures that have made a point to misunderstand each other entirely.

In the early twentieth century, most of the Muslim world was under European rule. With the mid 1900s came independence and the hopes that the Muslim world’s new found autonomy would bring prosperity. After all, Muslim civilization had been at a high in the Middle Ages, before the advent of European colonialism. However, like many parts of Asia and Africa, before leaving the occupied territories the Europeans broke up existing areas and created new states that had little or no history to speak of. As a result, local governments were socially, politically and militarily weak, and unable to govern the people within their assigned territory. This led to numerous wars, and foreign interventionist and peacekeeping campaigns. Regional political and economic order was and still is in part kept by the European colonialists themselves. Muslim countries now disillusioned, turned to alternatives of nationalism. This is where the image of the hijab began its assent into the political realm.

Leaders of Muslim countries pushed Islamic revivalism as an alternative to European secularism. And the most easily visible manifestation of this religious revivalism has been the adoption of the Islamic dress. Grandmothers, who had prided themselves in not wearing the hijab as a symbol of westernization and secularization during European occupation, saw their nieces putting it on. And this has been the overwhelming trend throughout the Muslim world.

For Muslim women, the hijab has created a new feminism. Rather than discarding their religious practices altogether and embracing Western feminism, or turning away from feminism in order to attend to their traditional roles, Muslim women have created another path where they turn to their religion and its texts for their definition of feminism. The view of Dr. Su’ad Saleh, a female professor at the world renowned Islamic University of Al Azhar, is that “women under Islam have reached a level that no other (woman) has reached in fourteen centuries“ strikes a defiant note of pride and confidence that is heard among many young women.

Western feminists argue that the hijab has been forced upon women in Muslim countries by their male counterparts and the inequitable teachings of Islam in an attempt to subordinate women. Dr. Saleh believes that while many do admit there are serious problems in Muslim societies, “this is because authentic Islam, under which women are highly revered and honoured, is not being practiced.“ People who use the hijab as a control device are not enemies of Muslim women but enemies of progress.

The hijab image has also been misused by some Muslim states in order to portray the Western world as unholy. However, more recently, Islamic movements such as the new Muslim feminism have used the hijab in opposition to colonial and western positions as a symbol for cultural resistance and dignity. In her book, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate, Leila Ahmad, a professor of divinity at Harvard university says, “far from indicating that the wearers remain fixed in the world of tradition and the past slamic [garb] is the uniform of arrival, signaling entrance into, and determination to move forward in, modernity.“

In the West the image of the hijab has been used in order to create a certain type of fear, where societal discipline is maintained by distinguishing the “other.“ In his ground breaking book Orientalism Edward Said traced the “West’s“ perception of the East as far back as the early the 1800s, where ideas of “Islam vs. the West“ seemed to conquer. In order to legitimize European colonial rule in the Muslim world, Muslims were and still are portrayed as barbarians unable to govern themselves.

Since the 1970s, the “West“ has become more interested in Islam and Muslims. Instant access to images and emotional accounts of terrorism and the barbaric ways of the East have entered homes and have secured vivid imagery of how the “we“ are worlds apart from the “they.“ However, the “West’s“ attention has been directed towards certain areas, such as “Islamic fundamentalism“ and “Muslim women.“ Rather than understanding the complexity of Islam. These subjects, which tend to evoke extreme emotional responses in both Muslims and Non – Muslims are magnified to portray the whole religion. In a sea of negative images in media associated with Muslims and Islam, an outpouring of sympathy towards Muslim women seems an extreme contradiction. There has been a flood of western media and literature describing the sorry plight of Muslim women as “poor and oppressed.“ And the recent surge of religious resurgence among young Muslim women is seen from a western point of view as being a confused return to the archaic; a regression of the East’s humanity.

With the dawn of the technology based era, communication is accomplished not through words but through the new found power of images. Photography has become the new cultural diplomacy. In the public relations world it has become a war being fought by Western (mainly the United States) media against visual sources in the Middle East. Both are trying to manipulate or selectively choose certain images to champion their own ideals. The connotations of images are always shifting, and while at the current moment the hijab may serve the purpose of making Muslim women look subordinate and Islam as backward, meaning could and will shift to a new set of ideals. Thus it is foolish to rely on images to do the job of public relations. According to some scholars, “A discourse that can only express the USA and the West as the land of the free will find it difficult to comprehend and depict the situation in complex terms. And the issue is indeed complex. The Muslim world has attached profoundly different meanings to images than North America.“

Indeed, the image of a hijab has been hurled into the public arena and is being batted around by misinformed people on both sides, and as a result the delicate line between information and propaganda has been entirely obscured.