Veiling is existentially familiar to me it has been part of my life even though I do not and will not wear a veil. At the same time, veiling involves me as a woman who grew up with relatives, neighbors, and friends who wore, or still wear, a veil.

By the same token, mystifying rationalizations are not necessarily expressions of false consciousness or “agency.” However, agency is not a free-floating capacity independent of the social framework within which it expressed itself neither is it above questioning. I cannot deny women’s agency or substitute mine for theirs on grounds that I am more equipped to make sense of their motivations than they are. This is a delicte endeavor as the risk is great that a woman’s rationale for wearing a veil might be discounted as a form of false consciousness, and her agency dismissed as illusory.

I instead approach veiling from an existential-philosophical standpoint that peels away the justifications that women who wear it or intend to wear it usually invoke. Such characterizations are unhelpful as they can easily be applied to our postmodern condition, marked as it is by a retreat from a meaningfully shared human experience and the flaunting of privatized forms of consciousness, which result in conceptions of women that are as detrimental to women’s integrity as the veil might be.

Nor do I consider wearing a veil at work as ushering in a new form of “modernity.” Furthermore, I do not intend to characterize veiling as representing women’s “alienation,” “enslavement,” or “subjugation” to cultural norms. New styles of veiling are less confining to a woman’s ability to move about than old ones, and a number of veiled women throughout the Muslim world have been carrying out their professional activities side by side with men in their workplaces. I do not approach veiling from the perspective of the struggle between “tradition” and “modernity,” which purportedly women resolve by opting for the veil, as a number of studies have claimed.

Questioning the Veil by Marnia Lazreg