her say
Want to change the world and have a camera and niqab to hand? Then the latest novelty campaign in the US is for you: “Snap a selfie with a beauty in hijab. Post on Instagram. Use the hashtag #DamnIlookGood”
The campaign was created by two Pakistani-American artists, Qinza Najm and Saks Afridi. They say that the hijab is misrepresented by cultures that don’t understand it, and their project aims to communicate that wearing a veil is an action of personal choice.
In the launch video, artist Najm says the selfie is “more than just a picture. It’s a product of a moment when one is feeling beautiful and confident”.
Afridi adds: “Our main point was that it takes a brave woman to wear hijab or niqab in the West. So let’s be more tolerant of it … Sweeping generalisations should be avoided at all costs. It’s important to take the time to speak to women who veil and engage with them.”
The intention of this campaign seems positive. Re-humanising Muslims, and particularly Muslim women, is needed to offset the global tendency in which Muslim women are seen as the “other”, with sometimes tragic results.
I want to like this campaign, I really do. But immediately I’m unhappy. Why is there a focus on beauty? No women of any background should need to be beautiful to be accepted. More importantly, the very premise of modest dress is to escape objectification.
To even think of applying “Damn! I look good!” to oneself would be deemed egotistical by most ordinary people. I understand that when the worlds of art and social media collide, the project must have an eyebrow-raising name.
But to tie together the vanity of a selfie and the self-obsession of declaring oneself fabulous misses the point of modest dress. The fact that the women who participated generally were not Muslim and had never previously veiled themselves suggests that the project still sees veiling as a superficial body-orientated act without any associated meaning.
The launch video makes for uncomfortable watching when the veil is teamed with a strappy top, or a niqabi woman poses with a topless woman and hugs men. These are all situations a woman who veils would generally avoid.
While the idea of the project might have been for Muslim women to be accepted on their own terms, its execution encourages the opposite – to pretend that veiling has no meaning beyond, literally, the cloth.
The project reflects a wider trend where those who do not veil themselves believe they can spend a day in the shoes – or, in this case, head dress – of a Muslim woman and document their experiences as someone who is adopting modest clothing as fancy dress rather than the life and spiritual choice it is for Muslim women who choose to wear it. This does not give them the ability to pontificate about what it’s like to be a Muslim woman.
I respect the artists’ intentions, but their project ultimately makes veiling superficial by defining Muslim women by how they look. They could instead take inspiration from the widely known internet meme of a Muslim woman with the caption: “Forgot to be oppressed. Too busy being awesome.”
Shelina Zahra Janmohamed is the author of Love in a Headscarf and blogs at www.spirit21.co.uk