Orientalism is a way of seeing that emphasizes, imagines, exaggerates and distorts the differences of both Arabs and Muslims and their cultures as compared to that of the West. This study will dwell on and evaluate the built false views and distorted picture of the Muslim and Arab women as represented by the West.
The Western representation of Arab and Muslim is not a recent fabrication. According to Said, Orientalism has been ingrained in the West brain wave ever since the period of European Enlightenment and colonization of the Arabs. In the past, the Arab and Muslim culture has been seen as exotic, uncivilized, inferior and primitive. Today, the terms “terrorist “and “blood-thirsty” have been over-generally attributed to the Arabs and Muslims.
Said’s Orientalism analysis
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According to their religious practices, they are expected to wear a veil, some scarf and clothes that cover their body as a symbol of chastity. The Islamic dress has become a means of constructing distorted ideas about Islam. The Western countries equates the veils to the mask that terrorist wear. Another argument among the West is that the veil is for hiding their “ugly faces”
Critics in the Europe and the U.S argue that the veil is forced on Muslim women; that it is not their choice. In contrast, the majority of Muslim women immigrants in the West confess that hijab is a symbol of devotion and piety and that wearing it and clothes that cover their bodies is their own choice. They see it as a way of religious identity and expressing themselves.
The other purpose of the hijab is differentiating gender and a way of controlling sexual desire among the men. Also, in the analysis of women’s travel writing to the Middle East during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries shows how Arab women enjoyed the freedom of movement guaranteed by the veil, a symbol of license in the Eighteenth