Opinions

The Persistent Colonial Fantasy of Unveiling Muslim Women

BYKhaoula Ghanem

September 28, 2026

Earlier this month, French politician Julien Odoul decided that an anonymous Muslim woman was wearing too many clothes. The woman had been photographed in a hijab, long pink dress, headphones, and sneakers, looking about as threatening to the French Republic as anyone listening to Spotify possibly could. French MP Aly Diouara shared the image with the caption “Liberté,” which apparently did not sit well with Odoul, a spokesperson for France’s far-right National Rally. So he did what any perfectly normal politician concerned with women’s freedom would do (not) and used artificial intelligence to remove her clothes.

In the version Odoul posted online, the woman’s hijab had disappeared, her hair was exposed, and her long dress had been replaced with a white tank top and trousers. Above his digitally undressed version of a woman who had never consented to any of this, he wrote “LIBERTÉ FRANÇAISE!”

And while the technology Odoul used is relatively new, the fantasy behind his image is not. Throughout history, France has spent an extraordinary amount of time deciding what Muslim women should wear, how much of their bodies should remain visible and, crucially, what their clothing supposedly tells us about their freedom. Long before anyone could ask AI to remove a hijab, colonial photographers, military officers, and politicians were trying to accomplish essentially the same transformation by considerably more labor-intensive means.

Colonial Algeria offers an almost painfully literal example, and for me, this history has never felt particularly distant. My father was born in Algeria under French colonial rule, which ended only in 1962, a reminder that the colonial history we sometimes speak about as though it belongs to another century still sits within living family memory. The photographs, policies, and ideas about Algerian women that emerged from that period are therefore hardly ancient history, even if Europe occasionally prefers to treat them that way.

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, European photographers produced enormous numbers of postcards claiming to depict everyday Algerian life, with Algerian women becoming particularly popular subjects. They appeared unveiled, lounging inside imagined harems, dressed in elaborate costumes, and sometimes partially nude, offering European audiences exactly the kind of exotic North Africa they had been taught to expect.

There was only one problem with these supposedly authentic glimpses into Algerian womanhood: Algerian women wanted absolutely nothing to do with the men holding the cameras.

The Algerian poet and critic Malek Alloula examined these photographs decades later in his 1981 book Le Harem Colonial, published in English as The Colonial Harem. What he found was essentially an enormous visual fiction masquerading as ethnography. Because photographers could not easily access Algerian women or the domestic spaces they wanted to photograph, they recreated those spaces inside studios and hired models to inhabit them. Algeria might have resisted his gaze outside the studio, but inside it he could manufacture an Algeria that behaved exactly as expected.

Alloula described these photographs as an “imaginary revenge” against a world that had denied the colonial photographer access, which feels almost unnervingly relevant in the age of generative AI. A woman can decide that her hair or body will remain private, appear in a photograph dressed accordingly, and discover that somebody with an internet connection can simply generate the version of her they wanted to see anyway.

The fixation went far beyond photography. Writing in 1900, French feminist Hubertine Auclert quoted General Thomas-Robert Bugeaud, one of the principal architects of France’s conquest of Algeria, as saying that “the Arabs escape us because they conceal their women from our gaze.” Few sentences capture the colonial entitlement to Muslim women’s bodies quite so efficiently.

Algerian women’s refusal to make themselves visible was understood as an obstacle to accessing Algerian society itself, turning the veil into something considerably more politically charged than clothing. If colonial power depended partly upon seeing, categorizing, and knowing the population it governed, the woman who remained inaccessible to its gaze presented an irritating limit to that power.

By 1958, France was no longer content with imagining Algerian women unveiled on postcards. During the Algerian War, French military psychological-warfare officers helped organize public unveiling ceremonies in Algiers, transforming women’s clothing into literal political theater. On May 18, Muslim women were brought into central Algiers, where European women publicly removed their haïks before cheering crowds. French propaganda encouraged Algerian women to uncover themselves with slogans including “Dévoilez-vous!” and the spectacularly condescending “Soyez une femme comme les autres.” Unveil yourself and become a woman like the others.

The obsession with seeing Algerian women uncovered continued beyond those ceremonies. Two years later, French conscript Marc Garanger was ordered to photograph women living in military-controlled regroupment villages in Kabylia after the colonial authorities decided residents needed identity cards. The women were lined up under armed supervision, made to remove their veils and photographed one after another against a white wall, exposing hair and facial tattoos that many had never shown publicly to European men.

Garanger would take around 2,000 portraits over ten days, later recalling that “the women had no choice in the matter.” Looking at the photographs today, that absence of choice is written across their faces. Many stare directly into his camera with an anger so palpable that Garanger believed their gaze became their only available form of protest. The authorities wanted these women identifiable, visible, and unveiled, even when becoming visible required soldiers, an interpreter and a camera.

The historian Marnia Lazreg, whose work examined women and colonialism in Algeria, wrote extensively about the way French authorities turned unveiling into evidence of emancipation. The appearance of Algerian women could therefore do political work that colonial policy itself struggled to accomplish, allowing France to present itself as the liberator of women while fighting a brutal war to prevent Algerians from liberating themselves from France.

You would imagine that decolonization might have retired the Muslim woman’s wardrobe as a geopolitical measuring device. The internet, unfortunately, had other plans.

Whenever Iran, Afghanistan or another Muslim-majority country enters a period of political crisis, the photographs begin circulating with almost impressive punctuality. Tehran in the 1970s. Kabul in the 1960s and 1970s. Cairo before the supposed arrival of conservatism. Beirut before whichever catastrophe the post happens to be discussing. You know exactly which photographs I mean because you have probably seen them dozens of times. Women walk through university campuses with uncovered hair, sunglasses, and miniskirts while captions marvel at how “progressive” and “modern” everything looked before Islamism, revolution, war, or some combination of all three apparently ruined the party.

The women in these photographs were real, and their lives deserve to be remembered as more than props in somebody else’s argument. The problem begins when a photograph of several fashionable women in a capital city is expected to tell us whether millions of women living across an entire country were free.

One particularly famous image shows three women walking through Kabul in miniskirts in 1972. The photograph has resurfaced repeatedly during discussions about Afghanistan and, according to The New Yorker, was even shown to Donald Trump in 2017 during discussions about American policy in the country. Imagine surviving decades of coups, Soviet occupation, civil war, American invasion, foreign intervention, and Taliban rule, only for your national history to eventually become a viral post about three skirts.

There is something seductive about these images because they make history wonderfully easy to consume. The uncovered woman becomes shorthand for modernity, while the covered woman becomes shorthand for regression, and suddenly several decades of politics can be explained by placing two photographs beside each other.

Egyptian scholar Leila Ahmed has written extensively about this contradiction, particularly through the example of Lord Cromer, Britain’s consul-general in Egypt. Cromer condemned the veil as evidence of Islam’s oppression of women while opposing women’s suffrage back home in Britain, where he served as president of the Men’s League for Opposing Woman Suffrage.

That contradiction sits at the center of what Ahmed calls colonial feminism, where the language of women’s rights becomes remarkably useful when it can establish the superiority of one culture over another. The veil could then carry an astonishing amount of political information, supposedly revealing whether a society was modern or backward, civilized, or uncivilized, progressing toward Europe or stubbornly refusing to follow its example.

France has maintained a particularly intense relationship with the subject. In 2004, the country banned conspicuous religious symbols, including Islamic headscarves, in public schools, followed by a 2010 law prohibiting face-covering garments in public spaces. Other European countries have introduced their own restrictions, while debates around hijab bans continue to be framed through secularism, integration, security, gender equality, and the protection of women and girls.

Of course, compulsory veiling exists too, and pretending otherwise would make any discussion of women’s freedom equally ridiculous. Iranian women have risked imprisonment and death while resisting mandatory hijab laws, while Afghan women under Taliban rule face sweeping restrictions governing their clothing, education, employment, and movement. Muslim women have spent years fighting governments that force fabric onto their bodies, just as others have fought governments determined to remove it.

Perhaps we could entertain the radical possibility that women might have some thoughts about their own clothes. There are Muslim women who consider hijab central to their faith and others who consider compulsory veiling an instrument of patriarchal control. Some wear it intermittently, some eventually remove it, some begin wearing it later in life, some resent having been pressured into it, and others resent being pressured out of it. With roughly two billion Muslims scattered across dozens of countries, the prospect of discovering one universal Muslim female opinion on the hijab was always going to be ambitious.

Yet the fantasy of the unveiled Muslim woman persists because she remains visually useful. She can be held up as proof that a country was once modern, that colonialism introduced progress, that assimilation has succeeded or that Western-style secularism has finally liberated somebody. After more than a century of supposedly liberating Muslim women from their clothes, you would think someone might eventually consider asking them what they actually want to wear.

I do not wear the hijab, although my mother, aunties, and cousins do. Nobody ever placed one over my hair, and nobody ever taught me that taking it off was a prerequisite for becoming free. I was allowed to arrive at my own relationship with faith, modesty, and my body without anyone deciding what that relationship should look like from the outside. That freedom should belong to every woman.

Liberation cannot live in the garment itself because it lives in the ability to choose it. After centuries spent debating what Muslim women should wear, perhaps the answer was always remarkably simple. Leave the decision to us.

The Persistent Colonial Fantasy of Unveiling Muslim Women

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