Infusing the Hijab with Affect

The hijab has been infused with affect for centuries on end. It is the perfect example of what Sara Ahmed calls a “sticky object” (2004, 89) through which affects move. Infused with desire, hijab has fueled orientalist fantasies of female harems and excited the (heteronormative) male gaze with the eroticized promise of the bodies that are “behind the veil.” Later, the hijab came to be imbued with disdain. In colonial discourse, hijab was perceived as backward, oppressive to women, and an obstacle to modernity and progress. It became “the white man’s burden” to “save” brown women. Ironically the very man at the forefront of “saving” Egyptian women from the alleged oppression of hijab was the president of The National League Opposing Women’s Suffrage in England (Ahmed 1993, 152–53). Suffice it to say, Lord Cromer’s engagement with gender equality was stunted at best. Decades later, emotional pleas to save the plight of women from hijab and backwardness, echoing colonial powers, were utilized, to back military invasions and wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere (Abu Lughod 2013, 46–47). These orientalist and colonial obsessions with hijab as a means of “saving” Muslim and/or brown women resurface in popular culture in Hollywood movies, in Disney productions, and through the massive production of books with titles like, “Behind the veil” (ibid.; Shaheen 2012). Berit Thorbjørnsrud (2005) brands them “the-truth-about-the-dreadful- life-behind-the-veil-books” and demonstrates how the genre both recycles orientalism and fabricates “truth.”

In contemporary Western Europe, hijab is no longer only a feature of the social imaginaries of a mythical far-away “lslamland” of deserts and female oppression (Abu Lughod 2013, 68–73.). Following the diversification of Western societies, the hijab is now visible up close. And its mere sighting is intensely emotionally triggering to certain social actors. Hijab is a sticky object so saturated with affect that scores of people rush to their keyboards to protest its mere sighting on their screens or streets. Frazzled, outraged, and provoked by the very existence of hijab in public space. Emotions run high and are continuously heightened and intensified. Antagonistic and highly emotional comments followed when Nadiya Husain, a hijab-adorning contestant participated and eventually won The Great British Bake Off in 2015. A near identical scenario unfolded in a Norwegian TV-cooking contest in 2019. Hell broke loose on social media in both cases.