"During the age of the British Empire, the image of the veil was used to shore up support for imperialist endeavours. Leila Ahmed, author of A Quiet Revolution, writes that agents of empire “appropriated the language of feminism” to bolster their case for the colonial project: poor Muslim women, so the story went, needed the British to save them from the constraints of their own countries and their fellow Muslims. Naturally, none of these women-friendly values were repeated at home...
A kind of fatigue accompanies such an association; the details of the situation do not need to be discussed because the familiar image has communicated all that the audience needs to know. History is elided and compressed into a more digestible narrative that pits West and East against one another, with the (metaphorically or literally) veiled woman in between...
Falah observes that the images can be divided into two categories, however conflicting: Muslim women as “passive victims” (objects of pity) and Muslim women as “active political agents” (dangerous threats)."
http://gutsmagazine.ca/blog/white-men-talking-about-the-niqab-a-brief-history
Related to (broadly): two essays by Muslim women navigating identity, style, and religion while living in the West: “The Surprising Lessons of the ‘Muslim Hipsters’ Backlash”; "Practicing Islam in Short Shorts"
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