During the beginning stages of the infamous “Global War on Terror,” the George W. Bush administration decided that Afghan women needed to be liberated from men forcing them to wear the burqa. However, this narrative has since been projected onto nearly one billion Muslim women worldwide. If we are liberating the Muslim women in Afghanistan … then why stop there? Professor Mimi Thi Nguyen from the University of Illinois examined how, in this narrative of “liberation,” the Muslim burqa became symbolic for Western armies.

XREF: Connects to orientalism and postcolonial critiques of Western intervention framing, echoing Said's analysis of how the West homogenizes the East.

XREF: Connects to broader postcolonial scholarship on how Western 'liberation' rhetoric justifies military intervention. SEED: Potential essay angle: how a single symbolic object (the burqa) became a justification for war and its projection onto a billion people.

Arsalan Iftikhar, Fear of a Muslim Planet_ Gl…, loc. 391