In response to rising Islamophobia in France and the United States, many Muslim women who previously did not veil did so as an act of political resistance. For some, spirituality or politics, or a combination of both, spurred this pivot. In the case of Algerian women fighting for independence against the French, the hijab and the niqab were converted into instruments for liberation, through which armed revolutionaries safely passed military checkpoints under their anonymizing shields.

XREF: Connects to the veil's dual meaning as religious devotion versus political resistance, a tension echoed throughout the book.

Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamopho…, loc. 846