CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. - "I'm scared. You might be carrying a gun under your veil," murmured one of my students. Why I would carry a gun to my class, I wondered? I was sure she was joking. But she was not. She was serious and frightened, too.
It was a fine spring day in 1996 and, wanting to strip the veil of its social stigma, I had decided to teach my class, a senior seminar in women's studies at the University of Virginia, covered head to foot in a full black chador.
The shocked silence of the students as I entered the classroom and the remarks of one student regarding the hidden gun under my veil shocked and in turn, silenced me.
By donning the veil, I had become someone else or, rather, I was perceived to be someone else. The image of a gun toting "terrorist" Muslim woman was so powerful that it concealed my reality. I became the image. I found myself unprepared for what transpired in that class. Over the years, I had grown accustomed to my students' identification of Islam with women's oppression and their singling out of the veil as the most visible sign of that oppression. The quick association of the veil with terrorism, however, took me by surprise.
Looking back, I should have known better. The active participation of veiled women in the Algerian War of Independence, the Islamic Revolution of Iran and the U.S. hostage crisis in Iran were etched indelibly in everyone's mind and memory. This was the post-Cold War era, and Islam was the new enemy.
American views of the veil have followed both the shifting meanings of the institution itself and of U.S. relations with the Islamic world.
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Predating Islam, the veil was originally a mark of distinction reserved for women of the court and high aristocracy. It was not considered a badge of Islamic identity. For instance, none of the Muslim women protagonists of European Medieval and early Renaissance literature - and there were many of them - were veiled.
Only during the past four centuries has the veil become the defining feature of women in the Islamic world. It also has come to embody a variety of undesirable attributes.
American culture, which values openness and transparency, commonly uses words with a negative connotation - masking, disguising, concealing, hiding, and camouflaging - to refer to veiling.
It's significant that the most popular icon of American femininity, the Barbie Doll, never adopted the veil. Sold in more than 140 countries around the world, the queen of the international toy market has assumed many different nationalities and ethnicities. However, her multi-ethnic wardrobe has never included the veil. Even as an international marketing strategy, the veil was deemed inappropriate and unacceptable.
In view of such negative and reductive associations, it should not have been surprising that my students reacted to my chador as a threat to their security.
So, how do the tragic events of Sept. 11 affect Western views of the veil? Paradoxically, the war with Afghanistan might have freed the veil, if temporarily, from its association with terrorism.
Finally choosing to notice the horrible condition of Afghan women, America has focused its camera on them. Virtually incarcerated by the Taliban inside their homes, Afghan women are now displayed in public as the true victims of a repressive regime.
Fully covered in their tent like burqas, the picture of Afghan women's oppression appears and reappears on the front pages of newspapers and on television screens.
The Taliban, who thrust women behind tall walls and mandatory veils, hiding them from public view, have inadvertently made them the object of everyone's gaze.
By eliminating women from their ranks, by making women's invisibility the emblem of their movement, the Taliban not only have brought Afghan women to the center stage of world attention - in an ultimate act of unveiling - they also have made terrorism a man's prerogative.
The veil, at least for now, symbolizes only victimhood and women's oppression.
Farzaneh Milani, a native of Iran, is an associate professor of Middle Eastern languages at the University of Virginia. Readers may write to her at P.O. Box 400781, 227 Minor Hall, Charlottesville, Va. 22904-4781, or e-mail her at farzaneh.milani@virginia.edu.
