SINGAPORE: While studying in Bryn Mawr College in the United States in the 1980s, Sahar Amer was the only veiled Muslim girl in the entire university. She often received probing questions about her “hijab”, a form of the Muslim headscarf.

“Everybody wanted to know why I was wearing it, what that meant. So the only questions I ever received were about why I covered my hair. And it became too much. I became like a representative of the entire Muslim community. It’s a big responsibility,” she recalled.

“So I decided to take it off,” she added.

Now a professor and Chair of the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Sydney, Prof Amer believes that three decades later, there is still a lot of misunderstanding in the world about most Muslim women’s choice to veil their faces.

“There’s this assumption that Muslim women are not free agents, and they are not individuals with free will who are able to choose their own religious traditions or their faith or how to express that way,” said the Egyptian-born author of the book What Is Veiling?.

With the exception of four territories – Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sudan and the Aceh province in Indonesia – where veiling is mandatory, the majority of Muslim women in the world are free to choose what they wear, she pointed out in an interview with Channel NewsAsia’s Conversation With.

Prof Sahar Amer talks to Conversation With’s Lin Xueling about veiling practices among Muslim women. (Photo: Kim Wong)

The new season of the interview programme debuts on Thursday (Jun 2) at 8.30pm SG/HK time.

“We have to give Muslim women agency and we have to respect when they tell us that they are choosing to wear the veil,” said Prof Amer, who grew up in France after her family moved there from Egypt in the 1970s.

Her comments came after the French Minister for Women’s Rights Laurence Rossignol provoked fury by comparing Muslim women who choose to wear the headscarf to “American negroes who accepted slavery” in March.

Veiling has long been a contentious issue in fiercely secular France.

The country has banned both teachers and pupils from wearing the headscarf in state schools, and public servants are also prohibited from wearing religious symbols.

It has also banned the full-face veil, known as the niqab, under legislation that says nobody in a public space can wear clothing intended to conceal the face.

“RIDICULOUS ASSOCIATION BETWEEN WOMEN’S DRESS AND TERRORISM”

The ascent of terror groups like ISIS and the terror attacks in France last year have also contributed to a significant rise of Islamophobia in the country.

A recent Institut francais d’opinion publique (IFOP) survey shows that 47 per cent of French citizens see Islam as a threat to the French identity.

Because of the visibility of their headscarves, “the first victims of Islamophobia in France are Muslim women, and they are veiled Muslim women”, Prof Amer said.

She slammed the “ridiculous association between women’s dress and terrorism”, asserting that the headscarf issue often becomes politicised shortly after terror attacks since it is “one easy problem that you might be able to do something about – which is Muslim women and their headcover”.

“It gives politicians and the society at large a sense of power, a sense of being able to address problems that they are clearly not able to address,” she contended. Terrorism by comparison “is a very vague, complicated, and difficult problem to deal with”.

“As if legislating Muslim women dress is going to resolve the question of terrorism,” Prof Amer said dryly.

Conversation With airs every Thursday at 8.30pm SG/HK time on Channel NewsAsia. Past episodes of this flagship interview programme have included one-on-ones with Christine Lagarde, Aung San Suu Kyi, Joko Widodo and Michelle Yeoh. They can be viewed here.