ABSTRACT
Towards the tail-end of interviews conducted for a research project on the practice of un-veiling among Muslim women in Malaysia, I was approached by a prospective research participant, Dian, who had been following my project. I was interested in the reasons why women have decided to stop wearing the hijab during a period of continued Islamisation and ethno-nationalism in Malaysia, in which Islamicist language and symbols have become dominant in political and cultural discourse. Dian had thought about living without the hijab for a year but was not ready to talk about it much less un-veil then. She is a thirty-four-year old corporate lawyer who started wearing the hijab at twenty-one when she became more pious in law school. After university, she married a Belgian man of Moroccan descent and now raises three daughters with him. For twelve years, she performed aspects of what she believed were concomitant of idealised modern Malay Muslim femininity: faith, modesty, and middle-class motherhood. However, Dian’s failure to live up to the Muslim feminine ideal – in particular, to efficiently manage a household alone and work full time – became the source of recurring conflict in her marriage. Her intellectual quest to make sense of her ‘failure’ led her to Muslim feminism. Reading the polemical writings of Arab feminists such as Mona Eltahawy bolstered her decision to un-veil.
