In 1992 the Egyptian-American writer on Islamic feminism, Leila Ahmed, observed the following in her book Women and Gender in Islam:

Veiling – to Western eyes, the most visible marker of the differentness and inferiority of Islamic societies – became the symbol now of both the oppression of women (or, in the language of the day, Islam’s degradation of women) and the backwardness of Islam, and it became the open target of colonial attack and the spearhead of the assault on Muslim societies. (p. 152)

Ahmed was writing in the context of Algeria under French colonialism.

How far we have come.