In September 2016, then-20-year-old Yasmine Yusuf had a project for a Global Communication course at the German University in Cairo (GUC). The theme covered the issue of stereotypes and Yusuf decided to tackle a universal and persistent stereotype, one which labels all veiled women as oppressed. But after completing her project in January in the form of a book she wrote, edited and designed, she decided she didn’t want its outreach to stop there. And so Yusuf decided to publish it – to offer it generally to readers all over the world and more specifically to readers in the West, as this is where she found the above mentioned stereotype to be most dominant (based on extensive research on the matter). We had a chat with Yasmine about “Beyond the Veil” and this is what she had to say. What is the idea behind your book? Living in Cairo and observing people around me all the time. I noticed that veiled women were frequently labeled as oppressed and backwards, even uncivilised; with several restaurants in Cairo proving the existence of this outlook by banning veiled women from visiting their spaces,…
