Reviewed by Emily-Jane Hills Orford for Readers' Favorite

As the world looks on and judges those women who wear head coverings, judges those who make women wear these coverings, people argue the justification of such subjugation. Are these women's rights being violated? Or, are they comfortable with the world in which they were born, a world which segregates men and women, a world that protects women by covering them up from head to toe? Perhaps it takes an outsider, a woman from outside of this culture, to infiltrate, if only temporarily, to understand the perspective both from within and from the outside.

In Travels in a Veil: A Journey into the Lives of Islamic Women, Australian author April Fonti undertook this challenge, perhaps not intentionally, but rather as her travels through the most Muslim states of Pakistan expected her to comply to the traditional dress code and expectations. She writes about her stay in Peshawar, in the north west frontier province of Pakistan. She describes how she wore the head scarf and the clothes that covered her to her ankles and yet the men still stared at her. Then she connected with Shaheen, an Iranian filmmaker who'd made Sweden his home. A traveler, like Fonti, Shaheen was Muslim and understood the conflicting feelings of culture shock and the frustration at not being able to immerse in the society - and all because she was a woman, and an outsider at that.

As Fonti accompanies Shaheen, they develop a relationship and the two travel to other distant and remote areas of the Muslim world. Fonti learns to accept her temporary role as a subordinate to her companion. She doesn't like it. When she later follows Shaheen to his home in Sweden and meets his fellow Swedish-Iranians, she starts to learn another side of the issue of female subjugation. But it isn't until Fonti separates from Shaheen that she learns a very valuable lesson from all of her experiences, "the difference between believing in an ideology and daring to let it filter into the most minute habits and rhythms of daily life."

Living amongst Muslim women in very strict Muslim communities in Pakistan, then living amongst Muslim women in the Western world where ideals and realities inevitably collide, Fonti realized that there was more to learn, more to understand and appreciate, and that one person's way of life was not the only right way and did not give that person the right to judge another person's way of life. Fonti has written a fascinating travelogue/memoir that follows her travels through Pakistan, Sweden and Iran.