-What are the historical and religious origins of the veils that muslims wear?

Growing up in Cairo, Ola Hafez had wanted to wear the traditional veil. Her parents forbade it.

"They wanted to make sure I understood the commitment I was making," she explained. Wearing a veil, they said, was not a rite of passage to be taken lightly only to be discarded later.

So it wasn't until 15 years ago, when she was 20, that Hafez started wearing a veil as a way of maintaining the appropriate modesty prescribed by her religion and culture.

Hafez, a lecturer in the English department at Cairo University, was among speakers at a recent UCLA forum, "On Veiling and the Media," sponsored by the Middle East Centers at UCLA in cooperation with New York and Columbia universities.

The forum's purpose: to critique the Western media's often-simplistic portrayals of the Arabic veil.

Among these protrayals is the stereotype of the veil as "the perfect symbol of [repressed] sexuality," said Sondra Hale, adjunct professor of women's studies at UCLA.

That image and its counterpoint--the unveiled Muslim female as "a fallen, salacious woman...tells us more about Western values than about the Middle East," Hale suggested.

The truth about the veil is quite different, conferees agreed.