This article examines Shirin Neshat's body of work, which addresses an Islamic identity in relation to Christian iconography and doctrine. Neshat's multi-layered images are slippery in their interpretation of the role of women in Islamic society in relation to ideology, as well as the relation between the female body, text, language, iconography and western stereotypes. Leleu concludes that though technology allows us access to distant cultures ultimately we must decode icon and the word of culture to be able to understand it.