Most people
think of the veil solely in terms of Islam, but it is much older.
It originated from ancient Indo-European cultures, such as the Hittites,
Greeks, Romans and Persians. It was also practiced by the Assyrians.
Veiling had class as well as gender implications; thus, the ancient
Assyrian law required it of upper class women while punishing commoners
for it. The strong association of veiling with class rank, as well
as an urban/peasant split, persisted historically up until the last
century. Then more privileged women began rejecting the veil, as
did Egyptian feminist Huda Sharawi, while poor women increasingly
adopted it as a ticket to upward mobility. (A similar dynamic occurred
with footbinding in modern China.)
The contraposition
of The West versus Islam certainly has historical roots, but these
two systems have similarities as well as differences. Women in medieval
Europe dressed more like women in the Muslim world than is generally
realized. It was customary, especially for married women, for them
to cover their hair with various kinds of headdresses. Paintings
of urban women in western Europe often show everything covered except
the face and hands. It was common to drape the neck and even sometimes
the lower face in a wimple. This became part of the classic nun's
garb that represents the most conservative style of female dress
in the Christian world. It drew on the traditional head-veil of
patrician Roman women, though the wimple may have Hunnic roots.
Peasant and
working-class women who did not cover in these ways were considered
"loose" and fair game for assault. This non-respectable
and therefore vulnerable status of unveiled women also plays out
in the Muslim context, going back to a Koranic passage which specifically
designates veiling as marking out Muslim women not to be molested
on the streets. Its historical roots go back further, to the neighboring
Byzantine empire's enforcement of veiling codes which impute high
social rank to families whose women are veiled. These were in turn
based on Greek and Roman values of male honor and female shame,
and of public space as male space.
They are also
reflected in Christian scriptures calling for veiling as a symbol
of male lordship over women. Perhaps more to the point for the Arabian
context are rabbinical sayings treating a woman's uncovered hair
as "nudity." In the Tannaitic period, she could be fined
400 zuzim for it. As elsewhere, men were the enforcers: "Cursed
be the man who lets the hair of his wife be seen..."
The Quran does
not enjoin face-veiling, or as some say, only calls for the wives
of the prophet Muhammad to veil or be secluded. Other women were
instructed simply to draw their cloths over their bosoms. However,
the pressure of regional patrarichal custom was great, and became
irresistable as the Arabs conquered countries where this was longstanding,
as Leila Ahmed has detailed in Women and Gender in Islam.
The process worked in the other direction, too, as more egalitarian
cultures became Islamicized and have adopted hijab, patrilineage
and Shari'a law. Indonesia has seen a very marked increase in veiling
over the past century, for example.
It is important
to pull back from the polarization of the historically Christian
world and the historically Muslim world. Both define themselves
as superior systems, not only in relation to each other, but also
in relation to cultures that do not belong to either category, and
here I am signalling a whole range of indigenous cultures. Many
of these societies were subjected to conquest and enslavement specifically
as their colonizers defined them as "pagans" or "kafirs,"
legally fair game.
A fundamental
pattern of colonization in both systems involved defining indigenous
women as indecent and loose based on their dress, freedom of movement
and other positive values in those cultures. This shaming of indigenous
women (with rape and the threat of rape behind it) forced them,
in self-defense, to give up their historic styles of dress and assimilate
to the dominant culture. Often this involved covering up breasts,
arms, legs, and even hair; such shifts were especially dramatic
in tropical countries. Thus indigenous perspectives offer rarely-considered
critiques of both Muslim and Christian modesty codes.
Hijab raises
complex questions of choice. Families often demand that women, and
sometimes girls too, wear hijab in the belief that it is the only
way decent females should appear in public. But for some Muslim
women, especially present-day working class women, the scarf opens
up a mobility in public places otherwise denied them, making it
possible for them to attend college or to work outside the home.
It can be a strategic choice as well as a religious mandate. In
some countries, hijab is imposed by the state (as in Saudi Arabia
and Iran) or forbidden by the state (as in France, according to
a recent law directed at schoolgirls).
State coercion
clearly violates freedom of choice in both cases, but this issue
is never simple. It is not only the French state that forces young
women who believe in wearing hijab to leave their hair uncovered,
but also young men who enforce the wearing of hijab, attacking young
women who wear "non-Islamic" dress on the streets of North
African banlieues in Paris and elsewhere. Self-determination can
be a tricky proposition for young Algerian-French women, who face
challenges of politics, identity and loyalties as they make their
way in the world. Legislating behavior such as personal dress is
also problematic for any country which claims to be a democracy.
There are no easy answers here.
In Afghanistan,
women still face considerable danger in rejecting the much more
severe form of veiling that has been current since the Taliban domination
(as well as a not-too-distant earlier history). Although the US
government has trumpeted the "liberation" of Afghanistan
from the Taliban, outside of Kabul and a few other urban areas the
burqa is still a necessity, especially for the majority of women
who do not have access to private vehicles. However symbolic of
oppression the burqa has become in the West, abduction, forced marriage,
economic privation, work opportunities, education are more pressing
survival issues for Afghan women.
The chador
has been mandatory for Iranian women for a quarter century, and
even in hot weather, standard women's outdoor wear requires a long
coat. Khomeini's Revolutionary Guards went around attacking women
on the streets for "bad hijab" (incomplete covering of
hair), sometimes scraping off their lipstick with razor blades as
well. Back in the 30s, the coercion went the other way. The last
Shah's father decreed that all women must unveil. Women who had
been veiled and secluded all their lives were suddenly compelled
to appear with uncovered heads in public. For many, this felt like
being naked, and it drove them deeper into purdah. Stories are told
of women whose husbands carried them in sacks on their backs when
they had to travel. Of course, other women welcomed the change as
an opening up of social restrictions.
Ataturk imposed
the same decree in Turkey, sharply reversing the compulsory dress
code from veiled to unveiled. In these intense polarities, women's
bodies are treated as social barometers and even as political fodder,
with all kinds of agendas and implications. For Franz Fanon, veiling
was only a symbol of national liberation and indigenous identity,
not patriarchy. But in a long-ago history, it too was a foreign
custom, counterposed to indigenous African dress which the newcomers
regarded as indecent. These profound changes in social norms can
be recent, or three hundred years ago -- as for Hausa women -- or
go back to the time of Roman domination, before Islam -- as in northern
Algeria.
Things can
shift, even under locked-down conditions -- or maybe because of
them. In Iran today, many young women resist the hijab requirement
by allowing their hijab to slip back, or hair to escape from their
scarves, or by wearing colors. Fundamentalists in Pakistan criticized
Benazir Bhutto for being similarly cavalier in the way she wore
the traditional dupatta. For orthodox Muslim women in the West,
resistance takes a different form: enduring hateful looks, disdainful
remarks, and discriminatory behavior. In today's climate, it involves
being regularly searched at airports and may mean missing a flight,
or worse, facing serious personal danger.
Nawal al-Saadawi
remarked that "makeup is the post-modern veil," pointing
out its near-compulsory use in certain contexts. That was certainly
my experience growing up in the Midwest many decades ago. It remains
so in the workplace, at the employer's whim, according to a ruling
by the California Supreme Court in 2000. The judges upheld the firing
of Darlene Jesperson, a longtime bartender at Harrah's Casino in
Reno, for refusing new requirements that women wear lipstick, face
powder and mascara on the job. This court decision also allows employers
to dictate dress, hair length, and other grooming decisions for
their employees.
Here the rationale
of enforcement is economic; in
the Iranian context, it is religious. There, both the state and
the family act as enforcers. Posters in Tehran explain that "Bad
hijab is equal to prostitution. Lack of hijab means lack of man's
manhood." With these kinds of controls in place, lipstick looks
like freedom to many Iranian women, and many have taken to wearing
small or narrow scarves to comply with the hijab enforcement to
the minimal degree possible. The latest twist, as Ziba Mir-Hosseini
writes, is a strategy of reformulating the issue of choice using
religious reasoning: "In current reformist discourse, hejab
is not seen as a woman's "duty," but as her "right."
Many reformists oppose compulsory hejab on religious grounds, as
it can have meaning and value only when a woman has the right to
choose it freely." ["Is Time on Iranian Women Protestors'
Side?" June 16, 2006, Online: http://www.merip.org/mero/mero061606.html]
Compulsion
of women, whether it is legal or culturally enforced, is the bulwark
of any patriarchal system. While open violence is highly effective,
social pressure, ridicule, and indoctrination can be more insidious,
because less perceptible to their targets. Religious fundamentalists
employ these, too, but they are really the prime movers in modern
US-and-globalized-empire patriarchy. From the mass-media marketplace
to high school hallways to the workplace, the commercial standard
is fetishized sexual display of young, thin females who are compulsorily
blonde, plucked and lacquered. To complicate the analysis even further,
this standard can be operative (in private) even in full-body-veil
places like Riyadh.