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Veil of ignorance: have we gotten the headscarf all wrong? Author: Leila Ahmed Date: May-June 2011 From: Foreign Policy(Issue 186) Publisher: Foreign Policy Document Type: Critical essay Length: 2,131 words

Full Text: IN 1955, ALBERT HOURANI, the Oxford historian and bestselling author of A History of the Arab Peoples, published a short article called "The Vanishing Veil: A Challenge to the Old Order." Pointing out that veiling was a fast-disappearing practice in most Arab societies, Hourani gave a brief history of how it was fading from modern society--and why it would soon become a thing of the past.

The trend to unveil, Hourani wrote, had begun in Egypt in the early 20th century, set in motion by the writer Qasim Amin. Amin had argued that "gradual and careful change in the status of women," including women's casting off their veils, was now an essential step in the advancement of Muslim societies--and "not contrary to the principles of Islam." Although Amin's ideas had been met with great resistance, Hourani recounted how they gradually gained acceptance and spread among the "more advanced Arab countries," first in Egypt and then "Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq."

By the 1950s, when Hourani was writing, the veil had virtually disappeared in Egypt, except among the "lower middle class, the most conservative of all classes," he noted. It was only in the Arab world's "most backward regions," and specifically Saudi Arabia and Yemen, that the "old order"--and along with it such practices as veiling and polygamy--"still persists unaltered."

But Hourani's article has proved spectacularly incorrect. Fifty-six years later, we live in a world where veiling among Muslim women, after steadily gaining ground across the globe in the last two decades, is incontrovertibly ascendant. How did we get it so wrong?

Until recently, I thought, as Hourani did, that the disappearance of the veil was inevitable; I was sure that greater education and opportunity for women in the Muslim world would result in the elimination of this relic of women's oppression. For decades, in books, op-eds, and lectures, I stood firmly and unquestioningly against the veil and the hijab, the Islamic head scarf, viewing them as signs of women's disempowerment. To me, and to my fellow Arab feminists, being told what to wear was just another form of tyranny. But in the course of researching and writing a new book on the history of the veil's improbable comeback, I've had to radically rethink my assumptions. Where I once saw the veil as a symbol of intolerance, I now understand that for many women, it is a badge of individuality and justice.

That was not always the case. Not long after I moved to Cambridge, Mass., in 1998, I recall walking past Cambridge Common with a friend who was visiting from the Arab world--a well-known feminist whom I will call Aisha. We were shocked to find a large crowd there, the women all in hijab. It was an arresting, unusual sight--and one that made both of us instinctively uncomfortable.

"To them," Aisha said as we stood observing the scene, "we are the enemy."

For Aisha and me, the hijab's presence meant not piety--for we knew many women who were deeply devout yet never wore hijab--but Islamism, the very political form of Islam that had been gaining ground in Muslim societies since the Islamic resurgence of the 1970s, a religious revival fueled significantly by the activities of groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. So for me the sight of women in hijab in America was a disturbing one.

I left Egypt in the late 1960s, by which time the Muslim Brotherhood had almost disappeared, many members having gone into hiding or fled the country because of the Nasser regime's systematic attempt to eradicate the group. In the late 1960s hardly anyone in such cities as Cairo and Alexandria wore hijab.

But by the 1990s that had all changed. The Islamic resurgence had made extraordinary gains across Egyptian society even as escalating militant Islamist violence was shaking the country in a growing atmosphere of intellectual repression. In 1992, Farag Foda, a well-known journalist and critic of Islamism, was murdered. The following year, Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, then a professor at Cairo University, was accused of being an apostate; he was later forced to flee the country with his wife. In 1994, Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian novelist and Nobel laureate, was stabbed by an Islamist who claimed to be outraged by his blasphemous works. It all seemed a shocking gauge of Egypt's drastic descent into intolerance, and for me it was very much connected to the spread of Islamism and its signature dress, the hijab.

All of this, then, was instantly brought to mind by seeing the hijab in Cambridge. Was some kind of extremist, militant Islam taking root in the West? Was that what the presence of the hijab signified? Could the Muslim Brotherhood have somehow managed to establish a foothold here and in other Western countries? Where were these young women getting their ideas? And because they lived in a free country where it was quite ordinary for women to challenge patriarchal ideas, why did they feel bound to accept whatever it was that they were being told?

My reading of that scene on the Cambridge street turned out to be accurate in that Islamism has now become a powerful influence in America, and yet it was also a misreading--as I would discover in listening to women who chose to wear the veil. My very first interviews began to unsettle my assumptions. "I wear it for the same reason as my Jewish friend wears a yarmulke," said one woman; the hijab, she said, was required dress that made visible the presence of a religious minority entitled to justice and equality. Another said she hoped her hijab would raise other women's awareness of society's sexist messages about women's bodies and dress. For many others, wearing the hijab was a way of rejecting negative stereotypes and affirming pride in Muslim identity in the face of prejudice.

Clearly, these women have a very different view of the veil here in the West, where they are free to wear whatever they want, than the old notion of the veil with which I grew up, fraught with ancient patriarchal meanings as it was and still is in societies where it is required by law or through ferocious social pressure. Listening to such women, I found it startling and moving to see how the Islamist emphasis on social justice had been transplanted to a democratic, pluralist society committed to gender equality and justice for all. This was certainly not an interpretation of the veil I had heard before, and it reflected a different Islam from the one of my childhood as well.

Indeed, I found that for all the alarmism sparked by episodes like the uproar over the building of a Muslim community center near New York's Ground Zero, the West is exerting far more influence on Islam than the other way around. Especially after the 9/11 attacks, religiously committed Muslim American women were spurred into active engagement with Islam and women's rights, propelled to action by the heightened scrutiny of their religion and community. The result, somewhat surprisingly, is that Islamic feminism is alive and well in America. And it is Islamists and the children of Islamists--the very people whose presence in the United States had initially alarmed me--who are now in the vanguard of the struggle for women's rights in Islam.

I would never claim, of course, not to have heard chauvinistic views expressed among Muslim groups in the United States. But such voices have been drowned out by women like Khadija Haffajee and Ingrid Mattson, the first women to play leading roles in a key North American Muslim group, or Laleh Bakhtiar, whose recent translation of the Quran offers a new and radically different interpretation of one of its key verses regarding women.

These are just the first stirrings of a new era in the story of Islam in the West. Historically, religions undergo enormous transformations as one strain of belief and practice gains ascendancy over another. Living religions are by definition dynamic: Witness the changes that have occurred in the last decades as women have become pastors and rabbis. A similar process is now under way within Islam, as the veil, once an emblem of patriarchy, today carries multiple meanings for its American and European wearers. Often enough, it also serves as a banner and call for justice--and yes, even for women's rights.

RELATED ARTICLE: It's not just the veil.

Technology and globalization have reinvented other traditional Muslim practices in some surprising ways

BY JOSHUA E. KEATING

JUST DO IT ... MODESTLY

Traditional clothing for Muslim women--think head coverings and long sleeves--might not seem compatible with modern athletics, where body-hugging spandex is de rigueur. Bahraini sprinter Ruqaya Al Ghasara, who once eyebrows by sporting a headscarf emblazoned with Nike swoosh, caused a stir at the 2004 Athens Olympics she became the first woman to compete in a running wearing a hijab. More recently, the "burqini," a bodysuit for swimming, has won fans from Dubai Indonesia since its 2007 launch, though traditionalists plain that the suits are tantamount to "playing a game Allah."

EGYPT'S JOEL OSTEENS

Like their Christian evangelical counterparts in the United States, Islamic religious authorities have been early and enthusiastic adopters of new communications The best known of the TV imams is Yusuf whose show Sharia and Life has been weekly on AI Jazeera for the last 15 years. Every more than 60 million people turn in to hear him on subjects ranging from suicide bombing to female Internet imams like South Africa-based muff Ebrahim Desai, who runs Asklmam.org, or Dany Doueiri, California-based Islamic scholar behind IslamiCity.com, thousands of queries from curious Muslims on topics such as work, marriage, and, especially, sex.

PRAYING WITH THE STARS

NASA engineers have planned for many contingencies over a half-century of flight, but how and when to pray wasn't one of them. When Malaysia sent its first astronaut, Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor, to the International Station in 2007, a panel of 150 Muslim scholars scientists convened by the Malaysian space agency produced "A Guideline of Performing Ibadah [Worship] at International Space Station." Among other rules, the stipulated that Shukor only had to pray five per 24-hour period, rather than five times every the station orbited Earth. Determining the direction Mecca was a little more complicated. The clerics told Shukor just to try his best.

NO-INTEREST BANKING

Modern Islamic banking started in Egypt in the early 1960s, when a small-town bank began offering interest-free loans in accordance with the Islamic ban on usury. Today, there are more than 400 sharia-compliant banks that offer loans without interest; the Kuala Lumpur-based Islamic Financial Services Board predicts that such institutions will have $1.6 trillion under management by 2012, With the sector growing at 15 to 20 percent per year even at the height of the financial crisis, Western banks including Citibank and HSBC

have started their own sharia-compliant divisions. Sharia-compliant banks have even found an unlikely ally: The Vatican's official newspaper recently wrote that Islamic banking was a model of the "ethical principles ... which should mark every financial service."

MECCA GOES MODERN

The hajj--the journey to Mecca that all Muslims are expected to make at least once in their lifetimes--is among the most important rites in Islam. It's also big business, with pilgrims dropping an average of more than $2,000 in the city and a record-breaking 2.8 million participating in 2010 (up from just 1.8 million a decade ago), according to the Saudi government. That has led to some decidedly non-holy modern businesses cropping up in recent years, including an amusement park, fast-food vendors, and shopping malls complete with lingerie stores. Recent additions to Mecca include a $1.8 billion rail line that can shuttle 3,000 passengers at a time--open only to pilgrims from the Persian Gulf--and the world's largest clock, unveiled in 2010 with the ambitious hope of one day replacing Greenwich Mean Time with "Mecca Time." And for those who don't have the time or money to make the pilgrimage to Mecca, there's now a virtual hajj online in Second Life, which for the first time allows even non-Muslims to experience circling the Kaaba.

RELATED ARTICLE: On and off >> a century of the Hijab.

1895

In the 19th century, many Egyptian women wore the full veil, as illustrated by this exoticized studio portrait.

PHOTOGRAPH BY FATHER BROWNE

1957

Scantily clad bathers on Alexandria's Stanley Beach.

PHOTOGRAPH BY ELIE MORENO

1940

Starting in the 1920s, however, women began to abandon the veil as a feminist gesture.

PHOTOGRAPH BY MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE

2011

Today, the veil is again omnipresent in Egypt, marking political identity as much as pious submission.

PHOTOGRAPH BY MAHMUD HAMS THE NEW MIDDLE EAST

Leila Ahmed is Victor S. Thomas professor at Harvard Divinity School and author of A Quiet Revolution: The Veil's Resurgence, from the Middle East to America.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 Foreign Policy http://www.jstor.org/journals/00157228.html Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition) Ahmed, Leila. "Veil of ignorance: have we gotten the headscarf all wrong?" Foreign Policy, no. 186, May-June 2011, p. 40+. Gale

College Collection, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A256602958/GCCO?u=mia56118&sid=lms-GCCO&xid=bd6b2058. Accessed 23 June 2021.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A256602958