During the first half of the 20th century, millions of Muslim women decided to abandon the head coverings their mothers had used; in the second half of the century, millions of Muslim women resumed wearing the veil. How and why these fluctuations of personal habit affected so many across the Muslim world is the question Leila Ahmed sets herself. She focuses on Egypt, which was a key influence in both the unveiling and the veiling, to trace the many meanings that this piece of cloth has acquired. It’s an acute study of how issues of political power and empire interact with women’s own claims to autonomy within families and communities. Ahmed beds her analysis into the wider political currents of Egypt without ever losing sight of women’s own interpretations of what they were doing and why.
What adds force to the analysis is the sense that the book has been a journey of personal discovery for Ahmed, a Harvard academic. She grew up in Cairo in the 1940s, and was raised by a generation of women who never wore the veil; she absorbed from them the assumption that the veil was backward, a restriction of female autonomy. Like many Muslim women of her generation, the veil’s reappearance has been shocking, unexpected and regarded as a step backwards. Writing the book has forced her to reassess such assumptions, and come to a new, more positive understanding of the veil.
The book starts at the height of British imperialism in the late 19th century when Evelyn Baring (Lord Cromer) effectively ruled the protectorate of Egypt. Many of the issues raised in that time have uncanny resonances with the recent debate. In 1899 Qasim Amin published The Liberation of Women, which provoked a furor: He argued that European civilization was clearly superior to that of Egypt; if women were not veiled in Europe, then it was clearly not necessary. In Ahmed’s words, he claimed that “Muslim societies are to be counted as advanced or backward by the extent to which they abandoned their native practices, symbolised by the veil.”
Following Amin, huge numbers of Egyptians westernized their furniture, their cities, their houses and their clothing. Amin wanted a profound transformation of Egyptian society: “It is impossible to breed successful men if they do not have mothers capable of raising them to be successful,” he wrote, making very clear that liberation of women was a means to achieving a better sort of man. At the heart of Amin’s “divided consciousness” as a Europeanized Egyptian was a modernization strategy for the nation — and veiling was a crucial symbol.
Cromer, on completion of his term in office, boasted that he had “practically abolished” primary education in the country. Yet in a best-selling book he expanded on the inferiority of the “dark-skinned Eastern” and on how Islam degraded women as exemplified by the practice of veiling. He set in train the notion of “saving brown women from brown men” (which, as Ahmed points out, was promoted by both Cherie Blair and Laura Bush ahead of the US invasion of Afghanistan).
For millions of Egyptian women, abandoning the veil was a statement of aspiration to modernity and held out the promise of education and work. It was not related, insists Ahmed, to secularization; religious women were as likely to go unveiled as the less devout.
What turned this social trend around was the trauma of the Arab-Israeli wars in 1967 and 1973. The humiliating defeats of the Arabs were perceived as a punishment by Allah and led to a renewed religiosity. Meanwhile an alternative idea of modernization strategy took hold — the Muslim Brotherhood’s demand for a more energetic religious practice. As Amin had once done, the Brotherhood called for a profound transformation of Egyptian society; as part of this political project, the veil would again become a central symbol. The clothing advocated by the Brotherhood expressed two key ideas: gender segregation and egalitarian principles of social justice. The veil as a statement of the claim to justice has spread across the world — in the West, against discrimination and an aggressive foreign policy; in the Arab world, against corruption and economic injustice.
But, points out Ahmed, there are much more pragmatic, private reasons for the veil’s popularity. Here she draws on a range of fascinating research studies conducted from the 1970s onwards, which paint a picture of women using the veil to resolve tensions between family convention and freedoms such as going to university and working. In crowded buses and lecture theaters, the veil is a “culturally available way” to make a statement about being a good Muslim.
“Paradoxically ... adopting strict Islamic dress” enables women “to flout traditional limits on their autonomy,” argues Ahmed, particularly in lower-middle-class families. The majority of women in these studies emphasize that wearing the veil has been a personal decision. Even if there are broad social and political trends shaping these decisions, they end up being experienced by individuals as private emotions.
Egypt provides a much more compelling narrative than the US, where Ahmed turns for the last section of the book. The activism of the US’ 10 million-strong Muslim community has a much less significant bearing on the global umma than Egypt. American Muslim community politics bear similar characteristics to those in the UK: Some thriving activism alongside complex diaspora factions and new initiatives coming together and petering out. She picks out the more liberal progressive representatives such as Laleh Bakhtiar, the first Muslim American woman translator of the Koran, and declares her conclusion to be far more optimistic than she would ever have imagined: She places her faith in the last decade’s “tremendous liveliness and activism among American Muslim women.” Certainly, it offers an intriguing combination of traditions, but I’ve seen little evidence that it travels well to Muslim minority communities in Europe, let alone other parts of the Muslim world.
This book is a drawing together of many other scholars’ work, in particular that of Gilles Keppel; the political analysis is at times a bit sketchy and economic contexts are largely absent. Perhaps most significant for a Western readership is the tart warning that support for Muslim women must be “without aiding and abetting imperial projects.” Ahmed is scathing about Western concern for women believed to be oppressed by Islam existing alongside an indifference to the very same women when they die at the hands of Western aggressors.
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