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Rethinking
MUSLIM
WOMEN and
THE VEIL
Challenging Historical &
Modern Stereotypes
Katherine Bullock
Series Editors
Dr. Anas S. al-Shaikh-Ali
Shiraz Khan
INTRODUCTION
In 1991 I saw a news report on the television that showed
Turkish women who were returning to the veil. I felt shocked
and saddened for them. Poor things, I thought, they are being
brainwashed by their culture. Like many Westerners, I
believed that Islam oppressed women and that the veil was a
symbol of their oppression. Imagine my surprise then, four
years later, at seeing my own reflection in a store window,
dressed exactly like those oppressed women. I had embarked
on a spiritual journey during my Masters degree that culminated four years later in my conversion to Islam. The
journey included moving from hatred of Islam, to respect, to
interest, to acceptance. Naturally, being a woman, the issue
of the veil was central.
Despite my attraction to the theological foundations of Islam,
I was deeply troubled by what I believed to be practices
oppressive to women. I felt that the veil was a cultural
tradition that Muslim women could surely work to eliminate.
I was shown the verses in the Quran that many Muslims
believe enjoin covering on men and women, and it seemed
quite clear to me then that, indeed, the verses did impose
covering. I wandered home, feeling quite depressed and sorry
for Muslim women. If the verses were clear, they had no
recourse: covering would be required for a believing Muslim
woman.
I had to put these issues aside in order to decide whether or
not to accept Islam. What counted, in the final analysis, was
the fundamental theological message of the religion that
Chapter One
Hijab in the Colonial Era
When did the veil become a symbol of oppression in the West?
Although I have not been able to pinpoint the origins of the
idea, it is evident that by the eighteenth century, the veil was
already taken by Europeans to be an oppressive custom
amongst Muslims. The British Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,
who traveled to Turkey with her diplomatic husband, the
Honourable Edward Wortley Montagu in 171718, disputed
the idea that the veil was oppressive. Having tried out the veil
while in Turkey, she argued it gave women freedom, for it
allowed them to go out unrecognized.1 However, the notion
of the veil as oppressive assumed a new and important focus
in the nineteenth century because that was the era of European
colonization of the Middle East. As Ahmed demonstrates in
her book, colonialists utilized that new focus on the status of
exhibition: they could not be seen; they could not be seen, but
were seeing; and they were not a picture that could be read.
They were mysterious beings who refused to offer themselves
up to the visitor. For me, this is a key aspect of the European
campaign against the veil. Europeans arrived in the Middle
East with the confident knowledge of being at the apex of
civilization, but this conviction was destabilized upon arrival
in the Middle East. How could one be superior, or establish
authority over creatures who could not be known (because
they could not be seen, grasped as a picture)? What could not
be seen, grasped as a spectacle, could not be controlled.
Moreover, Europeans felt uneasy about the veiled women: the
Europeans knew they were being watched by women who
were themselves unseen. That gave the women some power
over the Europeans. That was a reversal of the expected
relationship between superior and inferior to see without
being seen. And so and here is the crux of my argument
the Europeans retaliated. They attacked the veil, they tried to
rip it off; they tried everything they could to see the women.
They exposed women in paintings, photographs, etc., by
portraying them naked, or otherwise undressed. And thus
began the campaign to unveil Muslim women.
Conclusion
The metaphysics of modernity, where meaning is grasped
as a distinction between a material thing and the non-material
structure that it represents, with its emphasis on the gaze, led
European visitors to the Middle East to attack the veil. The
veil was a barrier to the European carrying through to
completion the project promoted by the Orientalist vision of
the Orient: namely the inherent inferiority of the Orient and
the need for the West to civilize it. Colonial discourse also
introduced ideas about Oriental inferiority and the focus on
womens status as the benchmark for progress into the
colonizeds discourse. Native elites seized upon the European
understanding of certain practices, such as the veil and the
harem, in their efforts to modernize. To the older premodern meanings of the veil, as a symbol of piety, wealth or
status were added the meanings that the veil symbolized
oppression and backwardness. The new meanings did not
displace the older meanings, just created a new layer that was
Chapter Two
Perceptions and Experiences of
Wearing Hijab in Toronto
Soon after I started wearing hijab, two school girls in
Montreal, Quebec, Canada, were sent home from school for
refusing to remove their headscarves in class.10 The incidents
sparked a debate across Canada about the meaning of hijab
and its place in Canadian society. The controversy in Canada
about the meaning of the headscarf was based on its being an
alien practice that Canadians had to decide whether or not
they would accept as authentic. A Canadian Broadcasting
Commission (CBC) investigative report asked the question:
Can the hijab pass the litmus test of being Canadian?11 That
the girls who were expelled were Canadian (born and bred)
seemed irrelevant. Jeffery Simpsons opinion piece in The
Globe and Mail, which argued that Muslim women should
have the right to wear hijab if they so desired,12 sparked an
angry response from two women citing that hijab was
clearly a sign of Muslim womens oppression.13
What were obscured in these popular debates were the voices
of covered Muslim women themselves. This chapter attempts
to fill that gap by presenting the voices of some Muslim
Canadian women who cover. I do not generalize from their
views to all Muslims. My aim was simply to gain a thorough
understanding of what a few Muslim women thought about
hijab. I interviewed fifteen Sunni women and one Ismaili
between May and July 1996, who lived in the greater Toronto
area, Ontario, Canada. Of the sixteen, six were converts to
Islam. Ten wore hijab all the time (of which five were
converts), and five wore hijab sometimes. Only two of these
Chapter Three
Multiple Meanings of Hijab
The sociological complexity of covering is not captured by the
conventional wisdom in the West that holds that the veil
(as if there was just one type) is a symbol of womens
oppression in Islam. My concern in this book is to challenge
the common Western presumption that every woman wearing
a scarf is doing so out of force or coercion, and that the scarf
represents her oppression in Islam. This chapter focuses on
the multiple meanings hijab holds, in order to demonstrate
that an observer should not read a single meaning into it and
to highlight the injustice done to women in the West who
Chapter Four
Mernissi and the Discourse on the Veil
Moroccan feminist, Fatima Mernissis two books, Beyond the
Veil and The Veil and the Male Elite are widely consulted in
the West about the meaning of the veil.41 In both books,
Mernissi argues that the veil is a symbol of unjust male
authority over women. Since my book is aimed at undermining the stereotype of the veil as oppressive, a critical
refutation of Mernissis main arguments found in these two
books is essential.
Mernissi and Methodology
The personal trauma that Fatima Mernissi seems to have
experienced growing up in Morocco is never far from the
surface of most of her writings. An anecdote from Mernissis
autobiography illuminates her relationship to covering very
well. During World War II, when she was not yet nine, she
and her cousins concluded that they needed to change their
hair color or cover it to protect themselves from Hi-Hitler
who hated dark hair and dark eyes and was throwing
bombs from planes wherever a dark-haired population was
spotted.42 Mernissi started wearing one of her mothers
scarves, only to have it ripped off her head by an angry
mother: Dont you ever cover your head! Mother shouted.
Do you understand me? Never! I am fighting against the veil,
and you are putting one on?! What is this nonsense?...Even
if Hi-Hitler, the Almighty King of the Allemane, is after
you, she said, you ought to face him with your hair
uncovered. Covering your head and hiding will not help.
Hiding does not solve a womans problems. It just identifies
Chapter Five
An Alternative Theory of the Veil
One of the points of this book is to show that social context
influences meanings ascribed to hijab. In this chapter, I aim
to develop a positive theory of the meaning of hijab for the
consumer capitalist culture of the twenty-first century. I argue
CONCLUSION
My book began with my attempt to understand why a secular
liberal society that is supposed to be neutral about how
individuals pursue the good, reacted badly to my becoming
Muslim and adopting hijab. My quest has taken me on a
journey back to colonial times when Europeans first encountered hijab, to contemporary times, where after abandoning
hijab, some Muslim women are wearing it again. I have
presented the voices of some Muslim women living in Toronto
who cover, and analyzed the emphatic voice of a woman
opposed to hijab. Finally, I have tried to articulate a positive
theory of hijab for the capitalist cultures of the twenty-first
century.
Hijab is a philosophy about male and female dress, and an
etiquette for male/female relations. However, it is the piece of
cloth that covers a womans body to varying degrees, also
known as hijab, that is the focus of hostility in the West, as
well as a site of a bitter struggle in the Muslim world. In
Turkey and Tunisia, laws banning hijab are enacted in the
name of modernity, a modernity, based on Orientalism that
sees Islam as backward, anti-civilization, barbaric, and
oppressive to women. At this point, the common Western
view of the veil as oppressive and the Muslim worlds attempts
to banish hijab converge.
The Author
KATHERINE BULLOCK completed her Ph.D. in Political Science at the
University of Toronto, in 1999. She has taught and lectured in California
and Toronto on Islamic Civilisation and Politics. Her most recent
appointment is with the University of Toronto, where she has been
teaching a course entitled The Politics of Islam since 2002.
Currently she is President of The Tessellate Institute, a non-profit research
institute, and also of Compass Books, a newly founded publishing
company. She was the editor of the American Journal of Islamic Social
Sciences (AJISS) from 20032008, and the Vice-President of the
Association of Muslim Social Scientists (North America) from 20062009.
Her publications include: Muslim Women Activists in North America:
Speaking for Ourselves and Rethinking Muslim Women and the Veil:
Challenging Historical and Modern Stereotypes which has been
translated into French and Turkish.
She is a community activist and lectures frequently, both to Muslim and
non-Muslim groups. Originally from Australia, she lives in Canada with
her husband and children. She embraced Islam in 1994.
Notes
1
The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, quoted in Leila
Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p.150.
2
Orientalism became a field of knowledge, or paradigm, for understanding the
Middle East and Islam that pretended to objectivity (impartiality), but that was
actually based on the guiding assumption of inherent Oriental inferiority.
Edward Said, Orientalism (1979, 2nd Ed., New York: Vintage Books, 1994),
p.209.
3
Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, p.128.
4
Ibid., pp.12930.
5
Ibid., p.145.
6
Ibid., p.129.
7
Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: Uni. of California Press,1988),
pp.1213, passim.
8
Ibid.,
pp.1920.
9
Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, p.104.
10
The Quebec issue followed on from French expulsions of girls in hijab in
1989. Naturally there are connections between French and Quebec culture.
11
Canadian Broadcasting Commission, Prime Time News, July, 1995.
12
Jeffery Simpson, The Current Objections to Muslim Clothing are Simply
Wrongheaded, Globe and Mail (Toronto, Canada), December 28, 1994,
p.A16.
13
Mona LeBlanc, Letters to the Editor, Globe and Mail, Wednesday, January
4, 1995.
14
I say other people because most of the interviewees, even though they
observed the five pillars of Islam, did not consider themselves religious. They
felt they would have to do more prayers, or read more Quran, to be truly
religious.
15
Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, Arab Muslims and Islamic Institutions in
America: Adaptation and Reform, in Arabs in the New World: Studies on
Arab-American Communities, eds. Sameer Y. Abraham and Nabeel Abraham
(Detroit: Wayne State University Centre for Urban Studies, 1983), p.75.
16
Azza M. Karam, Women, Islamisms and the State: Contemporary Feminisms
in Egypt (London: Macmillan, 1998), p.133.
17
Ibid., p.139.
18
For Algeria, see Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism. Trans. Haakon
Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1967). French edition, 1959, pp.6162,
passim. For Iran, see Azar Tabari, Islam and the Struggle for Emancipation of
Iranian Women, in In the Shadow of Islam: The Womens Movement in Iran,
eds. Azar Tabari and Nahid Yeganeh (London: Zed Press, 1982), p.13.
19
Sherifa Zuhur, Revealing Reveiling: Islamist Gender Ideology in
Contemporary Egypt (New York: State University of New York Press, 1992),
p.108.
20
John Williams, A Return to the Veil in Egypt, Middle East Review, 11, 3,
(1979), p.50.
21
Zuhur, Revealing Reveiling, p.2. Zuhur found this ideal contradicted by the
Yves St. Laurent line of headscarves available for purchase. See also Leila
Hessini, Wearing the Hijab in Contemporary Morocco: Choice and Identity,
in Reconstructing Gender in the Middle East: Tradition, Identity, and Power,
eds. Fatma Mge Gek and Shiva Balaghi (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1994), p.50.
22
Williams, A Return to the Veil, p.54.
23
Homa Hoodfar, Return to the Veil: Personal Strategy and Public
Participation in Egypt, in Working Women: International Perspectives on
Labour and Gender Relations, eds. Nanneke Redclift and M. Thea Sinclair
(London: Routledge, 1991), pp.110111; Arlene Elowe Macleod,
Accommodating Protest: Working Women and the New Veiling in Cairo (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp.114, 121.
24
Helen Watson, Women and the Veil: Personal Responses to Global
Process, in Islam, Globalization and Postmodernity, eds. Akbar S. Ahmed and
Hastings Donnan (London: Routledge, 1994), p.148. Nadia is the first woman
in the family to have a post-secondary education. She is now studying medicine
at University.
25
M. AlMunajjed, Women in Saudi Arabia Today (New York: St. Martins
Press,1997), p.47.
26
New Statesman, 27 March 1992, cover page.
27
The Atlanta Journal/The Atlanta Constitution, June 28, 1992, Section P.
28
LExpress, (Quebec), November 17, 1994, cover page.
29
Le Nouvel Observateur, September 28, 1994.
30
Toronto Star, May 14, 1996, F5.
31
Vancouver Sun, September 15, 1994, A18.
32
Montreal Gazette, April 11, 1994, B3.
33
Toronto Star, December 15, 1996, F4.
34
Deborah Scroggins, Women of the Veil: Islamic Militants Pushing Women
Back to an Age of Official Servitude, The Atlanta Journal/The Atlanta
Constitution, Sunday, June 28, 1992, p.P3.
35
Jan Goodwin, Price of Honor: Muslim Women Lift the Veil of Silence on the
Islamic World, (New York: Plume, 1994), p.262.
36
Ibid., pp.55, 789, 81, 98, 101, 1079, 293, 300; Scroggins, Women of the
Veil, p.P3
37
Goodwin, Price of Honor, pp.112, 161, 1867, 217, 247, 342. Goodwin
presents some women who cover as not fundamentalists and fearing
fundamentalism, p.85; Scroggins, Women of the Veil, p.P2. Geraldine
Brooks, Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women, (N.Y.:
Doubleday, 1995), p.8.
38
Goodwin, Price of Honor, pp.137, 175.
39
Andrea B. Rugh, Reveal and Conceal: Dress in Contemporary Egypt
(Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1986).
40
S. Brenner, Reconstructing Self and Society: Javanese Muslim Women and
the Veil, American Ethnologist, 23, 4, (1996).
41
Fatima Mernissi, Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern
Muslim Society (Revised ed, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1987), and The
Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Womens Rights in Islam,
Trans. Mary Jo Lakeland (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing
Co., 1991).
42
Fatima Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood (Reading,
Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1994), p.100.
43
Ibid.
44
Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, p.82.
45
Ibid.
46
T.J. Winter, Desire and Decency in the Islamic Tradition, Islamica (United
Kingdom), 1, 4, (January 1994), pp.1112.
47
Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, p.107.
48
Naheed Mustapha, My Body is my Own Business, Globe and Mail, Facts
and Arguments, Tuesday, June 29, 1993; Yusufali: My Body is My Own
Business, The Toronto Star, Tuesday, February 17,1998, C:1.
49
Susie Orbach, Fat is a Feminist Issue: A Self-Help Guide for Compulsive
Eaters (New York: Berkeley Books, 1979); Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight:
Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley, Calif.: University of
California Press, 1993); Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of
Beauty are Used Against Women (1991, 2nd Ed, New York: Anchor, 1992);
Jane Ussher, Fantasies of Femininity: Reframing the Boundaries of Sex
(London: Penguin, 1997); Catherine A. MacKinnon, Sexuality, Pornography,
and Method: Pleasure Under Patriarchy, in Feminism and Philosophy:
Essential Readings in Theory, Reinterpretation, and Application, eds. Nancy
Tuana and Rosemarie Tong (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995); A. Dworkin,
Pornography is a Civil Rights Issue, in Debating Sexual Correctness:
Pornography, Sexual Harassment, Date Rape, and the Politics of Sexual
Equality, ed. Adele M. Stan (New York: Delta, 1995).
50
John Berger, Sven Blomberg, Chris Fox, Michael Dibb and Richard Hollis,
Ways of Seeing (London: BBC and Penguin, 1972).
51
MacKinnon, Sexuality, Pornography, and Method, p.142.
52
Michael F. Jacobson and Laurie Ann Mazur, Marketing Madness: A Survival
Guide for a Consumer Society (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), pp.845.
53
Bordo, Unbearable Weight, p.290. Also pp.2467, 275.