The meaning of the niqab or veil is currently the subject of great debate throughout the Islamic world, including the US and European countries where Muslims make up a substantial minority population. Arab News carries two articles furthering the debate, one from the The Los Angeles Times, the other from the UK’s The Guardian. Both are worth reading, of course…
Women and the Veil: Hidden in Plain Sight
Zaiba Malik, LA TimesThere’s a poster on the wall of an Islamic dress shop in East London showing a young woman in a black “hijab.†Above her is the word “Pure.†The saleswoman who is helping me also has a scarf covering her head.
I’m here to buy a “hijab†too — but that’s not all. I’m here for the full Islamic covering, the complete three-piece suit: The “hijab†that I will wrap around my head, the shapeless robe known as an “abaya,†and the now-terribly-controversial “niqab†— a square of material that goes over one’s face with a slit of about five inches for my eyes.
I buy it for $73 and take it all home, but I don’t put it on until the next morning. When I do, I see myself for the first time in full Islamic dress — and I’m horrified. I have disappeared, and somebody I don’t recognize is looking back at me. I cannot tell how old she is, how much she weighs, whether she has a kind face or a sad face. Even my own mother couldn’t recognize me.
I’ve seen this shrouded figure in news reports from the mountains of Afghanistan and the cities of Saudi Arabia, but she looks out of place here in my bedroom in West London. In fact, I feel so dissociated from my own reflection that it takes me over an hour to pluck up the courage to leave the house.
Muslim Veil as a Symbol of Cultural Identity
Karen Armstrong, The GuardianLONDON, 28 October 2006 — I spent seven years of my girlhood heavily veiled — not in a Muslim niqab but in a nun’s habit. We wore voluminous black robes, large rosaries and crucifixes, and an elaborate headdress: You could see a small slice of my face from the front, but from the side I was entirely shielded from view. We must have looked very odd indeed, walking dourly through the colorful carnival of London during the swinging 1960s, but nobody ever asked us to exchange our habits for more conventional attire.
When my order was founded in the 1840s, not long after Catholic emancipation, people were so enraged to see nuns brazenly wearing their habits in the streets that they pelted them with rotten fruit and horse dung. Nuns had been banned from Britain since the Reformation; their return seemed to herald the resurgence of barbarism. Two hundred and fifty years after the gunpowder plot which sought to blow up the Westminster Parliament and kill the king, Catholicism was still feared as unassimilable, irredeemably alien to the British ethos, fanatically opposed to democracy and freedom, and a fifth column allied to dangerous enemies abroad.
Today the veiled Muslim woman appears to symbolize the perceived Islamic threat, as nuns once epitomized the evils of popery. She seems a barbaric affront to hard-won values that are essential to our cultural identity: gender equality, freedom, transparency and openness. But in the Muslim world the veil has also acquired a new symbolism. If government ministers really want to debate the issue fruitfully, they must become familiar with the bitterly ironic history of veiling during the last hundred years.
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November:02:2006 - 22:34
As much as I respect Karen Armstrong, I am surprised that she doesn’t see an obvious link between the Catholic veil and the Islamic veil. In her book “The Gospel according to Woman,” she wrote:
In the intro: “This book will examine the way that men regarded women in Western Christianity and the ways that they coped with their view of women. It will also look at the solutions that women found for the problems that were created for them by the particular neuroses of Christianity.”
Here are the places she speaks of the veil in the “woman” book: On pp. 3-4, she wrote: “The Koran says nothing about women having to be veiled or locked away in harems.
(Others cite the part of Mohammed’s hallucination in which he said the they could show only their hands and face as being the command that woman cover their body (so men won’t have to control their lusts)!”
Bakc to “Woman”: “In fact, in the early period of Islam, women had a good deal of freedom. Veiling came in during the thrid and fourth generations after Mohammed, and it has been suggested that Islam acquired the practice from its contact with Christian Byzantium, which had always treated its women this way. ” She makes a big point that Muslims enjoy sex…they punish sexual offenders, she says, because sexuality is valued and the ideal has been debased”…and because women are their (men’s) property.
In another place in “Woman,” pp. 62-63, she wrote about Tertullian and his animosity toward women. He wrote a treatise named “On the Veiling of Virgins.” In it, she said, his fear of women and their leading men astray “in a particularly disturbed form.” She continued: “St. Paul had said that women had to wear veils in Church ‘because of the angels.’ Here he was referring to the legend of the ‘Sons of God,’ the ‘angels’ who lusted after earthly women and came down from heaven to mate with them. …(Tertullian wrote) So perilous a face, then, ought to be kept shaded, when it has cast stumbling stones even so far as heaven.” Later on p. 63, she writes: “Already, years before Augustine would finally formulate for the West the doctrine of Original Sin, the emotional trinity which exists at the heart of that doctrine has been formed in the Christian neurosis of Tertullian: woman, sex and sin are fused together in his mind indissolubly. The only hope for man is that women hide themselves away — veil their faces from man’s lustful eyes, hide theri beauty by disfiguring themseleves and make themselves ugly and sexless in the penitential garb that befits each woman as an Eve.”
And on p. 262 — in a section about women prophetesses and other women who insisted upon leadership roles in early Christianity (despite Paul!) — she wrote: “From the very earliest days of the Church, direct religious and mystical experience gave women an equality with men. In the Acts of the Apostles the four daughters of St. Philip who were prophetesses are mentioned as well-known and important personages. The prophet claimed to receive a message for the community directly from God, and we have seen that S.t Paul’s nervous and defensive censures about the women prophets in Corinth who were not wearing their veils suggest that they challenged the traditional sex roles of superior men and dependent, subservient women.”
That — man’s right to determine what woman may and may not do and be — is the crux of the issue. Societies in which women have struggled toward equality with men are not willing to let anyone set us back, including Muslim women in veils (whether the womem say they wear veils because they want to or whether the women wear veils from fear of punishment from their men) or Catholic women wearing veils because the Pope told them to!
Karen Armstrong knows that whether a Catholic pope or an Islamic mullah orders women to wear veils, neither has that authority.
November:02:2006 - 22:53
I believe Armstrong has written recently on the similarities of the Christian nun’s habit and the veil.
They are similar in their purpose, but there are differences, also. The habit served to distinguish those who had dedicated their lives to serving God as their sole purpose from their lay sisters. Islamic cultures do not so distinguish.
Both are probably the result of social and cultural traditions, strengthened by religious interpretations which legitimize them. But those traditions are strong. I’m willing to bet that were one to go to remote villages in Sicily, Sardinia, Greece, or Spain, you’d still find elderly women who cover their faces in the presence of strange men. They’d also be wearing some sort of head covering.
In the Middle East today, you still find Christian and Jewish women who cover their heads, not only Muslim women.
The import, of course, always comes down to the intent.