are state laws forcing women not to wear the hijaab any less ridiculous than laws to the opposite effect? Turkey's Battle of the Headscarf, as Roger Hardy terms it, bears a rather disturbing resemblence to the Irani Shah's policies way back when.

when Zeliha says,

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"I don't feel I have to comply with what the state says. This is my faith - and I want to live by my faith,"

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i can criticise that, because i don't believe that the veil is sanctioned by the Qur'aan. but then, who am i to have imaginary arguments with her? perhaps she, like some Muslim women in the west wears the hijaab despite the fact that it's non-obligatory, as a marker of identity.

You don't need to shoot people to pressure them into something. I suppose there will always be a certain level of social pressure in any circle though. Perhaps, it will be a generational thing... it will get progressively easier for the newer generations of women to not wear it, or to honestly choose to of their own free will and conscience... and for the men in their lives to embrace change.

There's a great article by Anne-Emmanuelle Berger titled 'The Newly Veiled Woman: Irigaray, Specularity, and the Islamic Veil' and published in the journal Diacritics (28.1 (1998), pp. 93-119), I can forward the entire piece if anyone's interested. Here some bits.

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Whether sympathetic to the Islamist movement or not, all commentators and players of the field point more or less explicitly to a major determinant of both the content and politics of today's Islamism which makes it different from past reformist movements and other forms of religious revivals within Islam, namely the colonial legacy. Islamism is fundamentally dialectical: it inherits and revives both the trauma of the modern colonial encounter with the West, generally traced back to Napoleon's Egyptian "expedition"--an event which seems to have erased for all the concerned parties the memory of earlier and more peaceful encounters across the Mediterranean--and the ambiguous dialectic of subjectivation and alienation, so well described by Fanon, at work in the subsequent independence struggles. "Islamism," then, is constituted by its opposition to the "West." It sees itself in the eyes of an understandably antagonized "other" and makes itself seen by it. Or perhaps, it sees Islam as it has not been seen by the West and strives to make it "visible." In this sense, it might be read as a symptom of--and reaction to--the longstanding "specular" relation entertained by the West toward Islam. Keeping Irigaray in mind, I call "specular" here the imaginary relation of the West to the "Orient," predating and preparing its colonial takeover, whereby the latter occupied the place of the feminine onto which fantasies of domination and appropriation as well as fears of loss were projected, as postcolonial critics have long noticed. How does one resist one's "feminization"? Are all politics of resistance to it, conversely, politics of phallicization? [...]

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What does the hijab originally name, then, if not a woman's veil, and how can we account for its present "taking over" and catachretic use to designate specifically the required form of female veiling under Islamic rule? The hijab is mentioned several times in the Koran, including in sura 33, where one of the veiling prescriptions I just referred to appears. In verses 51 to 53, God orders the believers who have entered the house of the Prophet to talk to his wives only through a hijab when they want to ask them for something; the hijab here could literally be translated as "curtain" or, as the Iranian exiles Chahla Chafiq and Farhad Khosrokhavar gloss it in Femmes sous le voile, "barrier" [42]. The hijab is thus intended to separate not only or not primarily men from women but more precisely the household of the Prophet, which should remain invisible from all outsiders. The invisibility of the Prophet's wives, rendered as it were visible by the hijab, marks the place of God and confirms His presence, while securing the wives' place within the sacred space. Fatma Haddad, a professor of philosophy at the University of Tunis, who first attracted my attention to the original discrepancy between the hijab and the other women's veil(s) in the Koranic text, reads this particular instance as an allegory of the modus operandi of religious power within Islam. The inside/outside opposition delineated by the hijab would mark in this instance the separation between the sacred source of power, in whose intimacy the Prophet's wives rest, and the zone of influence of this power. In sura 19, Mary, who is about to receive the announcement of Jesus's conception, places a hijab between herself and the rest of her family, thus isolating herself in God. In sura 17, verse 45, the hijab designates once again a thick piece of cloth hung like a curtain between the praying Prophet and the nonbelievers. Here, there is no particular mention of women in the space configured by the hijab, underlying the "unisex" use of the latter. On the other hand, the hijab clearly separates, once again, the religious from the nonreligious, again rendering visible the opposition it creates between inside(rs) and outside(rs), or inclusion and exclusion.

According to the Koran, the hijab then makes visible a symbolic border, the very border that defines and protects Islam and allows it to operate. Inasmuch as today's hijab retains the features of the Koranic one, it turns women into the site of the border, without which Islam would not appear as such: for women are now the ones to delineate the religious space as they wear the hijab.. Like the Koranic hijab, today's hijab may thus enclose the community of believers, sealing off their identity as Muslims regardless of their sex. But at the moment when it identifies Muslims (with each other), it also underlines women's irreducible specificity and responsibility for achieving the community's identity. The role, both imaginary and symbolic, of the female wearer of the hijab as purveyor and representative of a defining enclosure may actually recall the underlying logic that Irigaray sees at work in the constitution of another primary enclosure, the "receptacle," whose figures and function in the Western philosophical tradition she attempts to uncover in Speculum.

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What I want to stress here is that wearing the hijab does entail the rejection of former veils, hence a consciousness of the hijab's specificity and modernity. Djamila Saadi quotes a number of arguments voiced by women against the haik: it is impractical (since one has to use the hands or even mouth to keep it in place), and it is démodé [170]: this latter qualification, if it is reliable, implies that the haik is both out of date and out of fashion. By contrast, once again, the hijab would be modern (this is literally what being à la mode means) and possibly even fashionable. Any invocation of fashion suggests a desire for display, which may be at odds with the theological understanding of the hijab. Let us take a closer look at these women's ambiguous perspective on the hijab.

The authors of Algériennes entre islam et islamisme interviewed 100 moutahajibate and 100 nonveiled women, with extreme care and sensitivity to the methodological problems inherent in any sociological inquiry; their comments do not seem to be guided by a precise theoretical agenda. The interviews were done in Algerian Arabic, interspersed with some French, and then translated into French for publication.

When asked to explain what the purpose of the hijab is, why they want to wear it, and how they feel when they wear it, adepts of the hijab give two types of answers, one which can be said to reflect the self-proclaimed religious doxa, and another which opens up a more complex perspective.

On the one hand, women explain that the hijab must hide the aourat of woman, a word the commentators translate variously as "stain" ("souillure"), or "defect," and which refers by metonymy to female "sexual parts" (their "pudenda"). The sexual parts are not necessarily confined to the genitals since a woman's hands or even voice can be considered aourat. They also note that in dialectal Arabic, aoura means "blindness" [59]. One recognizes here the endorsement by women themselves of the castration fantasy. It is as if, by covering up women's "blindness," a blindness which in turn risks blinding the onlooker, the hijab made them a proper (and clean) sight and enabled others to see (them). The hijab does not endow them with sight; rather, they become a mirror for those who look at them. Here the veil is explicitly construed as what isolates men from women's blind(ing) gaze rather than what shelters women from men's piercing gaze. Interestingly, the moutahajibate call the nonveiled women moutabarijate, an expression which in popular language designates a "civilized" (that is, Westernized) woman. Literally, it means "fragmented woman" (barj meaning "fragment" in Arabic), as if only the veil could give unity to an otherwise fragmented female body. But the sociologists translate moutabarijate as "made-up" or adorned woman, thus privileging one of the connotations attached to the image of the "civilized" woman. The opposite of the veiled woman would then be not so much the naked woman as the adorned woman; which means that it is the veil which, in a reversal of the traditional logic of the supplement, lays the woman bare, by rendering the adornment invisible. The denuded woman, the one whom God sees through and who allows men to see God, is the veiled woman. Paradoxes of revelation. One could also say, conversely, that if a nonveiled woman shows her adornments, it makes (her) nudity into an ornament, inasmuch as it is displayed. The Koran does indeed refer to female body parts as ornaments, making them indistinguishable from artifactual ones. The hijab, then, veils the excess of visibility (implied by the "adornment") as much as the lack of visibility (the blind "eye"), in a single fold which shows the reciprocal implication of the logic of lack and that of excess. This is corroborated by what the same women say regarding the necessity to veil the women who are either (too) beautiful or (too) ugly [61].

Another purpose of the hijab invoked by these women, which determines its cut and appearance, is indeed to enforce and signify at the same time a set of differences; the association of these differences is itself interesting: the hijab, they say, must not resemble masculine attire, nor the dress of the ungodly, nor that of the "people of the Book" (mainly, in this instance, the Jews). What shows them to be Muslim is what shows them to be female and conversely so. Is it really a paradox that, as their interviewers remark at this point, in order to secure their difference from men, or, more exactly, to ensure that this difference belongs to the order of the visible, they have to become undifferentiated among themselves thanks to the hijab? Isn't that precisely the double bind of "genderization"?

On the other hand, the two sociologists may be right to underline another paradox, namely that the same women who hide their lack or excess behind the hijab feel not less visible to the world but more visible, an enhanced visibility which translates, according to the authors, into aggressive behaviors, leading to claims of autonomy and efforts to achieve it at odds with their allegedly prescribed role within Islam. They note that, when it comes to issues of personal choice in marriage, of the right to an education, and even more of participation in the work force, in short on questions of social equality, there is not much difference between the discourses of the veiled women and those of the nonveiled ones. The stance of the moutahajibate might then be at odds not only with the traditional cultural order but also with the official ideology of at least part of the Islamist leadership. Moreover, whereas the nonveiled women more often cite financial necessity or service to the community, be it familial or national, as reasons for them to work, the moutahajibate invoke more frequently the need for personal balance, self-promotion, and other motivations of the same kind, which the sociologists sum up as self-assertion goals [81]. There is not much ground to account for this discrepancy in terms of class differences, since the women interviewed all belong to the same milieu. Not knowing how to qualify this phenomenon, the sociologists call it, awkwardly but eloquently, "surrepresentativity" ("sur-représentativité" [17]), a "surrepresentativity" which they trace back to the paradoxical emphasis put on women in Islamist politics. One might be tempted to dismiss these remarks as incidental or to explain them in the context of the particular history of Algeria. Yet other case studies on the topic, for instance in Egypt and Indonesia, conducted in the same time period exhibit strikingly similar features. Let me evoke them briefly in the hope that it might help us wrestle with the following questions: what might be the source of this "surrepresentativity" of the newly veiled women? And what exactly is thus "overrepresented," and to whom?

Yolande Gedeah, Egyptian-born and now living in Québec, makes a number of scattered yet converging remarks concerning the hijab wearers throughout her recent book Femmes voilées, intégrismes démasqués, which is basically a monograph on the history, progress, and contemporary forms of Islamism in Egypt. She notes for instance that the teenagers feel "valorized" by the hijab and derive from it not only a sense of autonomy, particularly in relation to their parents, but also of authority, a qualifier also used by the authors of Algériennes entre Islam et islamisme. Some young women describe themselves as more self-assured and empowered, whereas they used to be shy and self-effacing before they took up the hijab [207].

Suzanne Brenner significantly entitled her recent ethnographic study of Javanese women who wear the "veil" "Reconstructing Self and Society: Javanese Muslim Women and 'the Veil.'" In Indonesian, the Islamic veil is called jilbab, recalling the Arabic jalabib (jelbab in Algerian Arabic), which actually designates the long shapeless dress which goes with the hijab, although not systematically, and which is obviously confused with the latter in this instance. Her account shows little concern for the theological or political perspective of Islamist movements at large; it may be because the women she studied cast the jilbab in a less religious light, or showed less interest in or knowledge of the historical conditions of its redeployment. [...] Brenner's repeated use of the word "self," in expressions such as "self-consciousness," "self-regulation," and "self-mastery" [13-14] to designate the benefits of the hijab in the eyes of their wearers, most of them young middle-class women, point to the reflexive quality, indeed power, of the hijab; it is as if the hijab was indeed a mirroring tool, instrumental in the building and strengthening of the self, a self whose imaginary nature and imaging force a certain psychoanalysis indebted to Hegel's notion of reflexivity has taught us to recognize. Brenner also points out the double edge of the veil, which, while it allows its wearer to "stand out," quite unlike Javanese people "who don't like to stand out," according to one veiled woman [Brenner's translation 11], places her "under the constant scrutiny of others," a scrutiny she both seeks and fears [16]. The enhanced visibility of the veiled woman in Javanese society, where women do not traditionally veil themselves, allows her to stand against the community as she stands out; but the status of her new visibility is complicated by the fact that the hijab also acts, according to Brenner, who does not really follow through on her own suggestion, as a panoptical instrument, which makes the woman feel surveilled, overseen, as it were [16]. The hijab, then, is itself pictured as a prosthetic eye whose gaze cannot be escaped, while it sends back to women an image of their selves, which they strive to appropriate.

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[...]Interestingly, though, the young women seem to associate their newly found power not with their position as symbolic mothers but, perhaps more accurately as far as their hooded motherhood goes, with the power of the father/husband/brother: the Algerian interviewees describe the hijab as satra, a word which qualifies the protecting power of the hijab and which is also used to designate the protective role of fathers, husbands, or possibly brothers; it is as if the hijab-wearers bore the power of the father/husband on their shoulders. Now, the relationship between a certain cover and a certain power has long been established. In fact, the theoretician of women's veiling within Christianity, Saint Paul, made it quite clear in his famous Epistle to the Corinthians [1.11.3-10]. [...]

To go back to the hijab, the question might be: what allows women to appropriate this power (and possibly turn it against its source) rather than simply submit to it? Could it be their newly found ability to exhibit it (to show it off), an exhibition which would then trigger the dynamics of recognition, with its well-known narcissistic benefits?

[...]One can only begin to see oneself if one is seen by another. The women who wear the hijab today know they are seen by Westerners or their so-called "Westernized" representatives in their countries. At the beginning the protective envelope and connective tissue of Islam, the hijab has become a kind of mirror in which these women see themselves reflected as Muslims. It is perhaps the gaze of this third party, thanks to which and against which they define themselves, which allows them to appropriate their reflection. The "selves" they bring into view, however, seem detached from their bodies, if one trusts the experiences recounted by a number of Algerian moutahajibate, and reported by Djamila Saadi: one of them tells the story of how she entered the university's cafeteria, which had a huge mirror, and simply failed to see herself in the mirror [179]. The achievement of self-consciousness and self-control, then, does not preclude experiences of radical alienation. It shows either that this achievement can never be consolidated, or that alienation is indeed implicated in the process of appropriation.

By now, I hope to have also cast some light on the ambiguous nature of the hijab wearers' "empowerment." Far from turning the veil upside-down, it may well make apparent the hidden logic of its originary deployment, as if "modernity" named the phenomenon of its ultimate unraveling. It shows the entanglement of the problematics of power not only with that of specularity, but indeed with that of castration. It is as if the women had to acknowledge their aoura in order to become "authorized." They see themselves as seen by men; and they are authorized by a "masculine" power. To put it differently, it is as if they had to endorse their castration in order to have access to the phallus, if this is what they want. That the hijab enforces and signifies both these possibilities at the same time is no accident. This in turn may caution us against too naive an endorsement of the discourse of "empowerment" so understandably typical of feminist rhetoric. It may alert us as to the nature and extent of the "autonomy" achieved within these parameters, especially when it is implicated in a discourse and politics of identitarian consolidation.

[...]Can one escape the powerful spell of phallocentric specularity? Can Muslim women escape a specular economy of gender relations when the political and cultural relationship between Islam and the West is also specular?

And, finally, can and does Irigaray shake off the veils?

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The Newly Veiled Woman: Irigaray, Specularity, and the Islamic Veil

as Trespasser has pointed out to me, the journal, Diacritic is available through the Muse Project via the proxy server if you're at UofT...not sure about other universities.

i'll have to comment on it after my return from پرستان at the end of the week

[ July 25, 2002: Message edited by: skadie ]

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but, as i've said before, there's nothing inherently problematic about the hijaab as long as women are given the choice--by their religion, their family, their community, and their country--to wear it, or not to wear it.

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firstly, i would suggest that the phrase "as long as women are given the choice" betrays the power asymmetry that muslim (and all other) women's choices (be they religious, political, or quotidian choices) are made in the context of. masculinist cultural traditions (religious systems included) inform women's understandings of their place in the world; to say that it is women's "choice" to wear or not to wear the hijaab is a simplification. i mean to say that, as previous posts have argued as well, codified law is only one form of restriction on women's lives. we should question, as the article posted above attempts, the symbolic weight of the hijaab. we should, i think, also keep in view the fact that it is an artefact of a patriarchal cultural order, and that its resignification and appropriation by feminist muslims is, if possible, a difficult and delicate process.

[ July 27, 2002: Message edited by: anna_c ]

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firstly, i would suggest that the phrase "as long as women are given the choice" betrays the power asymmetry that muslim (and all other) women's choices (be they religious, political, or quotidian choices) are made in the context of.

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yes, you're absolutely right; i should have said, "as long as women have the choice." they don't need to be given it.

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masculinist cultural traditions (religious systems included) inform women's understandings of their place in the world; to say that it is women's "choice" to wear or not to wear the hijaab is a simplification.

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right, but as you've indicated, this is not a specifically islamic thing. it's a function of global patriarchy, and an ancient one, i believe. it may be problematic to say that even the staunchest feminist in Toronto has a "choice" in terms of what she wears; this is the nature, it seems, of the specularity that Berger writes of--nor is this specularity an exclusively patriarchal function (unless patriarchy is conceived of as the ultimate radix malorum, and the root of the othering dynamic)...i'll talk a bit about my own experiences with specularity later.

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i mean to say that, as previous posts have argued as well, codified law is only one form of restriction on women's lives. we should question, as the article posted above attempts, the symbolic weight of the hijaab. we should, i think, also keep in view the fact that it is an artefact of a patriarchal cultural order, and that its resignification and appropriation by feminist muslims is, if possible, a difficult and delicate process.

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i believe that this process is already under way, although it remains flawed as long as Muslim feminists wearing the hijaab continue to insist that it is a Qur'anic or an Islamic legal institution, which it is not--or, to be more faithful to the poly-Islamic thesis, i should say, "it need not be." as for it being the artefact of a patriarchal cultural disorder, this is undeniable, and it's something that Muslim feminists have not always done an excellent job of grappling with (again, though, i would say that any piece of clothing that a woman wears, regardless of her geographical location, race, religion, or personal ideology, is charged with that disorder). however, it is true that this is precisely what makes its subversion, which is going on in at least a seminal form, so deadly to patriarchy, just as the South Asian subversion of the language that the colonialists taught them proved deadly to the Raj. in both cases, of course, the end result must be resignificatory and pluralist; by the latter i mean that a mandatory feminist hijaab is no more of a victory than a South Asian English with a linguistic superiority complex...don't even get me started on this. i agree with you; resignification is always a delicate and difficult process, but i also believe that it an immensely rewarding one.

the issue that i wanted to discuss on this thread, though, was whether or not the Turkish model, or the Iranian Shah's, is the way to go. i was quite excited when reading the first bit of Berger's essay, in which she explains Irigiray's reading of Freud and Lacan, but i remember that i wasn't quite as impressed with its application. her argument is very interesting, and if i didn't have any knowledge of Arabic, i'd be thrilled with it, but i can't help but notice that she doesn't do a particularly good job of engaging the Qur'an, which is a bit disappointing

i can't help going off on a tangent here...Fatima Mernissi has a great anecdote in The Veil and the Male Elite (Le Harem Politique) in which she describes Hazrat Sukayna, the great grand-daughter of the Prophet, whose father, Husayn, was killed at Karbala by the Ummayad forces (Husayn's martyrdom has made him the equivalent of Jesus Christ for Shi'is). Sukayna attacked the Ummayad caliphate whenever she had the chance, and took one of her husbands to court to secure for herself the right to nushuuz (sexual rebellion).

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You can imagine my surprise when I was accused of lying at a conference in Penang, Malaysia in 1984, where I presented Sukayna as a type of traditional Muslim woman for us to think about. My accuser, a Pakistani, editor of an Islamic journal in London, interrupted me, shouting to the audience: "Sukayna died at the age of six!" Trying to snatch the microphone away from me in a vindictive rage, he kept repeating: "She died at Karbala with her father! She died at Karbala!" Then smugly assuming the role of qadi, he demanded that I name the sources where I found my version of Sukayna's history. I furnished him with a list on the spot--in Arabic obviously. He looked at it in disdain and told me it was very scanty. In fact, it contained the names of Ibn Qutayba, Ibn `Abd Rabbih, Ibn `Asakir, al-Zamakhshari, Ibn Sa`d, Ibn al-Ma`ad, al-Isbahani, al-Dhahabi, al-Safadi, al-Washaa, al-Bukhari--in short, the great names of Muslim historiography. I learned later that this important editor, whose journal claims to contribute to a better understanding of the Muslim world, neither speaks nor reads Arabic.

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anyhow, not knowing Arabic isn't a crime, but it necessitates a great deal of tact, as Mernissi's anecdote demonstrates. she would have done a lot better if she'd allowed an Arabic-speaker to proofread it. the alarm bells went off for me when i read that, "In Indonesian, the Islamic veil is called jilbab, recalling the Arabic jalabib (jelbab in Algerian Arabic)...." according to Berger, the Indonesian jilbaab equals the Arabic jalaabiib equals the Algerian Arabic jelbaab. in fact, the standard Arabic word is the same as the Indonesian: jilbaab--jalaabiib is merely the Arabic plural. as for the "Algerian" jelbaab, this is, again, the same word as jilbaab, just transliterated differently. Berger's misunderstanding of the relationship with jilbaab and jalaabiib stems from her reading of the Qur'an: "in sura 33, the face veil is called a jalabib." the word jalaabiib is used in this verse because jilbaab is in the plural; a single article of this type of clothing cannot be referred to as jalaabiib.

what's even more perplexing to me is the conclusion of the jilbaab/jalaabiib/jelbaab sentence: "In Indonesian, the Islamic veil is called jilbab ... which actually designates the long shapeless dress which goes along with the hijab, although not systematically, and which is obviously confused with the latter in this instance." this is an astute and correct remark, but it contradicts the other sentence regarding jalaabiib that i've already quoted: "in sura 33, the face veil is called a jalabib." or--and the thought just occured to me--perhaps her error in regarding jilbaab and jalaabiib as two separate things has led to her erroneous bifurcation of the jilbaab as a long dress not necessarily connected with the veil, and the so-called jalaabiib as a face veil.

in any case, her statement regarding the sura has it backwards: the face veil is not called a jalaabiib, but jalaabiib have been called face veils. what i mean is that Berger is inadvertently falling into the trap set by the agents of the "patriarchal cultural disorder" that we've been talking about. to say that the English "face veil" is called al-jilbaab in Arabic imposes this particular English translation of the Qur'an onto the original Arabic, erasing previous definitions of "jilbaab." Berger has pointed out herself that the jilbaab is "the long shapeless dress which goes along with the hijab, although not systematically." my Arabic-English dictionary (Wehr) says:

jilbaab pl. jalaabiib: garment, dress, gown; woman's dress

according to Steingass' Persian dictionary, it is a woman's shift or pelisse, a long veil, or a decrepit old man (i'm not going to read too much into that). Fatima Mernissi informs us that "According to the Lisan al-`Arab dictionary, jilbab is a rather vague concept. It can designate numerous pieces of clothing, ranging from a simple chemise to a cloak." questioning the meaning that patriarchy has hoisted onto the word jilbaab targets the very centre of the ideology, as the jilbab verse is by far the most unambiguous one on veiling. it's too bad that Berger muddles this a bit, and Mernissi misses her opportunity, apparently because she wants to engage with the historical context and can't find her way out of linear history--she does a damn good job of exposing the historical context of the revelation (the sabab al-nuzuul), but even so she doesn't seem to do a coherent critique of it (and i think she could have done it very, very well)...which made her book seem like something of a defeat. granted, i read it a while back.

Berger does this a couple of other times, but she also makes some deeply insightful observations when she presents less Islamist understandings of the Qur'an; such as the etymology of the word "hijaab" in the context of the verse regarding the Prophet's wives. the interpretation that she borrows from the Iranian exiles (who obviously aren't on the same wavelength as the Islamic Salvation Front quoted by Berger earlier on). her observation that the hijaab "turns women into the site of the border [of difference], without which Islam would not appear as such." Muslim males do indeed seem to leave this function almost entirely up to the females, both religiously and culturally. observe a Western Pakistani couple of my parents' generation at a formal event--the woman will be wearing shalwaar qamiiz, with or without the hijaab, or a saari or lehnga, perhaps, and the man will be in a business suit. Berger reveals, in part, why this is true.

but the most exciting thing in this essay for me was the word "specularity". it's very likely, perhaps inevitable, that i'm misinterpreting Berger's use of the term in order to apply it to my own experience. but it's something of a relief to find a word for something that's been troubling me for so long. it's impossible for me, as a male, to have direct experience of the kind of specularity that Berger focuses on, but, as the essay hints, specularity applies to ethnicity as well...but this post is long enough, and what i have to say beyond this doesn't relate specifically to feminism. maybe i'll post it in another section.

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I'm starting my own religion where all men have to wear blind-folds all the time. (I know this doesn't add much to your interesting discussion, but I just had to add my two-cents worth.)
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Mandos

skadie: I think your post does add something to the discussion. Can you perhaps point out some conditions under which men would choose to join such a religion? You may have posted in jest, but I think the question of what religious symbols appear where is related to it.

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Mandos, I guess the religious symbol of covering a woman's body is a reaction to the considerably unreligious symbol of a male erection. Men blame women for their own sexual reactions. These reactions are/were considered sinful so in order to protect their male souls women are/were made to cover up any sexually attractive part of themselves. I am sure it's obvious that I don't know anything about the hijab, but speak about good old Victorian attitudes. I sort of relate the two.

So, I suppose if women's sexual reactions were as - er - noticable as a man's, the man may have been the one to cover up.

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centuries of religious influence

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I don't think they are likely influenced by centuries of religious tradition passed down through ancestors.

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To go back to the hijab, the question might be: what allows women to appropriate this power (and possibly turn it against its source) rather than simply submit to it? Could it be their newly found ability to exhibit it (to show it off), an exhibition which would then trigger the dynamics of recognition, with its well-known narcissistic benefits?

[...]One can only begin to see oneself if one is seen by another. The women who wear the hijab today know they are seen by Westerners or their so-called "Westernized" representatives in their countries. At the beginning the protective envelope and connective tissue of Islam, the hijab has become a kind of mirror in which these women see themselves reflected as Muslims. It is perhaps the gaze of this third party, thanks to which and against which they define themselves, which allows them to appropriate their reflection.

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based on the bbc article, mohamad, it's not clear to me that zeliha, the woman you quote, is choosing to veil on feminist principles, per se. that is, while we might consider her right to veil/not to veil to be a feminist issue (in that the public presence and activities of individual women should not be contingent on how they dress), her decision to wear the hijaab (informed by a desire to adhere to an 'orthodox' faith, from what little we can surmise from the article) is not a feminist one, as such. moreover, the battle over the veil seems to be one waged between state and islam, with women's bodies being simultaneously the artillery and the contested ground. i suggest that the statement,

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Well, she had a point before 11 September. But I don't think that she has as strong a point as before

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serves to confirm this suspicion.

thank you for returning to this topic, mohamad! i am interested in hearing more of your thoughts.

[ August 17, 2002: Message edited by: anna_c ]

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based on the bbc article, mohamad, it's not clear to me that zeliha, the woman you quote, is choosing to veil on feminist principles, per se. that is, while we might consider her right to veil/not to veil to be a feminist issue (in that the public presence and activities of individual women should not be contingent on how they dress), her decision to wear the hijaab (informed by a desire to adhere to an 'orthodox' faith, from what little we can surmise from the article) is not a feminist one, as such.

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i'm not entirely sure about that. the idea seems to be that there is a single authentic form of feminism that necessarily excludes Islam, or, rather, "Islamism." i personally believe that feminism comes in many forms...i like the religiously tolerant brand of feminism, but years of reading about women in Islamic countries has convinced me that there is also such a thing as Islamist feminism, which i like much less, for reasons which should be obvious (but i'll talk about them anyhow). it's a question of semantics, perhaps, but if feminism is a movement that aims at sexual equality, then it is quite clear to me that many Muslim women have aimed for this and made some sort of progress towards it within an Islamist context, not, for example, in Afghanistan under the ultra-misogynist Taalebaan, but perhaps in Iran after the revolution and the seizure of power by the fuquhaa.

i don't disagree entirely with their methodology: the thesis is that the Qur'aan is a feminist text, more so than the Bible, and that its revelation brought about substantial egalitarian victories for women in the time of the Prophet. first of all, i reject their idea that the Qur'aan is any more or any less feminist than the Bible or any other religious text--this is a baldly Islamist notion--because i don't believe that any text, especially scripture, contains any single meaning. that literalism is a problem at the root of much Islamic theology, and also of much secular criticism of Islam...actually, i don't think that the term "literalism" suffices; perhaps it's better to call it a sort of "monosemanticism"(?) that inevitably authenticates itself by posing as literalism--i.e., one Muslim might uncompromisingly insist that in the Qur'aan men are superior to women, while another might insist that women are superior to men in the Qur'aan, and they could each authenticate their positions by claiming that these are literal interpretations of the Qur'aan! (that's an extremely unlikely example, but see the Sunni/Shi'a debate.)

for the same reason, i cannot simply say that the Qur'aan is a pro-feminist text--i would say that the Qur'aan can be a pro-feminist text if we effect that resignification, as many Muslim feminists are beginning to do. as for Muslim women being better off than their pre-Islamic ancestors, the simplistic historicisation of faith (another big problem for Islamists and their critics alike) makes me cringe; i believe that it limits faith needlessly by mooring it to historical constructions. but, alright, to come back down to earth and to operate within that historicist discourse, maybe i can say that the earliest Islams did improve the lives of many women, and i'm sure they messed some things up for women as well.

the biggest problem, of course, is that this sort of "feminism" is insidiously complicit with religious exclusivism and patriarchy, as numerous examples in Iran, Egypt, and Pakistan demonstrate. i remember an essay on Chaucer's "Prioress' Tale" (which is overtly anti-semitic) which argued that the Prioress employed a "disavowal of lack"--the only way that she felt able to have a voice as a woman, to enter the "we" of the largely male company of pilgrims, was to turn somebody else, i.e. the Jews, into an other, and even though this allowed her to have a voice, of course it was self-defeating and ultimately complicit with patriarchy. i think that a similar thing is going on with Islamist feminists.

so to get back to Zeliha, it's possible that her desire to adhere to an "orthodox" (thanks for the quotation marks!) faith is consistent with the kind of feminism that i'm talking about; but of course we can't determine that until we hear her voice in full, and as you've noted, the article doesn't help us much in that regard. i think you've hit the nail on the head when you say:

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the battle over the veil seems to be one waged between state and islam, with women's bodies being simultaneously the artillery and the contested ground.

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this is the very thing; the politically self-serving nature of laws and dogmas regarding clothing is the disease at the centre of the laws imposing the hijaab in Iran, and the ones penalising veiling in Turkey. ideally, i want to live in a society in which you could go out nude one day and fully covered the next without anybody telling you to cover up or take it off. but then my idealism is at the root of my pessimism.

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thank you for returning to this topic, mohamad! i am interested in hearing more of your thoughts.

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The hijab debate becomes irrelevant when I read this

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we started a thread on this in the News section a long time ago, and Babblers have long been condemning it and should continue to do so. the rise of Islamism in Nigeria is extremely alarming. i'm not sure whether the thread is in the archive or not, but if it is, you can dig it up and vent.

btw, Ian, it's intriguing that despite your characterisation of yourself as an "evolving male" interested in feminism and Wiccan philosophy, every recent post of yours besides this one has been on the subject of the Middle East. perhaps you're confusing yourself with Starhawk.

[ August 20, 2002: Message edited by: Mohamad Khan ]

For both race and sex/gender (I agree with people who argue this) the field of vision is of ultimate importance. It is the 'site' where they're first delivered, produced. Even when scientific discourse takes over both, or maybe especially after it takes it over.

You just reminded me, there were indeed cases when women saught refuge from demands of femininity of a particular epoch in religious seclusion - especially demands concerning procreation. If anybody knows more about Sor Juana, for instance, do tell.

I have a book sitting on on one of my shelves that I wanted to read for a long time, A Social History of the Cloister: Daily Life in the Teaching Monasteries of the Old Regime by Elizabeth Rapley (McGill-Queens) and I wonder if there's anything in it on this topic.

But any random history of Catholic orders in the Middle Ages (I still haven't heard of any resources on Orthodox Christian female monasteries in the East) shows that in some periods under some lucky constellations (decentralized church, slow flow of information?) some female orders have been living autonomously and even breaching church regulations by preaching from the pulpits and ordaining their peers. (This comes to me from an old Walter Ullman book, if memory serves.)

But this is most likely off topic.

[ August 20, 2002: Message edited by: Trespasser ]

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the religious symbol of covering a woman's body is a reaction to the considerably unreligious symbol of a male erection

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The hijab debate becomes irrelevant when I read this

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