Saturday, Jul 5, 2008
The burqa is a powerful symbol misused by Islamists and Western feminists alike.
Feb 1, 2002 | When Westerners talk about misogyny and the fate of women in Islamist countries, they fall at once for the decoy, the surface indicator by which all fundamentalist regimes are measured and judged. It's the same decoy that Islamists use again and again, in every country they dominate, to draw their own countrymen's attention away from the real social, economic and political problems at hand -- problems they came to power promising to solve, but rarely do.
That decoy is, of course, the veil, the abaya, the burqa, the chador, the jalabiyya, and every other possible version, extent or form of hijab that women are expected, and often forced, to wear throughout the Middle East and in some parts of Africa.
The veil is the common currency of subjection, or so the West considers it, and it is the yardstick of Muslim purity, or so the fundamentalists have conceived it. It is a pawn in the propaganda war between the major players in Samuel Huntington's clash of civilizations, or what Ian Buruma has dubbed the Occidentalists (those who demonize the West) and the Orientalists (those who demonize the East).
Both sides see the veil as the centerpiece of their causes, but both are wrong. The Islamists are wrong because the veil isn't Islamic, and the West is wrong because the veil isn't necessarily repressive.
The veil is a symbol manipulated both by those who would willfully misread the Quran to suit their political ends, and by neo-crusaders in the feminist free world who misunderstand its original, and some would say true, meaning and purpose. The Western feminist obsession with the burqa as symbol of oppression is everywhere. Take the Feminist Majority Foundation, the new publisher of Ms. Magazine, for example. On its Web site, it offers, I kid you not, a "Burqua Swatch," which one can purchase as a "symbol of remembrance of Afghan women" for the low, low price of $5. "This swatch of mesh represents the obstructed view of the world for an entire nation of women who were once free," according to the foundation's ad copy. Gift packs of 10 and 20 are also available.
The veil has been an instant, though superficial, indication of reform in either direction, toward or away from the West. When Kemal Ataturk came to power in Turkey in the 1920s, for example, he banned the veil in order to banish what he saw as Mideastern backwardness, and to ally himself culturally and politically with the admired West. Turkey remains the one ferociously and consistently secular government in the Islamic world.
Likewise, during the war in Afghanistan, shedding the veil became a kind of ceremony of freedom for the country's harshly sequestered second sex. The Western press reported that the first thing many Afghan women did after being liberated from Taliban rule was to tear off their burqas, walk outside and feel the sunshine on their faces for the first time in years.
Elsewhere, the veil has been used to quite different effect. During the lead up to the 1979 revolution in Iran, for instance, female supporters of the Ayatollah Khomeini donned the veil voluntarily as a form of protest against the reigning shah. Doing so was considered a pledge of support for the harsh religious reforms Khomeini espoused as a means of purifying the country of the debauched Western influences he blamed for the corruption and mismanagement of the shah's regime.
So what should we make of this symbolically loaded change of clothes? It has been said more than a few times lately that Islamist dress codes are really all a sham, and that they have nothing to do with the Quran.
As Jan Goodwin has written in "Price of Honor," her extensive treatment of women in the Islamic world: "The severe restrictions placed on women by the Islamist movement, such as confinement or complete veiling, have no basis in the Koran or the teachings of the Prophet ... veiling the face is an innovation that has no foundation whatsoever in Islam."
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