The West And The Veil: Think Again
Dear Nisaa Readers: This piece was first published at Eteraz.org; Shazia thought it might interest all of you, and kindly asked me to cross-post it here.—GWW
Sometimes a picture is not worth a thousand words; sometimes a thousand words are necessary to explain a picture. This one, which ran in the January 28 edition of the New York Times, needs at least that many, and what I will say will merely scratch the surface.
I was alerted to this picture by my wonderful mother, who, like many non-Muslim friends and family who have spent any length of time with me in the Middle East, now delights in opening up a magazine or newspaper and being able to read between the lines of reportage dealing with the Muslim world. I get a constant trickle of links to articles or pictures like this one, from colleagues and friends turned citizen journalists, with surprisingly astute commentary on aspects of a certain situation or idea that the writer of the article has missed. It gives me a boost of optimism; if ordinary people are this excited to understand what previously confused or frightened them, there’s still hope left. A lot of hope.
What my mother understood, looking at this picture, was the following: while a girl in a headscarf looking at a display of lingerie is meant to appear as a contradiction (the accompanying article suggests that the increase in veiling in Egypt is a social and religiously cosmetic phenomenon), it isn’t. Why? Because the hijab is not interchangeable with a nun’s habit. It is not a western symbol, and cannot and must not be interpreted through a western social lens.
Books and pictures tell us as much about the people who read or look at them as they do about the intent of the author or the reality of the situation he or she describes. When non-Muslims look at this picture and cry “Contradiction! See, she’s only pretending to be pious” I look and them and see a worldview irretrievably tangled in the idea that religion and sexuality are incompatible. They simply don’t have the tools to understand that the hijab is, for Muslim women, a symbol that separates public and private life; that at home a veiled woman takes her headscarf off, and has no qualms donning a little lingerie with her husband. Hijab is not a rejection of sexuality. Of the three major monotheistic traditons, Islam places by far the fewest restrictions on the intimate life of a married couple; making love incurrs God’s blessing regardless of whether or not the intent is to conceive children. Many Islamic scholars, including Al Ghazali, have pointed out that no children were conceived in the Garden of Eden; so during the brief time when humankind was in a state of perfect innocence, the purpose of sex was simply pleasure. Between a married couple, pleasure is perfectly licit. If you are a man and you see a woman in a headscarf, it doesn’t mean that she rejects sex. It means she rejects sex with you.
This photo was taken in downtown Cairo, on a street that runs between Tahrir Square and Talaat Harb Square. That particular street is lined with women’s clothing stores that display both all-encompassing robes and lingerie in the same window. They are not a contradiction. They are arranged that way on purpose. Non-Muslims routinely fail to realize that there is a private world of Islam that they do not see, and will in all likelihood never see, because for most modern Muslims ‘private’ still means private. But if I were walking down Shera’ Talaat Harb with a camera and came across this scene, I would like to think that rather than interpreting it according to my own agenda, I would keep an open mind, and wonder whether—just perhaps—this was a clue that there were things I still had to learn.
