Renewal
Well now let’s see. Making women wear bags over their heads is a foible of Islam’s, and Islam=Muslims, and Muslims are mostly non-white, so making women wear bags over their heads must be somehow egalitarian and about justice and postcolonial and generally right on. Korrekt? You bet. Especially if it’s Leila Ahmed of the Harvard Divinity School – oh what a blissful combination! Leila! Ahmed! Harvard! Divinity School! – who has written a book about the subject.
By the 1970s, disillusioned students and professionals were turning to an activist Islam – Islamism – that promised social, moral and political renewal. Observing strict dress became one means of displaying egalitarian principles and conveying the wearer’s strength and authority. From a symbol of disempowerment, the veil now, for some, became a mark of liberation.
Well, Islamism may have “promised” social, moral and political renewal, but it sure as hell didn’t deliver it. What would that renewal look like? Saudi Arabia? Afghanistan under the Taliban? Somalia? That’s an interesting notion of renewal. I think Rachel Aspden might have paused to mention that.
And as for the claim that wearing a burqa or niqab or abaya or hijab is one means of displaying egalitarian principles and conveying the wearer’s strength and authority, I call bullshit. Total, brazen, shameless bullshit.
They say covering is, among other things, a reaction against western sexism. Well you know what, it’s not the right reaction. Covering yourself does not end sexism, because women are not the problem here. Sexist people are. It’s like black people trying to use white makeup as a reaction against racism. What the hell?
The West patriarchal tradition uses women as sex objects, guilty of the original sin, the ones giving temptation and hellish desires to the otherwise virtuous men. Therefore, the female figure must be covered. What? In my opinion, the problem is not the female figure, but the people who think like that. For instance, I live in a seaside town and almost all women are topless there at the beach. Nobody gives a fuck. After all men are topless, why wouldn’t women if they feel like it? Individual liberty is respected. That’s is the right attitude, I think.
As long as people continue to give arab women shit for not wanting to cover themselves, I don’t buy any of this ‘liberation’ stuff.
I’ve heard that kind of reasoning before. The claim is that muslims respect their women, and the “bags over their heads” is a form of respect, of protecting them. So, okay, I tentatively accepted that as a possibility.
But then I hear that Saudi women are not allowed to drive. I suppose that is respecting them by protecting them from the dangerous road hazards. And then I hear of muslim women being stoned to death.
The “respect for women” becomes increasingly implausible. It is probably little more than self-deception.
Oh, but you aren’t thinking it through. The stoning execution is designed to protect the modesty of women. That is why women are tied up and then wrapped in a burial shroud before being tightly packed with rocks up to their shoulders in hole. You see, men are only buried to their waist, and if they somehow manage to wriggle free their death sentence is commuted, but women, to protect their modesty, are buried to their shoulders, making it impossible for any woman to wriggle free of her sentence of death. All to protect women
/disgusted snark
http://boingboing.net/2010/11/24/what-does-stoning-a.html
Absolutely right.
Well, Islamic society is the perfect society. How could it not be about all these good things? Of course it’s bullshit of the most shameless sort. And this comes from Harvard?!!!! What is the matter with people? Have they eaten of the insane root? Well, of course they have. Its name is religion. Religion is a cloak for all sorts of evils, but when it is proclaimed with this degree of confidence, and good is called evil, then perhaps we can understand a bit more fully why Hitchens was right to speak of religion as poisoning everything. It just does. It’s a malign form of self-deception.
Presumably the men who force women to wear the veil are outraged by their failure to display egalitarian principles…
Well, covering is used as a way for professional women to assert that they are Not Western, part of which involves rejecting materialism and what they see as an irresponsible degree of freedom. It isn’t all submission. But it’s fair to remind these women that their choice of expression abets real oppression. Aspden seems to think that it’s all just fine.
If by ‘renewal,’ they mean ‘becoming further entrenched in dysfunctional, negative, hateful and barbaric religious-values and superstitions” they’ve succeeded.
I thought it was interesting that the author of the article hit the nail on the head:
‘The veil is still the subject of an ideological tug of war – as Ahmed puts it, “a sign of irresolvable tension and confrontation between Islam and the west” – and, she could add, within Islam itself.’
That is, the reviewer is aware that the hijab is much more of an intra-Islam struggle than an Islam-West struggle. Most Western women are entirely unaffected by Islamic attitudes and Muslim women that I’ve met in the West wear either standard-to-modest Western garb or cover their hair but not their faces.
Is Leila Ahmed one of those historians whose career is based on finding that every social problem in the world is due to Western perfidy? Has anyone here read any of her work?
Ah, but remember how, before the U.S. Civil War, free blacks in the North began to voluntarily wear chains and shackles and adopted a shuffling gate and downward gaze, as marks of liberation and means of displaying egalitarian principles and conveying the wearer’s strength and authority.
Oh, wait. No. I guess they didn’t.
I don’t know how we’re supposed to know who is wearing restrictive clothing because they choose it, or because they are forced with death threats. If we can’t tell, how do we help the ones who want out? And they DO need help, because the victims are part of a culture designed to make sure that women cannot simply walk away. Their children are hostages, they have no money or property, no jobs or educations. How do we pick out those women from the privileged few who chose traditional Muslim garb as a fashion or political statement? And what do we say about those women who have that privilege, and reinforce the problem?
I’m against all the veil/burqa bans. I worry that women whose families are fundamentalist will not let the women leave the house without the “garb” and those women will be cut off from all outside contact. It seems to me that banning burqas is almost as sexist as requiring them, in that it shuffles women and their behavior around like they are political chess pieces and not actual human beings. The solution to Muslims requiring women to behave a certain way is not for Western governments to create an “equal but opposite force” in the other direction.
As other folks have noted, the real answer is to go after the sexist cretins, and not their victims. Cripes, I’m about to go off the deep end into a serious rant, this issue upsets me so much.
As someone who works in the areas of symbology and symbolic communication, I do see how a symbol can come to be used and viewed in a counter-intuitive way. Consider the crucifix: a horrifying image of torture, pain and death that has come to be seen as a symbol of liberation, freedom and empowerment for millions. Or the nun’s habit – in some senses similar to certain Islamic forms of dress, it is often seen as liberating by nuns themselves, rather than as oppressive. People have an amazing capacity to view symbols in very different ways depending on the social context in which they are imbues with meaning and the narratives they weave around them.
I hope this article doesn’t put you off Leila Ahmed: I find ‘Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate’ a very good book, which suggests that the rise and spread of Islam was *not a good thing* for many women. She points out, for instance, that many women contemporary with Mohammad criticised and resisted the new religion, and even held parties to celebrate his death. A lot of both extreme and progressive Muslims insist that life before Islam was a kind of Hobbesian nightmare, especially for women, so admitting that there were at least some women who lost power and status through the rise of Islam is an important step.
Thanks Jo; I’ll keep that in mind. I’ve been meaning to read her for years (and haven’t gotten around to it yet)…
Also, jumping off a cliff is a great way of feeling a cooling breeze on a hot day.
I’m with improbable Joe on this – just reading this starts the blood boiling. I often have to bite my tongue when I go to the supermarket and see some guy with his wife (read chattel) wrapped in a burqua (read prison) and walking the obligatory two paces behind…………..aaagggghhhhhh!!!!!!