veiled4allah: the politics of the veil

One of the things that's the most frustrating to me as a Muslim woman who chooses to veil is the monolithic image many people in the West have of veiling, assuming that it must be a bad thing and that it must be something a woman is forced by a man to do rather than being something she chooses.

Many feminists deplore the way that women's sexuality is used to sell things and the societal expectations that women have to be thin and beautiful to succeed. Yet when a woman chooses not to display her sexuality or to take part in the beauty game, somehow this is seen as bizarre.

Women's studies professor Amira Jarmakani has been looking into the issue.

Some highlights:

As part of her research, Jarmakani collected images of Arab womanhood in the United States, which fell into three basic categories: the veil, the harem and the belly dancer.

Talk about a stereotypical and one-dimensional portrayal!

Although American readings of such images assume the veil as an unwanted restriction on the woman, this is not necessarily the case. "The practice seems to be about the forced enclosure and restriction of women, rather than about sacred privacy and sanctity," Jarmakani said. "Furthermore, the interpretation of the veil as an absolute boundary for women and as a barrier for the colonial or imperial gaze ignores its function in many Muslim societies as a garment that enables, rather than restricts women from movement between and among a variety of public institutions and contexts."

Jarmakani criticized the "simplistic equation of being uncovered, unveiled or revealed with being modern or emancipated," which demands that Arab women expose themselves to Western eyes.

If you want to really learn a lot about this issue, I recommend Veil: Modesty, Privacy, and Resistance, which is one of the best books I've read on the subject. I reviewed it briefly earlier focusing on a small aspect of the book, which is the veiling of men.

The veil also serves an important purpose in the context of militarism by "demonstrat[ing] the supposed inferiority of the Arab male's excessive patriarchy, and function[ing] as justification for U.S. military action." "During both the 1991 Gulf War and the 2001 military action against Afghanistan, mainstream U.S. feminist organizations ... demonstrated seemingly unknowing collusion with the hegemonic project of U.S. imperialism," Jarmakani said. "The National Organization for Women acted in cooperation with the military ... by demanding that Arab women in the region align themselves against their 'overly oppressive' male relatives in the midst of a crushingly aggressive U.S. offensive. Similarly, the Feminist Majority rallied around the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan ... in the interest of advancing its long-waged cause of liberating Afghan women from the brutal oppression of the Taliban."

Jarmakani suggested an alternate form of action that such organizations could have taken.

"In formulating a feminist antiwar agenda, NOW might have more effectively attacked the U.S. military for posing as liberators of Arab women and for their treatment of U.S. military women," Jarmakani said. "Likewise, the Feminist Majority might have more effectively worked toward the liberation of women in Afghanistan by developing a critical consciousness about the U.S. goal in over 25 years of devastating conflicts throughout the region which utilized Afghanistan as a literal battleground for its own power struggles."

Here we get to the most radical part of the critique, which is Jarmakani's real point. The views that we have about Islam and about Muslim countries because of the issue of veiling may lead us to go along with policies that we would not otherwise support.

And in general, when we treat Muslims as Other and don't make any attempt to understand how they view the world or to look at whether there may be rational reasons for Muslim practices and customs, then we miss an opportunity to work for peace and greater understanding.

I really wish that more people would really take the time to think about these issues.