Abstract
Muslim women, and particularly Middle Eastern and North African women, for the past two centuries have been one of the most enduring subjects of discussion in the Western media. I can also assert without hesitation that the issue of the veil and the oppression of Muslim women has been the most frequent topic of conversation and discussion I have been engaged in, often reluctantly, during some twenty years of my life in the Western world (mostly in the UK and Canada). Whenever I meet a person of white/European descent, I regularly find that as soon as he or she ascertains that I am Muslim/Middle Eastern/Iranian, the veil very quickly emerges as the prominent topic of conversation. This scenario occurs everywhere: in trains, at the grocery store, at the launderette, on the university campus, at parties. The range of knowledge of these eager conversants varies: some honestly confess total ignorance of Islam and Islamic culture or Middle Eastern societies; others base their claims and opinions on their experiences in colonial armies in the Middle East, or on their travels through the Middle East to India during the 1960s; still others cite as reference films or novels. What I find remarkable is that, despite their admitted ignorance on the subject, almost all people I have met are, with considerable confidence, adamant that women have a particularly tough time in Muslim cultures. Occasionally Western non-Muslim women will tell me they are thankful that they were not born in a Muslim culture.
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Notes
See M. Lazreg, “Feminism and Difference: The Perils of Writing as a Woman on Women in Algeria,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 1 (1988): 81–107.
Judy Mabro, Veiled Half-Truths: Western Travellers’ Perceptions of Middle Eastern Women (London: I. B. Tauris, 1991);
Rana Kabbani, Europe’s Myths of the Orient (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986);
Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
Sherene Razack, “What Is to Be Gained by Looking White People in the Eye? Culture, Race, and Gender in Cases of Sexual Violence,” Signs 19, no. 4 (1994): 894–923.
Guity Nashat, “Women in the Ancient Middle East,” in Restoring Women to History (Bloomington, IN: Organization of American History, 1988);
Nikki R. Keddie and Lois Beck, Women in the Muslim World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978).
Nikki R. Keddie and Beth Baron, Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 3.
Fatima Mernissi, The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1991). Jamal A. Bedawi, The Muslim Woman’s Dress According to the Qur’an and the Sunnah (London: Ta-Ha Publishers, n.d.).
John Esposito, Islam: The Straight Path (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). Of course, this is not to say that there have not been other historical attempts to control women’s dress and clothing, rather that these attempts have not been in the name of Islam.
See, for example, Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
Germaine Tillon, The Republic of Cousin: Women’s Oppression in Mediterranean Society (London: Al Saqi Books, 1983). The French edition was published in 1966.
The situation of Nambudiri Brahmin women, through whom the family property passes from one generation to the next and who are carefully secluded, provides a good example. See the discussion in Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 140–158.
Soha Abdel Kader, Egyptian Women in Changing Society 1899–1987 (Boulder, CO: Lynn Reinner Publishers, 1988);
Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (London: Zed Press, 1986);
Homa Hoodfar, “A Background to the Feminist Movement in Egypt,” Bulletin of Simone de Beauvoir Institute 9, no. 2 (1989): 18–23.
For more discussion see Judith E. Tucker, Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Unni Wikan, Behind the Veil in Arabia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
Homa Hoodfar, “Return to the Veil: Personal Strategy and Public Participation in Egypt,” in Working Women: International Perspectives on Labour and Gender Ideology, ed. Nanneke Redclift and M. Thea Sinclair (London: Routledge, 1991);
Leila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments: Honour and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
Elizabeth Warnock Fernea, Guests of the Sheikh (New York: Doubleday 1965).
See Andrea Rugh, Reveal and Conceal: Dress in Contemporary Egypt (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986).
Arlene Elowe MacLeod, Accommodating Protest: Working Women and the New Veiling in Cairo (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).
C. M. Pastner, “Englishmen in Arabia: Encounters with Middle Eastern Women,” Signs 4, no. 2 (1978): 309–323.
Nikki R. Keddie, Religion and Rebellion in Iran: Tobacco Protest of 1891–92 (London: Frank Cass, 1966).
James Atkinson, Customs and Manners of Women of Persia and Their Domestic Superstitions (New York: Burt Franklin, 1832); Tucker, Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt.
Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978);
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993); Kabbani, Europe’s Myths of the Orient; Alloula, The Colonial Harem.
Kabbani, Europe’s Myths of the Orient; Alloula, The Colonial Harem; Mabro, Veiled Half-Truths; Leila Ahmed, “Feminism and Feminist Movement in the Middle East,” Women’s Studies International Forum 5, no. 2 (1982): 153–168.
Laura Nader, “Orientalism, Occidentalism and the Control of Women,” Cultural Dynamics 2, no. 3 (1989): 323–355. This figure is conservative; it does not include articles and other shorter references to the Arab world, nor does it take into account works on the non-Arab orient.
Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (London: Virago Press, 1989);
I. Pinchbeck, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850 (1930; reprint, London: Virago Press, 1981).
John Malcolm, Sketches of Persia from the Journals of a Traveler in the East (London: J. Murray, 1949).
See, for example, Isabelle Eberhardt, The Passionate Nomadi The Diary of Isabelle Eberhardt, ed. and introduction by Rana Kabbani (London: Virago, 1987).
For a summary of the debate, see Eliz Sanasarian, The Women’s Rights Movement in Iran (New York: Praeger, 1982).
Suratgar, who had been traveling in Iran at the time, also writes that she observed policemen shredding headgear that women wore. See Olive Hepburn Suratgar, I Sing in the Wilderness: An Intimate Account of Persia and Persians (London: Edward Stanford, 1951).
For some similar stories see Badr ol-Moluk Bamdad, From Darkness into Light: Women’s Emancipation in Iran, trans. and ed. F. R. C. Bagley (Smithtown, NY: Exposition Press, 1977).
Val Moghadam, “Women, Work, and Ideology in the Islamic Republic,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 20 (1988): 221–243;
Val Moghadam, Modernizing Women: Gender and Social Change in the Middle East (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1993).
Golnar Mehran, “The Creation of the New Muslim Woman: Female Education in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Convergence 24, no. 4 (1991): 42–53;
Golnar Mehran, “Ideology and Education in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Compare 20 (1990): 53–65.
Very shortly after the success of the revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini canceled the shah’s Family Code on the grounds that it was judged to be un-Islamic. See Azar Tabari and Nahid Yeganeh, In the Shadows of Islam: The Women’s Movement in Iran (London: Zed Press, 1982);
Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Marriage on Trial: A Study of Islamic Law (London: I. B. Tauris, 1992).
Kate Millett, Going to Iran (New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1982).
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 51–80; Lazreg, “Feminism and Difference.”
For more discussion of teaching as a minority woman, see Homa Hoodfar, “Feminist Anthropology and Critical Pedagogy: The Anthropology of Classrooms’ Excluded Voices,” Canadian Journal of Education 17, no. 3 (1992): 303–320.
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© 2001 Elizabeth A. Castelli
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Hoodfar, H. (2001). The Veil in Their Minds and on Our Heads: Veiling Practices and Muslim Women. In: Castelli, E.A. (eds) Women, Gender, Religion: A Reader. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-04830-1_22
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