The Possibility of a Sign

Abstract

They can be the means to make the unbelievable believable. Travellers from Western countries, having experienced a loss of faith at home and the link between industrial revolutions and apostasy, were eager to find signs of this unbelievable faith in pre-industrial regions of the Islamic world. They found it for instance in the veil. But to find and see signs is not always to understand them. In 1938, when Annemarie Schwarzenbach encountered women in burkas on the streets of Kabul, she was visually attracted and irritated by the all-covering pleated robe (as 62). She and her friend Ella Maillart took photographs, and in her travel journal she compared them to “ghosts flitting through the streets” (as 63). But it is impossible to see the burka without trying to understand or at least interpret it.