A Quiet Revolution (14 page)

The seventies would witness the emergence of militant Islamist groups, some of them established by former Muslim Brothers who had suffered torture in Nasser’s prisons and who now refused to accept the Brother- hood’s position against violence. Even these militant Islamist organiza-

tions could include women, as government investigations of some of the groups would show. The practices of one militant Islamist group in par- ticular, Jamaat al-Takfir wal-Hijra (Society of Repentance and Flight, a name given to it by its opponents), would scandalize many Egyptians when details of their practices became known following the arrest in
1977
of some of its members, who were charged with kidnapping and mur- dering a cleric from al-Azhar.

Jamaat al-Takfir wal-Hijra was founded by Shukri Mustapha, an agricultural engineer and a Muslim Brother who had been imprisoned by Nasser in
1965
and released by Sadat in
1971
. Like a number of others on the militant edge of the Brotherhood, Mustapha regarded the Brother- hood leadership as too weak and accommodationist vis-à-vis the gov- ernment, as well as mistaken in renouncing violence.

Mustapha maintained that most Muslim societies were in a state of jahiliyya. Only his own followers were true Muslims; most people, and in particular the political leaders of Muslim (or so-called Muslim) soci- eties, were
kafirs
(heathens). True Muslims, he believed, must flee from these corrupt societies, just as the Prophet Muhammad had fled when he had undertaken hijra (migration) to Medina from the corrupt jahiliyya society that had persecuted him. Today such groups, according to Mustapha, should form alternative societies in the wilderness from whence they could fight the heathens and their corrupt leaders and infi- del practices.

Mustapha’s group did in fact withdraw from society and live in communes in the hills, following rules that were broadly Islamic but modified by Mustapha. Members, women and men, were required to sever their ties with the rest of society and to regard their own family members as infidels to whom they owed neither obedience nor respon- sibility. The group practiced unconventional and unorthodox marriages, with Mustapha having the power to dissolve or arrange marriages at will. The group was accused of enticing young women away from their fam- ilies.
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Saleh Siriyyah, the leader of another jihadi group, also similarly preached that Muslims who did not follow pure Islam were kafirs, and that armed struggle—armed jihad—against the political leaders of so- called Islamic societies whose populations were in reality kafirs was a ne-

cessity. Siriyyah considered that jihad in the sense of armed struggle (jihad can also refer to inner struggle or endeavor) was obligatory for Muslim women as well as for men.

In the later seventies, as violent incidents from such groups es- calated, government investigations brought to light the fact that in practice women were excluded from most militant organizations. The exception to this was the organization founded by Mustapha. However, such groups are exceedingly secretive, and only scant information is available about them. Siriyyah and Mustapha were executed by the Egyptian government for their part in acts of murder and violence,

Siriyyah in
1975
and Mustapha in
1978
.

The students and organizations that El Guindi studied all belonged to the broad spectrum of mainstream, nonviolent Islamist organizations. (She remains our most important source on women in Islamist or- ganizations in that era.) It is these organizations, among them the Muslim Brotherhood, that make up the vast majority of the Islamist movement.

Just as the hijab served to signal to like-minded others (and to so- ciety at large) the presence of members of this different, alternative com- munity living in the mainstream, the ways in which women and men of this movement formally referred to each other as “brother” and “sister” similarly served, as El Guindi noted, to reinforce a sense of community and belonging.
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The hijab was only one of the distinctive features of the new Islamic dress being adopted by women. Abandoning the Western-style fashions of women in the mainstream—dress which they themselves had worn prior to undergoing their personal religious transformation—women who took up hijab also took to wearing what they referred to as
ziyy
or
zia Islami,
or shar‘i (Islamic dress or legal dress).

The zia came in a variety of styles that typically corresponded to different degrees of religious understanding and commitment, as well as to different levels of leadership in the hierarchy of sisters. Dress pro- gressed in terms of strictness from maxi-length skirt or pant-suit with long-sleeved shirt and headscarf to a
khimar,
a “head-cover which cov- ers all the hair down below the neck and in front goes below the chin

while still exposing the entire face.” This was worn with a
gilbab,
a long, loose robe with wide long sleeves. These garments were essen- tially standardized and were typically in sober solid colors, such as navy blue, brown, or beige. Typically they were made of “thick opaque ma- terial.”
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This standardization in material and color had the effect of erasing social and economic differences between wearers. In this way Islamic dress powerfully modeled and embodied (as El Guindi noted) two key ideas that were foundational to the Islamic movement. They visually em- bodied and proclaimed the central importance of a society committed to gender segregation, and they embodied and modeled egalitarian princi- ples and notions of social equality and justice across classes, another foundational commitment for the Islamist movement. As noted earlier, social justice had from the start been a key commitment of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The zia islami, in its telling and significant variations for insiders as well as in its overall uniformity, was something new to Egypt. These were not styles that the women’s mothers or grandmothers had ever donned. The zia was thus unmistakably
modern
Islamic dress, devised in styles and materials that signaled at once both the modernity of its wearers and their Islamic commitment. The dress also clearly indicated to the main- stream Muslim majority that the wearers were in some way affirming and embracing a different way of practicing and living Islam. Conse- quently, the wearers of this dress conveyed or at least seemed to convey an implicit rejection of the ways and dress of the mainstream, as they seemed also to be conveying the message that the dress of Muslim women who did not dress as they did was not properly or adequately Is- lamic. (In the debates under way today in some Western countries—in France, for example—Islamic dress is indeed being read as implying a re- jection not only of mainstream dress but also of the values and commit- ments of mainstream society.)

By the end of the seventies this form of dress was still essentially a campus phenomenon, and even on campuses it was confined to a small minority. The number of women wearing zia, wrote El Guindi in
1981
, was insignificant in terms of Egypt’s total population. And yet the visual

presence of this “new woman,” as El Guindi called her, was quite dra-

matic, as well as mysteriously arresting and compelling. The dress some- how conveyed, El Guindi reported, strength and power.

For the larger mainstream society the steady increase in Islamic dress that was evidently under way around them was a clear and visible sign of the growing strength of a minority in Egyptian society who lived by and were committed to different rules and a different understanding of Islam from that of mainstream society. Moreover, this was an under- standing of Islam that seemed distinctly at odds not only in matters of dress but also implicitly in terms of goals and ideology, with the ways, goals, and commitments of the larger society.
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This new dress was not something that observers could easily un- derstand or make sense of. It was not a return to traditional or old-fash- ioned and vaguely familiar form of dress. Members of the broader society, El Guindi reported, observed these developments with puzzle- ment and a growing sense of unease. Why was this happening, they won- dered? Was this some sort of identity crisis? Was this, as one interviewee remarked to El Guindi, “our version of America’s hippie movement, a fad, a youth protest or ideological vacuum”?
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Parents of the women in zia tended to be particularly distressed, El Guindi found. “Where did we go wrong?” they wondered. If their daugh- ter was unmarried, they anguished over who would marry her now that she was “hidden under a ‘tent’”? Some people were not only baffled but also offended and angered by the dress. As one woman said, “That a young woman goes on pilgrimage to Mecca two or three times this is not a phenomenon, this is good, it is being a good Muslim.” But, she con- tinued, “to dress like these college girls and cover with a veil, now that is a phenomenon. It is not even Islamic.”
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Feminists of the day also denounced the new veil. Among these was Amina al-Said, a prominent journalist and one of the first generation of Egyptian women to benefit from the early twentieth-century movement to both cast aside the veil and open up educational and professional op-

portunities to women. In
1932
, al-Said had been a member of the first

group of women to graduate from Cairo University (then King Fuad University). Almost at the first appearance of the new hijab in the early
1970
s, al-Said wrote an editorial in the feminist journal
Hawwa
(Eve) to decry the new dress as a garment that resembled the “shrouds of the

dead.” In words that echo Hourani’s essay (and before that, Amin’s work and Cromer’s pronouncements), al-Said declared that the veil was “truly the greatest enemy of civilization and progress.”
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‌

It was not only feminists who would take a stand against the veil or Islamic dress. As the phenomenon gained ground in university lecture halls, some professors would summarily dismiss from their classes stu- dents who dressed in this way.

In mainstream society there was speculation that some women were wearing this dress because they were being paid to wear it by the Mus- lim Brothers or by agents of Saudi Arabia.
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Another researcher, John Alden Williams, reported that when he asked people why they thought Islamic dress was on the rise, they were likely to “shrug their shoulders, roll their eyes and reply that they can’t imagine.” Pressed, they often elab- orated by saying that “it’s all because of the Saudis.” The Saudis, they say, “give a lot of money to writers and
shaykhs
to further their funda- mentalist vision of Islam.”
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In response to questions about the resurgence of “fundamentalist” Islamic groups, such as “the old Muslim Brotherhood,” that was evi- dently under way, people would assert, Williams reported, that they were subsidized by Saudi or Libyan money. Other findings that Williams re- ported in fact appear to lend some credence to such reports. Williams notes, for example, that among the people he interviewed, one student at Cairo University stated that she received a “small sum of money to hand out head-kerchiefs to her classmates and more money for every woman she converted to the wearing of shar‘i dress; money that came from a Saudi source.” In addition, Williams noted, men who joined the resurgent Muslim groups had been known “to threaten to divorce their wives if they do not adopt shar‘i costume.”

Williams interviewed nonveiled women as well as veiled women about what they believed constituted proper “Islamic” dress, and he de- scribed the Cairo scene with regard to women’s dress in the late seven- ties. He provides us with a wonderfully detailed glimpse into how people thought about Islamic dress in these very early days of the transition to veiling.

It had become rare in the seventies, wrote Williams, “to see a veil,

and common to see Egyptian imitations of most recent Western dress, including the mini-skirt.” Even in small provincial towns, Williams con- tinues, “women advertised their attachment to modernity by adopting forms of dress regarded as contemporary, international and modern.” In contrast, “women who continued to go out in the black milaya . . . were pityingly or contemptuously referred to as
baladi giddan
(very provinicial) and were looked upon as backward anomalies, or as mere peasants with quaint, disappearing manners.”

While the few women who continued to cover were regarded as backward, women who did not cover and who wore Western-style dress (without veil) were not seen as any “less Muslim” than others. Certainly, Williams writes, “they were viewed as pious and observant.” When ques- tioned on their views on dress, “orthodox women in ‘modern dress’ de- nied that there was anything un-Islamic about this, provided the dress was not gaudy and/or abbreviated. They argued that early Islam had not segregated or veiled women—except perhaps in the case of the Prophet’s wives,” who, the women explained, were living right by the main mosque where there was constant coming and going and where the Prophet’s wives hardly got any privacy at all. It was “generally assumed,” Williams noted, that the way women dressed “was the way it should be.” Egyptian women with their modern dress and no veil, Williams’s interviewees as- sumed (echoing the views of Hourani and those of others before him), “were demonstrating how the Arab woman of the future would behave and dress.”

Williams also notes that in recent decades conservative women who had been concerned to identify themselves as observant Muslims had worn simple modern dresses with long sleeves, along with a scarf over their hair—and that some women still dressed like that. While such dress was on the conservative side, it was not conspicuously different from the modern Western-style dress, noted Williams, in the way that the zia shar‘i was. Thus women adopting the latter appeared to be “evincing an aspiration to dress counter to recent norms of clothing, and claiming to be more observant of the Law than other women.” By their choice of dress the women in the zia appeared to be “sitting in judgment” on their society and “critical of the way it appears to be going.”
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