A Quiet Revolution (4 page)

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The Islamic Resurgence and the Veil

From Emergence to Migration

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Unveiling

I

n
1956
, Albert Hourani, the Oxford historian and best-selling au- thor of
The History of the Arabs,
published a short article in the
UNESCO Courier
entitled “The Vanishing Veil a Challenge to the Old Order.” Pointing out that veiling was a fast-disappearing prac-

tice in most Arab societies, Hourani gives a brief history of how and why the practice was disappearing and why, as he believed, veiling would soon become a thing of the past.

The trend to unveil, Hourani explains, had begun in Egypt in the early twentieth century, set in motion by the writer Qasim Amin. Amin had argued in his book
The Liberation of Woman
that “gradual and care- ful change in the status of women” was now an essential step in the ad- vancement of Muslim societies. The changes he recommended, which included women’s casting off their veils, were, Amin emphasized, “not contrary to the principles of Islam.” While Amin’s ideas had been met with great resistance, Hourani writes, they gradually gained acceptance and spread first in Egypt and then to the “more advanced Arab coun- tries,” among them “Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq.”
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Hourani’s article is illuminating not only for its reporting about veiling in the
1950
s but also for what it reveals about the views and as- sumptions about veiling that were common among intellectuals of the era. Hourani notes that the spread of education had been enormously

important to unveiling. Educated women would not accept veiling and seclusion, and educated men, who wanted “their wives to be compan- ions,” were similarly in favor of unveiling. As Hourani observed with re- spect to the
1950
s, “In all except the most backward regions polygamy has practically disappeared and the veil is rapidly going.”

By this decade, Hourani wrote, the veil had virtually disappeared in Egypt, although, he admitted, veiling lingered among the “lower middle class, the most conservative of all classes.” Similarly, he reported, the veil was disappearing from most other “advanced” Arab countries. It was only in the Arab world’s “most backward regions,” he continued, and specifically “in the countries of the Arabian peninsula—Saudi Arabia and Yemen,” that the “old order”—and along with it such practices as veiling and polygamy—“still persist[s] unaltered.”

Clearly Hourani’s narrative is grounded in a worldview that as- sumed that the way forward for Arab societies lay in following the path of progress forged by the West. Within this narrative framework, the way forward for such societies entailed leaving behind their “backward” prac- tices and adopting the “advanced” norms and practices of modernity and the West.

Today, in our postmodern era, it would be almost unthinkable that an Oxford academic would casually use such terms as “advanced” or “back- ward” to describe cultural practices, but for Hourani, writing at midcen- tury and at the height of the modern age, these were simply the terms that were in common use for expressing the assumptions of the day, assump- tions that, at midcentury, were in fact common to the dominant classes of both the Middle East and the West. As the British-born son of well-to-do Lebanese Christian parents who had settled in England, Hourani belonged by heritage and location to both groups. A rising young academic at the time he penned those words, Hourani also would be one of the first indi- viduals of Arab heritage—maybe even the very first—to gain acceptance at the professorial level into the elite academic world of Oxbridge.

The notion that the presence or absence of the veil was a mark of the level of advancement or backwardness in a society—a notion that is assumed to be true in Hourani’s text—was an idea that first appeared in Arab societies in the late nineteenth century, in the very book,
The Lib- eration of Woman,
that Hourani cites as having launched the unveiling

trend in Egypt and other Arab countries. In fact, the entire thesis un- derpinning Hourani’s assumptions in “The Vanishing Veil”—that Mus- lim societies are to be counted as advanced or backward by the extent to which they have abandoned their native practices, symbolized by the veil, in emulation of those of the West—is exactly the thesis that Amin puts forward in
Liberation of Woman
.

Amin’s text is grounded in the idea of the self-evident and com- prehensive superiority of Europe and its societies and civilization. This idea is present not simply as the implied and underlying framework (as in Hourani’s text), but as the book’s explicit thesis. It is this thesis, in fact, that forms the basis of Amin’s argument for abandoning veiling and changing the status of women in Islam.

Amin’s admiration for European civilization and European man is evident throughout his book, as is his dislike and even contempt for na- tive ways. Arguing, for example, for the unveiling of Muslim women, Amin asserts that veiling had once been practiced in European societies, too, but as they had advanced they had left the practice behind. “Do Egyptians imagine,” Amin continues,

that the men of Europe, who have attained such complete- ness of intellect and feeling that they were able to discover the force of steam and electricity . . . these souls that daily risk their lives in the pursuit of knowledge and honor above the pleasures of life . . . these intellects and these souls that we so much admire, could possibly fail to know the means of safe- guarding woman and preserving her purity? Do they think that such a people would have abandoned veiling after it had been in use among them if they had seen any good in it?
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Praising European civilization as one that had “advanced with the speed of steam and electricity” to conquer “every part of the globe,” Amin notes admiringly that wherever European man goes “he takes control of its re- sources . . . and turns them into profit . . . and if he does harm to the original inhabitants, it is only that he pursues happiness in this world and seeks it wherever he may find it.” When the European colonizers encountered “savages,” Amin writes, “they eliminate them or drive them

from the land, as happened in America... and is happening now in Africa. . . . When they encounter a nation like ours, with a degree of civ- ilization, with a past, and a religion . . . and customs and . . . institutions

. . . they deal with the inhabitants kindly. But they do soon acquire its most valuable resources, because they have greater wealth and intellect and knowledge and force.”

It was from within this framework of understanding—a frame- work that obviously saw European civilization as representing the pin- nacle of human achievement in the hierarchy of civilizations—that Amin set forth his argument that Muslim societies urgently needed to pursue reforms that would enable them to emulate Europe and follow in its foot- steps.

Among the most important of these essential reforms, Amin went on to argue, were changing the status of Muslim women and abandon- ing the practice of veiling. For what Muslim society needed above all, Amin insisted, was a profound transformation—not simply of outward practices, such as veiling, but of the very character of its men. “The grown man,” Amin explained, “is none other than his mother shaped him in childhood.” This fact, Amin stressed, was the very “essence” of his call for the liberation of women. For, he wrote, “
It is impossible to breed success- ful men if they do not have mothers capable of raising them to be successful
” (emphasis in original).

The publication of Amin’s book would provoke a furor in the press in Egypt, a furor that would resonate widely elsewhere in the Muslim world. In addition,
The Liberation of Woman
(Tahrir al-Mar’a) would come to be seen, as it is in Hourani’s article, as having introduced im- portant new ideas, ideas that marked the beginning of the spread of un- veiling and, along with it, the advancement of women across the Arab Middle East. In fact, though, as I argue later in this chapter, the current of unveiling was already under way at a grass-roots level among women who were themselves carrying the movement forward.

Certainly, though, the publication of Amin’s book was an impor- tant event, introducing novel and provocative ideas to the world of Ara- bic debate and letters. Most importantly and influentially, the book brought together two quite different strands of thought, both of which were in wide currency at the time—but in different societies.

The first set of ideas had its provenance in ideas that were current in Europe in Amin’s day. As European imperial expansion—particularly British and French—reached new heights, so also did Europeans’ ideas about the inherent racial and civilizational superiority of Europeans. This was the era (as many historians have noted) when the notion that human history consisted of a hierarchy of races and civilizations, at the pinna- cle of which stood European man and his civilization, had become widely diffused in European and North American thought. Anthropology along with other fields of study of that era provided “scientific” evidence— such as that offered by the measurement of skulls—which established the “truth” of the idea of European racial superiority. The measurement of skulls, as feminist scholars have pointed out, similarly served to “prove” the intellectual inferiority of women. In England in particular, proving the inferiority of women, as well as of the British Empire’s non- European subjects, was an important goal for the Victorian establish- ment of the day. British women were beginning to agitate against the government, just as were “the subject races” abroad, demanding such things as equality and suffrage.

Belief in the superiority of European man and his civilization and in the inferiority of Others—which encompassed all non-European peo- ples and civilizations—were the commonplaces of the day. In addition to the broad and overarching narrative of the West’s overall superiority, there were also stock narratives that defined the particular inferiority of each different group—Hindus, for example, or Muslims or “Orientals” or sub-Saharan Africans. And dress in some cases (too much covering, for instance, with respect to Muslim women, and too little in relation to some sub-Saharan African societies) came to epitomize, to European eyes, the differentness, Otherness, and inferiority of those groups and societies. In the last decades of the nineteenth century these narratives of racial, religious, and civilizational inferiority came to focus specifically on the issue of women and the ways that men of Other societies oppressed and degraded women. This narrative was useful in this era of European imperialism in that it cast European man in his role as colonizer as some- one who, by virtue of his imperialist rule, was not only bringing civiliza- tion to backward peoples but also saving local women from the oppression and degradation imposed on them by native men. Gayatri

Spivak would famously call this the trope of “white men saving brown women from brown men.”
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Thus Hinduism was seen as essentially inferior for many reasons, but the evidence of its inferiority in the European narrative was suc- cinctly and vividly encapsulated in its practices regarding women, and most particularly in the practice of suttee—a widow’s self-immolation following her husband’s death, a practice which, though never in com- mon use, was focused on by the British as exemplifying Hindu attitudes to women. Similarly, veiling and segregation were seen as reflecting Islam’s depraved attitudes toward sexuality (exemplified by the fact that Islam permitted polygamy and divorce—both practices considered anathema in nineteenth-century Europe). These ideas became center- pieces in the European narrative of Islam and its “degradation” of women, and the visually arresting sign of the veil became a symbol both of Islam’s degradation of women and of the religion’s fundamental in- feriority. These views about the veil as emblem of Islam’s inferiority and its treatment of women became prevalent in the late nineteenth century, most particularly in France and Britain, as both nations were extending and deepening their dominion over Muslim lands.

Qasim Amin, an Egyptian lawyer from the upper-middle class, had studied in France, where he had certainly encountered such ideas. We know, in fact, that he felt so strongly about one book in which a French author had set forth precisely such ideas regarding Islam’s inferiority and its degradation of women, citing the practices of veiling and segregation as evidence of that degradation, that he wrote an impassioned response to it entitled
Les Egyptiens: Reponse a M. le duc D’Harcourt.
In it Amin re- buts many of D’Harcourt’s critiques and staunchly defends Islamic prac- tices, including veiling and segregation. Moreover, Amin (particularly affronted, apparently, by D’Harcourt’s assertion that Islam encouraged sexual license and “lust, obscenity and degeneration”) even went on to criticize European societies for their depravity, a result of their easy mix- ing of the sexes.
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A few years later, however, Amin would entirely reverse his views. Princess Nazli (a niece of Khedive Ismail, ruler of Egypt in
1863
–
79
) re- portedly had had a hand in bringing about this change. Nazli Fazil, who

spoke several languages fluently, including French and English, and was described as a “determined champion of female emancipation,” had not been pleased with Amin’s defense of Islamic practices.
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She therefore in- vited him to the salons she held in her home in Cairo, frequented by lead- ing liberals and intellectuals, to expose him to their views on the subject. (Nazli was unique in Egypt in her era as a woman who hosted salons in which she mingled “unveiled with male guests.” Being a member of the royal family, she had “special leeway.”
6
) Evelyn Baring (later Lord Cromer), Britain’s consul general in Egypt from
1883
to
1907
, was occasionally among Nazli’s guests, and the princess, in the words of Ronald Storrs, a member of the British administration, was “embarrassingly pro-British.”
7
A few years later, as Amin evidently continued to ponder and dis- cuss these issues, along with other Egyptian intellectuals of his day, he would put forward in
The Liberation of Woman
the thesis and positions already described. The book was in fact written in Europe in
1897
when Amin was spending the summer with three other Egyptian intellectuals in Geneva. All were men who, like Amin, had spent time in Europe and