The Veil That Conceals Yet Reveals
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In the introduction of her book, In Search of Islamic Feminism: One Woman’s
Global Journey (NewYork: Double Day, 1998), Elizabeth Warnock Fernea writes:
“My mother counseled me about 'our' responsibilities to the women of other lands… Middle Eastern women, like Chinese women and Indian women, were in grave need of our help.”
 
 But setting out to enlighten Iraqi women in 1956, she discovered that women in Iraq “did not particularly want [her] to enlighten them, and were not interested in Western ideas about women's rights.” She found this hard to explain to her mother and friends, and so instead she “sat down and wrote [and] thus began forty years of writing, teaching, lecturing about, and filming Middle Eastern women -- a lifetime, really” (my italics).
 
On first reading Fernea's words one could justify a sigh of relief. Gone are the days of travellers bearing the burden of “illuminating dark continents”, hence relegating whole races to utter subservience. Gone are the days of a traveller idealizing native peoples. Gone are the days of debasing the native. Gone are the days where whole peoples were designated as emblems of evil, or the very children of innocent nature. Gone are the days where whole races were negated recognition of their existence, or reduced to nothingness. But before we sigh too deeply, let us consider: forty years of writing, teaching, lecturing about, and filming Middle Eastern women! Does that mean that cross-cultural travel writings have overcome their pitfalls? Has the Orient- Occident relationship become unproblematic?
 
In a book hyperbolically subtitled, “One Woman's Global Journey”, the author travels to Uzbekistan, Morocco, Kuwait, Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Palestine; talks to women there and claims that she acts as a “participant observer rather than follow anthropological or sociological methodologies.” The purpose of the book, according to the author, is to study the position of Middle Eastern women today. The author embarks on a journey, an “Odyssey”, as the excerpted review on the cover tells us, in order to “Discover” (and these are Fernea’s words): “a woman's place in Islam” and to ask once more what she calls “that simple question, the woman question. How are women doing? What does Feminism mean to them? Are its tenets universal? Do other forms of feminism exist -- Islamic Feminism, for instance?”
 
Apart from the fact that “the woman question” is anything but “simple”, there is the implicit assumption that, since the West is the primary referent for Fernea, then this position carries with it a certain privilege, and a degree of superiority. For although there is no explicit attempt to establish Euro-American Feminism as the only legitimate Feminism, (indeed some of the questions Fernea sets to answer are whether Feminism works across class, geographical and cultural boundaries) still, Western Feminism set vis a vis Other “movements” -as she elsewhere calls them- is like a river and its tributaries.
 
The “feminist premise”, against which those other movements will be judged, was set beforehand and the subject of the book is to see “How Muslim women are reacting to … the multiple aspects of the feminist dream”(my italics). The underlying assumption here suggests that the Feminist dream if not a western dream, is at the very least not a muslim dream.
 
That leads us directly to the question: why the search for Islamic feminism, and not just for feminism? Is Middle Eastern culture made up solely of Islam? Would one, then, in a study of the position of women in any given Euro/American context, be justified to search for Christian Feminism? Is Islam more than any other religion, unidentifiable from the cultures that host it?
 
 In examining Fernea’s search for Islamic feminism in Egypt, I hope here to shed more light on the term Islamic Feminism; its implications and possible configurations. The beginning of the book introduces “Islamic Feminism” within the familiar parameters of a familiar discursive field, that of colonial/travel writing literature. Hence, “Islamic Feminism” emerges as mysterious, exotic, and (given how Islam is sensationalised in Western media and rendered synonymous with terrorism) terrifying. All that holds the promise of adventure, discovery, and exploration. Expectations are fulfilled when a division is delineated between Islam as culture and heritage on one hand, and women's struggle for equality -defined in accordance with a modernisation paradigm- as modernization on the other hand. Hence, a reader has no
choice but to see Islamic Feminism as a “contradiction in terms.”
 
In the section on Egypt, “Islamic Feminism” recedes to the background and omen's dress comes to the foreground. The search for Islamic Feminism makes way or a search for the veil! The terror, mystery and iscovery that the former (Islam) arouses become attributes of the latter (the veil). Woman's body becomes a trope for culture. Women's dress: be it Hijab, Tesettur, headscarf, or modest dress. It becomes metonymic for cultural identity; hence simultaneously for Middle Eastern culture and Egyptian culture. The perception of Middle Eastern identity as synonymous with Islam is reflected in the close attention paid to women's dress and the meticulous description of it, in contrast to the absence of any description of facial features (except for a vaguely identified “heart shaped” face). The dress code is always potent in the interviews. The author never misses to point out, for example, that the interviewed woman “had worn Western dress [years ago], but now greeted [her] in a mid length skirt, and loose flowered silk tunic … plus a head scarf”, or that she is not “wear[ing] Islamic dress”; or that the interviewed was “not wearing the two-piece silk ensemble with matching turban or swirling scarf that is almost a uniform these days for middleclass and upper-middle-class Egyptian women.” Her search reveals not only a tendency to classify (what class wears what), but also an urge to clarify (who is wearing what?): “I saw very few Egyptian women, even those who have donned the hijab, or modest dress, who had covered their faces … Generally, they looked more like Huda Sharawi herself … whose photos show her in a long loose black dress and a tight black head scarf tied behind her head.” Standing on a street near
Cairo Bab el-Louk Station, the author says: “I began to count women who passed me … partly out of interest (who had their head covered, who did not) … I had counted seventy-seven women. Thirty eight or thirty nine were wearing Islamic dress … A few of the rest wore turbans on their heads.”
 
It is apparent from the above that surveillance, which has always been exercised in terms of the production of knowledges (“forty years of writing, teaching, lecturing about, and filming Middle Eastern Women”), is exercised here. The surveilled, Egyptian women, are constituted as objects of knowledge. Surveillance implies an imbalanced relationship that empowers the western traveller simultaneously as it objectifies the native women. In response to one of the interviewed women’s comment on western feminism's obsession with the veil, the traveler protests: “Well, it's what they can see with their own eyes!” Moreover, there is also an implicit assumption of a basic distinction between Western woman and Middle Eastern woman. Superficial differences (Veil, Hijab, etc…) are read as signs of cultural difference and become pretexts for "othering", upon which the Western traveller/woman never loses the upper hand and upon which the West’s identity is consolidated by setting itself off against Egyptian woman's identity. For the western traveller's discourse is continuously informed by a cultural power, among other powers (moral, intellectual), that has its own canons of taste and values. Hence, it is not surprising that the author, in a discussion over the hijab with an Egyptian friend protests: “But why put that dress on at all?”
 
 It is true that the author departs from Western Feminism's tendency to universalize woman's experience and elide specific cultural difference (a tendency that is underlined by a belief in 'universal sisterhood', and that usually fuels the urge to "save" those sisters, hence falling into the humanist trap). This departure is apparent in denouncing the role of 'saviour' which her mother's words dictate: “my mother also wore veils on her hats. But she patiently explained the world of difference that lay between her starched spotted black veil of net and the heavy veils Middle Eastern women had to wear, veils so heavy that she said, 'they couldn't even see to walk'” (my italics). But instead of narrowing the gaps between cultures, stressing cultural difference seems to widen these gaps by magnifying the visible signs of cultural difference. In registering minute details of dress, the “world of difference” between “veiled hats” and “veils”, between the Middle Eastern woman and Western woman is magnified. And cultural specificity seems to re-exoticise the people of other cultures anew.
 
But does the surveilled ever rise above their debilitating object status? I claim that the dichotomy between subject and object is not absolute; and I doubt that radical subjectivity is attainable even in the text of a native woman about native women. The interviewed in the book are far from voiceless. They reflect diverse ideological positions and come from different backgrounds.
 
And just as dress, as a cultural signifier, threatens to homogenise and suppress the heterogeneity of Egyptian woman's identity, it is also a site of resistance to the shrinkage of identity under the traveller's gaze. For the traveller's urge to pin down what women wear is countered by absolute turmoil in dress, the absence of any consistency. This non-adherence to the 'set model': Hijab/absence of Hijab, veil/absence of veil counters fixity/fixing. The traveller is faced with the unclassifiable phenomenon of girls in “jeans and sneakers and Mickey Mouse sweatshirts, with scarves over their heads”, and classification according to class and the urban/rural division is thwarted when a middle-class interviewed appears twice in a “peasant's dress” and not in “the two-piece silk ensemble with matching turban or swirling scarf that is a uniform … for middle-class Egyptian women” (my italics) as she should!
 
One can never get anywhere close to an understanding of alterity except in : preserving the Other's autonomy and complexity; abstaining from the urge to judge different races while retaining the intactness and unquestionability of one's identity; the urge to unveil that is, to dissect under the gaze, to lay bare, to delve into the most hidden regions. This urge springs from, and is reminiscent of an Enlightenment/ rationalistic emphasis on classifying, simplifying and clarifying. By "concealing", preserving the veil, that is, by attempting to understand identity in its totality, one version of the reality of that identity is "revealed".
 
 
Rania Abdel Rahman

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