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Islam & The Niqab

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Politics of the Veil

December 13, 2003
by Dheera Sujan

The veil is a subject that arouses a fair amount of emotion around dinner tables in Europe. In fact, I was surprised how the mention of the topic of women wearing veils or headscarves can drive the average leftist liberal into a veritable spitting fury. In very simplistic terms, this "western secular" camp believes that face veils (niqabs) and headscarves (hijabs) should be banned because they're a sign of patriarchal religious dictates that were designed and enforced by men to keep women under their thumb.

Furthermore, goes the argument, the future of Europe lies in integration. At a time when Islam is being treated with more and more suspicion by the West, "these people" should try and not stand out so much, they should make more of an effort to blend in with the rest of society in whatever European country that has so graciously allowed them to enter.

I should add, at this point, that until fairly recently I was more or less amongst the aforementioned group. I too believed any woman who wore headscarf or veil was a walking advertisement for Oppressed Womanhood.

Then something happened to change my mind. I came across people who had something to say about the other side of the story. I saw who they were, and I listened to what they had to say. And I discovered that actually "they" weren't all oppressed or "un-integrated."

And I changed my mind. Not that I'm about to take up the veil myself, or that I would want my daughter to. I just changed my mind about how I would regard veiled women in the future.

The Decision

Jamila Faloun is one of "them". The daughter of Moroccan immigrants, she was born and educated in the Netherlands along with her six siblings. Her father brought up his kids on a janitor's wage and made sure every one of them made it to university. Islam was never imposed on her by her family, but when she was 22, Ms Faloun decided to start wearing a headscarf for the first time in her life.

I tried being Dutch in the way they wanted me to be," she says. "But they didn't accept me." And now? "Well, before I wore a headscarf I always slumped with my head looking down – now I walk straight and I look up at people. It's not that they accept me more than they did before, it's just that I don't care anymore how they regard me." When Jamila Faloun discovered Islam in her own way, she found the part of her that she felt had been missing. She insists she's the same person she was before, just a happier, more confident one.

A few months ago, three girls came to their Amsterdam teaching institute wearing niqabs. The director asked them to remove them, and when the girls refused, they were told they would not be allowed to continue their studies there as long as their faces were covered. The girls took it to the Equal Opportunities Commission, which ruled in the school's favour. So the students have been given an ultimatum; if you want to finish your studies here, take off the face coverings.

Different Precedent

It's interesting to compare this year's ruling with the only other time the Equal Opportunities Commission has dealt with face veils, in the year 2000, when a Leiden University student decided to take up the niqab. At that time, the Commission ruled in the student's favour, saying that to ban her from school on the grounds of niqab-wearing would be discriminatory on religious grounds.

According to Annalies Moors, from the University of Amsterdam, the backlash against Islam sparked by the September 11 terrorist attacks, plus a growing insecurity about Muslim migrants, is responsible for opening the doors to all sorts of comments that wouldn't have been acceptable a few years ago.

"There's been an impact of September 11 and of the whole populist right wing party of Pim Fortuyn," she says. "There are real problems with [Moroccan boys] on the streets, in crime and so forth, but these are difficult problems to solve - they can't punish [the boys], so they're punishing their sisters."

Saba Mahmood, a social anthropologist with the University of Berkley, believes that too much symbolism is being attached to the veil. "Muslim women's lives have taken on a great burden of either justifying women's role in Islam or fighting against it. Is there no other mode of relating to Islam?" she asks passionately.

History Of An Attitude

The West's attitude to veiled women goes back to colonial times when western powers saw the veil as a symbol of inferiority, and believed that their mission was to "civilize" the people of the colonies from south Asia to north Africa. One of the ways they could show they were doing this was by tearing off women's veils. This attitude was inherited and enforced by the early nationalist leaders. Ataturk in Turkey, Jinnah in Pakistan, and the Shah of Iran all wanted to modernize their countries and believed the veil to be an obstacle to that goal.

According to Dr Mahmood, this attitude is hard wired into the Western imagination – even people unfamiliar with colonial history can't see the veil outside the perimeters of religious male oppression. "Imagine saying that miniskirts are just reflecting patriarchal values because they're indulging in an exhibitionism that's pleasing to men. That's one interpretation, but it's not the only one, and the same needs to be done with clothing in other societies and other religions."

Dr Mahmood believes that when girls are banned from school because they refuse to loosen their headscarves to reveal their neck and ears as in the current case of the teenage Levi sisters in France, the West is practicing exactly the same kind of oppressive dictates it claims to oppose. "We may not like it for ourselves, but does that give us the right to forbid others to wear it?" she asks.

Betrayal

Since the 50s and 60s when Muslim migrants flooded into Europe, Western feminists and secularists felt that though it may be too late to "liberate" the wives of the immigrants, they could still "save" their daughters. However now it is these very daughters who are deciding to take up the veil against the wishes of their families, and there's a terrible sense of betrayal on the part of the secularists.

This second generation however, feels there's a lack of understanding of who they are and why they want to show their newly discovered Islamic identity. And they do have a complex cocktail of motivations. They want to go back to traditions they find personal value in; they are educated in the Koran in a way their parents weren't and are making an informed choice; they want to show themselves as a new generation of European Muslims; they want to take a visible role in the current Islamic revival.

The key to integration perhaps doesn't lie in "blending in" but in understanding and acceptance. "I am Dutch," Jamila Faloun says. "I was born in this country, educated here, my friends are here, I love this country, I am Dutch. But I am also a Berber and a Muslim."

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