Witty and pertinent observations on matters of great significance
OR
Incoherent jottings on total irrelevancies
OR
Something else altogether
OR
All of the aboveRemember, remember, the 11th of September, hijab and niqab and rot
Just after my recent post on the veil debate came this piece in Thursday's Guardian. As ever with Karen Armstrong it's well-written, intelligent and thought-provoking. It certainly hadn't occurred to me before to make the connection between attitudes to veiled Muslims now and to habit-wearing Catholic nuns in the mid-19th century (just after they were first allowed to wear them in public). The same prejudice and hatred, the same abuse, the same assumption that these weirdly-dressed women hated freedom and democracy and wanted to overthrow the British state. And the stuff on the history of veiling in Egypt makes especially fascinating reading.
English readers should think of the parallels as they burn their Catholic effigies next Sunday.
posted by Rob @ 22:41
5 Comments:
I agree with a lot of what Karen Armstrong says - the relationship between ostensibly 'liberal' repression and seemingly 'reactionary' resistance is well worth considering. But she misses, or obscures, the crucial difference between the nun's veil and the niqab. To take the veil is to devote oneself to God: it's an emblem of withdrawal from any kind of involvement with society or with men, and of being set apart from the great majority of women. To put on the niqab is an act of religious duty, and it's an emblem of withdrawal from involvement with male-dominated society - but this withdrawal goes along with a continuing relationship with one man (and his children), and its advocates recommend it for all women. In many respects it's the polar opposite of the nun's veil. It's also an embodiment of attitudes which - if they were advanced by the Daily Mail instead of by people attacked in the Daily Mail - we wouldn't have any hesitation in describing as antiquated sexist nonsense. More on this (shot by both sides in comments) here.
A good post, Phil, but I don't buy your central argument that the Muslim veil and the nun's habit are polar opposites. In each case the wearer is withdrawing from the view of the profane ("look at me (or don't), I'm more devout than you") to be viewed only by same-sex members of her family (real in the Muslim case, adopted in the Catholic) and by her spouse (real in the Muslim case, divine - hence "bride of Christ" - in the Catholic. Whatever the aspirations of Muslim hardliners, universal veiling Muslims is never going to happen because (as you point out) there is no Koranic injunction to veil, and it is generally only where the Koran requires something that it has any chance of overcoming the huge diversity of interpretation in Islam. In 1986 Hilary and I visted the Yemen Arab Repubklic, as it weas then, and whikle in some parts of the country one could see the niqab, and the hijab was pretty universal in most of Yemen, the women of the Tihama (coastal plain) prided themselves on not veiling (though some kind of head covering was needed by both sexes to deal with the sun). And Yemen was, and is, an extremely devout Islamic country.
Let's also remember that while not all those who wear the niqab do so voluntarily, well into my lifetime Catholic women in Britain were still being forced into convents for "immorality".
Not so different, then.
to be viewed only by same-sex members of her family (real in the Muslim case, adopted in the Catholic) and by her spouse (real in the Muslim case, divine - hence "bride of Christ" - in the Catholic)
But that actually makes my point. In pre-modern societies, the norm for every woman was to be either a wife, a wife-to-be or a widow. The nun's veil and its accompanying metaphors are a way of breaking with that norm; the niqab is a way of living within it.
Clearly you make more of a distinction between being married to a real live bloke and being married to a virtual dead Palestinian; but I suspect the nuns in the latter case view themselves (in some senses at leaast) as very much married, and directing their love inwards toward a family just as much as any niqab wearer. It's just that the nature of that family is different.
I think we each consider that the other is making our point, so I guess we're not too far apart in fact. What we need is a passing Catholic nun to post a comment.
I don't know u people. All I know is that I love hijab!
Post a Comment
<< Home