Authors: Sajida Alvi, Homa Hoodfar, and Sheila McDonough
Publisher: Women’s Press, Toronto
Year: 2003
Introduction
While we often hear about
conservative or radical Islamic movements, we hear less about alternative social
and intellectual developments in the Muslim world.
Muslim scholars have risen to the
recent challenges presented by their Western peers in the war of ideas that
shape the discourse of politics, development economics, and policy making by
presenting and publishing exhaustive literature on Islam and Islamic
interpretation, culture and practice, law and jurisprudence, history and world
view. Historically, religious thought and opinion has been divisive. In Islam,
the division of opinion began to split the Muslim community with the death of
the Prophet (sws). The lines between belief and intellect became blurred as
sectarian conflict manifested itself into different schools of thought. In
caliphates under liberal rulers such as the early Abbasid such difference of
opinion was allowed to flourish while in later times un-orthodox and scholars
deviating from the mainstream were persecuted. The metaphorical “closing of the
gates of ijtihad” around the 4th century may have been the
first step, though initially innocuous, towards curbing the dynamic nature of
Islam. Today Muslims find themselves facing challenges on the extremes of
orthodoxy from the ‘ulama in Muslim countries, and misunderstandings from
the non-Muslim majority in the world that borders on racism. There has been a
call to elements in Muslim society whose voices are not often heard – women,
intellectuals, scholars, scientists, historians, journalists – the educated
elite, not to fight Muslim orthodox elements by giving up their faith or
concentrating solely on secular education; rather they should fight
misunderstandings from within the content of religion. The emphasis has shifted
from simply embracing a more “liberal” i.e. specifically Western outlook to
finding intellectual and academic ideals of logic, criticism and deconstruction
within Islamic tradition and philosophy itself.
It is these very ideals with which
the scholars who took on the four year project that is The Muslim Veil in
North America rise to the challenge of the debate surrounding the hijab,
which is, and always has been, a definitive symbol of the stasis in which
Islamic faith is set, according to Orientalist discourse. The methodology and
style of the book is a combination of an ethnographic study (largely tackled in
the earlier chapters by anthropologists Homa Hoodfar and Sheila McDonough), a
historical review and an extensive tafsir (comprising the latter portion
of the book, by Soraya Hajjaji-Jarrah and L. Clarke). The book is divided into
two parts: Part I: Veiling Practices in Everyday Life in Canada and Part II:
Women Revising Texts and the Veiling Discourse.
Part I: Veiling Practices in
Everyday Life in Canada
Chapter 1: “More than Clothing:
Veiling as an Adaptive Strategy” by Homa Hoodfar
Hoodfar’s
chapter sets the tone and paradigms of discourse for the book by introducing the
subject of clothing as more than just utilitarian. A brief history of how
clothes have been used historically to distinguish a person’s status and
position in society occupies the first part of the chapter. She touches briefly
on the colonial discourse regarding depictions of societies in the Middle East,
and the prevalent concept of “backward” Muslim communities and the attention
paid by travellers to veiling practices, as well as refuting several claims
presented in these writings. She then goes on to explain the divide in the
Muslim community with regard to the extent to which they agree with veiling
practices. More often than not, she argues, the struggle for women’s empowerment
by de-veiling was simply a façade to the underlying agenda of removing the
orthodox clergy from power.
The latter half of the chapter
quotes from interviews taken of Muslim women living in Canada. Hoodfar attempts
to show the logic behind veiling practices, studying them as a means of mobility
for women in a conservative culture of segregation. Hoodfar briefly outlines the
study, undertaken in a largely anthropological style, which is prevalent not
just in this chapter but throughout the first part of this book.
Chapter 2: “Coding Dress: Gender
and the Articulation of Identity in a Canadian Muslim School” by Patricia Kelly
Spurles
This chapter examines the role of
gender in the construction of Muslim identity within a full-time Muslim school
in Montreal. The case study involves fieldwork in several Muslim institutions,
and the debate surrounding the compulsory veiling for both female teachers and
students.
Beginning with reference to an
article published in a Canadian magazine that brought out certain biases against
Muslims, Spurles examines how racism leads to assimilation of the community
under attack. Muslim schools are seen by the community as “One Solution to the
Crises of Integration.”
Gender
segregation in these schools is dealt with, first with respect to teachers. A
lot of detail is given on clothing styles of the teachers, and the uniform
requirements of the students. Like other chapters in the book, it is directed to
those people in the media and western culture who are led to believe that Islam
is a rigid, inflexible religion that allows little variation in implementation.
The concluding remarks lay ground for further exploration of the diverse
spectrum of Islamic attitudes and culture.
Chapter 3: “Banners of Faith and
Identities in Construct: The hijab in Canada” by Reem a. Meshal
The chapter largely builds on
Hoodfar and Spurle’s themes of Muslim identities and diversity, and presents
extensive data dealing with certain issues in this context. The research takes
place across ten Canadian cities; targeting Muslim women from a variety of
ethnic, geographical and sectarian backgrounds. It is also important to note
that the matter of which identity –
religious, ethnic, national, racial or immigrant – is given the most importance
when forming a personal identity. In the context of the veil, this becomes the
question of who or what a Muslim woman subscribes to when she decides to “don or
decline the hijab” – her family, her community, her personal
interpretation of the religion, or another source? Efforts are made by the
author to categorize and try to make sense of the varying shades of the veil –
looking at socio-economic background, marital status, mother/aunt’s influence
are just some of the ways.
Similarly, she tries to draw links
between knowledge of Islam and practice of faith. Here, data on veiled women is
juxtaposed with that on women who do not veil – data especially on issues such
as family and community support and respect of the veil, as well as acceptance
of the decision not to wear the veil. An interesting issue which arises here is
that of justifying the veil as an Islamic requirement, and the ability to
specifically mention verses in the Qur’an, and Hadith, that require a Muslim
woman to cover her head. This comes with the understanding that when Muslim
women in North America adopt the veil, she says, they become even more “visible”
than before. The section entitled “The Mainstream Gaze” deals with the issue of
the veil as an ostensible mark of a different culture and religion in a society
that is portrayed as predominantly uncomfortable with such open banners of
declaration, especially of a faith they think is “extremist”.
The idea of a sense of alienation
in Diaspora and the difficult question of identity is what ultimately shapes the
discourse of this chapter and later chapters. Ideas in feminism, or rather,
western feminism that tends towards total equality of men and women, are
discussed – perhaps in an attempt to show the reader that this is not the only
“reality” that exists for many women around the world.
Chapter 4: “Voices of Muslim
Women” by Sheila McDonough
This chapter, as indicated by its
title, contains to a large extent only first-person, direct accounts of Muslim
women in Canada who “responded to highlight the factors that had led to her
decision either to wear or not to wear the hijab.” The interviews are
carried out as a project of the Canadian council for Muslim women, an
institution that is mentioned time and again throughout this book as an umbrella
to the anthropological study, scholarly discourse and research that is presented
in the book.
The seven women who contribute to
this study come from a variety of theosophical, spiritual and ideological
backgrounds. While one understood the veil as a requirement in Islam that she
had practiced all her adult life, another was inspired to do so after returning
from hajj. Another account deals with how the pressure of alienation had
first led a woman to adopt the veil, which she later discarded as her knowledge
of the history of veiling practices, to discriminate between free and slave
women, increased. Many women who took up veiling at a later point in their life
give no explanation, as such, for doing so, but defend it as a right that should
not really need explanation in the first place. Finally, one informant stated
that she had adopted the veil as a semi- socio-political strategy, and welcomed
the attention it received as an opportunity to discuss Islam publicly. After a
certain amount of time, however, she claims that she took “evidence of alleged
piety out of the public realm” by becoming more lax about the veil.
Chapter 5: “Perceptions of the hijab in Canada” by Sheila McDonough
McDonough presents the concluding
chapter to this section by closely studying some of the historical, political
and social factors in the Canadian community that could possibly help to explain
negative reactions to the practice of veiling in Islam. The prevalent attitudes
that Muslim women professed to encounter in their dealings with non-Muslims are
reiterated in this chapter by referring to paradigms set by popular literature
and media – most of which are quite misguided and harsh in nature, to say the
least. By quoting Said time and again, McDonough defines the parameters of her
paper as an intrusive look at Orientalism as it exists in Western societies
today; although her debate is nowhere near as cutting and critical of the
Orientalist outlook as is Said’s.
The debate of the veil arose from
certain events that took place in Canada and other countries in the West that
made it to the mainstream news such as the banning of head scarves from schools.
McDonough refers to Canada’s history of rule under the Roman Catholic Church and
the struggle to break canonical power as a possible explanation for distrust of
any sign of religious orthodoxy. She cites history of the suffrage movement in
Britain and Canada and the hard-won rights of women who might feel that the
hijab is a step back to extremism and gender inequality. Yet her concluding
remarks also discuss Canada’s legacy as a diverse community of immigrants from
various geographical regions, ethnicities, cultures and religions who have come
to terms with their differences and have come to accept diversity. Canada, she
claims, has not forgotten its origins in the context of “immigrants fleeing
poverty and oppression in Europe” which is why when legislature ultimately
allows Muslim women to wear the hijab in school and court, it is mainly
motivated by a concern for human rights.
Part II: Women Revising Texts and
the Veiling Discourse
Chapter 6: “Muslim Women and
Islamic Religious Tradition: A Historical Overview and Contemporary Issues” by
Sajida S. Alvi
The latter portion of this book
goes beyond anthropological discourse and enters the forum of Islamic exegesis.
Alvi presents her chapter as an introduction to the remaining two chapters which
deal exclusively with Qur’anic verses and Hadith, respectively. The chapter
therefore lays down a foundation of the history of Islam, articles of faith, the
life of the Prophet and even introduces the reader to diverging schools of
thought.
The chapter is divided into several
small sections.
Section I, titled “Islamic
religious tradition” deals with the language of monotheism, and conceptualizes
the supremacy of the word of God in Islam. “Islamic Law” introduces the reader
to the Qur’an, Hadith, Sunnah and the shari‘ah, as well as Sufism, in the
following section.
Section II highlights the status of
women in Islam, drawing on references to women in the Qur’anic text as well as
poetry and art in Muslim history, and their historical role in society.
Section III combines ideas in the
first two sections by dealing with issues of “social justice”, especially with
regards to issues of testimony in Islamic law, and the misuse of religion in
attempts to purge society by, literally, veiling women off from the public
sphere. The old discouragement of reinterpretation of the Islamic texts, as well
as a shift in public funding in Muslim countries to a more secular form of
education contribute as debilitating factors to Islamic scholarly work.
Chapter 7: “Women’s Modesty in
Qur’anic Commentaries: The Founding Discourse” by Soraya Hajjaji-Jarrah
As mentioned before, this chapter
deals almost exclusively with the content of the Qur’an regarding the hijab.
Hajjaji-Jarrah begins her discussion by briefly mentioning tafsir, and
cites the tafsir of al-Tabari of the 10th century and al-Razi,
13th century as the central focus of her debate.
The verses are examined by both
deconstruction and reference to specific words and how they have been used in
other places in the Quran (hijab, zinah, zahara and
khumur) as well as the context in which the verse was revealed. Reference to
historic texts such as Kitab al-Tabaqat al-Kubra to draw on how the
hijab was practiced in early Muslim times also lends the element of Sunnah
to the debate.
Closing remarks mention that
although these ideas, formulated in the bests of interest, have predominated
Muslim thought, the same traditional approach has also given rise to the
opinions of scholars such as Muhammad Shahrur of Syria, and Fatima Mernissi of
Morocco, who have taken a radically opposing view of the matter of veiling, much
of which has inspired the discourse in this book.
Chapter
8: “Hijab according to the Hadith: Text and Interpretation” by L. Clarke.
The final chapter in this book
deals with the Islamic text from which most injunctions for women to veil are
quoted – the Hadith. Clarke explains briefly methods of collection, the concept
of isnad, and verification; and begins her argument by discussing how
interpretation itself was, and is, never free from the social paradigms it is
set in.
The glaring lack of canonical
Hadith on the issue of covering the head and the hair is taken as indication of
it being more a construct of culture than a requirement of religion. This,
considering how particular most Hadith are with the details of practicing
religion, is given considerable weight. The “forced interpretation” of scholars
such as Abu Da’ud only seems to add dimension to the argument that there may
have been underlying motives to propagating the hijab in Islam.
Finally, she states how the only
opposition has come from the Orientalists, who seem to have used the conflicts
in interpretation and the seemingly totalitarian and misogynist dictum to
criticize Islam itself. Clarke concludes her paper by calling for a more
holistic approach to sift through not only the various Hadith and legitimize
them on the basis of their relation to the corpus of Islamic texts, but also to
examine interpretation in the light of the social forces that may have led to
certain paradigms and methods of conceptualization and understanding.
Criticism on The Muslim Veil in
North America
I - “A
Space for Diversity: North American Muslim Women’s Hijab”
by Zeina Zaatari
Zaatari remarks that the book could
have been made more useful to the reader by clarifying certain contradictions in
the anthropological findings of the chapters one and three, where the former
claims that the women who took up the hijab argued their right to do so
by quoting the Qur’an and the Hadith, while the latter states that only about
37% of the women surveyed were able to identify the relevant texts. She
therefore expresses the need for a conclusive chapter. She also criticizes,
justifiably, the paradigms set in the chapter titled “Perceptions of the
hijab in Canada” as an attempt to soften and depoliticize racism and
discriminatory propaganda.
She also feels that the last chapter, by Clarke, was a little difficult to
follow in its construction and content, and yet accepts that no literature on
the Hadith is easy to follow, given all that one must take into consideration
while examining the vast corpus of the Hadith compilations. The rest of her
article is full of praises for the book, summed up neatly in her conclusion
where she comments “I was elated to see that the authors did not choose a
“veiled woman” on the book cover.” Personally, so was I.
II- “The Muslim Veil in North
America: Issues and Debates” by Dr. Ahmad Shafaat
Shafaat is of the opinion that “no
religious discourse is worth much unless it also includes a discussion of how
people should behave…had the book been written as a purely sociological or
anthropological study, this question could have been avoided.” Unfortunately for
Shafaat, it was intended as a socio-anthropological study, amongst other
things. If a piece of literature changes the way a person might think about
their religion, that does not compel the writer to make normative judgments of
how people should and shouldn’t behave.
His other contention is that the
book is largely biased, and women who “believed” in the hijab should have
been represented not just as anthropological informants, but as scholars writing
the articles. However the Traditionalist point of view was quite adequately
represented by a host of scholars, not least of whom were figures like al-Tabari
and al-Razi, in Soraya Hajjaji-Jarrah article. While he agrees that “background
and assumptions” can enter scholarly discourse, he challenges the idea that all
interpretations are “equally valid”. However, the difference between the
influence of social constructs on writers who support the veil, including
traditional, modernist, or conservative scholars, and their influence on the
women who wrote this book is unclear; and hence so is the need to dismiss one as
“biased” and accept the other as a “valid” interpretation.
He disagrees with the idea that the
Muslim community in North America is in a position to assimilate at this point
in its history, much less come to a consensus of opinion on an issue such as the hijab. The Qur’anic injunction to cover the bosom/neckline translates
very clearly and obviously to an order to cover one’s head. He critiques the
idea of several “viable” interpretations as a concept born in the confused and
tangled Christian history of a Bible that has “no point of view of its own”, was
written by several different writers, was abused by canonical figures etc. The
rest of his argument in this context is a slightly confused battle between
Christianity and Islam, where at one point he states that Islamic clerics do not
claim priestly infallibility (unlike the Christian clergy), that the Qur’an is
open to interpretation, however the only valid interpretation is that of certain
scholars.
Shafaat has critiqued
Hajjaji-Jarrah and Clarke, especially, on matters of contextualization, taking a
stance that would relate back to early Islamic exegetes that favoured methods of
atomism by taking each verse on its own, in isolation. Also, women figures have
been misrepresented and taken to give undue meaning to certain ideas. The debate
over Hadith follows extensively, reinterpreting the very Hadith used by Clarke
to give different meanings.
There seems to be a constant
pressure on Muslim women, and not their male counterparts, to prove themselves
as pious and virtuous by donning the veil, and this is brought out beautifully
in the first part of the book. It is that very paradigm that brings out the
glaring sexism that Islam has been reduced to today. While focusing on political
issues might have given the constructs more depth and dimension, it would shift
focus from the flaws within Muslim discourse itself. The Muslim Veil is a
bold assertion that the hijab, like all other constructs, is still very
much open to debate.
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