So much of Western culture prizes extraversion, speed, noise, the outward journey and the surfaces of things very highly. Whatever it can, it turns into a commodity, even what is priceless…the waters, the skies, the bodies of the creatures, the bodies of human beings. In the West, one is in the marketplace and the marketplace is expected always to reside in one. Children are taught from a young age to market themselves and to shape their thoughts and hearts to such an end. Freedom, they are told, resides in the power to have many choices of things: to buy or do or work at or go to or wear or drive.
The ones who flow more naturally to this Western energy fit well, I suppose. But they are not going to be like the "lame and dreamy goat" of whom Rumi speaks, the one who leads others on a deep and inward journey to the Divine. In the West, what leads inward, to meditation on the essential mystery and source of existence (Allah), to the very center of being, becomes suspect, but the hunger for it blazes up nonetheless, even in those unconscious of it.
It is bold perhaps to say it this way, but I think that the whole Western world is hungry for the Veil, and hungry for the Veiled Woman, for she who cannot be stripped of mystery and sold to the highest bidder. Yet paradoxically, it wants to expose and investigate and leer at her who remains in dignified concealment, once-removed from manic consumption, gratuitous sexuality, and exploited soul-work.
The Veiled Woman of Islam maddens, terrifies, and attracts the West for it is she who seems to say "No" to trivialized life and to spiritual bankruptcy and means it. The West distrusts this more than anything, to be face to face with the confidence of the god-infused. If she’s under the veil, Western reasoning goes, she must be a slave. If she’s under the veil, she must be invisible, mute, and second-class. If she’s under the veil, she must be powerless, a pawn to archaic dogma.
But none of these assumptions is automatically true, no more than it would be to say that a woman in tight blue jeans, full makeup, and the most current hairstyle is "liberated" of anything. Context and individual interpretation must be considered always.
If for one moment, a person who denigrates the veil could think of it as a symbol of the inner journey, of a secret sisterhood, of the sheltering pilgrim’s cloak, or the bride’s modest and joyful raiment. What a leap! What a leap out of the cultural prison of Western mindset, a mindset which delegates that everyone in the world must want to be just like it is. And what an opportunity Islam gives the imagination to live its forms, and to keep leaping into deeper and deeper states of bliss.
The devout Muslima still has what very few in the Western world have, a sacred tradition with a visible and beautiful symbol of her inclusion in it. Hijab, they say, began with Mohammed (Peace be upon him) who borrowed it from Persia and Byzantium to protect and distinguish his wives. Veils became signs of spiritual prestige and responsibility and the other women admired this garb and adopted it. To Islam’s credit, they were allowed, for Mohammed (PBUH) was not interested in promoting unfairness or dissension. Islam seeks fairness, certainly.
Furthermore, one can look long and hard for instances where the Prophet (PBUH) demeaned women or kept himself apart from them in some strange or unnatural way, but nothing of the sort emerges. He died with his head in the lap of his wife Aisha, comforted and sustained by her love, no more beautiful a testament to his regard for woman’s ability to soothe and heal. That the West does not for the most part know much about Mohammed (PBUH) and women is in itself one more tragic veil which it pulls over itself to no good end.
For many years, I’ve noted with some chagrin, the hypocrisy of the West in refusing to acknowledge its own invisible "veiling" techniques. For instance, the most famous princess of Islam in the Western imagination is the one allegedly beheaded for adultery. "How disgusting, how barbaric, how Other," says the West, quick to point the finger.
Simultaneously, however, the West’s most famous princess, England’s Princess Diana, tried to starve herself to death, repeatedly cut her own arms, and flung herself pregnant down palace stairs. Yet few openly censored her husband (the self-confessed adulterer) who agreed to silence his wife’s psychological traumas for the good of monarchy. Had Princess Di been free of her "veil," the doll-like and unnatural persona she was forced to don, her young life might have been empowered, not stultified. At her death, I also saw the Western tabloids ignore the fact that Princess Di’s last and happiest relationship was with an Arab man. This they marginalized or cast aspersions on, automatically.
Imagine had she reverted to Islam and found strength in it!
The missed point for many Westerners is that one can indeed find her strength from being in accord with Allah (God) and from having the power to veil, sanctioned by a wise traditional culture. Wearing the veil, for those who embrace it, can be a privilege and a liberation.
In her book, Grandmother’s Secrets, Rosina-Fawzia Al-Rawi tells of her strong, wise, centered grandmother and the most pleasing of sisterhoods that an Iraqi woman could be part of, that of being a veiled woman among veiled women, confidently coming and going in the street, knowing who you are and what you’re doing, moving freely - the Observer Unobserved, powerful with belonging to a family, to a culture, and to Islam. Far from having been de-personalized, de-racinated or stripped of her individuality, Fawzia’s grandmother found every means of living fully and richly within her cultural forms.
And how many women in the West can say, like Al-Rawi, that they were offered something as meaningful and mysterious as an abaya (veil) upon being visited by their first menstrual period? Or were encircled by their sisters, girl cousins, girlfriends, aunts, mother, and grandmothers at this time, and celebrated with special foods and a special women’s dance (rahil) just for them…
Why would the West which prides itself on championing liberated women disparage anything so culturally lovely, so celebratory, so nourishing of the feminine soul? Does it realize that what the veil often veils is something deeply valued by those who wear it? To tear away at the veil so abruptly and forcibly (as Attaturk literally did in Turkey) can also tear at the root system of women’s cultural-spiritual lives and at their sense of physical well-being.
It amuses me to think that some of the same thinking which wished to strip women of their brassieres in the sixties and seventies is still employed in thinking about the veil. Is it any wonder such reasoning meets with resistance?
Many women liked their brassieres, finding them supportive, protective, and friendly, indispensable really. And to make them symbols when they were more useful as undergarments made little sense to people. And vice versa. Yet both ways function at times. For so it is with the veil, which can be appreciated as both symbolic when discussed philosophically and also as a culturally comfortable and useful garment, something which aids and abets the person wearing it, protecting her from commodification, sexual insult and undesired exposure.
Surely, there is no fair reason to pick on the veil any more. If it seems medieval or cumbersome or sanctioned by a Power which offends, then let those persons look to their own lives and to whatever it is that they themselves have hidden wrongly. If it is cloaked feminine power, abused and with its spiritual tongue muted, it won’t surprise me. Let such ones cease to worry about those Muslimas who are in joyful "slavery" to Allah and rather worry about women who are slaves to root-lessness, commodification and the self-critical notions in which their culture shrouds them.
*Patricia Catto is an Associate Professor of Liberal Arts in the United States. Her concentration has been on world religion and wisdom literatures. She found her way slowly but surely to Islam over a period of 17 years and continues in her study of its many facets
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