Resurgence of the veil

DURING the first half of the 20th century, millions of Muslim women decided to abandon the head coverings their mothers had used; in the second half of the century, millions of Muslim women resumed wearing the veil.

How and why these fluctuations of personal habit affected so many across the Muslim world is the question Leila Ahmed sets herself. In her book A Quiet Revolution , she focuses on Egypt, which was a key influence in both the unveiling and the veiling, to trace the many meanings which this piece of cloth has acquired.
It`s an acute study of how issues of political power and empire interact with women`s own claims to autonomy within families and communities. Ahmed beds her analysis into the wider political currents of Egypt without ever losing sight of women`s own interpretations of what they were doing and why.
What adds force to the analysis is the sense that the book has been a journey of personal discovery for Ahmed, a Harvard academic. She grew up in Cairo in the 1940s, and was raised by a generation of women who never wore the veil; she absorbed from them the assumption that the veil was backward, a restriction of female autonomy. Like many Muslim women of her generation, the veil`s reappearance has been shocking, unexpected and regarded as a step backwards. Writing the book has forced her to reassess such assumptions, and come to a new, more positive understanding of the veil.
The book starts at the height of British imperialism in the late 19th century when Lord Cromer effectively ruled the protectorate of Egypt. Many of the issues raised in that time have uncanny resonances with the recent debate. In 1899 Qasim Amin published The Liberation of Women , which provoked a furore: he argued that European civilisation was clearly superior to that of Egypt; if women were not veiled in Europe, then it was clearly not necessary. In Ahmed`s words, he claimed that “Muslim societies are to be counted as advanced or backward by the extent to which they abandoned their native practices, symbolised by the veil”.
Following Amin, huge numbers of Egyptians westernised their furniture, their cities, their houses and their clothing. Amin wanted a profound transformation of Egyptian society: “It is impossible to breed successful men if they do not have mothers capable of raising them to be successful,” he wrote, making very clear that liberation of women was a means to achieving a better sort of man. At the heart of Amin`s “divided consciousness” as a Europeanised Egyptian was a modernisation strategy for the nation — and veiling was a crucial symbol.
Cromer, on completion of his term in office, boasted that he had “practically abolished” primary education in the country. Yet in a bestselling book he expanded on the inferiority of the “dark-skinned Eastern” and on how Islam `degraded` women as exemplified by the practice of veiling. He set in train the notion of “saving brown women from brown men” (which, as Ahmed points out, was promoted by both Cherie Blair and Laura Bush ahead of the US invasion of Afghanistan).
For millions of Egyptian women, abandoning the veil was a statement of aspiration to modernity and held out the promise of education and work. It was not related, insists Ahmed, to secularisation; religious women were as likely to go unveiled as the less devout.
What turned this social trend around was the trauma of the Arab-Israeli wars in 1967 and 1973. The humiliating defeats of the Arabs were perceived as a punishment by Allah and led to a renewed religiosity. Meanwhile an alternative idea of modernisation strategy took hold — the Muslim Brotherhood`s demand for a more energetic religious practice. As Amin had once done, the Brotherhood called for a profound transformation of Egyptian society; as part of this political project, the veil would again become a central symbol. — The Guardian, London