Stupid War of (Un)Covering
Hanan J. K.
Last Saturday, March 17th, On the Road, a small private bookshop in Barcelona organised an interdisciplinary encounter to debate the questions of feminism and Islamic veil. The event was attended by academics, activists, students, artists and an elderly lady who lives next-door. The debate was opened and lead by translator and academic Fatima El Bejjaji, specialised in arabic studies, of Moroccan origins and feminist by formation. Fatima carried out the talk under the tittle: What Lies behind the Veil? The audience was cheerfully interested in learning about the answer, however the answer Fatima proposed was not what the majority expected. Most of the attendants expected Fatima to explain the origins, the reasons why Muslim women wear veil, while Fatima playfully turned the tables on her audience by responding to what is behind the CONTROVERSY of the veil in the West.
Most of the attending Westerners find the veil controversial as it implies the subjugation of women under patriarchal, misogynist religious faith, and therefore; they were surprised when Fatima, righteously, suggested that the controversy was in fact in the attitude towards the veil and not in the veil itself, as she puts it: the question lies in uncovering the female body rather than in the cover itself. The friendly atmosphere and the speaker’s wit to guide the conversation made the debate quite an amusing opportunity to bring up the subjects like ideology, colonialism and feminism into a sincere intercultural experience far from confrontation and indoctrination. The opportunity to bring up such questions into civil public debate in times of racism and Islamophobia is triumph. However, the question remained unanswered, why do some westerners and some feminisms see in the veil an instrument to subjugate women rather than an instrument to empower women in defining and highlighting their identity?
There is no doubt that many women around the world are illegitimately forced to wear the veil against their will and they are either forced by their families, social contexts or the state. It is also true that the reasons behind the legislations enacting the veil are questionable. Nevertheless among the top ten most powerful women in the Arab world in 2017, three are wearing the veil, according to the Gulf News newspaper. Women wearing veil are also occupying high offices in international banking, governments, higher eduction, literary and cultural productions. Feminist Muslim scholars are introducing women’s voice into Sharia’s authorship and Muslim women living in Muslim countries or Europe and the US are willingly embracing the veil and symbol of their cultural and historical heritage, not to mention their political positioning to combat racism, xenophobia and Islamophobia such as the work of the Muslim American artist Mona Haydar
http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOX9O_kVPeo&t=106s
And yet a huge public debate held by international feminist organisations such as Femen refuse to acknowledge that the veil can legitimately be an ideological statement that does not necessarily mean sexist or patriarchal. Covering my own body/head is as legitimate as uncovering it, because, in words of Femen slogan, my body, my manifesto!
The classical claim that covered women represent the values that feminism fought against for decades is certainly twisted logic. Feminism fought and still fights for equality and power to freely build one’s own subjectivity against patriarchy which basically establishes human male superiority over all living beings. Therefore; if the veil was a personal choice and an instrument of empowerment, then the veil can only represent what its holder wants to express.
The other classical claim of unveiling Muslim women was to save them from their patriarchal and dictatorial parents or political regime, which was one of the top three reasons to invade Iraq and start a war on Afghanistan, such claim expresses nothing more than sexism and colonial sense of superiority. Saving and protecting women is the patriarchal moto par excellence and invading a territory to uplift the state of its inhabitants because they are ‘unable’ or to do so is once more the claim of the colonial spirit.
A different approach to the controversy of the veil in the West is suggested by Slavoj Zizek, in which he argues that the problematic of the veil lies in the gaze of the covered face of a woman wearing the veil. Looking at it from a psychoanalytical point of view, the veil is like a mask behind which someone hides and the gaze of the covered woman to the uncovered woman is what scares the most, because it implies the look of otherness that we previously constructed under the masks. In other words, If you lift the cover of a veiled woman she can be something/one else, a different reality from the cover, but the face of the uncovered woman, which is supposed to reveal her identity, becomes the ultimate mask that might “engenders a third reality which is not the reality of the face hidden beneath”. Simplifying, the veil disrupts the reality that we believe we have, it is the uncertainty of the uncovered body about its ideological nakedness that implies the presence of the unknown otherness within us which we try so hard to avoid.
Raul Ganteng ha dit
May i ask? is this blog using Spanish..Greetings from Indonesia.Thank you
Mònica ha dit
This blog is multilingual. We use all the languages we know.
Pak Datuk ha dit
Good answer Monica. Thank You
Raul Ganteng ha dit
Hai Monica
Oh sorry I’m wrong, thank you for the explanation
Viomagz ha dit
I am also from Indonesia, correct as you said is this Spanish? apparently this blog is a multi-language blog. Great