To Veil or Not to Veil: Muslim Women Writers Speak Their Rights

Abstract

MUSLIM WOMEN FROM EX-COLONIAL COUNTRIES, whether Commonwealth or not, from cultures as diverse as India, Iran, and Iraq, have been writing in a feminist mode and often in English since the early turn of the century. I use the word 'feminist' with caution. Roushan Jahan, the editor of one of the earliest 'feminist utopias' conceived in India, Rokeya Hossain's Sultana's Dream (1905), urges this caution. Jahan writes: One hesitates to use a term that is not context free and does mean different things to different people.1 Jahan uses the word to describe the liberated attitude of Hossain (1880-1932) in asking for men to go into seclusion while women go to war. I use 'feminist' to describe the writings of women who are consistently resisting dominant hegemonies and writing against the grain, whether of Islam or that of Western attitudes, writings/or their cultural rights. Several of the books I examine, from Sultana 's Dream and Attia Hosein's Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961) to Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran (2004), Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis (2003), and Samina Ali's Madras on Rainy Days (2004), all have ambivalent attitudes towards Islam and the practice of it. In some situations, it could mean that they speak for or against the veil. In other situations, it could mean the ability to speak out on their own and criticize Islam, as in Taslima Nasrin's Shame (!997)· All these works require us to consider differential cultural rights as we read them, where the right to be different is exercised.2The fact that women on the Indian subcontinent and in the Middle East have been writing for and about their rights to do as they deem liberatory for them can be seen as the effect of British colonialism and education, or even just the effect of the presence of westernization. For instance, Iran was never colonized by the British, but the British presence was felt acutely from the early 1900s onwards. The British presence on the subcontinent and in the Middle East had a great effect on the roles of women and on the education of the populace in general. Although colonized for hundreds of years, countries like India came to modernization after the industrial revolution in Britain. With this modernization and westernization came the 'unveiling', as it were, of women and their greater freedom to speak out. In fact, it was their menfolk who encouraged many of the leading feminist writers at the turn of the 1900s and even encouraged them to free themselves from cultural restraints. Two examples from Roushan Jahan's edition of Rokeya Hossain's Sultana's Dream come to mind: she writes about how Hossain wrote in English to demonstrate her proficiency in English to her husband, and Hanna Papanek, in the Afterword to that work, writes about how a woman named Hamida Khala was devoted to purdah, but her husband finally made her throw her burqa out the train window because he wanted her to be civilized. These notions were no doubt coming from exposure to the British.It is interesting to see how, with current exposure to 'the West', as diaspora peoples, or as peoples resisting the influence of the West on their countries today, women in these parts of the world have begun to espouse their right to remain veiled and are speaking out for laws that 'Western' feminists today or previous colonizers would have considered oppressive. This tum of events is indeed fascinating, where the outspoken Muslim women writers are speaking out for their cultural rights - rights that would previously not have been considered 'rights' but as forms of oppression. At the same time, they are also criticizing their culture and sometimes speaking out against fundamentalist Islam. This raises a very interesting question regarding the 'Orientalism'3 of Western viewpoints - especially those of Western feminists who are unable to see how Muslim women might want to 'regress' to what the West considers 'oppression'. Interestingly, the wearing of the veil has become a statement of resistance to homogenizing Western influences. …