A World Where Womanhood Reigns Supreme

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A World Where Womanhood Reigns Supreme

Impact International

 

Mary Walker

 

The Seeds of My Own Re-evaluations

 

 

When I joined the team of "Living Islam" two years ago, my perception of Islam was dominated by prejudice and ignorance, and I found its treatment of women abhorrent. To me the veil symbolised the oppression of women, making them invisible, anonymous and voiceless, and the cause of this oppression lay in the will to perpetuate the family and maintain a patriarchal framework - the very basis of an Islamic Society. I thought women were entirely submerged by divine justification of their role as wife and mother.

 

"Living Islam" was filmed over two years in 19 different countries and on location I was a lone female in an otherwise male team. I was aware that I especially should behave appropriately. In my mind, women were to be neither seen nor heard. My first trip took me to Mali - to an untypical Muslim community in the bush. Making sure to cover every bit of naked flesh while the men wandered around in short sleeves, I wondered what rooms I was permitted to enter and who I was permitted to talk to. But I also wondered whether my new-found meekness was not in part a reaction to the overpowering atmosphere of the patriarchal society I found my self in. Was this how Muslim women felt - resignation in the face of impossible odds?

 

The first Muslim woman I met in Mali was far removed from my preconception about the Muslim female. She was the wife of a Shaikh dedicated to converting pagan villagers to Islam. A sophisticated, well-educated woman, previously married to a diplomat, she had renounced a Western lifestyle for a life in purdah. In my eyes she had sentenced herself to life imprisonment. But here was no prisoner, no poor downtrodden slave. A sharp intelligent and influential woman stood before me, clearly the one "who wore trousers" round here. Here seclusion gave her a status of honour and allowed her to exercise control from behind closed doors without confrontation. She was the bargainer, the head of the household, and the manager of her husbands affairs and schedule.

 

The emancipated woman in the West faces the conflict between confirmation of her femininity and the privileges that she associates with it, and repudiation of the confines of her female role and all the limitations that men want her to assume. From where I stood, this woman had transformed those limitations into privileges.

 

On my next trip to northern Nigeria I met two more women who would alter my views even further. These were two women from the household of Shaikh Zakzaky, a fervent preacher of Jihad who urges his supporters to follow the example of Iran and replace the imperialistic western regime with an Islamic state. Zeenah Ibraheem, Zakzaky's wife and Fatima Yunus, her friend, had agreed to be interviewed about the role of women in Islam. They were in purdah and would only speak to another woman. The producer asked me to interview them. I was nervous apart from the fact that I had never interviewed anyone before. I was worried that my feminist sympathies would antagonise the women. But it was precisely these sympathies that Zeenah and Fatima themselves were questioning. Once again, the women were educated and articulate. And once again they had rejected the Western lifestyle which I considered so superior to Islam in its treatment of women.

 

As I took my seat on a carpet in the courtyard, the invisible boundary between men and women was a welcome partition, and within this boundary womanhood reigned supreme. This was a sharp contrast with the feelings from the previous days in locations where my presence had been acceptable only as an "honorary man". We had been filming the medieval theatrics of the 'Salla' celebrations that marked the end of Ramadan. Men, men, men everywhere: 500,000 men gathered for prayer on the morning of the Salla, men pouring into the inner courtyard of the Emirof Kano's inner courtyard to pay homage - I was grateful to be allowed to witness these events but at what price? The complete annihilation of my female identity?

 

But now. I was taking the reins because of my sex. No more the feeling of inferiority and exclusion, as a novice in things Islamic surrounded by a team of experts, as a woman in a patriarchal society. Now the men were excluded. Apart from the cameraman and sound recordist, they were encouraged to stand well back. The cameraman covered his head and the camera with a black cloth - his very own veil. I was now in a world where the men had

no voice.

 

The women talked and in their answers I saw the seeds of my own re-evalutions.

 

They argued that the veil signified their rejection of an unacceptable system of values which debased women while Islam elevated women to a position of honour and respect. "It is not liberation where you say women should go naked. It is just oppression, because men want to see them naked." Just as to us the veil represents Muslim oppression, to them miniskirts and plunging necklines represent oppression. They said that men are cheating women in the West. They let us believe we're liberated but enslave us to the male gaze. However much I insist on the right to choose what I wear, I cannot deny that the choice is often dictated by what will make my body more attractive to men. Women cannot separate their identity from their appearance and so we remain trapped in the traditional feminine world, where the rules are written by men.

 

By choosing to wear the veil, these women were making a conscious decision to define their role in society and their relationship with men. That relationship appeared to be based more on exchange and mutual respect (a respect that was often lacking in the personal relationships I saw in the West), than the master/servant scenario I had anticipated. The Veil to them signified visual confirmation of their religious commitment, in which men and women were united, and for Zeenah and Fatima an even stronger commitment to a political ideal.

 

So were my notions of oppression in the form of the veil disqualified? If my definition of equality was free will then I could no longer define that oppression as a symptom of Islam. The women had all exercised their right to choose. To some extent, they were freer than me - I had less control over my destiny. I could no longer point at them and say they were oppressed and I was not. my life was influenced by male approval as theirs - but the element of choice had been taken out of mine. their situations and their arguments had, after all, served to highlight shortcomings in my view of my own liberty.

 

 

Mary Walker was Production Coordinator on the BBC2 series "Living Islam".

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Going under cover: the Jewish women who are taking the veil

Sheera Frenkel in Beit Shemesh, Israel

 

Several cars slow and one stops when Sarah walks down the street in her home town of Beit Shemesh, an ultra-orthodox Jewish enclave west of Jerusalem.

 

On this morning, the streets teem with women herding their children to school in the modest garb and head-coverings befitting their religious beliefs. For years, Sarah walked among them similarly dressed, but today a dark cloth is secured across her face, hiding everything save her eyes. It resembles the head-to-toe covering that is associated with religious Muslim women in the Gulf States.

 

“People in cars driving by often stop and stare. Some people are rude — they shout things at me because they think I am Arab,” said Sarah (not her real name).

 

Sarah is part of a budding movement of about 100 Jewish women in this city who have begun covering their bodies. Some cover just their hair and neck; others wrap their entire face, save their eyes, with the loose cloth. They call their head-covering a sal, refusing to acknowledge the resemblance to its Muslim twin, the hijab. In Beit Shemesh, the political line is strictly right wing, with many of the religious leaders advocating expulsion of Arabs from the biblical boundaries of the land of Israel. But the two communities may have more in common than they think.

 

Orthodox Jewish women have long concealed their hair with a scarf or wig upon marriage. Muslim women, who don a covering upon reaching puberty, traditionally sheath their necks as well as their hair. Depending on the country, the covering could be fashioned into a number of variations such as the chador, a loose cloak worn by women in Iran, or the burka, an enveloping garment that allows only for mesh netting over the eyes, worn in Afghanistan.

 

“The full body, or full face covering that people think is only part of the Arab world actually started with Jewish women,” said a woman who asked to be identified by her first initial, M.

 

“Muslim women are imitating Jews to try to gain God's favour with modesty. The truth is that the women of Israel are lessening in God's eyes because the Arabs are more modest in dress. If the Jews want to conquer the Arabs in this land they must enhance their modesty,” added M, who covered her face for over a year, but currently wears just a loose cloak over her garments.

 

The first time that M saw a sal was at the Western Wall, one of the holiest Jewish sites. “I saw a woman who looked like an Arab and I was scared. I got near her, to try to determine why she was there, and saw that she was praying in Hebrew. I began to talk to her and became curious and then attended her classes,” she said.

 

The woman M met that day was a religious instructor in Beit Shemesh, and the founder of the sal style. “We have been criticised by so many in the community who see what we are doing as the opposite of Jewish law. Many women have stopped wearing the sal because of pressure from their husbands or rabbis,” said M, who adds that her family persuaded her to stop wearing the garment.

 

Part of Jewish religious teaching states that a woman should not draw unnecessary attention to herself — a rule that some rabbis feel the sal breaches, said Chevy Weiss, a liaison between the religious community in Beit Shemesh and its leadership. “If that is what these women need to do to feel a stronger connection to God, I have respect for them,” she said.

 

For Sarah, wearing the sal is worth the stares and occasional harassment. “In my heart I know this is what God wants me to wear. God willing, more women will see the truth.”

 

Dressing down

 

— Hair covering among Jewish women can be traced to Jewish law. The 13th-century scholar Moses Maimonides is quoted in the Mishneh Torah as stating that the covering of a woman’s hair is from the teachings handed down to the biblical figure of Moses, or rather from the Old Testament.

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Religious head covering: hijabs, sais, scarves and sexual insecurities

 

Libby Purves

 

In Beit Shemesh, a strict orthodox enclave in Israel, ever more Jewish women have taken to covering up - not just hair and neck but in some cases the whole head. They call it a sai rather than a (Muslim) hijab, but one worryingly says "The truth is that the women of Israel are lessening in God's eyes because the Arabs are more modest in dress. If the Jews want to conquer the Arabs in this land they must enhance their modesty,”

 

The Jewish Chronicle columnist speaks strongly against the practice: "They are making themselves invisible, effectively non-persons. Modesty, for them, is not participation in the world, while de-emphasising their physicality — as it is in halachah — but complete self-effacement, to the point of self-obliteration. They have no faces". Women retaliate. Some claim tradition. Other sites again say it is parallel to an eating disorder, denying the body to make it disappear.

 

Covering up women, however, has a history as old as religion. In the European medieval period women wore their hair loose when unmarried but once married covered it in a linen wrap. Among the stricter Plymouth Brethren to this day, the 'sistern' must cover their heads. Joanna Bourke writes interestingly in the Times. And most modern women would ask why it is that they must hide from men: have men no self-control? Whereon we discover that the male hijab is gathering favour among some Muslims, followers of strict advice on websites like Muttaqun. A thoughtful piece in the Guardian refers to this. While the prevailing sluttiness and exhibitionism of much Western dress is not universally admired, the sense of mutual hiding and shame in these sites is profoundly depressing...