‘Don’t let her lack of a headscarf and her donning a bikini in public fool you. Miss Michigan USA, Rimah (sic) Fakih is a Muslim activist and propagandist extraordinaire’ (Schlussel 2010).
So wrote ultra-conservative commentator Debbie Schlussel in her blog about Rima Fakih, the Arab American woman who won the title of Miss USA in May 2010. Schlussel’s site is not for the faint-hearted, calling Fakih ‘Miss Hezbollah USA’ and ‘Miss Hezbo’ on account of the unlikely winner’s background. Not enough that she is Lebanese Muslim, but a Shi’a from the south had the right wing commentariat quaking in their high heels.
Aside from the primitive racism encased in Schlussel’s bilious commentary, her mention of both headscarf and bikini in the same sentence perfectly encapsulates the delimits of Western discourse about Muslim women. As Australian activist and theorist Anne Aly argues, ‘unlike members of any other religious group, a Muslim woman’s character and identity will almost always be brought into question based on what she wears, or does not wear’ (Aly 2009: 22).
An optimistic reading of Fakih winning Miss USA is that she, like Barack Hussein Obama, has broken the glass ceiling. This might count towards further proof that America is truly a ‘post-racial’ state. First, an African American wins the US presidency, then an Arab American Muslim reigns supreme as Miss USA in her glittering tiara. What a shame that the latter contest is a sexist event that is all about objectifying women’s bodies and reducing their individual agency to how well the contestant can negotiate a catwalk in bikini and back-breaking heels.
Hijab Scene #1
‘You dress strange,’ said a tenth-grade boy with bright blue hair
to the new Muslim girl with the headscarf in homeroom,
his tongue-rings clicking on the ‘tr’ in ‘strange’.
(Kahf 2003: 41)
In the same tumultuous week as the Miss USA pageant, liberal feminists and Christian fundamentalists alike were urging a ban on the burqa and niqab in Australia. Following the lead of European states, there are similar calls here to institute a law that would forbid face veiling in public. By the end of April 2010, the Belgium parliament had agreed unanimously on a law that would ban full veiling in public, and in May, the French cabinet introduced a similar bill. If the French parliament agrees to this measure, wearing a burqa or a niqab could carry a fine. Women who break the law would have to pay a sum of 150 euro according to some reports, and men who force women to wear veils could face a year in prison and a 15,000 euro fine (Deutsche Welle 2010).
Why stop there? Can’t we fine men who tyrannise women in the workplace and harass them on the street? What about footballers who glass their girlfriends? And men of just about every persuasion who force women into all sorts of oppressive conditions, contexts and clothing, including politicians, religious leaders, advertisers and fashion designers?
In addition to Belgium and France, several bills banning face veils are being prepared simultaneously in the Netherlands, with schools and the public sector being especially targeted. Right-wing politician Geert Wilders is pushing hard for a ban on veils and Italy’s Equality Minister Mara Carfagna wants to write an explicit ban on the burqa into laws on the ‘protection of the public order’. Additionally, there are also four different bills from the governing coalition and the opposition for a ban of face veils, with penalties of up to two years in jail. The Austrian far-right Alliance for the Future of Austria party intends to introduce a bill to parliament calling for a burqa ban. Switzerland has already passed a ban on the construction of minarets, and is also calling for a ban on the burqa (Deutsche Welle 2010).
While the catch-cry ‘ban the burqa’ has populist currency in Europe with Sarkozy leading the charge in France, how many burqa-wearing women are there lurking in the back lanes of Sydney and Melbourne? While the niqab is more prevalent, it is rare enough to see a niqabi in the multiracial interstices of the largest metropolis in Australia. For its part, the burqa is quite specific to Afghanistan and represents the most potent symbol of the political supremacy of the Taliban, a movement of disaffected men that evolved out of the guerilla forces that fought the Russians, nurtured and supported by the American CIA. Having worked with Afghan women for over a decade in the suburbs of Sydney, I am yet to see an Afghan Australian woman wearing the burqa in Bankstown, Blacktown or beyond. So, if the burqa is specific to Afghanistan rather than Australia, how likely are the Taliban to take note of the local Western liberal feminist and the fundamentalist Christian in their call for a ban? Are you listening, Talibs?
As for the woman in the niqab, if indeed she has been forced against her will to wear this item of dress, how does a discussion conducted by mostly white elites in the media change the immediate situation of women living in oppressive conditions? And what to do with the woman who says she dons the niqab of her own volition? What exactly are we saying to her in the broad light of day? That she does not have the right to wear what she so chooses, because perhaps, she looks like ‘death out for a walk’ as Guy de Maupassant so morbidly put it a century or so ago?
‘I’ve seen it elsewhere around the world, but I didn’t expect to see it here. Certainly not on a hot summer’s afternoon at the Canberra Centre. But there it was. A ghostly figure walking towards me, clad from head to toe in a heavy black niqab, black gloves and dark shoes. She was trailing along behind her husband and four little children. The sight of this hideously shrouded figure in an Australian shopping mall is confronting and offensive. And it makes me angry, very angry’ (Haussegger 2010).
It is important to discern what is really at work in this ‘debate’ and who is leading and participating in it. If we are to speak of women’s political rights, is it at all possible to desist from making reductive assumptions about Muslim women in general, and scrutinise the political contexts where the burqa and the niqab are prevalent? That way, instead of drowning out and exhausting the women who are attempting to effect change from within, we might offer a different sort of solidarity that neither privileges the big white voice, nor makes a spectacle or rescue project out of the ‘other’ woman.
Hijab Scene #7
No, I’m not bald under the scarf
No, I’m not from that country
where women can’t drive cars
…
Yes, I speak English
Yes, I carry explosives
They’re called words
And if you don’t get up
Off your assumptions,
They’re going to blow you away
(Kahf 2003: 39)
The wearing of the burqa in Afghanistan, the chador in Iran, and the full covering of Saudi women all have historical and political contexts that are as markedly different from each other as are the histories of women’s evolving emancipation in European states. Many Afghan, Iranian and Arab feminists have been working under the most difficult of circumstances for decades to effect political and social change in terms of gender and anti-colonialism struggles. It doesn’t help that neo-colonialist feminist and patriarchal agendas continue to intrude and impact on the evolution and sustainability of both the women’s and broader democracy movements in those spaces, especially so in Afghanistan.[1]
The burqa is but one of many infringements on the human rights of women in Afghanistan. It is a recent phenomenon that is tied to the absolute breakdown of civil society via the political ruptures of largely imperialist interference, and the internal fracturing and fragmentation of the state and society over the last 30 years. The latest Human Rights Watch report provides a sobering picture of the state of women’s rights in Afghanistan. This is how the report begins:
‘The US and its allies cited the defense of women’s rights as one of the primary reasons, after the need to root out al Qaeda and defeat the Taliban, for their 2001 invasion and subsequent commitment to rehabilitate Afghanistan. Eight years after the fall of the Taliban, and the establishment of the Karzai government, Afghan women continue to be among the worst off in the world. Their situation is dismal in every area, including in health, education, employment, freedom from violence, equality before the law, and political participation.
Despite the rhetorical commitment to women’s rights and women’s empowerment, and despite the millions already spent on women’s rights and development projects, women have not been a central priority for the government or for international donors, whose focus is primarily on the armed conflict rather than the broader concept of civilian security and rule of law’ (Human Rights Watch December 2009).
It is dangerous to be a woman in contemporary Afghanistan. It is dangerous to be a young Hazara man for that matter. Perhaps that’s why so many are seeking asylum in Australia. And as the ‘debate’ about banning the burqa in Australia takes all our attention, those who are escaping the Taliban are rejected with hostile indifference, with the Federal Government announcing that there will be no processing of new asylum claims by Afghan nationals for six months because of ‘changing circumstances’ in Afghanistan (McAdam and Murphy April 2010). Why doesn’t a political decision that takes away the right to humanitarian protection have the same anger attached to it as the hostility lobbed at the woman wearing a niqab in the shopping mall?
Hijab Scene #3
‘Dammit … I’m a Muslim woman, not a Klingon!’
-but the positronic force field of hijab
jammed all her cosmic coordinates.
(Kahf 2003: 25)
In thinking about the first wave of feminism in the United States, dress reform was a theme that underpinned early political agitation. The height of the dress reform movement occurred in the 1850s in America when a group of women adopted Turkish-style trousers as a protest against their clothing. They became known as ‘bloomers’ and this term took on a derogatory meaning. They faced so much hostility from the public that this first wave of women’s dress reform failed. Australian feminist Dale Spender provides us with some clues as to why:
Because so ‘many laughed it to scorn and heaped such ridicule on its wearers that they soon found that the physical freedom enjoyed did not compensate for the persistent persecution and petty annoyances suffered at every turn. To be rudely gazed at in public and private, to be the conscious subjects of criticism, and to be followed by crowds of boys in the streets, were all, to the very last degree, exasperating’ (Elizabeth Cady Stanton, quoted in Spender 1983: 249)
Spender goes on to write,
‘Today, we would call this form of behaviour harassment. Like the bloomer wearers, a media image – became a caricature … and because of the adverse publicity – and because women were obliged to defend their dress at the expense of articulating their ideas – many women, like Stanton, returned to the conventional and restrictive costume of the day. (Spender 1983: 249)
Women who wear the hijab and the niqab relate uncannily similar stories of harassment, being stared at, ridiculed and spat upon. ‘To be the conscious subjects of criticism’, and always being ‘obliged to defend their dress at the expense of articulating their ideas’ is resonant of the contemporary condition that Muslim women living in the West find themselves in. Australian journalist Virginia Haussegger is at pains to make the point that she doesn’t have a problem with the hijab, seeing it as ‘a matter of individual right’. She writes, ‘whether worn for reasons of devotion, modesty, conformity or fashion, it is personal and the state has no business banning it’ (Haussegger 2010). These reasons could equally be argued by the niqabi, so where does that leave Haussegger’s argument?
‘I am furious that some women will continue to choose to wear [the niqab]. But then, throughout history, feeble women who are afraid of modernity have always been complicit in their own oppression’ (Haussegger 2009).
So, women only have the right to choose up to a point. Who precisely is deciding what is ‘acceptable’ and what is not? Who is feeble and who is not? In this economy, on the one side there’s the oppressive male forcing women to put it on; and on the other, the oppressive liberal feminist forcing women to take it off. If women freely choose to wear the niqab – and certainly women in Australia do – haranguing them in the media and in shopping malls amounts to little more than harassment.
Hijab Scene #2
‘You people have such restrictive dress for women,’
she said, hobbling away in three-inch heels and panty hose
to finish out another pink-collar temp pool day.
(Kahf 2003: 42)
It doesn’t stop there. Muslim women are randomly called up to answer for the burqa in Afghanistan, the Saudis, the chador, and the niqab-wearing-subject respectively, regardless of their own political and personal choices. Perhaps, the worst form of harassment is pitting Muslim women against each other as a way to force them into some sort of public spat-as-spectacle. Haussegger does precisely this in her article, invoking the opinions of high- profile women like the The Independent’s Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and award-winning journalist Mona Eltahawy, who both make a point of expressing their ‘abhorence’ at the niqab. Alas, we don’t hear a peep out of the niqabi.
‘I can’t sleep from stressing out whether I’ve got the guts to do it. To wear the hijab, the head scarf, full-time. ‘Full-timers are what my Muslim friends and I call girls who wear the hijab all the time … Part-timers like me wear the hijab as part of our uniform at an Islamic school or when we go to the mosque or maybe even when we’re having a bad hair day’ (Abdel-Fattah 2006: 2)
Despite the seeming acceptance of the hijab by some liberal feminists, it still remains the object of derision for the most part, with women being the targets of racial abuse. Australian social geographer Kevin Dunn has surveyed public attitudes towards the hijab, noting that in Europe, it is seen by critics as ‘emblematic of “non-integration”; a performance of “non-conforming nationalism”’ (Dunn 31). The niqab could thus be read as an absolute rejection of everything the Western state has to offer women, bikinis and all.
The bikini and the burqa are the two sartorial extremes that have come to define women’s modernity or lack thereof. To this day, dress remains a gendered signifier of a woman’s morality and sexuality in much of the world, including the ‘modern’ West. In that sphere, the oppressive ideals of Western beauty have women defacing their faces with botox and other toxic substances, rearranging their bodies with a repertoire of cosmetic surgeries and interventions. Corporate advertising continues to objectify women’s bodies, with girls hyper-sexualised and grown women infantilised. Is this liberation?
‘Despite her dark, cascading waves and toned body, the new Miss USA has come under fire by right-wing bloggers, who have dubbed her a “terrorist in a bikini” (Sydney Morning Herald, 2010)
Like the first wave of feminism, the right to freedom of dress was a demand of second wave feminism as it arrived a century later in the late 1960s and 1970s. Another demand was an end to the sexual objectification of women. A note from the archive:
‘The existence of the movement burst upon the general public in September 1968, during the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where demonstrations against sexism and the objectification of women were given a great deal of media attention’ (Tuttle 1986: 36).
It seems there is a great deal of applause and glittering rewards for a Muslim woman who puts on a bikini and joins her Western ‘sisters’ in a sexist parade in the brave new 21st century. Perhaps Hezbollah MP Hassan Fadlallah scored a political point when asked his opinion on the new Miss USA: ‘The criteria through which we evaluate women are different from those of the west,’ he said.
Neither Hezbollah nor those triumphalists in the West have anything to crow about when it comes to the treatment of women in all spheres of social, political, cultural, spiritual, emotional and economic life. While the Western liberal feminist might feel she has more ‘freedom’ than the average Muslim woman, white women’s ‘freedom’ in Australia has come at the expense of other women’s freedom, most notably, Indigenous women. Indignant posturing about the niqab has a rather rank ring when you consider the bigger picture.
Notes and References
Abdel-Fattah, R. (2006) Does My Head Look Big in This? Pan Macmillan Australia.
Ahmed, L (1992), Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Aly, A. (2009) ‘Media Hegemony, Activism and Identity: Muslim Women Representing Muslim Women’ in T. Dreher & C. Ho (eds.) Beyond the Hijab Debates: New Conversations in Gender, Race and Religion Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne.
Deutsche Welle ‘The prospect of a burqa ban spreads across Europe’ 21 May 2010 http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,5594778,00.html Cited 23 May 2010.
Dunn, K.M. (2009) ‘Public attitudes towards Hijab-wearing in Australia: Uncovering the Bases of Tolerance’ in T. Dreher & C. Ho (eds.) Beyond the Hijab Debates: New Conversations in Gender, Race and Religion Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne.
Haussegger, V. (2009) ‘Ban unAustralian Burka (first published in The Canberra Times 27 June 2009 http://virginiahaussegger.blogspot.com/2009/06/ban-burka-27-june-2009.html Cited 23 May 2010.
Haussegger, V. (2010) ‘The burqa is a war on women’ 21 May 2010 www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/the-burqa-is-a-war-on-women-20100520-vnp3.htm Cited 23 May 2010.
Human Rights Watch, ‘We Have the Promises of the World: Women’s Rights in Afghanistan’ 6 December 2009 http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2009/12/03/we-have-promises-world-0 Cited 23 May 2010.
Kahf, M. (2003) Emails from Scheherazad University Press of Florida, Gainesville Florida.
Maupassant, G. de, (1890) La Vie errante quoted in Mabro, J. (1996) Veiled Half-Truths: Western Travellers’ Perceptions of Middle Eastern Women, I.B. Tauris, London.
Schlussel, D. (19 May 2010) quoted in Sydney Morning Herald ‘Newly crowned Miss USA ‘pride’ of hometown in Lebanon’
http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/beauty/newly-crowned-miss-usa-pride-of-hometown-in-lebanon-20100519-vcji.html Cited 23 May 2010.
Spender, D. (1983) Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them Ark Paperbacks, London.
Spivak, G.C. (1988) ‘Can the Subaltern Speak’ in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds.) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 271-315.
Sydney Morning Herald, (19 May 2010) ‘Newly crowned Miss USA ‘pride’ of hometown in Lebanon’ http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/beauty/newly-crowned-miss-usa-pride-of-hometown-in-lebanon-20100519-vcji.html Cited 23 May 2010.
Tuttle, L. (1986) Encyclopedia of Feminism Longman, Essex.
[1] Underpinning gendered imperialist discourse is the rhetoric of the ‘civilising mission’, a legitimising device that has effectively functioned to justify attacks on Indigenous societies and colonial expansionism in the form of patriarchal colonialism. Cultural theorist Gayatri Spivak terms this rather ironically as ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’ (1988: 296). In a similar vein, feminist theorist Leila Ahmed tracks how ‘the discourse of patriarchal colonialism captured the language of feminism and used the issue of women’s position in Islamic societies as the spearhead of the colonial attacks on those societies’ (Ahmed 1992: 243). She exposes the hypocrisy particularly of imperialist men ‘who were the enemies of feminism in their own societies, [while] abroad espoused a rhetoric of feminism attacking the practices of Other men and their ‘degradation’ of women, using the argument that the cultures of the colonised peoples degraded women in order to legitimise Western domination and justify colonial policies’ (1992: 243).