西方穆斯林服飾議題
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is a woman who prides
herself on bridging worlds, denouncing racism at west London dinner parties
while opposing religious bigotry down at the mosque. A committed anti-racism
campaigner, she has been an almost-lone Muslim voice in
the mainstream British media arguing against immigration scaremongering and
retaliating against sweeping stereotypes of Muslims as anti-British terrorists.
Her latest book, Refusing the Veil, part of a series entitled
“provocations” for Biteback Publishing, is a passionate treatise against what she – as a Muslim, feminist and liberal – considers to be submission to a misogynistic symbol of
women’s inferiority.
“The veil,” she argues, “in all its permutations,
is indefensible and unacceptable”.
But this is no theological treatise aimed at
challenging the textual validity of “veils”, though Alibhai-Brown does also
question that. It is a fundamentally political treatise on the place of Islam
and Muslims in Europe, in which Alibhai-Brown contends that Muslim women are
exploiting “the weaknesses and vulnerabilities at the core of free societies”.
The book opens with her bemoaning the “bullying”
of schools over the right of female students to wear face veils, arguing that
“veils are now ubiquitous”, something she refers to as a “depressing and scary
development”. The bullying, we are told, is happening
from radical Muslims allied with well-intentioned liberals, who misunderstand
the meanings behind the face veil. While the face veil has become a
source of tension in certain contexts, namely schools and court buildings, establishments have typically found a compromise between
upholding security requirements or other societal obligations and the freedom
of religion of individuals. Sadly, discussions
of mutual accommodation, itself a manifestation of the very integration
allegedly at stake here, are entirely absent in favour of a
confrontational binary between entitled radical Muslims on one hand and
beleaguered liberal institutions on the other.
Nor is the underlying argument particularly
original.
Abandoning the veil as a renunciation
of the “backwardness” of traditional religions has its earliest permutations in
the Sixties and Seventies in Muslim majority countries, where reformers sought
to emulate the west’s “success” through the wholesale adoption of European
mores and habits. In Iran, this involved the forced
imposition of bowler hats in place of turbans by the then Shah. Elsewhere, it manifested as a move away from the headscarf and
traditional clothing in favour of European-style skirts and suits. Since then, postcolonial critics have argued against linear
view of these developments, promoting instead the idea of multiple modernities,
within which traditional symbols can and are inverted to produce new meanings. Contemporary
academic studies of veiling widely recognise it as one such example, with
multiple meanings ascribed to a garment – the significance of this is open to
evolution as part of Islam’s discursive tradition.
Although Alibhai-Brown quotes the academic Leila Ahmed approvingly, Ahmed’s most recent
publication is a refutation of these views, in which Ahmed asserts that many
women who wear the hijab, or headscarf, “now essentially make up the vanguard
of those who are struggling for women’s rights in Islam”.
Indeed Alibhai-Brown seems out of touch with
contemporary debates among Muslim women surrounding the significance of
veiling, not least as a feminist principle aimed at challenging the very
patriarchy she claims underpins it.
Contemporary arguments examining how
the global south has re-appropriated traditional symbols as a means of
resistance and national cultural reassertion are all but
lost in favour of simplistic arguments concerning the veil as a sign of
commitment to backward values. This is a view buttressed by support for the
views of intellectuals like the Egyptian thinker Qasim
Amin, who believed in the superiority of European civilisation, or the
dubious feminism of the late nineteenth century colonialist Lord Cromer who,
while he did reject the veil as backwards, simultaneously opposed the
suffragettes back in the UK.
Of the many critiques which can be made
of this book, its lack of conceptual clarity is surely the most glaring. To pen an entire book on “the veil” without clarifying what exactly
one is referring to at any point lacks intellectual rigour. This may well be the desired objective, to lump all Muslim
women’s religious attire together under one problematic term – except
that these varied manifestations of faith, and sometimes culture, are motivated
by different world view. There is no single, monolithic, misogynistic worldview
underpinning all of them, (although such motivations may exist among individual
wearers) and consequently her objections are united by one common theme – the
problematisation of the visibility of Europe’s Muslim population. This aligns Alibhai-Brown’s voice with the Swiss ban on
minarets, the French face veil ban and the Danish ban on halal meat, which are
all reflections of European’s contraction in the face of a more confident and
assertive Muslim identity.
And yet, Alibhai-Brown is
unwilling to recognise the continuity of her discourse with that of the far
right, whose increasing presence on the European political scene has
allowed them to dictate the terms of national discussions, including on this
very issue. Her sole acknowledgement of this overlap is a single line when she
states “these people don’t matter”. Sadly, that isn’t entirely accurate. Just
this year, the French Front National (FN)
captured its historic first senate seats, following a strong showing at the
European elections in May. French Prime Minister Manuel Valls warned the FN is “at the
gates of power”. Polls even suggest that FN leader
Marine Le Pen could easily make the run-off in the 2017 elections and even win
if up against Francois Hollande. In Germany, anti-islamisation
protests, which have nothing to do with the far right, are growing.
Here in the UK, the rising popularity of the xenophobic Ukip can hardly be
divorced from a broader climate in which Muslims are regularly the focus of
national ire. Consequently, and according to new
research, Muslims are facing the worst job
discrimination of any minority group in Britain, with Muslim
women up to 65 per cent less likely to be employed than their white Christian
counterparts. According to Dr Nabil Khattab, of Bristol University, the
situation was “likely to stem from placing Muslims collectively at the lowest
stratum within the country’s racial or ethno-cultural system due to growing
Islamophobia and hostility against them.”
Alibhai-Brown herself has been the victim of this
growing racism, writing recently of how she was spat at by a middle-aged white
woman who shouted at her “bloody paki“
on a bus, a fact which only makes her blind spot on this all the more troubling.
The book links the veil to problems of
integration and national identity, yet ignores the broader dynamics of
integration – the reception offered
to migrant communities, unemployment, racism, ghettoisation. The veil
becomes the focal point for societal ills because, it is claimed, it represents
a commitment to backward values, rather than the progress epitomised by western
societies. This teleological view of progress underpins the entire book. We are
given the sense of a besieged liberal Britain under attack from fanatical
veiled hordes.
Alibhai-Brown claims not to want to ban the face
veil, but provides all the moral arguments necessary for precisely that. Whether she supports the legislation directly or not, her
arguments complement a growing tide in Europe which seeks to criminalise Muslim
women, ironically in order to free them – despite themselves! Amnesty International has condemned moves to ban face veils
as “an attack on religious freedom”, in recognition that restrictions on
women wearing the veil in public life are as much a violation of the rights of
women as forcing them to wear one. But Alibhai-Brown doesn’t even engage with
the arguments concerning the co-opting of feminist rhetoric and the language of
human rights in order to mask a growing tide of anti-Muslim sentiment.
The complexities are numerous – some Muslim women, such as the granddaughter of Iran’s
Ayatollah Khomeini who wears the headscarf out of conviction, also object to
state imposition of the headscarf. Award-winning Iranian graphic
novelist Marjane Satrapi, an outspoken critic of the “veil”, believes “It is
surely a basic human right that someone can choose what she wears without
interference from the state”.
In a Foreign Policy
article discussing the headscarf, one woman explained: “I wear it for the same
reason as my Jewish friend wears a yarmulke,” but there is no discussion in
YAB’s book of whether all religiously associated garments are to be problematised
– the Sikh turban, or the Jewish skullcap, say – rather the entire focus is on
the uniquely troubling item worn by Muslim women. This
is a view that feeds into this view of Islam as distinctively troublemsome, and
as somehow singularly oppressive to women. (其他宗教者的服飾不談，只談穆斯林婦女服飾)
This assumption of coercion permeates the book
over and above than the myriad voices of the women Alibhai-Brown consults and
who offer up a range of motivations for their sartorial choices, from resisting
consumerism, to spirituality, through to political solidarity. And this
simplification of Islam is recurrent in the book – elsewhere, she falls into classic orientalist depictions of over-sexed
Muslims, as the reader is told “Muslim men and women spend an inordinate amount
of time thinking, talking, regulating and worrying about sex.”
For all its pleas of defending
liberalism, this is a socially conservative book dressed up as a liberal
feminist manifesto. It expounds an intolerance regarding the visible difference
of others which is distinctly at odds with core liberal principles and their
very British articulation in the shape of “live and let live”.
Its feminist credentials are equally
questionable, especially given that any explanation articulated by
“veil”-wearing women is delegitimised through an appeal to arguments about
“false consciousness” and brainwashing, denying Muslim women agency in their
decisions and reducing them to passive recipients of male intent. Muslim women
are described as “severely controlled”, and “hard” Muslim men, we are told,
“want to banish Muslim women from shared spaces”.
Although the existence of controlled women and
controlling men, Muslim or otherwise, is undeniable and a serious cause for
concern, the suggestion that this is the predominant case when it comes to
women and “veiling” is not only at odds with academic studies (Scott, Ahmed,
and others) but confirms precisely the sort of stereotyping Alibhai-Brown has
spent so much of her life denouncing.
Refusing the Veil might be a revolutionary title in Iran or Saudi Arabia where it would
signify opposition to a legal imposition on women. Here in Britain, where
despite the undeniable existence of community pressures on women, most adult
women have a considerable margin of freedom concerning their sartorial choices,
it is just another call for policing women’s clothing.
In the book, Alibhai-Brown
slips fluidly between Saudi Arabia and Hammersmith with no attention to the
differing contexts and consequent meanings each place carries. While the Saudi government undoubtedly uses clothing as items
of subjugation, it is wrong to assume that women in the UK are experiencing
anything like the same subjugation. This a problematic conflation of
Muslim female victimhood, which perpetuates stereotypes of passive, voiceless
victims.
Alibhai-Brown presents herself as the middle
ground, referring disparagingly to veils, while denouncing other women’s
clothing as “tarty”. Yet the patriarchal impulse underpinning any public call
to define what should constitute appropriate women’s clothing remains. In a
section in which she seeks to debunk the idea that covering will protect women
from rape, she doesn’t address the worrying assumption
that rape itself is linked to clothing, and that discussions of rape in
terms of women’s attire only confirm the view that women are somehow complicit
in their abuse.
Alongside the fluid use of the term “veil”,
other, disparate phenomena are put in the same bracket. Honour killings and
domestic violence both end up linked, through reference to personal anecdotes,
to women wearing the “burka”. It is worth stating with force that neither
so-called “honour killings”, themselves a form of domestic violence, and
domestic violence more broadly are in fact a “Muslim” phenomena and sadly exist across cultures. Burkas may well cover bruises, but so does make-up – neither
can be causally linked to the violence itself.
According to Alibhai-Brown, the main culprit behind the rise in “veiling” is the austere
Wahhabi interpretation of Islam promoted by Saudi petro-dollars – but the truth is
while some women who cover their face certainly are Wahabi-inclined, others may
well be traditionalists or Islamist, and some even claim feminist motivations. It
really can’t be overstated how problematic it is to attribute meaning to
people’s choices without ever even enquiring as to the basis for those choices.
Too often discussions about the meaning of
religious coverings are undertaken – as was the case of the French face veil
ban – without involving the voices of the women who choose to wear the items.
In her book, Alibhai-Brown sees a woman in a full face veil pushing a pram in
the park, and proceeds to impute a whole series of ideas to her, without even
stopping to speak to the woman – her defence? Her face
being covered made it impossible to communicate. But the truth is, to quote
Arundhati Roy: “There is no such thing as the voiceless, only the deliberately
unheard.” Alibhai-Brown could have just as easily approached the woman
and struck up conversation, particularly if, as she claims in her book as
grounds for opposing the “veil”, she is that concerned that under every face
veil could lie a battered body. In the modern age, so much of our interaction
occurs without being face to face, without eye contact or the ability to read
facial or body language. While you might prefer eye contact, it can hardly be said to be an absolute impediment to any
form of interaction.
Many of the arguments in the book are
emotional – why are babies or young girls being dressed in
headscarves? Burkas hide bruises! Solidarity with women who are forced to wear
them should make you remove it! Where will you get your vitamin D?! None of these are particularly original and many are
completely nonsensical. For a start, solidarity with women who are
legally coerced into wearing certain types of clothing might arguably be better
served by supporting women’s right to make informed choices, whether in Saudi
Arabia or in France. Secondly, evidently not wearing
burkas isn’t the solution to ending domestic violence, with 30 per cent of
British women – most of them not wearing burkas –
experiencing domestic abuse. As for arguments about vitamin D
deficiency, they hardly warrant a rejoinder but to note that like any vitamin
deficiency, a supplement – not a political debate – is a more apt response.
A final, salient critique of the book,
is its middle class bias. That the veil offends the
sensibilities of west Londoners out on walk on Ealing Common should hardly
provide the basis for a repudiation of a garment which, whatever its symbolic
ascription, is often worn by a strata of women already facing many different
challenges. To claim to do so out of a feminist concern for those very same
women, while actively contributing to their dehumanisation through the use of
terms like “cloaks” and “masks”, to legitimate “revulsion” by empathising with
such reactions towards them, is to give credence to the very same racist and
discriminatory attitudes which Alibhai-Brown has made her name opposing.
This book is a validation of quiet,
middle class prejudice, the type which dare not
speak up for fear of being accused of being racist, but as Alibhai-Brown
herself reveals in the book, feels deeply uncomfortable with “the veil”. Rather
than challenging that prejudice, Alibhai-Brown provides the ultimate insider’s
reassurance that such emotions are warranted and legitimate. For such a pivotal
anti-racism campaigner, it is a sad capitulation to anti-Muslim prejudice.
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