reading room
| The Veil Unveiled
by Faegheh Shirazi Illustrated with photographs, drawings, and cartoons gathered from popular culture, this provocative book demonstrates that the veil, the garment known in Islamic cultures as the hijab, holds within its folds a semantic versatility that goes far beyond current clichés and homogenous representations.
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| Table of Contents and Introduction - HTML | Learn More/Purchase | |
Contents
List of Figures
Note on Transliteration
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Veiled Images in Advertising
2. Veiled Images in American Erotica
3. The Cinematics of the Veil
4. Iranian Politics and the Hijab
5. Militarizing the Veil
6. Literary Dynamics of the Veil
Conclusion
Notes
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
Introduction
Donning the Veil
It was long past midnight on the Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt to Tehran when a voice over the airplane's loudspeakers reminded me and fellow passengers that the Islamic Republic of Iran enforces the law of hijab.1 Upon hearing this message, I knew that my plane had reached Iranian skies and that I had to put on my rupush, a loose outer garment that flows down past my knees and covers my arms, and my rusari, a large scarf that covers my hair, shoulders, and neck. Every year upon my visit home, for the last twenty years, I have chafed at the necessity of wearing this cumbersome attire but have complied with the dress code in order to avoid harassment and likely imprisonment upon arrival at Tehran's Mehrabad airport.
For the next few hours, I stood in line waiting to clear customs. Finally, it was my turn to be interrogated by a customs officer wearing white gloves. He asked me twice if I was carrying any videos, music tapes or CDs, magazines or books, or electronic equipment. After I answered twice in the negative, he demanded to know if I had illegal drugs, prescription medicine, or alcoholic beverages in my luggage. When I replied again that I did not, he wanted to know if I was sure that I wasn't in possession of any chocolate filled with liquor.2 Eventually, I won my way free and was able to greet my brother, who had been waiting for hours behind a glass wall. Overjoyed, we hugged and kissed and he bustled me to his car. Breathing the cool crisp air of the early morning hours and looking at the snow-covered peak of Alburz Mountain, I gradually relaxed and began to enjoy the half-hour drive through nearly empty streets to my parents' house. Every now and then I read the graffiti that was plastered on the walls of houses and factories bordering the roadway. Slogans such as "the improperly veiled woman is a stain on the Islamic Republic of Iran who must be eliminated immediately" and "death to the improperly veiled woman!" jarred me from my solipsistic reverie. At these moments I adjusted my rupush and rusari, wiped my lips nervously to make sure that not a trace of lipstick was left, and looked furtively at my feet to ascertain that my thick black socks obscured the red polish on my toenails. I realized once again that for many of my compatriots the veil did not represent a cultural and religious artifact but had ideological proportions that continued to permeate every aspect of their daily lives.
But even this realization did not prepare me for an article in Abrar (July 19, 1997) that my fifteen-year-old niece, who is very interested in my research on the veil, urged me to read. A revolutionary guard from Tehran complains in this article that while the Iranian film industry complies with the laws of hijab, it does not actively promote the more severe form of hijab (chador) that Ayatollah Khomeini recommended as the best type of coverage for the female body.3 I was aware that the Iranian clergy regards lipstick and nail polish as paraphernalia of the prostitute, but I was surprised to read that some Iranians are critical of the law of hijab because it does not enforce a specific form of hijab, namely the chador.4 After skimming through the article, I glanced up at my niece, who sat across from me wearing jeans, a sweatshirt, and sneakers. She looked like an average American teenager and a world apart from the vision this revolutionary guard had of a properly veiled Iranian woman. Yet, later, when we left the house to visit my aunt in another part of Tehran, my niece donned the veil with a confidence that only years of experience could instill. She has worn the hijab outside the privacy of her home since the very first day she started school, when she was but seven years old. During my three-week stay in Iran in 1997, I watched television programs that showed women wearing the proper hijab and listened to radio announcers extolling the virtues of the veil. Every newspaper and magazine I picked up explained the benefits of the veil and advised me on how to wear it properly. Even when buying a stamp to put on a letter I had written to my daughter back in the United States, I was reminded that the hijab is the only proper form of dress for the Iranian woman. This stamp, with the word hijab inscribed on the lower-left corner, depicts an eye whose pupil is a woman clad in a conservative black veil with the barrel of a gun reaching above her right shoulder (fig 4.6). The Iranian woman is, of course, not allowed to actively participate in battle. As we shall see in chapter 4, Iranian women are depicted on stamps carrying guns in order to announce to the world that they lend their self-sacrificing support to Iran's male fighters.
Researching the Veil
Ever since the Islamic Revolution swept through my native country in 1979, I have been interested in issues related to the veil. Since 1994, when I started to teach courses on Middle Eastern culture at the University of Texas at Austin, I have collected visual and printed material that depicts veiled women and elaborates on the significance of the veil. At that time, I became aware that this unassuming piece of cloth has a history that antedates the Islamic Republic of Iran by thousands of years. Nikki Keddie informs us that the first known reference to veiling was made in an Assyrian legal text of the thirteenth century bce. In this text, veiling is restricted to respectable women and prohibited for prostitutes.5 The veil is also mentioned in the Middle-Assyrian Laws (750-612 bce), more than twelve hundred years before the advent of Islam. Here, a harlot or slave girl found improperly wearing a veil in the street is ordered to be brought to the palace for punishment.6 The Roman social commentator Ovid (43 bce-17 ce) in Book IV of his Metamorphoses relies on the veil to carry a Babylonian love story.7 Pyramus and Thisbe fall in love, but their parents disapprove of their relationship. The lovers agree to meet in secrecy at the tomb of the Babylonian King Ninus. Thisbe, who arrives early, sees a lioness and flees into a cave, leaving her veil behind. The lioness, whose muzzle is dripping with the blood of a fresh kill, rips Thisbe's veil. When Pyramus finds the torn and bloodstained veil, he concludes that the lioness has killed Thisbe and commits suicide with his sword. When Thisbe finds Pyramus's dead body, she throws herself on his blade.8
In the Assyrian, Greco-Roman, and Byzantine empires, as well as in pre-Islamic Iran, veiling and seclusion were marks of prestige and symbols of status.9 Only wealthy families could aVord to seclude their women. The veil was a sign of respectability but also of a lifestyle that did not require the performance of manual labor. Slaves and women who labored in the fields were not expected to wear the veil, which would have impeded their every movement. At the turn of the century, when the practice of veiling became associated with women's oppression under Islam, the veil was transformed into an object of political, social, and religious contention. As such, the veil quickly became a favorite subject for writers in the Muslim world. It suffices in this context to mention the Egyptian Qasim Amin, the Iraqi al-Azri, and the Iranians Iraj Mirza and Parvin E"tesami (chapter 6). In 1923, the Egyptian feminist Huda Shaarawi, who was returning from an international feminist meeting in Rome, drew the veil back from her face when she got oV the train. Her daring act elicited loud applause from the waiting women and displeased frowns from the eunuchs who guarded the women.10 Another important date in the history of the veil is 1936, when Reza Shah of Iran abolished the veil. Moving forward to the present day, my investigations of American erotica (chapter 2) and the Hindi popular cinema (chapter 3) demonstrate that the veil has acquired cultural connotations that reach far beyond the borders and religious context of the Islamic Republic of Iran and even of the Muslim world itself. The veiled playmate in photographs in Playboy and Penthouse is without exception identified as an American or European woman posing as odalisque. The veiled heroine in the Hindi popular movie is as likely to be a Hindu as she is to be a Muslim. The fact that the veil possesses cultural significance not only for Muslims but for Hindus as well is also clearly revealed in a short story by the Indian writer Yashpal (chapter 6).
This historical and cultural near-omnipresence of the veil has shaped the focus of my research. The visual and printed material on the veil is so diverse and plentiful that to impose cultural or historical restrictions on my investigation seemed tantamount to a selective censoring of all that I had compiled over the last five years. In order to investigate fully the semantics of the veil, analyzing the meaning of the veil to Saudi advertisers of sanitary napkins proved just as relevant and revealing as exploring the poetic context in which Ayatollah Khomeini uses the veil. In addition to examining veiled images in television and magazine ads, I have utilized the collections of Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler at the law library at The University of Texas at Austin and found more than 250 images of the Middle East in photographs and cartoons. These images have also played an important role in my research and have helped shape my understanding of the veil's significance and symbolic versatility. I was also surprised when, after spending one morning researching the veil, I found a picture of a veiled woman on the very can of couscous soup I was opening for lunch. Furthermore, when watching Iranian and Hindi films I realized that the veil has established a cinematics of its own. But the veil appears not only in pictures. The words hijab or muhajjibah (veiled woman) are often used in the slogans plastered all over the whitewashed walls of houses, office buildings, and factories in Iran. On my most recent visits to the Islamic Republic of Iran, I have clandestinely, while riding on the bus, taken photographs of slogans praising the properly veiled woman and threatening the improperly veiled woman (chapter 4). My investigation of the semantics of the veil also focuses on poems, song lyrics, and short stories that are titled "The Veil." The Uzbeki parandja, the Arabic as well as Persian hijab, and the Urdu and Hindi purdah have provided the titles for works by authors from the former Soviet Union, Iraq, Iran, and India (chapter 6).
The large number of books whose cover designs or titles suggest a discussion of issues related to the veil aided as well as hindered the progress of my research. My work benefited from some books that use in their title the veil as metaphor, metonym, or synecdoche for the experiences of Muslim women. Books such as Mernissi's Beyond the Veil and The Veil and the Male Elite; Mabro's Veiled Half-Truths: Western Travelers' Perception of Middle Eastern Women; Abu-Lughod's Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society; Minces's Veiled: Women in Islam; and Goodwin's Price of Honor: Muslim Women Lift the Veil of Silence on the Islamic World have proven helpful to my research. Other books were too restricted in their subject matter to be of use in my eVort to decipher the semantics of the veil. For example, Evelyne Accad in her groundbreaking Veil of Shame analyzes the role of women in the contemporary fiction of North Africa and the Arab world. Marianne Alireza in At the Drop of a Veil gives a grim account of her experiences in a harem in Saudi Arabia, while Cherry Mosteshar in Unveiled: One Woman's Nightmare in Iran describes her personal experiences in modern Iran. Unni Wikan's Behind the Veil in Arabia: Women in Oman describes the plight of women in Oman.
For every book whose title includes some form of the word "veil" and that addresses the practice of veiling in particular or women's issues in general, there is another utilizing similar language or imagery that has nothing to do with women's lives.11 Both authors and publishers have a tendency to include "veil," "veiled," or "unveiled" as often as possible in the titles of books that discuss countries and regions in which women are known to veil, whether or not the work has anything to do with that particular article of clothing. The marketing departments at university presses have apparently discovered that using the word "veil" in the title or picturing a veiled woman on the cover sells books. This fact was brought home to me at the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) meeting in 1998. While there, I gave a paper on Muslim images in American erotica and was approached shortly thereafter by a representative of a university press who told me that his organization might be interested in my book if I were to include the term "veil" in the title. Taking his advice to heart, I decided not merely to use the word "veil" in the title but to make visual, political, and literary dynamics of the veil the focus of my entire work.
My research focuses particularly on the role of the veil in popular culture: the importance of the veil to advertisers of Western products; the exploitation of the veil in American erotica; the use of the veil in Iranian films, Indian popular films, and Bernardo Bertolucci's The Sheltering Sky; the utilization of the veil on posters and stamps promoted by the Iranian government; the chameleonlike quality of the veil that enables it to meet the requirements of the military forces of the United Arab Emirates, Iraq, and Iran; and the opinions of popular Iranian poets on the practice of veiling.
Defining the Semantics of the Veil
The large number of books of which the titles or subtitles include "veil," "veiled," or "unveiled" testifies to the semantic versatility of the garment. Once the veil is no longer perceived as a mere piece of cloth, a cultural or religious artifact, it quickly takes on semantic dimensions that can be fathomed only if we clearly define the parameters of our discourse. For example, we may be able to determine its meaning for the Playboy photographer who drapes a transparent veil over an otherwise nude model, thereby hoping to increase male interest in his subject. We may establish what significance a white veil has for the Saudi advertiser of sanitary napkins. We may deduce from the history and politics of the Mujahedin-e Khalq reasons that explain why their female combatants wear red veils. In all these examples we are able to determine the meaning of the veil because we know the specific context in which it is being used. The analyses of diVerent visual, political, and literary representations of the veil demonstrate that its symbolic significance is being constantly defined and redefined, often to the point of ambiguity. Modern Iranian history may best exemplify the many possible alterations in the meaning of the veil: in 1936, Reza Shah abolished the veil because he saw it as a sign of backwardness; in 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran forced women to adopt the veil because the Iranian clergy regards it as a sign of progress along the ideological path of Islam. In a period of less than fifty years, the rulers of Iran have allotted the veil diametrically opposed meanings.
This semantic versatility of the veil helps explain its enormous marketing potential. Not only university presses and academic authors have profited from the veil's marketability. Recent television ads for IBM computers and Jeep Cherokees have banked on the salability of the veiled woman. She is selling cigarettes, perfumes, and even soup to the American consumer. In Sayidaty, a Saudi magazine, veiled women promote sanitary napkins and Swiss watches. All these ads are tailored to appeal to a specific market, and thus almost all allot the veil a specific meaning. Interestingly, American advertisers rely on one particular connotation of the veil when marketing products to male consumers but on quite another when marketing products to women. Saudi advertisers exploit one meaning of the veil when selling sanitary napkins to average Saudi consumers and another when selling expensive Swiss watches to the wealthy (chapter 1).
The semantic versatility of the veil also manifests itself in American erotica. The garment's meaning varies from publication to publication. Since Penthouse and Playboy cater to diVerent markets than Hustler, the photographers and cartoonists of these magazines portray the veil in disparate ways intended to appeal to their respective audiences. Furthermore, meanings of the veil also change within the pages of the same magazine, depending on whether photographs or cartoons are involved. While photographs of veiled women in Playboy and Penthouse aim at drawing the male gaze, cartoons of veiled women mock and ridicule Muslim society. The meaning of the veil when portrayed in a cartoon also depends on the overall state of political relations between the United States and the countries of the Middle East. For example, when the United States was at war with Iraq, cartoons, especially in Hustler, depicted veiling as a barbaric practice (chapter 2).
Once the veil is assigned a certain meaning, the veil itself acquires the power to dictate certain outcomes-the garment becomes a force in and of itself, and this force must be deferred to by many people. When the semantics of the veil are defined, they set a dynamics of the veil in motion that dictates context. The law of hijab that is enforced in the Islamic Republic of Iran provides a telling example. For the lawmakers in Iran, wearing the hijab is synonymous with obeying Islamic injunctions that define the proper behavior of the female believer. This law weighs on every aspect of daily life in Iran. It defines, for example, artistic expression: the Iranian film director is not allowed to show women in the privacy of their homes, where they would not veil. Iranian filmmakers have thus introduced ingenious techniques and subject matters in order to comply with government regulations (chapter 3). Iranian politics are also subject to the semantics of the veil. For Reza Shah, the veil was synonymous with backwardness, and thus he sought to promote progress by abolishing the veil. For Ayatollah Khomeini, unveiled women embodied Western values, and thus he sought to promote Islamic values by forcing women to veil (chapter 4). In countries that use the veil to segregate the sexes, women either are not allowed to join military forces (Iran), have limited access to certain branches (United Arab Emirates), or are permitted to join only if they wear loose-fitting uniforms and head scarves (Iraq) (chapter 5).
The female combatants of the NLA (National Liberation Army), the armed wing of the Mujahedin-e Khalq, demonstrate the difficulty of attempting to define the semantics of the veil. First, the Mujahedin-e Khalq, expatriate Iranians and Muslims, believe in sex segregation but allow women to participate actively in battle against the enemy Iran with the provision that the combatants stay celibate during their time of service. Second, this party, in order to survive politically, has to form alliances with nations willing to support it financially. Interestingly, the headgear of the female combatants changes with the party's attempts to forge alliances. The combatants wore red veils when support from the former Soviet Union was sought and green veils when the party was courting the Taliban in Afghanistan. In 1999, in a party demonstration in The Hague (The Netherlands) against the regime in Iran, the women were sporting American baseball caps (chapter 5).
Literary works on the veil expose the semantic versatility of the veil. Some writers endorse the veil, allotting a positive moral value to it. Others reject the veil, describing it as a sign of backwardness. Still other writers such as the Urdu poet Asadullah Khan Ghalib and Ayatollah Khomeini use the veil as metaphor to express their ontological anxieties. What cultural context makes it possible for a physical object to acquire metaphysical proportions? (chapter 6).