A Quiet Revolution (21 page)

And yet Macleod could not completely accept this conclusion. As the evidence she gathered toward the end of her research period shows, there were new pressures on women to adopt hijab, making it a matter not entirely of their own choice and volition. There was clear evidence, Macleod reported, of the growing influence of men on the trend. While

in
1983
and
1984
Macleod’s interviewees had confidently told her that

“this movement was under their control and at their initiative,” by
1988
several women now admitted to her “that they had put on the dress re- cently to avoid men’s constant harangues.” Women who had originally said they would not wear it now reported that they had “succumbed to the insistence of male family members “and growing conformity in the office.”

Women reported that a variety of social pressures were making it ever more difficult to not veil. They reported feeling that veiled dress was steadily becoming “less one option among many and more the correct thing to do.” Few women naturally felt able or willing to argue that their “religion or cultural traditions are in some way wrong.” A number of the women in the group had privately conveyed to Macleod that they did not believe in wearing hijab. One older woman, for example (and older women were more likely, she found, to be openly opposed to it), had commented that “these girls can wear higab if they want, but I will never wear it. I worked very hard to be in the position I am in today... and these young girls do not know how hard it was in the past for women. Really it does not matter what people wear, but I will not wear it.” Younger women confided that they did not believe that wearing hijab was necessary to being a good Muslim. But the young often found it very hard to take a stand against wearing it and typically deflected questions

about it by declaring that they intended to wear it at a specific time—on marriage, say, or when the feeling and need to do so “strikes in her heart.”

Part of the ethos of the day regarding the adoption of hijab was, Macleod reported, that taking on the hijab should come about not out of compulsion but rather as the result of a woman’s personal choice. This

is an ethos that is clearly a product of the late twentieth century and one that unmistakably postdates the cycle of history of the
1900
s to the
1970
s and from unveiling to veiling. Before the era of unveiling, covering was just normal dress for all women in Muslim majority societies, and choos- ing not to cover was not an option. As we will see in Chapter
9
, the idea that women had to be personally convinced of the need to veil—an idea that first emerged, probably in Egypt, in the
1970
s and
1980
s—is now commonly accepted in twenty-first-century America.

In the context of the new veiling movement, this ethos, noted Macleod, enabled women at least to defer the decision for a while. Such was the tactic used, for example, by one young woman when she was teased by fellow workers about when she meant to begin wearing hijab. “I don’t feel this need in my heart yet,” she had said, unable to openly state her own conviction that the veil was not required at all: “God will- ing, I will feel it someday, and then of course I’ll put on the higab.”

The pressure for women to wear hijab was distinctly growing. There was evidence, Macleod found, that women were being pressured not only by the men in their families but also by male religious author- ities. Several women now mentioned that they had decided to wear hijab because of their local religious leaders. Others mentioned that male rel- atives would cite the authority of religious men in their “attempts to per- suade fiancés, wives or sisters to veil.”

In the face of these findings, Macleod concluded that the hijab trend was initially a women-initiated movement controlled and driven forward by women’s own needs, choices, and volition. But by the late eighties it was increasingly becoming co-opted by men.

While women who wore hijab in Macleod’s group had all grown up wearing “modern” or “Western” dress, the veiled women in Zuhur’s
1988
study, conducted just five years after Macleod had begun hers, had typ- ically begun wearing hijab as schoolgirls, having been influenced by

teachers and peers. Parents and siblings had at first hated their adoption of the hijab, they reported, but they had eventually accepted it. Some had even gone on to adopt it themselves.
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Through the eighties the Islamist current had continued to gain strength. Islamist schools multiplied, and Islamist notions of correct dress and proper religious practices were spread through these schools’ curricula and teachings. Government schools joined the effort as well. For the government, eager to show itself as no less religiously commit- ted than the Brotherhood and other Islamist groups, had continued to try to gain popular support by promoting religion and religious themes in schools, as well as by building more mosques and increasing religious programming on radio and television.

To meet their teaching needs, government schools hired instructors of religious education who most often were graduates of Islamist schools. Similarly, the increase in religious programming and the emphasis on religion in all departments also created more jobs, opportunities, and positions of influence for people who had had Islamist training and ed- ucation.

By the late eighties the generation of university students who had been on the frontlines of Islamist groups in the seventies had graduated and joined the workforce and were advancing in their professions. Typ- ically these graduates (and their successors) were people who had trained

in such professions as engineering, medicine, law, chemistry—profes- sions with considerable prestige and influence. By the early
1990
s, Is- lamists had gained control of a number of the most important and powerful professional organizations of the country—among them engi-

neering, medicine, and law.

Whereas in the seventies it had been veiled women who had been seen as different and who might find themselves, as we saw in the case of Beshir, the targets of hostility, by the late eighties it was unveiled women who could find themselves in this situation, as one of the stories told to Zuhur by an interviewee indicates. This woman, who had “light hair” and was “quite fair,” was visiting a friend in the hospital and was wait- ing for the elevator. “I was dressed decently,” she explained, wearing a mid-calf-length skirt and a short-sleeved blouse when “one of those re- ligious types with a beard and long shirt, shouted at me, ‘How dare you

come to our country and insult our religion!’ Well,” the woman con- cluded her story, “it’s my country and my religion too. How dare he talk to me as if I’m a foreigner!”
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‌

Zuhur’s study explores and compares the views and attitudes of the unveiled woman with those of the “new Islamic woman” on a number of issues, including women’s rights. She found no differences between them on this matter. They held similar views as to the “nature” of men and women—both considering them to be “equally capable but com- plementary rather than identical.” And both unveiled and veiled (in- cluding “even the more conservative respondents”) believed that “women should be given equal opportunities with men, and equality under the law so long as the principles of sharia were upheld.” Similarly, both groups found Islamist critiques of Western societies as “lax in their moral values” to be resonant and meaningful.
8

Both were equally critical of the government and viewed the cur- rent social and moral condition of the country to be distressing. Differ- ences emerged as to their attitudes, however, regarding the possibility of an Islamist government: unveiled women did not see the rule of Islamists as a desirable alternative to their current government, whereas veiled women emphatically did. Unveiled women were alarmed at the gains Is- lamists were making and feared that their continued gains would lead to the curtailment of their own civil rights. Veiled women hoped for the day when an Islamic state would be instituted and “all other women will wear higab.”
9

Echoing the findings of earlier researchers, Zuhur found that un- veiled women did not believe that the veil was required by Islam. Many claimed that its use was spreading through society because women were being paid to wear it by the Brotherhood and other Islamist groups and by funds from Saudi Arabia and Libya.

Veiled women, on their side, considered unveiled women to be fail- ing to practice a foundational Islamic requirement, and they saw their own adoption of the hijab to be a sign of their social and moral awaken- ing. Among the elements that had made the Islamist message attractive to women (and more successful among them than had been “interna- tionally anticipated”), Zuhur suggests, was “its association with cultural authenticity, nationalism, and the pursuit of
‘adala,
or social justice.”
10

As veiled women’s hope for an Islamist government indicated, Zuhur’s veiled women, in contrast to Macleod’s interviewees, seemed to be adopting the hijab not merely (or perhaps not at all, since Zuhur does not address this point) to resolve personal dilemmas but because they were self-consciously affiliating themselves with the goals of Islamism. However, the veiled women in her group were not themselves Islamist activists, Zuhur emphasized. (Aiming primarily to study “what takes place in the mind of the ‘average’ woman,” and to portray the world of “ordinary women,” Zuhur deliberately excluded activists from her study.)

Just as the fact that the veiled women in Zuhur’s study were likely to have adopted hijab as schoolgirls—and thus at a far earlier age than those in Macleod’s study—the differences between Macleod’s and Zuhur’s groups with regard to their attitudes toward Islamism perhaps similarly reflected the fact that Zuhur’s research, conducted a few years after Macleod’s, captures yet another and more advanced moment in the ongoing progress of Islamism.

Like Macleod, Zuhur also set out to investigate whether women who wore hijab were more religious than those who did not. Like Macleod, she concluded that they were not. Zuhur did find, though, that while veiled and unveiled women may be equally pious, the ways in which they conceived of and practiced their religion differed in subtle but palpable ways. The difference lay above all in the profoundly differ- ent emphasis they placed on the importance of the “inner” practices of religion, on the one hand, and on “outward” and “visible” practices on the other. For veiled women, the emphasis typically fell on the outward practices and on the public display of piety and religiousness. Often, in response to the question of whether they considered themselves religious, veiled women were likely to say, “Since I veil, I am religious.”
11
They might also say that since they prayed regularly and fasted and read the Quran, they were religious.

Unveiled women, in contrast, were more likely to define religion in terms of the inner dimensions of religion, and in terms of good deeds and of dealing with people in the “right way.” “The unveiled woman considers the
jawhar
[the jewel] or essence of her religion, to be more important than the
mazhar
[the appearance] or exterior practices, al-

though most observe [also] the
mazhar
through regular prayer, fasting during Ramadan, reading of the Quran, and so on.” As one unveiled woman explained, she considered herself religious “because I believe in God and I try to deal with people in the right way.” While many unveiled women, Zuhur found, also performed the “outward” practices of reli- gion, such as prayer and fasting during Ramadan, some did not—but they nevertheless considered themselves to be religious. One respondent, for instance, declared, in response to Zuhur’s questioning, that she did not pray or fast, “and if that’s what you mean, then I’m not religious.” But, she went on, “Islam is a
din muamalah
(a religion of social associa- tion and reciprocity): religion is how you treat people, how you live your life, and in that sense I am religious.”

Emphasizing that her findings showed above all that Muslim women “conceive of and practice their religion in diverse ways,” and that some unveiled women considered themselves to be no less pious than veiled women, Zuhur notes that the nonveiled woman “may be equally pious,”and therefore cannot be termed “secular.” The use of this term to refer to nonveiled women was evidently beginning to come into aca- demic currency at the time that Zuhur was writing, and in the interest of accuracy Zuhur, as she is careful to point out, chose to refrain from using it.
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(Notably the term does not occur as an appropriate description for the nonveiled in any of the prior academic writing in English on women and veiling reviewed here—from El Guindi to Macleod.)

Zuhur’s attempt to pinpoint the different understandings of the meanings of religion and of what it meant to be a religious or pious per- son, brief and unelaborated though it is, nevertheless touches on a key matter: the redefinition of the very meanings and practices of piety, and of the very understanding of religion and what it meant to be religious, that the spread of Islamism was bringing about in these decades. Simi- larly, Zuhur’s scrupulous refusal to adopt the term “secular” for non- veiled women on the grounds of its essential inaccuracy underscores the new descriptive force that the term “secular” was beginning to gain in these years, as it underscores also the transitions in meanings and dress that were now under way as new forces gained power and their vocabu- laries of dress, language, and religious practice steadily gained ascen- dancy.

As we saw earlier, the Muslim Brotherhood from its very founding had had the goal of persuading the general population to leave aside their traditional ways of living and practicing Islam, ways that the Brother- hood regarded as passive and “dormant,” and of educating them into adopting in its place the engaged, activist ways of Islamism along with all its attendant requirements, rituals, and prescriptions, including veiling. Older, more traditional ways of living and practicing Islam, passed from one generation to the next, would come to be looked down on by Is- lamists as constituting incorrect ways of practicing the religion.
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