A Quiet Revolution (8 page)

religious women typically wore no veil. For us, as Hourani’s article cor- rectly captures, not wearing hijab was simply the “modern” and “ad- vanced” way of being Muslim. Islam sans veil was essentially to us “true” Islam—Islam stripped (as we saw it) of centuries’ worth of false and backward cultural accretions.

There was no suggestion whatsoever in that era that women’s un- veiling signified their rejection of Islam or their secularism. Notably, there is no such suggestion in Hourani’s essay either: on the contrary, Hourani emphasized that Amin had made a point of asserting that the changes he was recommending were in no way “contrary to the princi- ples of Islam.”
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The idea that women who did not veil were secular, a common view today, was simply not among the meanings of unveiling in that era, at least not among the dominant middle classes in Egypt or among peo- ple of Hourani’s background and education. Perhaps such ideas were coming into circulation in other populations—in Saudi Arabia, for ex- ample, and among the Muslim Brotherhood. In the ensuing decades, as both the Saudis and the Brotherhood steadily gained power, so did the view that women who did not veil, and Muslim-majority nations whose women did not veil, were secular—or at best were people who had fallen away from the practices of “true” Islam.

Thus the ideas and practices that had articulated the desires and beliefs of an earlier era became, in Egypt by the
1940
s, the hackneyed as- sumptions of the socially and politically dominant groups in the coun- try’s cities. Grounded in an earlier generation’s acceptance of the beliefs

and prejudices of European imperialist societies, these assumptions and the practices associated with them were also expressions of an inner land- scape that was charged and layered with the longings of that earlier gen- eration.

The story of how these ideas would become the assumptions of much of society, accepted by the vast majority of the population, only to be undermined and reversed in the ensuing decades, forms the subject of the ensuing chapters.

One noteworthy fact about the unveiling movement is how it originated not in precolonialist Middle Eastern notions of the meaning of the veil, notions rooted in Islamic, Christian, and Jewish local meanings, but rather in Western nineteenth-century ideas about the veil’s meaning.

With the rise of the West to global dominance, Western views of the world would come to supersede local meanings in a vast range of matters, including the veil. For even in such countries as Turkey, which never experienced direct colonial domination but which was nonetheless powerfully affected by the spread of Western ideas, the local meanings of the veil came to be superseded by Westerners’ view of the veil as a sign of the inferiority of Islam and Muslim societies and peoples, as well as of Islam’s “degradation” of women.

This, one could say, was at root the reason that Amin (reproduc- ing ideas such as Cromer’s) advocated the casting off of the veil in Egypt in
1899
: to erase from Egypt and Islam this blot of inferiority. Similarly, it was in order to eradicate this sign of inferiority from his society that

Kamal Ataturk, the leader and modernizer of Turkey, would declare in a speech in
1925
: “In some places I have seen women who put a piece of cloth or a towel or something like that over their heads to hide their faces, and who turn their backs or huddle themselves on the ground when a

man passes by. What is the meaning and sense of this behaviour?” Ataturk went on, “Gentlemen, can the mothers and daughters of a civi- lized nation adopt this strange manner, this barbarous posture? It is a spectacle that makes the nation an object of ridicule. It must be remedied at once.”
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By this time such opinions were becoming the norm among

the middle and upper classes in the Muslim world. In the
1930
s the shah

of Iran banned the veil, and police were required to remove it from women who did not comply.

In much of the Arab world, the process, as Hourani described it, happened gradually and without enforcement. Women in the region (with the exception of the Arabian Peninsula) unveiled through the first half of the twentieth century for a plethora of reasons, among them as ex- pression of their longing for the goods, opportunities, and amenities of modernity. All of these meanings, along with others, were simultane- ously present and in the air in that era. But it is noteworthy that the process of unveiling occurred initially because the Western meaning of the veil—as a sign of the inferiority of Islam as religion, culture, and civ- ilization—trumped and came to profoundly overlay the veil’s prior in- digenous meanings (common to all three monotheistic religions in the region) of proper and God-given gender hierarchy and separation.

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The Veil’s Vanishing Past

he world that Hourani evokes and the assumptions that un- derlie his essay were, then, entirely those that shaped my own

T

consciousness growing up in Egypt in the

1940

s and
1950
s. Be-

sides offering a snapshot of where the different countries of the region stood with regard to veiling, Hourani’s article also perfectly captures the middle- and upper-class ethos of that era around veiling.

Through those decades and until the end of the Nasser era in Egypt in the late
1960
s, the hijab became ever more rare. By the late fifties, even the class that Hourani had written of a few years earlier as tenaciously

holding on to the practice—the lower middle classes, the “most conser- vative of all classes”—were now joining the broad tide of women who wore no veils. If the era of the
1900
s to the
1920
s was the Age of Unveil- ing, the
1920
s to the
1960
s was the era when going bareheaded and un- veiled became the norm. A good proportion of the women coming of age during these decades (women of my mother’s generation, for exam- ple—she was born in
1908
—as well as, of course, women of my own generation) never unveiled because, in fact, they had never veiled.

But in about the mid-seventies, the veil began to reappear, first among small groups of female university students, and then—taking contemporaries completely by surprise—in society at large. Within a couple of decades, women who had never worn hijab began to do so.

And young girls were soon growing up unaware that there had been a time when Muslim women—devout, mainstream Muslim women, and not merely secular women—had not worn hijab. The entire era of Mus- lim women going bareheaded was being quietly erased from Muslim memory, and even Muslim history. For through these and the ensuing years, and as Islamists steadily gained ascendency, that era would be re- cast as a secular age, a time when women had given up veiling because they were no longer devout or even believing Muslims and had given up on Islam.

How and by virtue of what forces was this extraordinary transfor- mation accomplished? In this and the following chapters I pursue this question, piecing together the available facts of the emergence and spread of the veil and the forces that brought about the veil’s resurgence—crit- ical among these being the Muslim Brotherhood and the powerful Is- lamist currents backed by Saudi Arabia.

In this chapter, covering the
1920
s to the end of the
1960
s, I review

the events that set the stage for the dynamic Islamic Resurgence of the
1970
s. I describe the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood and some of its commitments and activities until it fell afoul of the Nasser regime in the
1950
s. I also describe other important developments in the Nasser era, including the fierce rivalry (dubbed the Arab Cold War) between Saudi Arabia and Egypt, a rivalry in which the Muslim Brothers would side with Saudi Arabia. I end with Egypt’s and the Arabs’ military defeat by Israel. That defeat is seen as marking the end of Nasserism, even though Nasser himself lived for another couple of years, and as ushering in the new mood of religiosity that would sweep across the country.

Drawing on my own memories I can supplement and slightly adjust Hourani’s overview with respect to Egypt. While it was true that it was rare by the late
1940
s and early fifties to see anyone in a veil in the city centers and modern neighborhoods of Cairo or Alexandria, where the middle and upper classes lived, the veil was still an ordinary part of life in other segments of society. In the villages, for instance, women typically wore a head veil. While working in the fields they wore loose, full-length gowns, often black but sometimes in colorful floral patterns, along with a loosely flowing black head covering in a fairly light fabric. It was com-

mon, in the area in which we lived, on the outer edges of Cairo, to see women from the nearby village dressed in this way—but always wearing a black outer garment over the colored robes—walking past our house on their way to shop or to run errands or pursue work in the city.

Through the forties and early fifties women who lived in Old Cairo and in the poorer districts bordering modern Cairo (Hourani’s “most conservative of all classes”) might also be seen wearing a veil or covering. The style of their covering was quite different from that of village women. The city form of covering at this class level, called a
milaya laff
(“wrap- ping sheet”), consisted of a black enveloping wrap, covering both head and body, that women wore over their clothing when they went out- doors. Sometimes they would draw the garment across the lower half of their faces, particularly if they found themselves in a direct exchange with a man. Sometimes a woman dressed in this way might also wear a heavy (rather than flimsy) black veil over the lower half of her face. This would be held in place by a cordlike thread, sometimes adorned with a decora- tive gold ring that rested on the nose. The hijab worn by middle- and upper-class city women of my grandmother’s generation (she was born in

1885
) also differed from either of these styles. In their case the head cover-

ing was made of very light material that was closely and complexly wrapped around the head, so that it looked opaque. When they ventured outdoors (my grandmother even covered her head indoors after her son died) they might additionally wear a flimsy white veil over the lower half of the face. The only times I saw my mother in a veil was when she attended fu- nerals. A covering of black see-through material wrapped closely around the head was routine formal wear for funerals (among the deceased’s close relatives, in any case) for women of my mother’s generation well

into the
1950
s.

Another type of covering was also occasionally to be seen: a scarf— and often an expensive-looking European-style scarf—that covered the head and was tied under the chin. This was a style in favor among “very conservative” middle- and upper-class families who had cast off tradi- tional hijabs but evidently considered covering to be an essential re- quirement. I personally knew no one in our city community who dressed in this way, but we did have distant relatives whose main residence was in the countryside who followed this style when they came into the city

—women both of my mother’s and my own generation. And certainly it was a style that even I, as a youngster, recognized as one of the ways people might dress. Along with the scarf, such women wore “conserva- tive-style” Western dress: long sleeves and skirts (never pants—none of us wore pants) that were about mid-calf in length. This was how most of the rest of us dressed, too; the only difference I recall was that in our fam- ily our sleeves were not always full length, although they were never shorter than just above the elbow.

There also were, as mentioned earlier, the coverings of the women of the Muslim Brotherhood. Like the coverings of the women who wore European-type headscarves, these too were not like any traditional veils. Unlike the headscarfed women, though, these women wore, along with their modern-style head coverings in mainly solid neutral colors (and which covered their heads and necks more fully than a headscarf would), not conservative versions of Western-style dress but modern-looking Is- lamic style robes that, like their head coverings, differed from traditional styles of dress.

While the attire of the women wearing European-style scarves seemed to signal that the women were “like us” but more conservative— that they too were going with the flow of Western dress and ways while also adapting them to what they considered to be Islamic requirements

—the dress of the women of the Muslim Brotherhood seemed to dis- tinctly signal that they were definitely not “like us” and perhaps were even opposed to “us” and the Westernizing current that we—the dom- inant in society—were part of. Although I cannot be certain of this today, I believe that even as a youngster I sensed that this was what their dress meant and what they wanted us to understand by it: that they were both different from and opposed to us.

Certainly the Brotherhood affirmed the veil as a foundational Is- lamic requirement. The universal importance of this rule was manifest on the practical and visible level: the women of the Brotherhood invari- ably wore hijab. The Brotherhood was generally deeply critical of the Egyptian government and opposed to the broadly Westernizing trend being set and followed by the governing middle and upper classes. The veil of the Brotherhood women was a visual emblem of the Brother- hood’s commitment to a form of Islam requiring hijab, and at the same

time it signaled their opposition to the dominant classes and the direc- tion in which they were taking society.
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Founded in
1928
by al-Banna, the Muslim Brotherhood quickly

gained grassroots support among young men of the urban working classes and first-generation rural immigrants, groups that formed the core of al-Banna’s following. Gradually the organization would gain fol- lowers in the middle classes.
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