- This is a good book.
ar
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Veil: Modesty, Privacy and Resistance. FADWA EL GUINDI. New York: Berg, 1999; 242 pp.
Fadwa El Guindi has done a great service to readers interested in veiling and its social significance and symbolic meaning cross-culturally. She provides students of Islamic societies in particular with an informative and incisive book that draws on a variety of sources and approaches. These include dress literature, Islamic textual sources, ethnographic studies in Egypt, the Sudan, and Jordan, etymology, Egyptian social history; and perhaps most important, her own work in contemporary Egypt, particularly on the Islamic movement over the last two decades. She is a gifted cultural anthropologist who has used her literacy in Islamic textual sources and her ethnographic skills to yield insights on the meaning of veiling as part of a general pattern of dress and public demeanor.
Her book includes illuminating chapters on "Ideological Roots to Ethnocentrism," "The Anthropology of Dress," "The Veil in Social Space," "The Veil Becomes a Movement," "Contexts of Resistance," and "Veiling and Feminism." One of its important messages is that veiling, particularly in the Arab Middle East, is not a reference to shame and oppression of women, but rather to privacy in the public arena, the identity of the group, and rank, respectability, and power. A related message is that veiling must be placed in its social context and seen in relation to men's behavior and dress. Indeed, she points out that the primary Islamic textual sources (Quran and Traditions of the Prophet or hadith) either make more references to the proper dress of men than women or introduce verses regarding women's proper behavior/dress with verses regarding men's proper behavior/dress. El Guindi's point is that veiling must be viewed in its historical, sociocultural, and situational/spatial context in order to ascertain its meaning and significance.
In addressing the social/situational/spatial context of dress (Ch. 6), she distinguishes the various items of women's dress and the different degrees of modest behavior they provide--covering head and hair vs. covering the body vs. covering the face. Each degree of covering symbolizes a different degree of modesty and religiosity. But El Guindi also emphasizes the dynamic flexibility of meaning that is allowed and realized by women as "they pull down to cover and pull up to uncover" (p. 97), depending on changing social situations. For instance, the modesty code is relaxed when women are in the presence of their mahram (male kin bound by the incest taboo). In addition, different cultures emphasize systematic changes of different kinds by changes of modest dress. Veiling in North Indian villages symbolically separates the wife from her own kin group and absorbs her into her husband's group; whereas veiling among the Rashayda tribe of the Sudan indicates the particular life-cycle stage the woman has reached.
El Guindi supplements this social, spatial analysis with etymological and textual analysis. She points out that the Quranic denotations and connotations of the term libas (dress)--cover, haven, sanctuary, shelter, morality--are quite different than the denotations and connotations of the term hijab (woman's dress, a term little used in the Quran but popularized by the Islamic movement of the 1980s and 1990s)--meaning sacred, separation, partition, resistance. She argues (Ch. 9) that Quranic verses on modesty address both men and women, do not demand face-veiling, focus mainly on the special status of the Prophet's wives, and do not refer to sexuality or sexual shame, but rather to sacred divide, sanctuary, reserve, and privacy.
One of the most perceptive chapters in the book is Chapter 10 where El Guindi focuses on Arab Muslim attitudes towards women's work. Here, she insists that such attitudes must be framed with the protective role of the consanguine family (my term, not hers) as the main context. The males of the patrilineal extended family must support and protect the women of their family. Jobs as domestics and clerical jobs in bureaucracies staffed by foreigners or unrelated men expose the woman to molestation and dishonor. It is not dishonorable for women to work outside the home when the woman is self-employed or where there is an egalitarian work milieu where men do not dominate. This emphasis on the role of the consanguine family in many Muslim (and non-Muslim) societies emphasizes El Guindi's view that veiling must be viewed as a phenomenon within the context of a much wider social and cultural pattern.
The last section of the book is devoted to understanding veiling as part of the Islamic movement of resistance beginning in the 1970s in the Middle East and continuing to the present day in many other parts of the world. El Guindi argues that in Egypt it begins as a bottom-up movement by college women (unlike the elite Egyptian feminist movement at the beginning of the century) that spreads rapidly to other classes. It is a movement renewing cultural identity and rejecting western values (permissive sexual morality, consumerism, commercialism) and style-of-life in a culturally appropriate manner, that is, with reserve and restraint in dress, voice, and bodily movement. Earlier in Algeria in the 1960s veiling was a symbolic act of resistance helping to liberate Algeria from French occupation and later in Iran it became a symbolic focus of struggle between the State and popular resistance to the State during the Iranian revolution.
I have two criticisms of this scholarly and perceptive book. First, El Guindi like other intellectuals, among whom I do not except myself, emphasizes the functions of veiling that are sublime and heroic: Islamic nationalism, resistance to colonialism, resisting authoritarian regimes, liberation from materialist cultures and consumerist behavior. She neglects the more mundane and pragmatic functions of veiling appreciated by non-intellectuals, for example, improving one's marriage prospects in conservative circles, being more comfortable in a work milieu governed by men, avoiding harassment in the public arena (streets, sidewalks, buses, parks), and simply being chic. Second, although El Guindi has provided many incisive insights into the symbolic meaning of veiling in different contexts, she has not carried out a systematic symbolic analysis of veiling. She might have turned to myth, marking, social drama, or rhetoric of the kind done by a number of anthropologists, triggered by the special issues on symbolism in the American Ethnologist in the early 1980s. Hopefully, that will be next on her agenda and does not diminish the substantial contribution her book has made to the anthropology of dress, cultural anthropology, and Middle East studies.
Reviewed by Richard T. Antoun, State University of New York at Binghamton
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