Click here to read Kavita Ramdya’s “A Veiled Truth” in the January/February 2010 issue of “The Indian American” magazine.
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“A Veiled Truth” by Kavita Ramdya (January/February 2010 issue of “The Indian American”)
Women’s fashion is not only topical in the pages of “Vogue” but also in heady financial and news publications such as “The Financial Times” and “The Washington Post”. Ladies fashion is not limited to discussing the runway shows at fashion week or the holiday-season sales; instead, what women are wearing, or desire to wear, has emerged as a major theme in the global debate around Muslims versus Islamists. And the global debate is focused on headwear. The variety of national cultures and disparate governments which govern the communities in which Muslim women live has resulted in a disparate and non-uniform, excuse the pun, attitudes towards answering the age-old question, “what to wear?!” However, looking at the political regime under which these disparate communities function in connection with the most infamously-dressed woman, albeit a fictional one, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s heroine Hester Prynne in his novel “The Scarlet Letter” sheds light on the inconsistent attitudes Muslim women purport towards traditions like wearing a head scarf, veil or niqab.
For months I have made thinking about why Muslim women do or don’t want to cover their head an intellectual pursuit of mine. It began with reading Charlemagne, the European columnist in “The Economist” magazine, column “In knots over headscarves” where he describes how in 2004 Muslim headscarves “have been banned at state schools” [in France]. Belgium, on the other hand, has left it to school administrators to decide whether to allow headscarves or not; right now only three schools in Antwerp allow students to don the religious clothing including Ms. Karin Hereman’s Royal Atheneum. It was when many of her female students arrived at school wearing “all-concealing robes and gloves” that Ms. Heremans confronted these young girls who were often seen unveiled on the weekends and off school grounds. Rather than agree with Ms. Heremasn that their veil stigmatized them, her students turned the accusation around and said the administrator’s attitude towards their wearing the veil was stigmatizing.
The young women at Antwerp are not the only ones to assert their right to cover their heads and bodies; the feminist group “Boss of my own head” (or BOEH in the Dutch acronym), in a distinctly post-modern fashion, protested Ms. Hereman’s reversal that her students be allowed to wear headscarves, etc. Rather than protest in full hijab, however, the members of BOEH wore such random objects such as “sieves and toys on their heads”, implying that articles of religious clothing can be emptied of their non-secular significance and that random objects are open to interpretation by the community rather than having intrinsic meaning. Everything—religious significance, political overtures, traditional values—is ultimately in the eyes of the beholder when it comes to making sense of why women want the right to wear religious articles of clothing.
In a country where the government could not be more different from Belgium’s liberal democracy, journalist Lubna Hussein continues to wear pants as a way of criticizing Sudan’s Islamist ruling party’s decency laws. However, Sudan’s decency laws not only target Muslim women: on November 28th, the Associated Press reported a “16-year-old Christian girl from southern Sudan said… she was lashed 50 times for wearing a skirt deemed indecent by the authorities”. Whereas Belgium strives to promote liberalism and tolerance among its minority groups, Sudanese women are alienated by the Islamist government which resulted from Omar Hassan al-Bashir’s rise to power after a 1989 coup.
Again, regional differences emerge when it comes to why women do or don’t want to cover their heads. Whereas the local men in Hussein’s community threatened women who violated decency laws with throwing acid on them to disfigure these women’s faces and bodies, leading Egyptian cleric Shaikh Tantawai banned the wearing of the niqab or burqa (full-face veil) at Al-Azhar university. Governed by men who would rather the world focus on Egypt’s hospitable tourism industry and ancient history, the Muslim government is running an international publicity campaign to further distance itself from the growing problem of terrorism that has marred the reputations of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and even India. Ironically, although Egyptian women couldn’t live in a society more different from that of Belgium’s Antwerp, in both countries female-university students expressed their right to veil their heads when faced with the ultimatum of banning religious articles of clothing.
In following the international debates centered on women in such far-flung countries such as Belgium, Sudan and Egypt, I was improbably brought back to America. Most, if not all, American high-school students have read Hawthorne’s mid-19th-century novel about Hester Prynne whose adultery was punished by being forced to wear a letter “A” (for adulterer) on her bosom in the Puritan, pre-Independence Massachusetts community in which the novel’s events take place. No woman, Paris Hilton or Hollywood’s starlets on the red carpet at Oscar Night, has been the target of such analysis and debate as Hester when it comes to discussing women’s fashion. Doctoral students have been writing about the significance of Hester’s punishment in English Literature dissertations across the globe, college students discussed the local township’s court structure in light of the Queen’s royal legal system, and high-school students learn about early colonists’ Puritan values which they were able to freely express as subjects in the Queen’s Thirteen Colonies.
Hawthorne, in “The Market-Place” (Chapter II), describes Hester’s community not unlike mainstream, western media’s portrayal of Muslim society: harsh, judgemental and merciless. He writes, “… as befitted a people amongst whom religion and law were almost identical, and in whose character were so thoroughly interfused, that the mildest and the severest acts of public discipline were alike made venerable and awful”. Like the vigilante Sudanese Islamists who threaten to mar women’s features with acid as a way to punish their breach of “decency laws” by wearing trousers or short skirts, Hawthorne is critical of Hester’s community which doles punishments disproportionate to the “crime”.
Just like the Muslim veil is meant to deflect lust and ensure marital faithfulness, Hester’s peers describe her punishment as one which should remind the community’s women not to wield to feelings of lust. One “autumnal matron” argues that the judges should have “put the brand of a hot iron on Hester Prynne’s forehead”. Ultimately, in both the Islamist and the colonial-Puritan society, sex is wholly determined by the woman’s behavior. She is held fully responsible for any sexual transgressions whether it be adultery or temptation of a man who is not her husband.
Whereas the letter A spurs ridicule and teasing from the local boys and jeering from her neighbors, years of living a quiet life in the woods raising her daughter Pearl as a single mother enabled her community to forgive Hester’s “frailty” and instead began “to look upon the scarlet letter as the token, not of that one sin, for which she had borne so long and dreary a penance, but of her many good deeds since” (Chapter XIII). Similarly ostracized Puritans seek solace in Hester’s cabin, and many a woman neighbor advice from the woman they once castigated as an adulterer. The letter A, through Hester’s own agency and that of her community’s, evolved in meaning: Adulterer becomes Able.
Why the transformation? Why does Hester undergo such a transformation by wearing an A on her bosom and her community for being reminded of her transgression? Like the veil or hijab, the letter A is symbolic of “original sin”. According to the Abrahamic religions, inclusive of both Islam and Puritanism, we are all descendents of Adam and Eve whose carnal delight in one another spawned nations. However, this same act of sexual self-expression is their first act of defiance against their maker, God, who expressly forbids them not to partake in the apple which will reveal their nakedness to one another.
Whereas Hester who abandons the idea of running away from the colony A-less with her lover Reverend Dimmesdale and Muslim women who fight for their right to cover their heads, the Reverend and his Islamist contemporaries spend their lives running away from original sin: the will and human impulse for sexual self expression. While Hester proudly wears her humanity on her bosom and basks in the freedom of being “outed” for her original sin, the Reverend dies of guilt for having slept with Hester, denying Pearl a father and living as a hypocrite in his community. His Puritan commitment to his self-admonishment is symbolized in “the breast of the unhappy minister [where] a SCARLET LETTER-the very semblance of that worn by Hester Prynne-imprinted in the flesh” (Chapter XXIV).
Just like Hester uses her scarlet letter A brand as a way to liberate herself from the societal pressures of adhering to Puritan social mores and denying her original sin, Muslim women who choose to cover their heads participate in a similar exercise of altering the meaning and significance of wearing a veil or hijab. I suspect that Egyptian men flinch at covered-up women because it reminds them of their own moral transgressions and Sudanese Islamists enforce decency laws as a tool in controlling women’s ability to express themselves sexually. As for the post-modern Muslims in Belgium, I laud their intellectually-robust suggestion that the meaning of the veil is entirely in the eyes of the beholder and BOEH for suggesting that objects like scarves can be emptied of meaning just like random “sieves and toys” can just as easily be filled with significance.
Hester’s A was not without fashion. She exercises her God-given talent as a seamstress when she dons “in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread… the letter A. It was so artistically done, and with so much fertility and gorgeous luxuriance of fancy… [and of all the] splendour in accordance with the taste of the age…” After all of my years of living in international cities like New York and Boston, it was not until I moved to London in 2006 that I now regularly shop among mothers in full hijab and share the double-decker bus which transports me to work with veiled lawyers. I’ll never forget walking into the high-end department store Selfridges (the London equivalent to New York’s Neiman Marcus) and being regaled by the seemingly infinite supply of high-end, designer-branded veils and head scarves. Groups of Muslim women exercising their family’s petrol-sourced wealth shopped like they owned the store, queen-like in their elaborate, chequered gold Louis Vuitton head scarves and Burberry-patterned veils. Even ironic and religious women need to look good.
Kavita Ramdya is the author of “Bollywood Weddings: Dating, Engagement and Marriage in Hindu America” now available on Amazon. www.bollywood-weddings.com
Excellent post I must say.. Simple but yet entertaining and engaging.. Keep up the awesome work!