Of Veils – and Their Provenance
photo by Khashayar Elyassi
Section One. Introduction
What follows are my thoughts on the issue of Veils worn by Women in societies predominantly Muslim – and as a self-ascribed practice. The note was crafted in response to an invitation elsewhere and has been edited to fit a general readership among friends on this wall. You, of course, must read this text with some caution for two reasons. One, I teach Middle Eastern History from late antiquities to late modern periods, though my real strength if you can call that a strength is in the late antiquities to say just after the invasion of the Mongols of Baghdad which lay that city to waste in 1258. Although I do teach the Ottoman Empire, my offerings here are a bit ersatz as my early Ottoman Turk is a bit rudimentary though I can make sense of texts particularly where imperial naval rivalries are concerned in the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean South at the cusp of European Renaissance. Two, I am a Combonian and Jesuit educated scholar with a reasonable grasp of Islamic theology and jurisprudence particularly where it relates to (a) the Muta’zallite discourses and their detractors, and Sufism. You will find background on the formative years in the autobiography section here at <http://csub.academia.edu/Dhada/Autobiographical-Bits-and-Pieces>.
I say all this so that you can assess my comments in their appropriate context. In short, the text by definition comes to you soiled at the hands of someone with a lived in experience as a scholar and as a critical observer of the affairs of Muslims living in both, Muslim majority states and non-Muslim countries of Euro-Atlantica.
Section Two. The Veil and Its Appearance
The practice of the veil was asymmetric during the emergence of Islam in the 6th century. In fact there is sustainably reliable evidence, though anecdotal, to suggest that it was not. There is of course historical evidence that points to two things. The veil was an artifact in greater Mesopotamia just after the cusp of the first ever agricultural revolution. Given that such a revolution brought with it the formative foundations of a judiciary – witness the Hammurabi Code – and the emergence of early empires in the classic period the veil and or such ancient derivatives covering a female body as an asset was accentuated with the emergence of women as war booty. Whether such a practice was enforced in a genderized context or not is besides the point.
Section Three. The Veil and the Cultural Matrices
The point important here is that it was a social artifact grooved by war, and determined by trade protectionism, i.e., exchange of booty. Incidentally, while it is important here not to inject feminist dialectics if only to preserve contextual appropriateness, it is worth pointing out that, seen from our viewpoint today, the veil initiated a commodification of women in early classical civilization. Its value as variable capital, as Marxist historians would say, was unquestionably well established. Its value as producers of progeny equally assured. Looking at a man, his value was and remains singular. A woman on the other hand was and remains a bearer of several bambino earthlings. Assyrians and their progeny were no fools – and neither were the early Persians who adopted the practice with greater enthusiasm – and for good historical reason, one being their incredible sense of almost Cartesian thoroughness in imperial governance. They were avid practitioners of systems. They invented highways. They perfected espionage on a grander scale than Ashoka. They established the first postal service. And having learned a lesson or two from their governance of Mesopotamia under Cyrus, which brought us the Cyrus Cylinder, and Egypt where they came in contact with variants of Iknatenian monotheism, they too engaged in what could best the described as the world’s first experiment in monotheistic episcopacy – Zoroastrianism. The veil here was firmly established as a socially engineered artifact particularly among the Persic aristocracy, despite the fact that no such practice was to be found in Egypt, where women were in transparent partnership with men over issues of governance, divorce, business and rulership. Here,the veil failed to take root – not until much later – and in part because men in battle had left the field of governance and social life behind the frontline open for women to step into the breech.
Section Four. The Veil Turns Godly
Early Islam right up to the middle of the Abbasid period demonstrated little appetite for the practice of the veil as a state sanctioned practice with royal/caliphal imprimatur. Regional variations dictated here the theological text – note how utterly secular the early Ummayads proved to be once they snatched lower Syria from the Byzantine jaws from across the steppes in Constantinople. In fact, contemporary records bemoan the drunken and indeed very rampant debauchery and other clearly inappropriate practices of the rulers in Damascus. It is only after Islam is no longer Arab in ethnicity and more importantly becomes deeply tinted by the influx of Barmakid aristocrats and bureaucrats from Khurasan brought in to help Abbasid governance that we see a deep change occurring.
But even here, it is worthy of note that the courts of Harun al-Rashid and his progeny exhibited a wonderfully colourful and highly eclectic tapestry of society, culture and sexuality. Let us not forget that it was in this milieu that lasted nearly four hundred years that the best Islamicate poetry emerged, as did satire, music, and some very odd and very compellingly enlightened sexual norms and practices – see my review of _The Slave Girls of Baghad_ for instance. Do also note that this period also proved to be a highly socially mobile period in Abbasid history for some at least. Slaves became consorts of rulers, courtesans, and rebel leaders with a just cause to grind. The practice of navel baring as a fashion statement and as a dance practice emerged. Segregation between the public woman and the private woman of the Hurram emerged.
Note here the case of the Zinj rebellion, which successfully challenged from Basara its rulers by the north, and in which women appeared on occasions to have played a prominent role in challenging certain norms. Also let us not forget that it was in this period that led al-Rashid’s progeny to lose Baghdad to his half-brother at the banks of the Tigres if I am not mistaken as he competed with his transgender paramour over who could catch the most fish! Here Islam appeared to have exhibited a truly humane, truly compassionate, truly global, truly forgiving, truly progressive, truly amiable life style untouched by clouds of wrath, damnation of women baring their soul as an expression of their culture and NOT seeing this necessarily as a contravention of faith, and sacramental punishment.
At the center of this history emerged the most devastating core that eventually ripped the veil from its agro-social and thence multi-cultural matrix and placed it at the core of Islamicate theology – and that was the formation of the House of Translation also known as the House of Wisdom. As we have seen, that initiative on one hand salvaged residual classical texts from oblivion but it also brought in its wake a fierce and ferocious debate over God’s word as truth and God’s word as a created truth, in short God as LOGOS and God’s text, or the Koran as a text with room enough for contextual historicity to live side by side.
To cut a long story short, that debate raged for a while delineating two positions – one calling for a return to fundamentals and the other solidly seeking to contextualize it to evolving social, cultural and contextual norms.
Section Five. As So The Need To Unveil All This
The debate between the purists seeking to use Islam as a normative tool for social enforcement and engineering and their opponents continues since the Ibne-Taymiah days. In the eighteenth century the debate found a willing and oil-fortified audience, the Wahabbist movement which then found Arabia Felix as its ground to practice the veil as a religious artifact. Other Muslim states before and after colonization followed. The rest of the world, predominantly secular is naturally split asunder. One hand is dominated by those who find the practice utterly barbaric, and the other hand is inhabited by those passionately committed to relativist thinking. As an act of good neighborliness, the latter accept difference and are avid practitioners of non-judgementalism. In short, what began as a social and cultural artifact is now enshrined by some (perhaps many) as a religious cannon to hurramize women. I can fully empathise with women who ELECT out of free will to wear the veil as a cultural artifact. But veil as a cardinal expression of faith in Islam has very little validity and is historically speaking genderazed as an act of hegemonic masculinity. In all of this the singular casualty is context which was enshrined by Islam in the middle five hundreds after the common era in the words of Muhammad, Islam’s prophet when he said “Let Islam not be a burden to you” or words to that effect.
(photo by Khashayar Elyassi, Flickr)
