Unqualified Offerings

(posted by Jennifer)

Here’s a BBC photo essay about an Egyptian woman named Magda Amer, who is a Muslim preacher. Very interesting little piece—Magda’s definitely not the poor oppressed fundamentalist woman you read about in places like Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan, and I’m sure she’d be resentful of any Western woman who dared to feel sorry for her.

And yet I do. Here’s how she described her decision to take the veil:

At the time I was wearing mini skirts and had long hair. Veiling was the most difficult decision of my life … My mother and all the family were against me. I had to fight to convince everyone, I had to be strong. I didn’t want people to look at me for my body and my hair.
In the street I’m not bothered like I was before, and I feel peace inside. When I started to veil, men respected me.

She also makes sure to wear drab veils. Criticizing the young Egyptian women who wear colorful and stylish headscarves and clothes, she says:

It has to be the true veil. Now in Egypt it is not the true veil – it is worn very tight round the face and the colours of the veil are very showy. The purpose of the veil is not to show off. Also, women should not attract attention by wearing bright colours and tight clothes. They can be chic but they should not be showy.

Of course she has the right to make such choices. But I condemn the culture that makes her think they’re good ones.

You can argue that this is an arrogant Western imperialist culturalist otherbadthingist lens through which to look at the world. You can make arguments about vanity. You can even point to the struggle I had with my hair this morning and say that I’m more of a victim than she is, because the time I took out of my life turning a bad hair day into a good one was probably a lot more than the time she took out of her life to tie on her headscarf.

I’ve heard people defend hijab and its variants by comparing it to the overdone Victorian dress of Western women a scant century ago, when they showed hardly more skin than a modern woman in traditional Muslim garb. But I don’t buy that comparison. A Victorian woman had to wear a lot of unnecessary, uncomfortable and asinine clothes, it’s true, but at no point did she have to become invisible.

That’s the problem I have with Magda’s fashion ideals: they don’t promote modesty; they promote invisibility. Don’t wear bright clothes. Don’t wear tight clothes. (And from the photos, this woman defines ‘tight’ as ‘anything which suggests the circumference of your waist might be smaller than that of your boobs,’ though ‘anything which makes it possible to guess your weight within fifty pounds’ would work too.) Hide everything about you but your face. (And in many places around the world, hide even that.) Don’t stand out.

But even then, it wouldn’t bother me so much if the men in that culture were expected to abide by the same drab principles.

Here’s something else she said:

I am not a feminist. I see feminism as a western thing. Of course, I’m interested in women’s rights, but according to Islamic legislation. I would never ask for a woman to be equal to a man on every level.

I am a feminist. I’d never ask a woman to be equal to men on every level either, but I mean that in the sense that I wouldn’t expect a woman to be able to bench-press as much as a man. Hell, I can’t even expect myself to open jars on a man’s level. But I suspect the fans of female invisibility take their non-expectations a lot further.

(Speaking of invisibility, I think this is my last guest post, since Jim is supposed to come back tomorrow. If so, then good-bye, y’all. It’s been a lot of fun.)