Read A Quiet Revolution Online
Authors: Leila Ahmed
Tags: #Religion, #Islam, #History, #Social Science, #Customs & Traditions, #Women's Studies
A Quiet Revolution
L E I L A
A H
M
E D
The
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A Quiet Revolution
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A Quiet Revolution
The Veil’s Resurgence, from the Middle East to America
LEILA AHMED
•
b:=
New Haven and London
Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Philip Hamilton McMillan of the Class of
1894
, Yale College.
Copyright ©
2011
by Leila Ahmed. All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, includ- ing illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections
107
and
108
of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.
Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail
[email protected] (U.S. office) or
[email protected] (U.K. office).
Set in Minion type by Vonda’s Comp Services.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ahmed, Leila.
A quiet revolution : the veil’s resurgence, from the Middle East to America / Leila Ahmed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
978-0-300-17095-5
(cloth : alk. paper)
1
. Hijab (Islamic clothing)—Middle East.
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. Hijab (Islamic clothing)— United States.
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. Veils—Middle East.
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. Veils—United States.
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. Muslim women—Clothing—Middle East.
Muslim women—Clothing—United States. I. Title. BP
190
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5
.H
44
A
46 2011297
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5
'
76
—dc
22 2010049535A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z
39.48
-
1992
(Permanence of Paper).10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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F
irst of all, I would like to thank the Ford Foundation for a gener- ous grant in support of my research for this book, and particular thanks are due Constance H. Buchanan for her steadfast support
and patience. My thanks also to Ike Williams and to the always cheery Katherine Flynn at Kneerim and Williams Agency for their enthusiastic efforts on my behalf. Thanks also to the anonymous readers at Yale Uni- versity Press, and also at Columbia University Press, for their generous readings of my manuscript and for their invaluable comments and sug- gestions. Many thanks, too, to the entire production team at Yale Uni- versity Press, with special thanks to Heidi Downey, senior manuscript editor, for her wonderfully precise and exacting copyediting, which greatly improved my manuscript. I had the good fortune of having Jen- nifer Banks, senior editor at Yale University Press, as my editor. Jennifer took a keen interest in the project from early on, and her reading of the completed manuscript, at once enthusiastic and incisive, proved enor- mously helpful in enabling me to bring my arguments into sharper focus in the final reworking of the text. I owe her very special thanks.
I have worked on this book for many years, and thanks are due many, many others, far more than I can name, among them the women, many of them students, who kindly gave of their time in agreeing to be interviewed, and the women and men whose writings and activism I have
viii
acknowledgments
had the privilege of observing, following, and describing in these pages. My enormous indebtedness to other scholars in the field—predecessors, contemporaries, and colleagues—is evident throughout the book. I am very grateful also to students and colleagues here at Harvard, where I have had the extraordinary privilege of participating in conversations both in the classroom and beyond that have stimulated and enriched my think- ing beyond measure. Numerous conversations, exchanges, and consul- tations through the years with colleagues both at Harvard and in the wider Boston community have been illuminating and helpful. I would like to mention Kecia Ali, Ali Asani, Dorothy Austin, Ann Braude, Bernadette Brooten, David Carrasco, Nancy Cott, Maria-Pia Di Bella, Diana Eck, Janet Gyatso, Shahla Haeri, Charlie Hallisey, Karen King, Michael Jackson, Baber Johansen, Roy Mottahedeh, Afsaneh Najmabadi, Jacob Olupona, Diana Rowan Rockfeller, Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza, Jane Smith, and Malika Zeghal. Throughout, Karen Armstrong, a fre- quent visitor, has been a cherished friend and an extraordinary and won- derful interlocutor.
I am very grateful also for the leaves that enabled me to complete this book, and to William A. Graham, dean of the Harvard Divinity School, for his supportiveness throughout.
Finally, I am enormously grateful to family and friends for their support and patience through the years of my work on this project.
I
recall a particular evening a few months after I moved to Cam- bridge as one of those moments that was at the genesis of this book. After an early dinner with a friend who was visiting from the Arab world—a well-known feminist of Muslim background whom I will
call Aisha—we were taking a leisurely stroll back to her hotel. Rounding a corner, we came to a spontaneous halt at the sight of a crowd gathered on the Cambridge Common, evidently enjoying a private event or cele- bration. What was arresting was that all the women were in hijab—the veil or head covering that some Muslim women wear. This was in the
late
1990
s, when the hijab was much less common than it is today in
America. Seeing a public gathering of forty to fifty people, among whom all the women were in hijab, was still exceedingly rare. In fact, this may have been the first time I had seen such a gathering in America.
“To them,” said Aisha as we stood observing the scene, “
we
are the enemy. That’s how they see us, all of us, people like us, feminists, pro- gressives. That’s just how it is.” She spoke ruminatively, as if resuming a conversation, which in a way she was. I understood at once of course whom she meant by “them”: Muslims who wore or required the wear- ing of hijab. “We can’t ignore that,” she continued, “or simply pretend it isn’t so. And anyway they
are
our enemies. They threaten us, ban our books or try to, oppose everything we stand for. That’s just how it is.”
“And now,” said Aisha, as we resumed our walk, the twilight now perceptibly closing in, “our own friends defend them. And what’s worse,” she went on, “as we were saying, they’re right to do so. This is what they have to do in this country, defend minorities, defend people’s right to be different. That’s why we love their societies. That’s why we want to be like them.”
We had gone back and forth many times on this subject through the past few days, over coffee and tea and the meals we had shared. This was a new and different time for us, posing new questions in the field of
women and Islam, in which we both worked. When we began working on the subject in the
1970
s there had been neither a Muslim immigrant “problem” in Europe, as was brewing now, nor was fear of Islam and Muslims in connection with terrorism even an issue. Both of these had begun to become issues mostly in the
1990
s. In France the subject of women and Islam and the veil in particular were emerging as highly politicized issues in the fierce national debates under way around immi-
gration policies, and they were topics that were often invoked in partic- ular by the Right, who were in favor of restricting immigration. How, we wondered, would these winds of change complicate our subject even further, and how would this affect our work?
I have not seen Aisha since that time. She used to visit the United States quite often but now no longer does so. When she was invited to a conference here some years back, soon after we had embarked on our
She has not published anything on women and Islam since.
Many Americans and Europeans, in the
1990
s and today, assume that some Muslim women wear hijab simply because they are observant Mus- lims. Wearing hijab, they assume, is just what devout, observant Muslims do. But for Aisha and myself, the hijab’s presence meant not just piety— for we both knew many women in our home societies who were deeply devout yet never wore hijab. Rather, to us it plainly signaled the pres- ence of Islamism: a particular and very political form of Islam that had been gaining ground in Muslim societies since the Islamic Resurgence of the
1970
s, a resurgence significantly fueled by the activities of the Mus- lim Brotherhood.
Thus for us the hijab had meanings that it did not have for most Americans and even perhaps for many among the younger generations in our home societies—essentially because of the history we had our- selves directly lived and witnessed. This was history that we knew vis- cerally, in our memory and in the pulse of our being. For myself, for example, having grown up in Cairo in the
1940
s, the hijab that I was see- ing now in America, in its looks and style, powerfully evoked the hijab I recalled seeing in childhood worn by the women of the Muslim Broth- erhood—and only by the women of the Muslim Brotherhood. It was a different kind of hijab from the traditional sorts that one might occa- sionally see at that time, albeit by the forties and fifties quite rarely, on the streets of Cairo.