Fashion in Action!

Dubai’s Khaleej Times op-ed columnist Mohammed A.R. Galadari takes an unexpected view on Jack Straw’s call for the doffing of the veil:

Beyond the veil
By Mohammed A.R. Galadari
9 October 2006

IT IS so sad to see the newspapers in the UK make fun of the Muslim British citizens over this new controversy about veil or hijab. But it is not the media’s fault. They are in no way responsible for this state of affairs.

Unfortunately, many British Muslims do not understand that when they choose to become citizens of a country and make it their home, they also embrace its culture, customs, habits and social behaviour. This is a reality that is as clear as daylight. All Muslims have to do is accept it. Unfortunately, most Muslims who came to Britain decades ago do not understand this fundamental reality.

Dear readers, in this respect, there are lessons for British Muslims in the example of British Jewish community. Many Jews, who came to live in Britain, changed their names to fit the new social milieu. Some married people outside their close-knit community. So much so that today British Jews ? strikingly different from orthodox Jews ? are difficult to differentiate from the indigenous English people.

Why did the Jews do all this? Because they wanted to integrate with the host society and its social values and norms. That is how they managed to achieve eminent position in power and society as well as earn respect. Britain even had a Jewish Prime Minister in Benjamin Disraeli. Disraeli was the British PM for two tenures.

This of course became possible thanks to the liberal and generous nature of the British people. The British are essentially good-natured and most welcoming to new arrivals in their midst, helping new-comers easily integrate. They do not discriminate and distinguish between people. I know it. I have lived long years in Britain.

Unfortunately, some British Muslims at times behave in irrational ways. The other day, a blind woman called for a cab when she had her dog with her. A Muslim taxi driver apparently refused to take the dog in although she needed the dog as a guide and escort. As a result, she took the taxi driver to court and won the case.

Coming back to this row over the remarks made by former British foreign secretary Jack Straw on the chador or veil worn by Muslim women; as far as I know, Islamic law calls for covering one’s hair, not face. Now Jack Straw is considered as one of the most sympathetic leaders when it comes to Muslims. There is a huge number of Muslims in Straw’s parliamentary constituency of Blackburn. But they voted against him in last election on issues that concern Muslims. Now Straw has come up with this advice to Muslim women saying their veil may be holding them back from integrating with British society.

Dear readers, reasons like these antagonise people who are generally sympathetic to Muslims. And these are the kind of things that antagonise British people too. We must look at how Jews integrated with the British society but never changed their religious beliefs. They continued to pray in their synagogues and held on to their faith. I believe this is what the Muslims living in Britain and other countries in the West need to do. As long as the Muslims do not truly integrate with their host societies, they will continue to face hostility.

Readers? response may be forwarded to marg@khaleejtimes.com

It’s very difficult as a feminist to come to terms with veiling. One’s innate instinct is to condemn it as an imposition on women, which it often is, and to campaign against it. But I don’t, and there’s a reason why – because I believe if there’s to be change it has to be from within. Empowerment can’t be imposed.

I don’t agree with this article’s basic premise – it seems to hark back to a time when the world was a sight less global and a lot more insular and when you moved to another country you blended in. In today’s global culture with such easy access to travel, cultures are much more fragmented worldwide and less closed to outside influence. Difference is much more accepted these days. But I do agree with what the writer says about how previous minority groups have assimilated – that it has not been by force but by time and internal change.

Many, mostly male, cultural commentators and pundits are spouting off about the huge cultural and social rifts caused by one simple item of clothing, the niqab, as though it encapsulated some simple black/white clash between their own, enlightenment, values and some upstart, barbarous desert religion. They forget that the Moslem world is as far from homogenous as the West is and veil-wearing’s not always about religion and politics. Sometimes it’s just about clothes; particularly so in a consumer culture.

There as many differences as similarities between Moslem co-religionist countries as there are between say, Britain and Bulgaria for example; both are Christian but there the similarity ends. The culture is different, the style of life is different, the fashions are different – just as they are in many countries where a significant proportion of the population are Moslem.

The burqa and niqab and similar face-covering dress originated in desert countries and arose from the necessity to cover one’s eyes and mouth during a sandstorm. This combined with the Koranic injunction to be modest in dress has resulted in the head-to-toe coverings we see today.

Full covering is as much a cultural statement about where you’re from and what your subculture is as it is a religious one (though that is not to minimise the attempt by some Moslem missionaries to impose a one-size-fits all, Wahabi style veiling to countries such as the Maldives where it’s at least climatically if not culturally inappropriate).

As all cultural artifacts change and evolve, so do the niqab, abaya and hijab and their variants. These items of clothing are as much subject to the whims and changes of fashion as are handbags, or a pair of shoes. You can tell as much about someone by the fabric, cut and colour of a hijab or burqa as you can by any designer label jacket.

The cultural and social signifiers of dress don’t disappear because they’re not native, you just have to get your eye in. Pattern, colour and cut can tell you where someone originates from, what their income level is, whether they’re educated, even to which branch of their religion they belong.

It just so happens that this drastic style of dress and life is what’s fashionable now in a particular British demographic, in the same way that adopting an anarchist-gothy-vegan-dressed-in-black pose or that of a full-on hip-hop queen is for some other young women. Sometimes it’s just what it seems, a lifestyle choice – and sometimes a veil is just a piece of fabric and nice fabric at that.

I see young women in Amsterdam in every shape, style and possible variation of the veil. They are modern young women with modern ideas and they mostly make their own choices. Moslem women all over Europe are making their own peace with their often-clashing religious and cultural beliefs. Perhaps we should be celebrating that rather than blaming?

It wasn’t so long ago that a respectable Englishwoman wouldn’t have gone out in the street without her head covered. My own mother rarely went out without a headscarf when I was a child – she’d’ve felt undressed without it. Widows wore shawls and veils well into the 20th century, as did Anglican first communicants. Catholic women still regularly wear veils to prayers. It’s just fashion. Times change. This drive towards complete covering by young British Moslem women’ll change when men particularly white men, stop paying so much attention and projecting their own cultural signifiers of radicalism and violence onto what Moslem women wear. They also need to have some self-examination about their orientalist curiosity about the imagined exotic beauty beneath the fabric.

Strict Moslem patriarchs and the likes of Jack Straw have this in common at least – they’re equally threatened by what women choose to wear or not, and that says more about them than about the women in question.

Change’ll come, if it does, when people are ready and it’ll come from within – either when those who veil are sick of it or when the majority of the population accept it as a style of dress like any other. I suspect that once niqab becomes accepted as mainstream a lot of the shock value will be gone and the fashion will subside to hijab only, if any veil at all. What’s important is that change is by choice and made because women themselves want it. To try and push change with the kind of argument Straw is using is as bad as forcing women into veiling.

Read more: UK politics, Islam, British Moslem Women, Veiling, Niqab, Fashion, Jack Straw, New Labour