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  • A Quiet Revolution: The Veil's Resurgence, from the Middle East to America
  • Joan Wallach Scott
A Quiet Revolution: The Veil's Resurgence, from the Middle East to America Leila Ahmed . New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011 352 pages. ISBN 978-0-300-17095-5.

Leila Ahmed's Women and Gender in Islam (Yale University Press, 1992) was an early and important text for teachers and students of women's history. Written against the tendency to portray Islam as a unified and unchanging religious doctrine, Ahmed insisted instead on history. She argued that there were two foundational tendencies in the teachings of the prophet Muhammad that were in tension with one another: one was a vision of the spiritual and moral equality of all humans; the other was a hierarchical structure of gender relations. In the course of Middle Eastern history (especially in the eighth to thirteenth centuries) and in the context of patriarchal social arrangements, the second of these tendencies [End Page 116] prevailed. The existence of the first tendency, however, made it possible for dissenting voices (some of them women's voices) to emerge at different moments in time.

In her new book Ahmed offers a similar argument, this time specifically in relation to the veil. She acknowledges that she was among those who expected the veil to disappear as modern, secular values replaced traditional practices and that she was initially disturbed by its resurgence. A Quiet Revolution: The Veil's Resurgence, from the Middle East to America is her attempt to account for this resurgence and to counter the near hysterical reaction to it on the part of many commentators, among them secular feminists who share her background and politics.

She insists first on the complex history of veiling and unveiling in Egypt over the course of the twentieth century. This history is situated not only within Egyptian domestic politics, but in a larger context of Western influence, colonialism, and Arab nationalism. The long section devoted to this history is, indeed, the best part of the book. In the early twentieth century, she writes, unveiling became an emblem of modernity as defined by Western standards. Although in the period of the 1920s to 1960s unveiling did not necessarily connote secularism, the Western meanings of the veil inspired the movement. At the same time, a counter-movement developed, embodied in the Muslim Brotherhood (founded in 1928), that sought a renewal of Islamic values and, with it, a repudiation of Western imperialism. Ahmed's informed and dispassionate history of the Muslim Brotherhood is an important corrective for its (mis)representation as a terrorist organization. She shows, instead, the ways in which its emphasis on social justice led it to provide networks of schools and clinics for the urban poor—services that were otherwise unavailable or unaffordable. The Brotherhood's call for women to veil was an assertion of Islamic identity; indeed, Ahmed notes that modest dress and gender segregation did not necessarily connote a misogynist agenda. The history of the Brotherhood—alternately in and out of favor depending on the vagaries of domestic politics and the calculations of those in power—is itself instructive. During the "Arab Cold War," which pitted Gamal Abdel Nasser's pan-Arabist socialism against the Wahabism of the Saudis, they were jailed in Egypt; but in the 1970s when Anwar Sadat embraced Islam, they were welcomed back and became important participants in the beginnings of the Islamic revival. In this period, (and [End Page 117] particularly after the 1973 war with Israel) the hijab became increasingly visible on campuses—a form of Islamic and anti-Western identification.

Two chapters explore the variety of motivations that led more and more women to veil during the 1980s and 1990s. Ahmed goes back and forth, reporting that many women insist that they have chosen to wear the veil as a way of signifying their religious commitments. Others admit that they have succumbed to pressure from Islamists in their communities. Still others have a more explicit political agenda: For them the veil is a way of rejecting the materialism of Western capitalism and endorsing a program of social justice. Some commentators have even equated Islamist teachings...

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