What Is Veiling?

1. Understanding Veiling in Islamic Sacred Texts

21 [Headscarves] create a tent of tranquility. The serene spirit sent from God is called by a feminine name, “sakinah,” in the Qurʾan, and I understand why some Muslim women like to wear their prayer clothes for more than prayer, to take that sakinah into the world with them. —Mohja Kahf, “Spare Me the Sermon on Muslim Women” (2008) C H A P T E R O N E Understanding Veiling in Islamic Sacred Texts Muslims and non-Muslims alike commonly believe that Muslim women are required to veil and that Islam prescribes veiling in no uncertain terms to its female adherents. Indeed, most veiled Muslim women I have met report that they cover primarily because the Qurʾan prescribes it. And when asked whether they feel hot with their entire body and head covered, many reply with a smile that they do indeed feel hot, but that “the heat of Hell is even hotter.” This observation is echoed by many Muslim men who consider veiled women more pious than those who do not veil. Similarly, many non-Muslims attribute veiling to strict religious observance, and at times to familial or political pressure. It thus makes sense that we should begin our exploration of the meaning of Muslim veiling by looking at how and what Islamic sacred texts tell us about Muslim women’s clothing. Three main textual sources can help us investigate this. The central source for answers to anything to do with Islam is of course the Qurʾan, the holy book of Islam that observant Muslims consider the direct word 22 Islam, Politics, and Veiling of God revealed to the Prophet Muhammad beginning in 610 CE. Muslims believe that the Qurʾan has been preserved in an unaltered form since it was standardized in the Arabic Quraysh dialect by order of the third caliph, Uthman, in the middle of the seventh century. Even though the Qurʾan is indeed Islam’s sacred text, its poetic language often makes it difficult to understand even for educated native speakers of Arabic. It is thus accompanied by a lengthy tradition of commentary (tafsir) that has for centuries provided dominant modes of interpretation . These commentaries have today circumscribed the meaning of the Qurʾan and given rise to a community of practice that delimits all possible interpretations. In other words, it is not just what the Qurʾan itself says about veiling that must be taken into account to understand Muslim women’s veiling but also how some of the Qurʾan’s key commentators have interpreted the text. The second main textual source that can shed some light on the general rules of Muslim women’s dress is the multivolume collection known as hadith. The Islamic scholar Barbara Freyer Stowasser has defined hadith as “both a record of what Muhammad actually said and did and also a record of what his community in the first two centuries of Islamic history believed that he said and did.”1 In other words, hadith provides brief eyewitness reports of some of the sayings and doings of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions. It represents a major source of information about Islam, and it is the place where the idea that pubescent Muslim women must start veiling is most clearly articulated. The third source of information about Muslim veiling is Islamic jurisprudence . Since its formal establishment more than one thousand years ago, the goal of Islamic jurisprudence has been to translate the Law of God (sharia) contained in the Qurʾan and hadith into a practical legal system for the Muslim community. It is thus another important tradition in which to search for clues on Muslim veiling practices. Taken together, the Qurʾan with its exegesis, hadith, and Islamic jurisprudence are the three sacred Islamic traditions establishing the rules and ethical principles that Muslims consider fundamental to their religious identity, to their ritual and spiritual practice. It is these three traditions that I invite you to explore with me to understand why Muslims invoke religion first to explain veiling practices. Understanding Veiling in Sacred Texts 23 LOOKING FOR VEILING IN THE QURʾAN Because the English term “veil” has no simple or direct Arabic equivalent (see introduction), a discussion of discourses on veiling in the Qurʾan must focus instead on a variety of other Arabic terms. It is worth beginning with an investigation of the Arabic word hijab, which today...